Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Rob Levine: How Charters Kill Public Schools, the Example of Minneapolis

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2019 //
52

Rob Levine, a critic of Ed Deform, created a website called edhivemn.com that tracks funding of education reform orgs in MN –  and it has a feature called Charter School Scandals of the Day

Levine created a graphic to demonstrate the damage that charters do to public schools. He focuses on the charter schools in Minneapolis, which are well funded and highly segregated. Defenders of charters in Minneapolis actually think that racial and ethnic segregation is a good thing. They think that as long as families choose segregation, it is okay. George Wallace would have agreed with them.

The cycle of destruction begins as the districts loses students and money to charters. The district must cut programs and increase class sizes. When they cut programs and class sizes grow, they lose more students to charters. The cycle continues until the district shrivels to insignificance or disappears.

Rob writes:

Though specifics vary, across the nation charter schools are draining the students and finances of public school districts, creating distress in many. In Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Foundation is trying this very strategy with its created entity, Minnesota Comeback, whose goal is 30,000 new charter seats in the city.

Does the Minneapolis Foundation want to destroy public schools in Minneapolis? Look at its partners: all the same “reform” groups that are working with DeVos, the Waltons, and the Koch brothers.

Rob’s graphic shows that tens of millions spent by “Reformers” to disrupt and destroy public schools in Minneapolis.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Privatization, Teach for America

Watch My Interview with Lauren Steiner, Taped Yesterday

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2019 //
14

 

Lauren Steiner is an activist who is actively engaged in fighting privatization in California. She has a regular program on Facebook, where she interviews people like me.

She interviewed me yesterday about charters, billionaires, neoliberalism, and other issues. The California Legislature is deciding right now about bills to regulate charters and make them accountable.

I reactivated my FB account for this interview. You don’t have to be on FB to watch as it is posted on YouTube and easily available. 

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

Rucker Johnson: The Value of Racial Integration

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2019 //
46

Rucker Johnson, economist and professor of public policy at Berkeley, has written an important new book called Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. 

It arrives at an opportune moment, as the Disruption Movement (AKA Reformers, Deformers) has decided that school segregation is a very good thing indeed, because charters are more segregated than public schools. A charter operator in Minnesota recently argued in comments here that segregation was just fine so long as it was voluntary. That was to rationalize the fact that Minneapolis has purposely segregated charters for children who are black, white (“German immersion”), Hmong, Hispanic, and Somali. Most recently, a charter supporter said that it was time to abandon the promise of the Brown decision, because it had not been realized.

In short, embrace the status quo, don’t fight it.

It is thus refreshing to read Rucker Johnson, who briefly summarizes his findings in an article at Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet.”

Do not be content with reading the summary. The book is rich with history and anecdote, as well as Johnson’s meticulous research about the long-term and significant benefits of school integration.

He writes:

How did we get here? How has de facto Jim Crow been nurtured back to health?

Policy amnesia. We have forgotten the efficacy of the boldest suite of education policies this country has ever tried: school desegregation, school funding reform and Head Start.

School desegregation and related policies are commonly misperceived as failed social engineering that shuffled children around for many years, with no real benefit. The truth is that significant efforts to integrate schools occurred only for about 15 years, and peaked in 1988. In this period, we witnessed the greatest racial convergence of achievement gaps, educational attainment, earnings and health status.

Using nationally representative longitudinal data spanning more than four decades, I analyze the life outcomes of cohorts tracked from birth to adulthood across several generations, from the children of Brown to Brown’s grandchildren. The slow and uneven pace of desegregation, school funding reforms, and Head Start programs across the country created a natural “policy lab,” that allowed for rigorous, empirical evaluation of integration, school funding and Head Start.

The research findings are clear: African Americans experienced dramatic improvements in educational attainment, earnings and health status — and this improvement that did not come at the expense of whites.

Sixty-five years after the Brown decision, our nation is at an inflection point. Do we intend to pursue the goal of  equal educational opportunity for all or do we want to cling to the discredited policies of our apartheid past?

Do we listen to those with a vision for progress or to those who embrace a failed and corrosive status quo?

Rucker Johnson explains the way forward. Read his book. Send a copy to your members of Congress.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Tom Ultican: Jeb Bush’s Disastrous Florida Education Mess

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2019 //
24

 

You may hear choice zealots boasting about Jeb Bush’s “Florida Model.” As Tom Ultican explains here, they are delusional or  just making stuff up (to put it politely). 

Ultican relies on Sue Legg’s excellent report and digs down to show that the motivation behind Jeb’s so-called A+ plan was profits and religion, not education.

Jeb Bush and his friends have made Florida into a low-performing mess that can’t attract or retain teachers. But it has become a magnet for profiteers, grifters, and fundamentalists.

Ultican writes:

When the A+ Program was adopted in 1999, Florida had consistently scored among the bottom third of US states on standardized testing. The following two data sets indicate no improvement and Florida now scoring in the bottom fourth…

Last year, 21 percent of Florida’s students were enrolled in private and charter schools. The Florida tax credit scholarships (FTCS) went to 1,700 private schools and were awarded to over 100,000 students. Most of those students are in religious schools. Splitting public funding between three systems – public, charter and private – has insured mediocrity in all three systems.

Privatization Politics and Profiteering

To understand Florida’s education reform, it is important to realize that its father, Jeb Bush, is the most doctrinal conservative in the Bush family. He fought for six years to keep feeding tubes inserted into Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistently vegetative state. Jeb was the Governor who signed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law. During his first unsuccessful run for governor in 1994, Bush ‘“declared himself a ‘head-banging conservative’; vowed to ‘club this government into submission’; and warned that ‘we are transforming our society to a collectivist policy.”’

This is a deeply researched and eye-popping post.

Read it to arm yourself against rightwing propaganda.

The Florida Model is an abject failure.

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

Oakland: Charter Supporters Wonder Why No One Loves Them Anymore—and Blame the Unions

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2019 //
17

At the annual conference of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which raises millions to launch charter schools, there was a sour and tremulous mood, according to Matt Barnum in Chalkbeat. 

A group from the Oakland Education Association picketed outside the meeting, and the conveyors focused in on “the unions” as their big problem. It was especially galling to them that some of their own charters had been the target of strikes. The report did not indicate that anyone thought seriously about the teacher turnover for which charters have become noted. Nor about the gap between the sky-high salaries for charter administrators and lowly teachers.

Nor did there seem to be any self-awareness about the near-daily scandals in the charter industry. Did they discuss the public revulsion to for-profit charters or for-profit EMOs and CMOs? Apparently not.

They were aware that the teachers’ strikes during the past year specifically targeted charter schools, but they didn’t know why. Must be those damn unions. They really didn’t get that they were not only left out of Red4Ed, but seen as the enemy of teachers in states that had weak unions.

The level of self-scrutiny, as reported here, seemed defensive and shallow.

The event offered a look at how charter leaders from across the country are coming to grips with new limits on their growth and political clout. And there are signs that their anxiety is warranted, with charters losing support particularly in blue states and cities and among Democrats.

NewSchools attendees were reminded of the opposition when dozens of protestors, organized by the Oakland Education Association, gathered outside the conference hotel downtown. One of their chants: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, charter schools have got to go.”

“They are a leech onto the public system,” said Harley Litzelman, an Oakland teacher who protested at the event.

But charter backers also used the event to explain how they’re planning to confront what they see as the danger posed by teachers unions, internal and external.

The charter industry will never understand what went wrong until they stop looking for enemies and examine their own ranks and their own behavior.

Several years ago, I was invited to speak at Rice University in Houston by KIPP and TFA. At that time, I warned them that if the charter industry did not clean out its Augean stables and get rid of the grifters, entrepreneurs, dilettantes, and crooks, they would all be tarnished. They didn’t listen. They still lack the capacity to look inside to learn why things are going so badly.

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

Sue M. Legg: The Failure of Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan in Florida

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2019 //
66

Sue M. Legg is a scholar at the University of Florida, a leader in Florida’s League of Women Voters, and a new board member of the Network for Public Education. She has written an incisive and devastating critique of Jeb Bush’s education program in Florida, which began twenty years ago. Bush called it his A+ Plan, but by her careful analysis, it rates an F. Advocates of school choice tout Florida’s fourth-grade scores on NAEP, which are artificially inflated by holding back third graders who dontpass the state test. By eighth grade, Florida’s students rank no better than the national average. Note to “Reformers”: a state that ranks “average” is NOT a national model.

Twenty Years Later, Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. 

Sue Legg explodes the myth of the Florida miracle in her well documented report:  Twenty Years Later: Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. She has compiled the research over twenty years showing the negative impact of privatization in Florida.  The highly touted achievement gains of retained third graders are lost by eighth grade.  Top ranked fourth grade NAEP scores fall to the national average by eighth grade. One half of twelfth graders read below grade level.  The graduation rate is above only 14 states.

The A+ Plan was a great slogan, but its defects resulted in a twenty-year cycle of trial and error to fix the problems.   School grades are unreliable.  A school receiving a ‘B’ grade one year has about a thirty percent chance of retaining the grade the following year. Invalid grades occur so frequently that State Impact reports that Florida made sixteen changes to the school grade formula since 2010.  It was thrown out but the new version is no more stable.  What it means to be a failing school, moreover, is consistently redefined to make more opportunity for charter school takeovers.  

Florida touts improving academic achievement in the private sector that is not supported by research.  The CREDO Study reams Florida’s for-profit charter industry.  According to a Brookings Institution study, low quality private schools are on the rise, and the LeRoy Collins Institute’s 2017 study, Tough Choices, explains that there are twice as many severely segregated Florida schools (90% non-white students) than there were in 1994-5.  The legislature ignores the problem in part because key legislators have personal interest in charter and private schools.  “Florida suits him” said Roger Stone, recently indicted in the Mueller investigation.  The New York Times article: Stone Cold Loser: quoted Stone’s admiration for Florida when he said “…it was a sunny place for shady people”.  A Miami Herald series “Cashing in on Kids” reported a list of questionable land deals and conflicts of interest by for-profit charter school management. The federal government began an investigation in 2014.  Last year a  charter management firm faced criminal charges, and Florida charters have the nation’s highest closure rate.

WalletHub reports that Florida is 47th of 50 states in working conditions for teachers.  As a result, the Florida Education Association projects 10,000 vacancies next fall. Teacher shortages are not only related to money, they are due to a deliberate attack on the profession in order to break teacher unions and impose a political ideology.  As Steve Denning in a Forbes magazine article explains: “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and schools alike”. The thinking, he says, is embedded in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top policies.   The A+ Plan is an extension of these policies that includes increased testing and rewards and punishments related to results.

Florida’s teachers are not allowed to strike.  Parents may have to.  The legislature recently approved small raises for teachers but expanded the unconstitutional voucher program.  The governor is not concerned; he appointed three new judges to the Florida Supreme Court.  In the May 3rd 2019 Senate session, Senator Tom Lee chastised his fellow Republicans.  He has supported charter schools for years, but said ‘the industry has not been honest with us...first they wanted PECO facility funds, then local millage; now they want a portion of local discretionary referendum funds’.  He called the current supporters ‘ideologues who have drunk the kool-aid‘.

The full report is published on the NPE-Action website.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: The All-New, Rebranded Achievement School District

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2019 //
18

 

Gary Rubinstein has been following the progress—or lack thereof—of Tennessee’s Achievement School District. Funded with $100 million from Race to the Top money, led by a top-drawer charter school operator from YES Prep, it was supposed to take the lowest-performing schools in the state and catapult them into the top performing, in only five years. The secret ingredient for their promised success wasturning them over to charters operators.

Sadly, it didn’t work.

Gary Rubinstein writes here about the latest gambit. Rebrand the failed ASD!

Legerdemain!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Oregon: While Teachers Strike, Corporate Reformers Kill Bills to Stop Testing Pre-K-2 and to Expand Opt Out

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2019 //
14

 

Corporate Reformers in Oregon joined with their allies in the business community to kill a bill (HB 2318) called “Too Young to Test,.” Modeled on laws in New York and New Jersey, the bill would have prohibited mandatory standardized testing from pre-k through grade two. Most of the testimony favored the bill.

The purpose of HB 2318:

Prohibits State Board of Education from requiring, and school districts from administering, certain assessments to students enrolled or preparing to enroll in prekindergarten through grade two. Makes exception for assessments administered for diagnostic purposes as required under state or federal law.

The Corporate Reformers and the business community killed it. 

No one, the Corporate Reformers insist, is ever too young to test.

They also focused on killing a bill to strengthen Oregon’s opt-out law.Then they killed a bill to strengthen Oregon’s opt out law. (SB 433). Here is their letter of opposition to SB433.

They claim they need the test scores so they can effectively advocate to meet student needs. No one should be allowed to opt out of testing, no matter how young.

Apparently they don’t know that standardized testing is highly correlated with family income and family education. They should read Daniel Koretz’s The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.

Stand for Children was part of the pro-testing lobby. SFC is heavily funded by the Gates Foundation and other pro-testing, pro-privatization foundations. Stand for Children advocates for high-stakes testing, charter schools, and test-based evaluation of teachers. Dana Hepper of “The Children’s Institute” also lobbied against these bills and in support of standardized testing of kindergartners; she previously worked for Stand for Children. In addition to endorsing the joint statements, here is her testimony supporting mandated standardized tests for children of all ages and opposing opt out.

They say they need the scores so they know what children need.

BUT, THE CORPORATE REFORMERS HAVE THE TEST SCORES NOW AND THEY ARE NOT ADVOCATING FOR STUDENT NEEDS.

Teachers in Oregon are on strike to advocate for smaller classes, nurses, mental health counselors, librarians, and social workers.

Where are the corporate reformers?

Fighting for more standardized testing, even for kindergartners! Fighting parents’ right to opt their children out of standardized testing!

Are they joining the teachers to demand more investment in schools? No.

Are they on the picket lines demanding smaller classes? No.

Are they lobbying for increased funding for nurses, social workers, librarians, and mental health counselors? No.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Class size, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Opt Out, Oregon, Standardized Testing

Indiana: Schools Chief Blasts Republican Plan to Eliminate Local Control of Schools

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2019 //
18

Jennifer McCormick, Indiana’s last elected state superintendent, has 20 months left in her term. She is a Republican, but she is different from the state leadership: She actually cares about students and democratic control of public education.

The Governor and the Legislature have decided that in the future, all power over education will be concentrated in one office: the Governor’s.

The state’s last elected superintendent of public instruction is not leaving office quietly. With just more than 20 months left in her four-year term, Jennifer McCormick is on a mission to warn Indiana voters of the immense power over education legislators just handed off to the governor’s office.

In a presentation to more than 100 parents and educators at Ivy Tech Community College’s Coliseum campus Thursday, the schools chief described the state’s current system of school governance, what it will become in 2021 and why Hoosiers should begin paying closer attention. 

“What we’re going to have is not the norm,” McCormick said, describing oversight of preschool education through higher education. “In most states, somewhere in here, beyond the governor’s office – is your voice. In most states, it’s either the state board (of education) is elected, or the state superintendent goes through confirmation by those who are elected, maybe in the state senate. Indiana will be very, very, very top-heavy in one office, with a lot of control.”

McCormick, a Republican, spent more than an hour highlighting policy differences between the Department of Education she now oversees and the governor’s office and like-minded education leaders in the General Assembly, beginning with views on school finance.

“I know it’s not all about the money, but it’s hard to operate school systems without adequate and equitable resources,” she said, citing numerous examples of funding proposals that shortchange public schools and a growing system of “haves and have-nots.”

She has a singular focus: What is in the best interest of the student.

She pointed out the disconnect between different leaders’ objectives. Gov. Mitch Daniel pushed to get every Indiana student prepared for a four-year college track, she said. Now, under the Holcomb administration, the push is for workforce certifications and two-year college programs… 

“We need to start saying our customer is not the workforce,” McCormick said to loud applause. “Our customer in K-12 is the child. You have to consider their ability, their passion.”

This is a very unusual point of view in Indiana, where the business leaders make the decision and the Governor expresses them. Educators are supposed to remain silent and do what they are told. Communities are supposed to relinquish local control and take orders from the Governor.

This is not democracy. This is not the way public schools are supposed to operate. The Hoosier state is turning into an autocracy where children are useful only as lon as they meet the needs of the workforce.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Indiana

Steven Singer Recommends a Fun Book for You

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2019 //
3

I begin by saying I don’t like selling anything except ideas. That’s why this blog accepts no advertisements.

Nonetheless, I recommend this post by Steven Singer, which describes his reaction to the collection of many of my essays in a book called “The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch.”

Any royalties earned by the book will be donated to the Network for Public Education.

Steven begins:

“Imagine you could talk with Diane Ravitch for 10 to 15 minutes everyday.

“That’s kind of what reading her new book, “The Wisdom and the Witt of Diane Ravitch”, is like.

“You’ve probably heard of Ravitch before.

 

“She’s the kindly grandmother you see on the news who used to think standardized tests and school privatization were the way to go but actually had the courage to pull an about face.

 

“She’s that rare thing in public policy – a person with the honesty to admit when she was wrong — and even lead the resistance to everything she used to believe in!

 

“Now she champions teacher autonomy, fair and equitable school funding and authentic public schools with duly-elected school boards.

 

“Her new book is full of shorter pieces by the education historian from all over the mass media – The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Huffington Post and even her own blog.

“You’ll find an article explaining why she changed her mind about school reform nestled next to a reflection on what it’s like to grow up Jewish in Texas. Here’s a succinct take down of President Obama’s Race to the Top next to an article extolling the virtues of student activism in Providence. Ever wonder what Ravitch would say to her mentor Lamar Alexander about our current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos? It’s in there. Ever wonder what books on education she would recommend? It’s in there.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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