Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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New York City: Leonie Haimson Reports on Exit of a Top Klein Aide

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2018 //
11

Bill de Blasio was elected Mayor of New York City in 2013. He appointed former Deputy Chancellor Carmen Farina as his chancellor. Having been a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent, she was far more qualified than her predecessors Joel Klein (a lawyer) and Dennis Walcott (a non-educator who had served as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Deputy for education), and teachers welcomed a leader who had knowledge and e perience. However, Farina never cleaned house. People hired by Joel Klein remained in top positions. Farina, of course, had worked for Klein too.

The new Chancellor Richard Carranza has done some shaking up, although the deep strata of corporate reformers remain sheltered in place throughout the upper echelons of the Department of Education.

Leonie Haimson reports here on the resignation of one top Klein hire after two recent demotions and the retention of others.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Klein, Joel, New York City

D.C.: Mayor Picks Private School Parent and Privatizer as Deputy Mayor for Education

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2018 //
4

Thanks to G.F. Brandenburg for alerting me to this important post by Valerie Jablow, public school advocate in D.C.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser picked a bona fide corporate reformer as her deputy mayor for education. Even the pro-charter Washington Post Thought the choice was “odd.” Jablow thinks the correct word was not odd but conflicted.

The new deputy mayor Paul Kihn is a private school parent. He has close ties to the power structure. He previously worked in Philadelphia where Jablow notes some of his less than admirable feats, which make his appointment to oversee the D.C. public schools very odd:

Also odd is how the Post article did not mention a few things about Kihn that are, well, downright strange–if you believe in public schools BY, FOR, and OF the public:

–Kihn apparently made changes in a teacher contract in Philadelphia to eliminate guarantees about water fountains–because teachers wanted to ensure every school would have functional water fountains. (Not to mention what we know this means for kids’ developing brains.)

–Kihn also was apparently behind an idea to increase public engagement in Philadelphia’s public schools by allowing parents at a few underfunded district schools to vote to turn their schools into charters–or accept no additional funding. Now that’s school choice–with teeth!

[Confidential to Paul Kihn: As a DCPS parent, I really don’t wake up at night thinking about how I need to have even less engagement in my kids’ schools by turning them into charter schools that are not subject to FOIA; that can use annual facilities allocations for anything without any public accountability; and whose plans are not a matter of public knowledge until after the fact. But I do think about stranded costs and empty seats and civil rights violations created by the uncontrolled growth of charter schools in our city. Do you?]

–The wife of Scott Pearson (head of the charter board) is the boss of Kihn’s wife–at a think tank started by Pearson’s wife, called JPMorgan Chase Institute (associated with the financial institution of the same name).

Even more odd is that Paul Kihn, his wife, and Scott Pearson are all former employees of McKinsey, which applies business thinking to every activity.

If all of this sounds incestuous, well, it is.

The mayor has controlled D.C public schools since 2007. We are still “waiting for Superman” to land in D.C. So far, the biggest change has been to hand over half the kids to charter schools, most funded by the rightwing Walton Family Foundation and to introduce a failing voucher program. This looks more like floundering than strategy. Abandoning public responsibility for public schools is retreat, not success. Soon, Betsy DeVos is likely to name D.C. as one of her demonstration districts.

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

Hess and McShane: Why Did the Bush-Obama Reforms Fail to Achieve Their Goals?

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2018 //
42

Rick Hess and Michael McShane of the AMERICAN Enterprise Institute bring a fresh perspective from their perch on the right. Writing in the conservative journal Education Next, they speculate on the reasons for the disappointing results of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, the twin policies of Bush and Obama.

Policy makers in Washington loved the ideas of testing, accountability, choice, and national standards. Yet, we now know that these policies were controversial and ultimately ineffective. NAEP scores flatlined, and there is little or no evidence that these policies succeeded.

They write:

“Within a few years, though, those Obama administration efforts—especially its support for teacher evaluation and the Common Core state standards—would themselves turn controversial, breeding backlash that rivaled the dissatisfaction with NCLB. Obama’s reforms would get mired in bitter debates about their emphasis on test scores and whether they constituted federal overreach.

“The results of all this activity were decidedly mixed. There’s some evidence that NCLB’s accountability push led to modest test score gains, at least early on (though one can reasonably ask how much of those gains was evidence of schools “getting better” and how much might have been due to teachers shifting time and energy from other subjects to reading and math instruction). Over the past decade, however, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has shown an unprecedented flat-lining of achievement growth. Research suggests that ambitious efforts to remake teacher evaluation did not lead to meaningful changes in how candidly teachers are actually evaluated, and that the $7 billion in the federal School Improvement Grant program did not, on average, improve achievement in participating schools. The Common Core and many of these other efforts may yield benefits down the road, but the results have certainly not been revolutionary and are widely perceived to be disappointing.

“This brief recap prompts a simple query: What happened? Why did each of these initially promising, seemingly popular efforts at federal leadership ultimately lose its luster? Were the high-profile initiatives of the Bush-Obama years a much-needed kick-start that forced America to get serious about school improvement, or a recipe for slipshod policymaking and rushed implementation that ultimately undermined reform? Did these reforms reflect a gutsy commitment to putting students first or political gamesmanship that yielded a counterproductive series of distracting mandates?”

There is no reason to believe that the latest version of these policies—the Every Students Succeeds Act—Will fare any differently.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Los Angeles: Superintendent Beutner Meets Often with Privatization Advocates, Not Public School Leaders

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2018 //
6

Hedge fund manager Austin Beutner, superintendent of schools for the Los Angeles Unified School District, has lots of time to meet with Eli Broad, Peter Cunningham, the head of the California Charter Schools Association, and a long list of charter leaders and privatization advocates.

The teachers’ union, which has already authorized a strike, fought to get Beutner to release his calendar. He resisted, and now we know why.

Here is the story.

Of course, he has also met with union leaders, which is inevitable. But he has an unusual availability to charter school leaders and their lobbyists.

Perhaps Beutner could arrange a visit by Betsy DeVos. He could show her the progress he has made in undermining the public schools that he is supposed to lead.

This was LAUSD’s comment on Beutner’s calendar.

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

How Charter School Chains Make a Profit

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2018 //
17

In this post, journalist Stephen Rosenfeld explains how charter operates make a profit. He has only scratched the surface. Some make profits through clever real estate deals, where they buy or lease a space, renovate it at public expense, then charge the state exorbitant rental fees. Some embezzle. Some use their school credit card like an ATM. Some set up “related companies” and divert funds to those companies, which they happen to own. Some hire contractors and get kickbacks. There is no end to ingenuity when no one is watching.

Rosenfeld begins with the interesting question: In what way is Enron like the charter industry? (One of the major funders of charter schools is John Arnold of Texas, who made his fortune as an Enron trader, before it imploded).

On the surface, Enron was in the energy business. But behind closed doors, it was engaged in an array of dubious investments and transactions that helped its top executives amass wealth. The charter schools cited in their report similarly present a public face of being alternative public schools. But their founders also used an array of financial tactics, especially involving school real estate deals, to become rich by diverting millions from their classrooms.

Nationwide, 43 states and the District of Columbia have 6,800 charters serving 2.9 million students. They comprise 6 percent of K-12 public school enrollment, which has increased six-fold in the last 15 years. When states approved the first charters in the 1990s, the idea was to nurture locally accountable experimental schools. However, since then a K-12 privatization industry has emerged that is dominated by companies seeking to create regional or national brands, akin to any other corporate franchise. These larger charter operations tend to have non-profit and for-profit arms, which can mask an array of complicated financial relationships.

The charter industry’s largest operations often are run by what’s called educational management organizations, EMOs, which “now control 35-to-40 percent of the industry with an estimated 45 percent of charter students,” the scholars said. These sophisticated operations can attract private investors because they can use their status as schools to get large tax breaks, which, in turn, are applied to a range of profit-making ventures that have nothing to do with educating under-served communities.

“Charter schools attract investors because of the potential for new revenue streams,” the authors said. “For instance, the New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) program provides investors the opportunity to make profits from charter-school real estate transactions. Enacted as a component of the Community Relief Tax Credit Act of 2000, the NMTC was designed to encourage investment in low-income communities. The NMTC accomplishes this goal by providing investors in a community development entity (CDE) a 39% tax credit over a seven-year period.”

But the biggest way to grab seven-figure sums in the privatized education sphere was through shady real estate transactions, they said, saying their for-profit arms can “obtain revenue from charter schools through lease payments for the use of the facilities.” The authors them gave five stunning examples, where the school’s founders could not stop themselves from grabbing millions.

Read about his five examples.

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

California: Antioch Unified School District Approves Two Charters, Gives Up $25 Million for Its Own Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2018 //
13

The school board of Antioch Unified School District in California had an extended discussion about whether to approve two new charter schools. The discussion was often heated. The district made the decision knowing that the two charters will draw away $25 million from its own public schools. The board staff urged the board to reject the charters.

It makes for interesting reading.

The lead petitioner stressed the district’s low test scores and the urgency of change.

On Wednesday, the Antioch Unified School District approved charter petitions for East Bay Tech Middle School Academy and High School Academy on 3-2 votes in a meeting that lasted more than 5-hours.

As a result, District staff anticipate losing $25 million in revenue over the next several years.

In favor was Debra Vinson, Chrystal Sawyer-White and Walter Ruehlig. Opposed were Gary Hack and Diane Gibson-Gray.

The vote came after staff recommended the Board deny the petition based on an analysis by legal council in which numerous deficiencies were identified in the petition along with concerns related to the petition and the proposed Charter School’s operations. HE also stated that that more than one of the legal grounds for denial were met. Specifically, the petition does not provide a reasonably comprehensive description of several essential charter elements and the petitioners are demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the proposed education program.

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

Jim Miller: Who Will Save Us from the Billionaire “Saviors”?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
26

Jim Miller, professor at the San Diego City College, has posed exactly the right question: Who will save us from “our billionaire saviors?” The question was inspired by Andrea Gabor’s excellent new book After the Education Wars, and by the possibility that billionaire Michael Bloomberg will run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.

In New York City, we remember him as a data-driven, test-loving, top-down Reformer, who hired non-educator Joel Klein to terrorize teachers and principals and introduce choice and charters. The result was a public relations success and an education failure. Much boasting, vast disruption, constant reorganization. Change for the sake of change. Bloomberg is one of the billionaires identified in the NPE report about the super-rich who fund anti-public education candidates in state and local elections.

Miller writes:

After failing to prop-up Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagging gubernatorial campaign last June, Michael Bloomberg apparently spent the summer pondering whether it would be wiser for him to personally save the United States rather than waste his time trying to rescue California by proxy. Last week the New York Times reported that Bloomberg was mulling a run for the Presidency as a Democrat because that represented the most viable path to victory. As the Times story observed, while Bloomberg has engaged in some good work on guns and the environment, many of his other positions might not be very likely to win over the liberal base of the Democratic Party…

As Andrea Gabor, (ironically) the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, writes in her excellent new book After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Bloomberg’s reign in New York hardly represented a golden era for education: “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia—never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined…”

The business reformers came to the education table with their truths: a belief in market competition and quantitative measures. They came with their prejudices—favoring ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in the messy trenches of inner-city classrooms. They came with distrust of an education culture that values social justice over more practical considerations like wealth and position. They came with the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators. And most of all, they came with their suspicion—even their hatred—of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.

What this has resulted in, according to Gabor, is that the corporate reformers “adopted all the wrong lessons from American business.” Rather than innovating by harnessing “the energy and the knowledge of ordinary employees,” who are the most “knowledgeable about problems—and solutions” because they know the process, the billionaire boys club has favored a punitive, hierarchical, undemocratic, one-size fits all approach that has hurt students more than it has helped them.

Wedded to a factory-style approach to education, corporate reformers “focused on a Taylorite effort to standardize teaching so that teachers can be easily substituted like widgets on an assembly line. This despite the fact that, on average, ‘unions have a positive effect on student achievement’ and the best charter schools are often the independent charters that give teachers voice, often via union contracts.” All of this reflects the fact, Gabor reminds us, that “the corporate education-reform movement has deeply undemocratic roots.”

What this movement has brought us is not pretty. We have systematically devalued the “art” of teaching in favor of a dumbed-down, accountability regimen that prefers standardization and over-testing to empowering educators and students to think more creatively and independently. It has assailed teachers and attacked educational culture to such a degree that it should be no surprise that our society has become increasingly anti-intellectual and hostile to fact-based analysis. As Gabor observes of the Trump era:

[T]he election of this larger-than-life Chucky demagogue, with his multiple bankruptcies and divorces, his sexual predations and business malfeasance, his hate-filled speeches and tweets, also represented a failure of corporate-style education reform as it has taken shape over more than twenty years. Among an electorate that often favors “ordinary” people they can identify with, Trump, the consummate philistine—unread and uninterested, crude, unthinking, and disdainful of facts and any attempt at rational truth—holds up a dystopian mirror of the electorate…

It may not have been the intended outcome of those who simply wished to produce a more useful workforce, but it does show the profound limits of their debased instrumentalism. Hence Gabor again observes: “Corporate education reformers cannot be directly blamed for the ascendance of Trump. However, over two decades of an ed-reform apparatus that has emphasized the production of math and ELA test scores over civics and learning for learning’s sake has helped produce an electorate that is ignorant of constitutional democracy and thus more vulnerable to demagoguery.”

Gabor’s thorough study does more than just criticize the failures of corporate education reform. She outlines how multiple examples of innovative educational practices across the country have defied the technocratic dictates of the well-heeled and focused instead on “bottom-up” strategies that have relied heavily on “a participative, collaborative, deeply democratic approach to continuous improvement, drawing on diverse constituencies—including students, teachers, and local business leaders—in their effort.”

Thus, there are some insights to be found in approaches that rely on “local democracy” that can help do right for our children and the society at large. Following these examples, rather than the lead of self-important billionaires, is where we can find hope for a better education system and a more democratic society.

As for Bloomberg, maybe he should just go away and let the people lead. We’ve had too much “reform” from self-declared rich saviors and philanthrocapitalists already. In fact, it’s long past time that we save ourselves from them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Gary Rubinstein: CONFIRMED! The Complete and Total Failure of the Tennessee Achievement School District at a Cost of $100 Million

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2018 //
21

Gary Rubinstein reports that the latest Tennessee school rankings were just released. Now we know. The Tennessee Achievement School District was a complete and total failure. $100 million down the drain, which came from Race to the Top funding. The same money might have been used to reduce class sizes in these schools. Instead, it was used to induce charter operators to come to Tennessee and work their magic. It failed.

Would someone tell Bill Gates, John Arnold, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the other billionaires who are still spreading the phony claim of charter miracles?

Spread the word to states like Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, which created their own “achievement school districts” based on the Tennessee model.

Seven years ago, as part of Tennessee’s Race To The Top plan, they launched The Achievement School District (ASD). With a price tag of over $100 million, their mission was to take schools that were in the bottom 5% of schools and, within five years, raise them into the top 25%.

They started with six schools and three years into the experiment, Chris Barbic, the superintendent of the ASD had a ‘mission accomplished’ moment where he declared in an interview that three of those six schools were on track to meet that goal.

But a year later, the gains that led to that prediction had disappeared and it wasn’t looking good for any of those six schools. By the time the five year mark had been reached, in the Fall of 2016, Chris Barbic had already resigned and taken a job with the John Arnold Foundation.

The thing about 2016, though, is that whether or not the ASD schools met the lofty goal could not be determined, officially. Tennessee releases their official ‘priority’ list of the bottom 5% schools every three years. And, conveniently enough, the last one was in 2015. So even though it was clear in 2016 that the original 6 ASD schools would not be in the top 25%, an even more important question — how many of those schools remained in the bottom 5%? — would not be known officially for two more years, in the Fall of 2018.

A few days ago, Tennessee finally released the long-awaited 2018 priority schools list, and for the ASD, the results were decisive and devastating.

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

The Business of Charter Schools: A $45 Million Charter Deal

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2018 //
28

Long, long ago, almost everyone went to the neighborhood public school. The school had a principal, who was overseen by the superintendent. The superintendent answered to a local school board. Those were not idyllic times, to be sure, but no one ever imagined that there was profit to be found in the public schools, or that the public schools would one day be part of “the education industry.” All that is changed now. There are still neighborhood public schools, but now there is an industry that relies on entrepreneurs and market forces. You don’t have to be an educator to manage or operate or start a charter school (think tennis star Andre Agassi or football hero Deion Sanders). There are tax breaks for investors in charter schools. Charter school properties are bought and sold, like franchises or just ordinary real estate. They have no organic connection to the local community. The profit for entrepreneurs is to be found in the real estate transactions.

A recent real estate deal brought this change into focus. There is a buyer and a seller; there are investors. There is return on investment. The world has changed. The charter industry has profits and losses. They open and close. It is not about education. It is a business.

school

[more intro]

A $45 million charter deal suggests profits on the horizon

by Tom Chorneau
Graduation mortar board cap on one hundred dollar bills concept
August 09, 2018(Fla.) A private real estate fund, which boasts of pioneering big money investments in charter school properties, announced this week a $45 million deal to buy four schools in three states.

ESJ Capital Partners, based in the Miami area, added the schools to a portfolio that includes a number of more traditional investments, including apartment buildings, medical offices and tourist attractions.

But the firm also owns 28 charter school properties that they say are valued at more than $650 million.

The firm promises to “provide optimum returns for our investors through disciplined procedures, selective investment criteria and structured processes,” according to their website.

Although for-profit investment in charter schools accounts for only a small slice of the movement nationally, there are examples of commercial enterprise within the system.

In some instances, a lender might be able to take advantage of a tax break because of their investment in a school that is located in an economically challenged neighborhood. In other cases, an investor might be interested in the consistent, government-back rent that charters can pay.

There is probably far more invested by a handful  of very wealthy patrons of charters, who view the movement has providing a much needed competition to traditional public schools.

Whether driven by profits or politics, the growing availability of financial support for charters is much needed, supporters say.

In comparison to traditional public schools, charters have much more difficulty borrowing money. The banking community has traditionally viewed charters operators has carrying far more risk of insolvency than traditional public schools.

Charters in most states must also pay for school improvements or new construction out of operating budgets.

A number of big philanthropic organizations have stepped in to improve the fiscal landscape for charter facilities.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has been very active in the Los Angeles area, as has the Gates Foundation in Washington State.

Earlier this year, the Walton Family Foundation—led by the heirs of Walmart founder—announced the creation of two nonprofit entities to help finance the cost of building and maintaining new charter schools. Combined, the investment from the foundation is expected to be close to $300 million.

But there apparently is also money to be made too.

In 2016, ESJ sold five Florida charter schools for $72 million to Charter School Capital, a financial services company specializing in charter schools. The partners did provide the purchase price of the schools.

The partnership’s latest acquisition are schools located in in the Phoenix area, Washington D.C. and Toledo, Ohio.

All of them are operated by Virginia-based, Imagine Schools.

ESJ reportedly has $100 million invested in properties operated by Imagine Schools.

“The Imagine campuses that we just acquired have been open over 13 years and are thriving financially and academically, with consistent high enrollment,” Matthew Fuller, chief investment officer of ESJ, said in a statement.

According to a release from the partnership in announcing the 2016 transaction, ESJ was one of the first investment groups nationally to see the potential in charter schools.

“At the height of the Great Recession, ESJ identified a niche in developing charter schools as an alternative to their traditional commercial investments,” the release said. “The real estate asset management group predicted this asset type would evolve and scale into a mainstream, single tenant investment category, attracting more institutional investors, lenders and bondholders.”

…read more

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

Who Is Hakeem Jeffries?

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2018 //
82

Hakeem Jeffries is a Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn. He is part of the Democratic leadership team. Some people believe he might be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, the successor to Nancy Pelosi. He is a favorite of hedge fund managers and the charter school industry. He recently was honored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools as an African American charter school leader (why the organization established a racially segregated award is unclear, as it is unclear why Congressman Jeffries would accept it).

It is not “progressive” to support privatization of public services. It is not progressive to support schools staffed by non-union teachers. It is not progressive to support a “movement” that ignores racial segregation and even celebrates it. It is not progressive to support a movement financed by the anti-union Waltons, the DeVos family, the Koch brothers, and ALEC.

Progressives support public schools.

Dorothy Siegel, a longtime activist in the Working Families Party, wrote this comment about Congressman Jeffries:

“I know Hakeem well. I worked very hard to get him elected, first, to the NYS Assembly, and then to Congress, in order to defeat the even worse Democrat Ed Towns. I even raised a bunch of money for him. Then I saw him slip over to the dark side. But, make no mistake, I believe that his embrace of privatization is NOT (as he claims) primarily about wanting poor black and brown kids to get a good education, but about the fact that there is more money and power on that side than on the side of public education. That money, the hedge funders who provide it, and the corporatist establishment Democrats, were the drivers of Hakeem’s political rise. Money and power have totally corrupted him. Hakeem, like Cuomo and Booker, has and will continue to sell out our public schools when they are in the inner sanctum of their party leadership positions. Hakeem’s rise within Congressional Dem leadership is helping him to thwart ALL our efforts to reign in Congressional support for privatization. On education issues, he wis arguably more powerful than all the new progressive congresspeople we will elect in 2018, combined.

“Sad to say, we must recognize that Hakeem is THE ENEMY. He can not be defeated in his very safe Brooklyn seat, so we must all ORGANIZE to EXPOSE him as the corporate shill that he is. We must tell our progressive Congressional friends that it is NOT ok to go along with Dem leadership (Hakeem) on charters and privatization. Believe me, Hakim will have the tools he needs to fight harder for his corporate friends than anyone on our side will have, so we need to be loud and clear. We also have to insist that, for politicians to gain our support, it’s NOT ok to be “progressive” on reproductive choice and Medicare for All, etc, etc, but anything less than TOTALLY AGAINST corporatism and privatization. Time to take a stand!

“BTW, Hakeem was a key supporter of Zellnor Myrie, the victor in one of the races against the IDC traitors we defeated in the NYS Dem primary. We need to watch what Zellnor does in Albany to make sure he doesn’t pay back his mentor by supporting Hakeem’s education agenda. I’m not at all worried about the other five IDC-slayers. They are solidly and deeply pro-public education. Zellnor may be, too, but he will certainly get pressured by Hakeem and that ilk. So we need to let him know that “progressive” means 100% pro-public education.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, New York, Privatization
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