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Tom Ultican: Is Reform of the Charter Law in California Still Possible?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
5

 

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced math and physics in San Diego, is a dogged investigator. In this post, he traces the ongoing efforts to reform the weak charter law in California.

California has more charter schools than any other state, with more than 1,300. The original law capped the number at 100. Since then, the money of the California Charter Schools Association has blown away the cap as well as all previous efforts to regulate charters. Billionaire Reed Hastings served as chair of the state board and demolished the meager limits that existed.

In this huge state, the law allows a district to authorize a charter in another district hundredsof miles away and collect a commission for every student who enrolls. It allows charter applicants to appeal all the way to the state board and ignore the needs and wishes of the local district. The law assures that charter schools will have little or no oversight, since the state education department does not have the staff to oversee them.

The current law is an invitation to fraud, embezzlement, and corruption. This is not to say that all charters are run by corrupt individuals, but the constant revelation of financial scandals in the charter industry demonstrates the need for revision of the law to protect the public interest. Only a few weeks ago, eleven people in the charter industry were indicted for stealing more than $50 million.

Yet, as Ultican shows, the road to charter reform has been rocky. Governor Jerry Brown, whose leadership was admirable in many other ways, adamantly refused to rein in the charter industry. Governor Newsom is indebted to powerful families in the charter industry, and his chief of staff is a charterista.

Yet Ultican holds out hope that some actual reform might yet survive. Anything, he says, is better than the complete deregulation that has currently allows unscrupulous grifters to feast on the money intended to pay for education.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

Los Angeles: Board Member Shares Secret Information with Charter Lobbyists First

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
11

Jack Covey, a regular reader and contributor, posted the following comment about the latest revelation from blogger Michael Kohlhaas in Los Angeles. Kohlhaas (which may be a pseudonym) somehow gained access to a treasure trove of emails between the Green Dot charter chain and the California Charter Schools Association, as well as between these entities and public figures like school board members. He has published a small number of these emails, and he continues to drop them like bombs (think emails from Wikileaks). What we are learning from these data dumps (drip, drip, drip) is that certain school board members and public officials were more loyal to the charter industry than to the children and public schools of Los Angeles.

Covey writes:

Blogger and L.A. political gadfly Michael Kohlhaas shares confidential emails detailing how CCSA’s Cassy Horton was only one of two people who where provided with the text of (then-indicted-&-future-felon) LAUSD Board Member Ref Rodriguez’s LAUSD board resolution pertaining to charter school oversight, with Horton being provided that by none other than Ref himself.

http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/12/in-march-2018-then-lausd-board-member-ref-rodriguez-shared-a-top-secret-confidential-copy-of-a-board-resolution-with-cassy-horton-of-the-california-charter-school-association-before-anyone-oth/#more-27507

Mind you, as detailed in Horton’s email, only two people were provided Ref’s board resolution:

Dr. Richard Vladovic, LAUSD Board Member
AND
Cassie Horton of CCSA (California Charter Schools Association lobbyist)

Not the five other board members

Not the LAUSD Charter Schools Division (CSD)

Not UTLA (Perish the thought!)

At this point, more private emails show that CCSA’s Cassie Horton then EXTENSIVELY RE-WROTE the board resolution so it would be more to CCSA’s / Horton’s liking, with Ref dutifully accepting and not challenging Horton’s extensive rewrite in any way. The rewrite, of course, gutted LAUSD’s ability to exercise oversight or properly regulate charter schools.

In essence, YOU HAVE DOCUMENTED PROOF (emails) showing a totally unelected charter school partisan and lobbyist effectively doing the work of, and exercising the effective power of an actual LAUSD Board Member … because one of those LAUSD Board Members, now-convicted-felon Ref Rodriguez was letting her to do.

Ref was basically Horton’s and the charter school industry’s cowardly (see parenthetical BELOW) ventriloquist mannequin.

(By the way, CCSA backer and Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings was, at the time, paying the full costs of Ref’s multi-million-dollar criminal defense lawyers, who ultimately got him what many consider was a sweet deal for pleading Guilty, but all of that probably didn’t influence Ref’s dealings with Ms. Horton in anyway. <—- SARCASM)

The mind boggles.

After Kohlhaas started tweeting about this, Horton jointed the Twitter thread, and incredibly tweeted that her doing all this was totally legal and proper:

(Hey, nothing wrong with Ref giving Horton a “heads up,” along with a request for Horton’s input? Right?)
https://twitter.com/Cassy_Horton/status/1145389749764419585
And no Kohlhaas blog article would be complete without a snarky cartoon one of the blog’s subjects:

(in this case, former LAUSD Board Member & convicted felon Ref Rodriguez)
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ref_rodriguez_ccsa_cartoon.png

Kohlhaas wrote:

KOHLHAAS: “And yeah, it’s true that Ref Rodriguez is long gone, is a convicted felon, and so on. He’s off the table. But none of the other players here are gone. And the system that allowed the CCSA and the baby-sacrificers in the charter industry it serves to insinuate themselves this deeply into what’s meant to be a democratically controlled system, that allowed them to insert their wholly-controlled puppets into power and then to pull their strings so that they dance to the tunes called by their zillionaire masters, that system outlived Ref Rodriguez and will, unless these privatizers are specifically defanged, will outlive all of us.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Oakland Parent Jane Nylund Writes a Letter to Governor Gavin Newsom

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2019 //
10

Dear Governor Newsom:

It is with profound disappointment that I heard that your office was responsible for essentially gutting the main features of these charter reform bills. While I can only speculate on the reasoning for essentially caving to the charter industry (besides Ann O’Leary and the task force espousing all kinds of charter-friendly platitudes), I can say that as a California native, public school graduate (1983), advocate, and 16-year parent/volunteer (two sons in Oakland Unified), and now employee of Oakland Unified, I am well familiar with the education landscape in this state,  particularly the damage being done to schools in Oakland. I’m also familiar with what happens when districts don’t have local control over the schools for which they are responsible. You and I have something in common-we both attended well-resourced public high schools. You went to Redwood High School in Marin, and I attended Miramonte High School in Orinda, located in what is now one of the wealthiest suburbs in the East Bay. Lucky us. 

The irony regarding your potential alliance with privatization groups like CCSA is that, because of your severe dyslexia, you would have been rejected by the same schools that are now being touted as “high quality seats”, aggressively marketed as superior to real public schools because of test scores. According to the bio I read, you were rejected from a private prep school and enrolled in your local public high school instead. So you have first-hand experience with the idea that real public schools enroll all children, not just the easy ones. Charter schools aren’t interested in promoting their schools to children with learning disabilities such as yours, and consciously or unconsciously discourage SPED kids from applying. They don’t test well and they cost too much. Your own private-to-public school trajectory clearly illustrates how private schools select students. The same situation occurs when real public schools are allowed to be privatized into charter schools. These charters schools, because they are privately managed, are now able to choose and keep the students they want, not the other way around. Lotteries do not create equity. They only encourage more motivated families to self-select into the lottery. In many cases, SPED, ELL, and newcomer students need not apply. 
What is a good school anyway? I will bet Redwood High and Miramonte High were both good because of the usual reasons: wealthy families, well-resourced, free transportation (before Prop 13), experienced teachers, lots of enrichment like art and music, language classes, health care, and sports. Prop 13 had just been passed, so the facilities had not fallen into ruin yet. Later, when our sports and bus service were eliminated, my school (and probably yours, too) was able to rally the parents to pony up the cash for all the extras that had abruptly disappeared. Other schools weren’t so lucky.  Did that make them less “good”? No, it made them underfunded and unsupported, and it’s been that way ever since. 
I will speculate that you have no personal experience with any of the long-term damage done to school districts because of charter friendly laws in California, written by the very people who want public schools to go away. (Reed Hastings).  Because of this lack of real world experience in education, you therefore are relying on the advice of education reformers that aren’t as interested in improving outcomes for high-needs children as they are putting money in their pockets and/or heading up the next rung of the political ladder. 
Over the years, I’ve heard all kinds of excuses why charter schools deserve more protection, more appeals, and more expansion. For the uninitiated, there seems to be an underlying assumption that charters are of higher quality (“high quality seats” is a marketing term thrown around a lot for charters schools that JUST opened), that they perform better than the neighborhood schools, and therefore deserve up to three chances for authorization or renewal.

In the past, the charter-friendly state board made it nearly impossible for any local control to happen, which is wrong but also purposeful. Our own traditional district schools are not given the same opportunity to appeal their closures, and they are simply closed for any reason, without any more due process. There is this pervasive idea that maybe a “good” charter will fall through the cracks somehow, and therefore must be given another chance. But, in this case a good district school is not given the same opportunity. So, by this definition, district schools and charter schools, in order to be on equal footing, both would deserve the same appeals process. Otherwise, this charter appeals process automatically games charter expansion by rubber stamping any appeal to the county or the state board. We’ve seen this happen over and over and it needs to end. The CCSA’s agenda is unfettered charter expansion and privatization of our public schools. Do not allow them to use their power and billionaire influence to gut AB1505 and AB1507. Reed Hastings and Eli Broad have dictated their privatization agenda and charter expansion for far too long, and the local community deserves to take back control of its own schools, regardless of which type their students attend.
 I’d like to discuss a few characteristics of the current charter school landscape and debunk a few myths that your advisers, like Ann O’Leary and the charter-friendly task force appear to be selling to either curry favor with the charter industry or to curry political favor with Latino families, many of which have been sold on the promise of “quality” charter schools. 

Myth-a school is “good” because it has high test scores
Reality-test scores don’t measure anything and are essentially used in our district and others to weaponize school closure. There is no agreed upon measure for learning. Test scores correlate with wealth. Therefore, a high-testing school is often labeled “good” because it is well-resourced and well-funded with a rich curriculum and supports. What else is new? Charters can also manipulate test scores by keeping out low-testing populations, and high student attrition that concentrates better test takers at these schools.  They also favor a lot of test prep, which is not authentic learning and is a strategy that would never be tolerated or accepted at the kind of wealthy public schools we attended.
Myth-charters perform better than neighborhood schools based on test scores
Reality-the population of the neighborhood district school is often far different than the charter school. In Oakland, most district schools support far more SPED students, and other high-needs groups like ELL and newcomers.  Often, the poverty levels can be significantly different. Motivated families that are willing to even enter a lottery often attract a student population that test better. The populations between these two groups aren’t the same and therefore one can’t make any sort of statistical inference as to whether one school is better than the other based on test scores. Because population differences usually skew test scores in favor of the charter, these schools often discourage certain students to apply, or encourage certain students to leave. And don’t kid yourself if you think this doesn’t happen. 
Myth-charters do more with less
Reality-charters do less with less. As a privately managed business, they operate on revenues and expenses. Charters keep expenses low by hiring inexperienced TFA teachers and churning them constantly. They generally offer fewer supports, such as afterschool programs, transportation, or meals. They may not provide a rich curriculum that a lot of us had before Prop 13: art, music, sports, clubs, nurses, counselors, etc.  Charters don’t want to pay for these “extras”, but they are essential to a quality education. This business model can’t supply a high-quality product to all, and was never designed for that. Charters are a privately managed business that first and foremost have to offer an acceptable ROI to their investors. These investors are the real customers, not the students.
Myth-there is so much demand for charters, they must be doing something fantastic and amazing
Reality-Oakland has become a target for privatization because of its urban setting, combined with its valuable real estate. If opening charters was all about the kids, then there would be several in surrounding areas like Hayward and San Leandro, with similar student populations. Hayward, with a population of around 25K students, has 4 charters. San Francisco, with a population of 60K has 18 charters. Oakland, with a total student population of 50K has 46 charters. It is simply a business saturation model that has nothing to do with “quality” and everything to do with disruption and school closure. Twenty years ago, many parents in Oakland were thrown a lifeline called a charter school. Fast forward, and the model now isn’t much different than saturating the poor neighborhoods with cheap fast food. I heard an East Oakland resident say, in a public meeting, that charter schools were like having drug dealers on every corner. 
How to create demand? The current strategy is as follows: close your neighborhood elementary schools, which then feed into the middle schools (demand dries up there as well). Then, open a charter right near these same schools. Out of the last 18 school closures in Oakland, 14 were converted to charters. Doesn’t take a genius to see how that will turn out. Ask the students at Roots International how they feel about their neighborhood school closure. But our charter-friendly ($$$) school board fully supports this portfolio model; there are charters right around the corner that former Roots students can attend instead. Instant charter demand creation.
Myth-there are so many students on waitlists that charters must be allowed to expand
Reality-giant wait lists are created when students are allowed to apply to multiple schools. A pool of 100 students can create demand for 500 seats if each one applies to 5 different schools. Each of those schools then puts the student on a waitlist. But the student only attends one school. The rest of the seats on the waitlist are phantoms once the student enrolls. But they remain and are presented as proof of demand, when that proof is only an illusion.
Myth-It’s the charter parents vs. the teachers’ union
Reality-that language is purposeful. It is used by CCSA and its billionaire allies to pit these groups against each other, and it’s working. News flash-it’s the billionaires vs. the rest of us that want and deserve good neighborhood schools that aren’t defined by a piece of paper with test scores on it. Parents and students from all walks of life deserve the same clean, well-resourced schools that you and I attended. Any rhetoric spouted by Reed Hastings (school board hater extraordinaire) and Eli Broad, along with the Koch Brothers and the Waltons about charters being a civil rights issue would make Martin Luther King turn in his grave. There are no civil rights to be had when your school doesn’t support your child’s unique academic needs (like dyslexia), doesn’t provide programs or wraparound services, doesn’t provide food, transportation or a playground, no arts programs, no sports, doesn’t support SPED, sticks your child in front of a computer all day, and test preps them to death. And if your child is suspended or expelled, there is no due process. Nothing you can do about it. Parents are voiceless and that’s what these billionaires want. 
 Our school district loses $57M a year to unfettered charter expansion. It’s time to get back to some no-nonsense approaches to this problem such as real local control, as well as including impact to district finances. Charter schools don’t have the right to expand just because it’s what the Waltons and Reed Hastings want. This failed experiment on our most vulnerable children must end, and your office needs to reevaluate the amendments of AB1505 and AB1507 and ask yourself who really benefits from those amended bills.  It is obvious that these bills were gutted to satisfy your charter friends and allies, which an insult to all hardworking teachers and public school parents who have seen firsthand what kind of devastation this education model has caused over the years.
As these bills wind their way through the legislature, keep in mind how different your life might have been if you had attended a “good” charter school and been rejected (“You have dyslexia, so this school isn’t right for you”). Your entire life, career, and political aspirations might have been completely sabotaged if you had not had that well-resourced, authentic public school to fall back on. And remember what it was that made it a quality school. And remember that it’s a school model that all kids deserve, not just those in Orinda or Marin. Thanks for listening.
Jane Nylund
Oakland, California
Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

D.C.: Famed Philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein Endorses Charter School Dominance In D.C.

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2019 //
48

 

To understand the charter industry, you must appreciate that it is driven by extremely wealthy people and has no grassroots. It has mastered the arts of marketing and branding, but does not have a plan to improve education other than to draw students and resources away from public education, which belongs to all of us.

People often ask me, “Why do the super-rich cluster to the cause of privatization?” The Answer is not simple because many different motives are at work. Some see giving to charters as a charitable endeavor, and their friends assure them that they are “giving back,” helping poor children escape poverty. Others want to impress their friends in their social strata, their colleagues in the world of high finance. Being a supporter of charter schools is like belonging to the right clubs, going to the right parties, sharing a cause with other very rich people.

Perhaps infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein fits into the last category. Perhaps he fits into all those categories.  He is a man who grew up in modest circumstances in Brooklyn, attended public schools, and owed his start in life to the New York City public schools.

But once he achieved wealth and could call himself a “philanthropist,” he realized that choosing the right causes was important as a way of burnishing his image, showing that he was running with the In Crowd.

So, of course, he announced that he supported charter schools, not the public schools to which he owed a debt for launching him in life.

In 2013, his foundation issued a press release announcing that he looked forward to the dominance of charter schools in Washington, D.C. and predicted that they would succeed because they were unregulated. That, in a sense, was his own secret: he succeeded because he was unregulated, neither his appetites nor his activities were regulated. Supporting charter schools showed that he moved in the circles of the DFER elites, the hedge fund kings. No longer was he the boy from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn; he was a philanthropist encouraging the growth of school privatization, not just as competition but as a replacement for public schools.

Now that he has been indicted yet again, this time in New York, for his crimes against young girls, it is interesting to read his fulsome self-praise for investing in the charter industry.

This press release was issued by the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation:

NEW YORK, Feb. 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — For the first time, more students in Washington DCenrolled into charter schools than public schools. Last year, charters had an 11% increase in student enrollment, while public schools had a 1% increase. Mayor Vince Gray noted that the nation’s capital is only a few years away from being evenly split between the two school systems.

The shift was welcomed by financier and well-known education philanthropist, Jeffrey Epstein and his foundation, the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. Jeffrey Epstein founded the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University with a $30 million dollar grant in 2003 and has since expanded his support into early development, Head Start and charter school programs across the nation, including Washington DC.

Some of the charter schools that the Jeffrey Epstein has supported include, Harlem Link Charter School, the Maya Angelou Schools in DC and the Bard High School Early College in New York. “Charter Schools have the freedom to self-regulate. It’s a critical component of their success. They also reduce the burden on the public school system,” Jeffrey Epstein asserted.

In fact, last year, the DC Schools Chancellor, Kaya Henderson, decided to close fifteen public schools due to the shift to charters.

Despite this growth, there is concern about the number of charter schools that close every year. According to The Center for Education Reform, 15% of charters close every year. However Jeanne Allen, President of the Center for Education Reform explained that unlike the public school system, this closure rate reflects a healthy level of accountability. Today 41 states have charter school laws and audit requirements. 52% of charter schools are also now authorized by school districts and 48% independently.

“We need to enhance state standards of excellence,” Jeffrey Epstein noted. “But it’s essential that these laws are just that, standards, and not management policies.”

Jeffrey Epstein is a trustee of the Institute for International Education, a former board member of Rockefeller University, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, New York Academy of Science and sits on the board of the Mind, Brain and Behavior committee at Harvard.

SOURCE www.jeffreyepsteineducation.com

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization

Beware! Powerful Koch Network Starts New Group to Fight Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2019 //
14

Charles Koch and his network of wealthy donors have created a new Astroturf organization called “Yes Every Kid” to promote school choice and take public money away from public schools.

Yes, they are targeting “every kid” as a prime prospect for a charter school or a voucher.

Yes, they want to shrink public schools so that they are no longer the “choice” of 90% of American families.

Koch in June announced the Yes Every Kid initiative as the latest addition to his sprawling network of wealthy donors, political groups and tax-exempt advocacy organizations best known for pushing anti-regulation, small-government policies. Its political arm, Americans for Prosperity, has made waves supporting the tea party and fighting former President Barack Obama’s health care law.

The Yes Every Kid group is tasked with monitoring statehouses where it can be influential on school choice, said Stacy Hock, a Texas philanthropist who is among hundreds of donors each contributing at least $100,000 annually to the Koch network’s wide-ranging agenda.

Hock and officials with the Koch network said it’s too early to provide specifics about what policies the group is pushing.

“The priority is to go where there is a political appetite to be open to policy change and lean in there,” said Hock, who also leads the Texans for Education Opportunity advocacy group that supports charters and other education alternatives.

She cited Texas, West Virginia, Tennessee and Florida as priority states where school choice proposals have flourished.

It is hard to say that West Virginia is a place where school choice proposals have “flourished” since the legislature approved them just weeks ago for the first time, and they have not yet been implemented. So translate: Koch money has successfully bought enough legislators in rural West Virginia to foist “choice” on local communities, although it has not happened as yet.

In Tennessee, Koch money bought the new governor and the legislature to impose charters and vouchers on districts that don’t want them.

Florida is a wholly owned subsidiary of the DeVos-Jeb-Koch combine.

There is no evidence that students benefit by having school choice, although there is plenty of evidence that vouchers underwrite racism and ignorance and there is plenty of evidence that school choice promotes segregation.

This is what the billionaires actually want: ignorance, racism, and segregation. And it is worth paying for. For them. Not for us, and not for our society.

Peter Greene defined this new group of Astroturfers far better than I. 

He calls it the “Astroturducken,” with one deform idea wrapped around another, all of them guaranteed to destroy public schools, trick parents, and generate jobs for the faithful hangers-on from Reformy world.

Greene writes:

Yes, don’t wait for things to come down from above, says this website that has come down from a billionaire who wants to drive the education bus despite his complete lack of educational expertise. But this astroturfery is insistent. “Real change has to start from the ground up. We’re here as your resource to facilitate conversation.” That might be really moving if the very next sentence weren’t “We’re here to foster a culture of disruptive innovation,” which suggests that these facilitaty listeners already have some answers in mind. Also missing– an acknowledgement of where all that negativity came from. Here is yet another reformy outfit talking about negatives from the past as if they simply fell from space, instead of saying, “Yeah, that was us. Sorry.” And here comes the tell:

We want to hear new ideas, new solutions, and new voices. And it can only happen when we listen to the real stakeholders in education: you.

But who is this “we” and why should stakeholders feel any need or obligation to talk to “we” in the first place? This is the same old rich fauxlanthropist baloney– we’re not only going to vote ourselves a seat at the table, but we’re also going to go ahead and give ourselves the seat at the head because, yeah, this is our table now. It’s so big and generous of you to agree to listen to us, Sir, but I still haven’t heard a reason that we should be talking to you. This is the overarching narrative of decades of modern ed reform– actual teachers and educators were working long and hard on the problems of education, and a bunch of rich amateurs strolled up and announced, “Good news! We’re going to take over this whole conversation now!” Thirty years later we’re still all waiting to hear why these guys should be running any part of the show beyond reasons like “I’m rich” and “I want to.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Texas: Three Small Districts Oppose Federally-Funded Charter Growth in El Paso

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2019 //
2

Three small districts near El Paso passed resolutions opposing the dramatic expansion of the charter sector, which is driven by federal funds awarded by Betsy DeVos to the IDEA charter chain. 

As charter schools expand in El Paso, fueled by a sizable federal grant, three of the county’s smaller districts are hoping recent resolutions will prevent students from leaving and encourage lawmakers to do more to quell charter growth.

On Wednesday, San Elizario ISD’s board became the latest to approve a resolution opposing charter school expansion in the region. The Clint and Tornillo ISD boards approved nearly identical resolutions in late June.

The resolutions come just months after IDEA Public Schools won an unprecedented $116 million over five years from the federal government to create 38 new schools across three states, 14 of which are slated for El Paso.

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That growth takes away much needed public funds from districts already grappling with enrollment declines, the Clint, Tornillo and San Elizario superintendents said, and the financial impact is particularly felt by smaller districts.

“We have to be conscientious that if we don’t take initiative to inform our communities, then you have great marketing teams from these charter schools coming in and painting a picture … that gives the appearance that they’re better than public schools,” San Elizario ISD Superintendent Jeannie Meza-Chavez said.

Well, of course, their marketing materials will claim they are better than public schools; they will claim that 100% of their students will go to college, but they won’t tell parents about their high attrition rates, nor will they tell them how long their graduates survive in college.

This is Beto O’Rourke’s district, but the school boards can’t look to him for help. He told the NEA meeting in Houston that he opposes “for-profit charters and vouchers,” but not the kind of non-profit charters that are about to damage the public schools in his own community.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Peter Greene: Reformers Try to Rehabilitate Tarnished Reputation of Virtual Charters

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2019 //
11

 

Now here is a nasty job, but someone has to do it (if the price is right.) Even “reformers” agree that virtual charters are a disaster, a sector with horrible results that is populated by entrepreneurs and grifters. 

Peter Greene reviews an effort by “reformers” to salvage the rightly blemished record of this industry of scammers. 

Can it be done? Not really. 

First, he examines the connections of the writers of this report. Gold-plated reformers, for sure. Then he shows that their “insights” are either old hat, commonplace, or silly. 

The report was written by Public Impact, whose staff has few actual educators. 

Like most such groups, Public Impact likes to crank out “reports” that serve as slickly packaged advocacy for one reform thing or another. Two of their folk have just whipped together such a report for Bluum. Sigh. Yes, I know, but it’s important to mark all the wheels within wheels if for no other reason than A) it’s important to grasp just how many people are employed in the modern reformster biz and B) later, when these groups and people turn up again, you want to remember what they’ve been up to before.

What is Bluum? 

So Bluum. This Idaho-based is a “non-profit organization committed to ensuring Idaho’s children reach their fullest potential by cultivating great leaders and innovative schools.” Its 2016 990 form lists that mission, though it includes some more specific work. “Bluum assists the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation determine where to make education investments that will result in the growth of high performing seats in Idaho.” (I will never not find the image of a high-performing seat” not funny.)Then they monitor the results. The Albertsons are Idaho grocery millionaires with an interest in education causes.

Blum’s CEO is Terry Ryan, who previously worked for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Ohio.

Bluum partners with Teach for America, NWEA. National School Choice Week, the PIE Network, and Education Cities, to name a few. And they are the project lead on the consortium that landed a big, juicy federal CSP grant to expand charters (that’s the program that turns out to have wasted at least a billion dollars).

Just so we’re clear– this report did not come from a place of unbiased inquiry. It came from a place of committed marketing.

Of “reform-style” mushrooms, the supply is endless, and the money is infinite. The results are consistently negative. Yet they keep trying.

The Albertson Foundation in Idaho is a rightwing foundation that shares the Betsy DeVos agenda. 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, For-Profit, Virtual Charter Schools

Larry Cuban: AltSchool Collapses, Reborn as a “Learning Platform”

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2019 //
13

 

Larry Cuban recounts the short history of AltSchool, which was intended to be a progressive moneymaker but flamed out  and has been replaced by another company called Altitude Learning.

Another chapter is added to the annals of the for-profit education history.

Cuban writes:

Begun by wealthy high-tech entrepreneur (and ex-Google executive) Max Ventilla in 2013, AltSchool made a splash with its string of private “micro-schools” in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area (tuition was $26,000)–see here, here, and here. Ventilla saw AltSchool as a string of lab schools where progressive ideas could be put into practice and the individualized software that staff designed and used in the “micro-schools” could be bought and used in public schools.

AltSchool “micro-schools’ were ungraded, used project-based learning complete with individually designed “playlists,” small classes, and experienced young teachers. Were John and Evelyn Dewey alive, they would have enrolled their six children in AltSchool.

I stopped here to wonder what the socialist John Dewey, the philosopher of democracy and the common good, would have thought about for-profit schools.

Ventilla’s dream collapsed when he realized that he was spending $40 million a year and taking in revenues of $7 million.

So AltSchool is now evolving into Altitude Learning, a “platform” that will be sold to charters, public schools, and other customers.

Ventilla passes the torch:

In a blog post six months earlier, Ventilla signaled readers that AltSchool would be changing.

In 2017 we were fortunate to attract a number of world-class career educators and administrators to our team, to guide everything we do. Moving forward, I am pleased to announce Ben Kornell will become President of AltSchool. Ben joined our team back in 2017 as VP of Growth. He’s dedicated his life to reducing educational inequity; he started as a Teach for America middle school teacher and later went to Stanford Business School to learn how to cultivate educational change broadly. As COO of Envision, he helped lead a network of charter schools and scaled a performance assessment system to public schools across the country. Since joining AltSchool, Ben’s led our company’s transition to partnering with public and private schools nationwide. As we continue to integrate the platform into existing school systems, it is essential to have education leaders like Ben at the helm.

Another entry into the annals of Corporate Reform.

My suggestion to corporate reformers hoping to get rich by investing in the education industry.

Read Jonathan A. Knee, Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.  

And Samuel Abrams’ illuminating account of the rise and fall of the Edison Project, in Education and the Commercial Mindset.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Technology

DeBlasio: A Hypocrite on Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2019 //
56

 

DeBlasio recently boasted at the NEA candidates’ panel about his courageous resistance to the charter industry. It is true that he started his first term in office in 2014 determined to stop the charter zillionaires’ efforts to grab money and the students they wanted from the public schools.

When he did not grant Eva Moskowitz all the new charters she wanted, her backers launched a PR blitz against DeBlasio, spending $6 million on emotional appeals on TV.

Eva bused parents and students to Albany, where Governor Cuomo pledged his loyalty to the charter cause. The legislature passed a bill requiring NYC to let the charters expand at will, to give charters any public space they wanted at no cost, and to pay their rent if they couldn’t find suitable public space.

At that point, DeBlasio stopped fighting the charter industry.

Currently, the New York City Department of Education gives the charter industry its lists of students’ names and addresses for recruitment purposes.

Parents have protested this misuse of their children’s private information. This practice of releasing personally identifiable student information is illegal under state law.

Recently Chancellor Carranza pledged to end the practice. But as Leonie Haimson reported, DeBlasio reversed the decision and promised to reach his own decision. He has not made any decision and the charter industry continues to bombard public school parents with recruitment letters.

So much for those mythical long waiting lists!

Speaking of mythical waiting lists, Leonie Haimson also reported on an exciting new development at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain:

More recently, Moskowitz created what is described as a “full service, brand strategy, marketing, and creative division within Success Academy” called the “The Success Academy Creative Agency” according to the LinkedIn profile of its Managing Director, Meredith Levin. 

In an earlier version of her profile, Levin described this internal marketing division of Success as a  “group of over 30 creative directors, designers, copywriters, strategists, e-learning architects & project managers to develop, execute and optimize campaigns to recruit 1,000+ teachers, enroll families, donors, influencers, and cultivate community engagement.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Hoax, Oakland, Privatization, Propaganda

Jan Resseger: The Long Process of Repairing the Damage to Education in Wisconsin

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2019 //
6

 

Jan Resseger writes here about Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ efforts to repair the damage done to education in Wisconsin by ex-Governor ScottWalker, who used his time in office to try to destroy education.

She writes about Gordon Lafer’s brilliant book The One Percent Solution as context for the siege of the schools and universities by Walker.

She begins:

In Gordon Lafer’s 2017 book, The One Percent Solution, in the first chapter entitled  “Wisconsin and Beyond: Dismantling the Government,” Lafer makes Wisconsin the emblem of what happened in the 2010 election, as corporate lobbies, the Tea Party, and the collapse of state revenue following the Great Recession converged to fuel a Red-state wave that took over state governments:

“Critically, this new territory included a string of states, running across the upper Midwest from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, that had traditionally constituted labor strongholds… Starting in 2011, the country has witnessed an unprecedented wave of legislation aimed at eliminating public employee unions, or, where they remain, strictly limiting their right to bargain.  At the same time, the overall size of government has been significantly reduced in both union and nonunion jurisdictions. The number of public jobs eliminated in 2011 was the highest ever recorded, and budgets for essential public services were dramatically scaled back in dozens of states.  All of this—deunionization, sharp cuts in public employee compensation and the dramatic rollback of public services—was forcefully championed by the corporate lobbies, who made shrinking the public sector a top policy priority in state after state.”  (The One Percent Solution, pp. 44-45)

Wisconsin was Ground Zero for the attack o the public sector unions, public schools, and public higher education.

Resseger describes Governor Evers’s first steps toward putting together what Walker destroyed.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers
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