Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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BREAKING NEWS: Former Secretary of Education for Puerto Rico Arrested!

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2019 //
13

 

In a major corruption investigation, the FBI arrested former Puerto Rico Secretary of Education Julia Keleher in DC. 

Keleher was brought to the Island to cut costs, impose charters and vouchers, and break the union. She was paid $250,000 a year while preaching austerity and budget cuts.

Puerto Rican educators did not like her, to put it mildly. They referred to her with the hashtag #JuliaGoHome.

Puerto Rican journalist #RimaBrusi tweeted that the new hashtag is #JuliaGoToJail

The charges include wire fraud, money laundering, and theft.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Reform, Fraud, Privatization, Puerto Rico

Carl J. Petersen: Public School Allies Retake Control of the Los Angeles School Board

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2019 //
16

Carl J. Petersen, parent advocate and blogger in Los Angeles, writes here about the long, hard struggle to wrest control of the Los Angeles Unified School District school board from the hands of the billionaires.

Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings and other billionaires have funded the campaigns of charter advocates. The billionaires spent many  millions to gain control, only to see one member of their slim majority—Ref Rodriguez— indicted for campaign finance violations. Even after his indictment, however, he refused to step down for nearly a year until after the board had chosen businessman Austin Beutner  as superintendent.

But everything changed after the election of Jackie Goldberg, who won Rodriguez’s seat.

Read this great story.

 

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Los Angeles

Peter Greene: The Essential Foolishness of the Fordham-CAP “Moonshot”

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2019 //
17

 

Peter Greene writes here about the “moonshot” to transform American education, co-sponsored by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the allegedly liberal Center for AMERICAN Progress. Peter points out that this collaboration demonstrates that both sides of the DC Establishment endorse corporatedceducarion reform (despite its manifest failure for the past 25 years).

He compares their competition to education’s version of the self-driving car.

He writes:

Do you mean something that’s promoted relentlessly but is still far off in the future? Or do you mean a program that faces major obstacles that tech-cheerleaders just sort of gloss over?

Perhaps you meant a tech-based solution that strips all participants of power and agency and gives it instead to a bunch of programmers? Or did you mean a new tech initiative that promises to make a bunch of people rich?

Or do you mean something that can fail with really catastrophic results?

All their goals are stated as measurable results.

And he notes:

These goals are all about changing numbers; they are an open invitation to apply Goodhart’s or Campbell’s Laws, in which focus on a measurement leads to that measurement being rendered useless. This is about coming up with ways to make better numbers. Yes, one way to improve numbers can be (though not always) to improve the underlying reality those numbers are supposed to represent. But those techniques are hard to scale, expensive and not easy to devise. There are always simpler methods.

If you want a piece of this action, the group is open to submissions of 500 words until the end of the month. But remember– this is not about coming up with a self-driving car. It’s about coming up with a marketing package that makes it look like a self-driving car has been perfected. It’s about doing a good job of using modern CGI to fake your presence on the moon without all the hard work, expense and challenge of actually getting a rocket up there.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Carol Burris: Don’t Let Democratic Candidates Get Away With: “I’m Against For-Profit Charters”

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2019 //
64

 

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about the efforts by most Democratic candidates to avoid confronting the dangers of privatization:

When Democratic candidates are questioned about charter schools, many typically reply, “I am against for-profit charter schools.” Everyone cheers. Politicians have created a convenient (and false) dichotomy that says nonprofit charter schools are good, and for-profit charter schools are bad.

Don’t be fooled. There are now only 2 states that allow for-profit charter schools—Arizona and Wisconsin. California changed  its laws. 

However, 35 states allow for-profit Charter Management Organizations (CMOS) to run their nonprofit charter schools. 

40% of the charter schools in Florida are run by for-profit charter management companies. While the individual charter is a nonprofit, it can turn over everything from hiring, to curriculum, to financial management to a for-profit corporation. In Michigan, 80% of the so-called nonprofit charter schools are run by for-profit companies. 

To understand how this arrangement works, read this blog I wrote for the Answer Sheet on Florida’s charter schools. You will read about the Zulueta brothers who were on the board of an Academica charter school even while their for-profit real estate companies, including one in Panama, were leasing property to the schools. 

Let me shock you a bit more. The National Alliance for (so-called) Public Charter Schools recently gave the controversial profiteer, Fernando Zulueta, an award at its national conference!

You probably know the names and reputations of the other big for-profit CMOs—BASIS, National Heritage, Academica, K12 and more.

The question candidates need to answer then are:

 “Do you support for-profit Charter Management Organizations, and if you do not, what are you going to do about them?”

The most important questions to ask, however (and don’t let them off the hook), are whether they support the NAACP moratorium on new charter schools and “Will you stop the the federal funding of new charter schools?”

There is a reason the charter lobby never complains when a candidate says that he/she is against for-profit charter schools. It means nothing will change.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Hoax, Privatization

Andrea Gabor: The Slow But Steady Decline of the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2019 //
8

 

Andrea Gabor is one of the most interesting education writers around. She holds the Bloomberg Chair in Business Journalism at Baruch College. Her articles appear on sites read by people in the business world. Yet she has a firm grasp of education issues. Her latest book, After the Education Wars, has the best discussion of New Orleans education issues that I have seen. Her book The Man Who Invented Quality, about W. Edwards Deming, has a brilliant chapter #9) utterly demolishing merit pay. Follow her articles.

Her latest appears on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Gabor tells the story of the reversals of fortune of the charter industry in California. Its billionaire funders spent heavily on losing candidates in the last election and are now playing defense.

The article was written before the indictment of 11 people in the charter industry in California for scamming the state of $80 million. That got lots of press and increases pressure on the Legislature to plug some holes in its charter laws.

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

Michigan: Gov. Whitmer Wants to Impose Deformers on Benton Harbor

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
10

 

Thomas Pedroni of Wayne State University writes that Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants to impose corporate reform organizations on Benton Harbor to “save” the underfunded district. A cruel hoax. She is carrying forward the foul legacy of Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

 

Michigan Gov Whitmer Grants Benton Harbor Schools a Trojan Horse-load of School Privatizers 
 
Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, propelled to the state’s highest office just eight months ago by Black, Latino, and other progressive voters, is coming out to her electorate— not as a progressive, but as a third term retread of former Republican Governor and Flint Poisoner-in-Chief Rick Snyder.
 
Not only has Whitmer continued Snyder’s penchant for strong-arming and dismantling predominately Black school districts (he gutted Inkster, Buena Vista, Muskegon Heights, Highland Park, and Detroit; she’s “offered” to close Benton Harbor’s only high school in exchange for not immediately dissolving the entire district), but she also shares her predecessor’s fascination with the disruptive possibilities of some of our nation’s foremost corporate education reform companies.
 
While the Governor has responded to statewide outrage over her indecent proposal for Benton Harbor High School by grabbing her political life preserver and offering to consider alternative suggestions by the elected board (which returns to power after five years of state supervision on July 1), her rhetorical softening comes with a new “proposal”— Benton Harbor trustees must now agree to onboard a “turnaround expert” to guide their return to autonomy.
 
As the Benton Harbor trustees learned on Wednesday, June 26, just days before their restoration, the Governor has given them a choice— they must work with one of the four whole district “turnaround” companies she has laid on the table: AUSL (Academy for Urban School Leadership), TNTP (the New Teacher Project), TfC (Turnaround for Children), or ERC (Educational Resource Strategies).
 
AUSL, of course, has consistently failed to reach its promised benchmarks in the schools it’s taken over in Chicago and, remarkably, has underperformed non-AUSL Chicago schools despite receiving large resource infusions from the Gates Foundation. A recent Chicago Teachers Union analysis of AUSL teacher firing and replacement in Chicago found that the largest impact of AUSL takeover may be on the racial composition and experience level of the teaching workforce— fired teachers were disproportionately more experienced and of color.
 
TNTP, which traces its founding to the teacher-bashing Michelle Rhee and TFA’s Wendy Kopp, has been described by Peter Greene as the “big boys and girls” version of Teach for America, in that its objective is to transform people with established non-teaching careers into teachers. TNTP believes in using computer-administered multiple choice questions to identify better teachers.
 
The final two organizations, Turnaround for Children and Educational Resource Strategies, similarly partner with and are funded by a who’s who of the corporate education reform world— TfC by the Bezos Family Foundation, the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Kipp DC, and America’s Promise Alliance, among others; and ERS by the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, TNTP, and the New Schools Venture Fund.
 
How Governor Whitmer’s staff came up with this short list of corporate education reform organizations for Benton Harbor Schools is unclear; but one thing is clear— the Governor is passing over the insights and recommendations she might garner from the Benton Harbor community; from educational researchers and teacher educators; from officials and researchers at the Michigan Department of Education; from rank and file teachers and their unions. Instead she is laser-focused on whoever it is from the corporate education reform world who is whispering in her ear.
 
Benton Harbor Area Schools, its children, and the people who elected Whitmer deserve much better than this, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t get it. But this can only happen if Whitmer chooses to disavow the corporate education Koolaid and actually listen to the people she claims to value.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Michigan, Privatization

Peter Greene: On Reading “Winners Take All,” a Morality Tale for Our Times

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
57

Peter Greene read and loved Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

So did I, which is why it is on my short list of books I recommend for summer reading.

Peter writes:

Every so often you come across a book that unpacks and reframes a part of the universe in a way that you can never unsee. Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas has been a book like that for me.

Giridharadas is writing about “the elite charade of changing the world,” and while he is taking a broad look at the way the Betters are trying to influence our country and our world, the connections to education reform are unmistakable. I’m about to go ahead and give my grossly oversimplified take on his work and its intersection with public education; as a general guide, assume everything smart came from his book and everything wrong is my fault. There’s a lot to pack into a blog post, and I will cut corners like crazy; there are so many pull quotes from this book that I have put up an entire supplemental blog post just of quotes from the work. My best recommendation if you find any of this striking is to buy the book…

The elite assumption is that the system that put them on top, the game that they are the winners of, is fair and just and unrigged and not in need of being changed in any major ways. They are not part of the problem, and they are hurt that you would even suggest that was true; they are simply the just winners in a meritocratic system.

So the solutions they will propose meet a couple of standards:

1) It will include no challenge to the fundamentals of the current system.
2) The elites will be in charge (because their eliteness is proof of their fitness to run the show).
3) It will harness entrepreneurial energy (i.e. someone’s going to make money from it).
4) It will hand most of the blame responsibility to the people on the bottom who are being “rescued….”

The fingerprints of this mindset are all over education reform.

* The very notion, popular and bipartisan among the Betters, that education is the fix for everything. All the socio-economic inequity in the country can be solved, not by looking at the system that created that inequity– in fact, we’re not even going to admit that the system had any hand in creating inequity. No the system is swell, and the winners are people who are at the top got there by hard work and wisdom and meritocratic excellence. So, no, we don’t need to look at that system– we just need these people on the bottom to get themselves better educations (including things like grit) so that they can win at the game, too.

* Think Bill Gates, deciding that he needs to rewrite and standardize public education, and will have to circumvent, subvert and co-op the actual government to do it. Nobody elected him Grand Poobah of US Education, but he is perfectly comfortable appointing himself to the job.

* Think the deification of business standards in ed reform, and the notion that the free market will fix the system, that we will know which ideas are working best because they will succeed in the market. Think Eli Broad’s assertion that schools don’t have an education problem, but a business management problem.

* Think the repeated notion that democracy is a problem in education. We need to get rid of elected school boards and we need to give school leaders the kind of freedom that an all-powerful CEO has to create his vision. In ed reform, local control and the democratic process are to be avoided.

* Think the constant rejection of expertise. Reformsters don’t need to talk to teachers. What do teachers know? (If they are really such great shakes, why aren’t they rich?) I’ve succeeded at the game, and the same wisdom that made me a winner at that game will apply to fixing education. No other sorts of wisdom are necessary.

The huge irony of this book, which excoriates the elites and the billionaires who pretend to “save” the world by privatizing it, is that one of the blurbs was written by Bill Gates. He (or more likely, someone in his office) wrote:

In Anand’s thought-provoking book his fresh perspective on solving complex societal problems is admirable. I appreciate his commitment and dedication to spreading social justice.

This is a book that lambastes the likes of Gates. Why did he endorse it?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Hoax, Privatization

Jersey Jazzman: Do Test Scores Go Up When Tests Are Harder?

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
18

 

Jersey Jazzman untangles a simpleminded assertion by New Jersey Reformers: Harder Tests Make kids smarterand Cause scores to go up.

We have been hearing this claim since NCLB was enacted.

And we must ask, what’s the connection between scores going up and learning more?

Test prep can drive scores higher too.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Privatization, Testing

Great Britain: School Privatization Run Amok

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2019 //
6

 

 

Thanks to Leonie Haimson for sending along this paper. The “academy” concept began under a Conservative government that believed private enterprise was infinitely wiser than public anything. Corporations and wealthy individuals were encouraged to “buy” control of schools by putting up a large sum. Things seem to going swimmingly for the idea. This is a small excerpt. When I was part of the Koret Task Force at the rightwing Hoover Institution, we journeyed to England as a group to learn about this example of privatization in action.

The paper contains a valuable review of “related party transactions,” that is, financial self-dealing in the private entities that receive public funding in the U.S. and Great Britain.

 

Charter Schools, Academy Schools, and Related-Party Transactions: Same Scams, Different Countries

Preston C. Green III and Chelsea E. Connery

 

Academies were first introduced in 2000 as the City Academy Program. 34 City academies were to

replace locally run schools in urban areas that were deemed to be failing by the school inspection

body Ofsted, or that were underachieving. The Education Act 2002 permitted academies to open

outside of urban areas.

 

Eight years later, Parliament enacted the Academies Act 2010. This statute extended the academy

option, until then limited to struggling schools, to include successful schools at both the primary

and secondary levels. The government financed conversion costs and provided considerable

financial incentives to encourage schools to convert. The number of academies increased

dramatically as a result of these policy changes. In 2010, there were 203 academies throughout

England, all of them serving secondary schools with high proportions of disadvantaged students.40

As of September 2018, there were 8,177 academies, constituting 36% of England’s state funded

schools. About 66% of England’s secondary schools and 30% of its primary schools have achieved

academy status.

 

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

St. Louis: Four New Charters, One Charter Closes

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2019 //
5

 

St. Louis will get four new charters, including another KIPP and a private school that turned charter so families would no longer pay tuition. A charter plagued with financial mismanagement and suspicion of inflated enrollment will close.

Kairos Academies is enrolling sixth-graders for its personalized learning-themed middle and high school opening in the Marine Villa neighborhood. It’s the only entirely new school opening in August. Founders Gavin Schiffres and Jack Krewson are Teach For America alumni who taught briefly in north St. Louis County districts. Krewson is the son of St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson.

St. Louis College Prep closed in May after it wound up in financial trouble mid-year following revelations of possible attendance inflation by its founder and executive director. Lafayette Preparatory Academy, a nearby elementary school, tried to step in and purchase the building to add its own high school. The deal to purchase the building fell through and plans for a high school have been postponed, according to Susan Marino, Lafayette Prep’s executive director.

The Soulard School, which had been a private school in south St. Louis, is converting to a charter school this fall.

Creative destruction continues to roil St.Louis, aided by TFA.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, St. Louis, Teach for America
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