Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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BATS: What Is DFER? Why Does It Matter?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
30

 

Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson of the BadAss Teachers Association wrote this analysis of the organization called Democrats for Education Reform, known as DFER. It was organized in 2005 by a small group of hedge fund managers. Its purpose is to promote charter schools by funding candidates for Office who share its goal. It also supports test-based evaluation of teachers and high-stakes testing of students. Its inaugural meeting was held at a luxurious apartment in New York City in 2005, where the speaker was Illinois Senator Barack Obama (as recounted in Stephen Brill’s admiring account “Class Warfare”).

During the Obama campaign of 2008, the candidate’s spokesperson on education was Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. It was widely assumed that she would be Obama’s Secretary of Education. But DFER recommended Arne Duncan, a charter enthusiast known by DFER, and Duncan it was. Obama and Duncan’s Race to the Top embodied DFER’s principles. It propelled the proliferation of charter schools, school closures, Common Core, VAM for teachers, and high-stakes testing for students. It was a complete failure when judged by its announced goals of closing achievement gaps and lifting test scores to the top rank on international tests.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Obama, Privatization, Testing

Leonie Haimson: Is Colorado’s Rebuke to DFER a Turning Point in the Battle Against Privatization?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
15

 

Leonie Haimson writes here about the stunning rebuke administered by the Colorado Democratic Party to “Democrats for Education Reform” last Saturday. 

It is hard to overstate the commanding position of DFER in that state. Senator Michael Bennett is DFER-approved. So are two of the leading Democrats running for Governor. DFER’s Dark Money has captured the Denver school board.

Until now, no one has stood up to them. No one could match their cash.

Will DFER survive this denunciation? Of course. But their stamp of approval might turn into a stigma for real Democrats. Real Democrats do not support the DeVos privatization agenda. Real Democrats support public schools u dear democratic control.

Leonie writes:

”Let’s hope that the Colorado vote is a turning point, and that it is no longer politically or ethically acceptable for progressive Democrats to act like Republicans when it comes to education policy.”

Wouldn’t that be great?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Industry, Privatization

Puerto Rico: President of the Teachers Association Denounces Privatization of Island’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2018 //
12

Mensaje: Aida Díaz, president of the Teachers Association of Puerto Rico (AFT), spoke on television and denounced the privatization of the Island’s public schools.

 

Good afternoon and thank you for allowing me to enter your homes.

• For decades, the public education system, its students and teachers, have had to fight hard battles to advance the right to an education of excellence,

• The rights acquired by teachers have been threatened by the administrations on duty. The Association of Teachers has successfully confronted them in the courts, administrative forums and the Legislature.

• All administrations have attempted against public education and its teachers, but never, never, have we witnessed an effort to dismantle our education system as Governor Rossello and Secretary Keleher intend to do. We had never seen such a clear intention to run over our teachers and students.

• First the Governor and his Secretary told us that they had to close schools and closed 167.

• Then, they awarded operators with 100 charter schools and educational vouchers, opening the door to fraud.

• And I wonder … and I know that you too, to benefit whom? To the teachers and the students, or is it to advance the interests of the Fiscal Control Board and the vulture funds?

• Governor Rosselló and Keleher now want to close 283 schools. If we allow it, they mean 450 schools closed in less than a year. 35% of schools.

• There are 450 affected communities, over 8,000 displaced teachers and thousands of families and students whose lives were interrupted without foundation. To the tragala!

• Has anyone thought about the effect that these closures are going to cause the small businesses that depend on our schools, the corner shop or the lady who sells “limbers” to keep her house?

• Has anyone thought of those teachers, who with their own money bought materials because the government does not help?

• Has Secretary Keleher thought of the thousands of students with health conditions whose parents walk to their schools to give their children medicine because there are no nurses?

• If the enrollment of students was reduced by 15%, how is the closure of 35% of the schools justified?

• How does the Governor allow his Secretary to disparage our people, opening a call for outside managers, with a payment of $ 125,000 per year?

• These acts reflect the little respect we have for our people.

• The Governor said he was not going to do more of the same, and he’s right. No one has tried to close down a third of the schools, run over thousands of teachers, displace thousands ofstudents, close Montessori schools because they refused to become charter, and affect thousands of small businesses.

• No Governor has placed public education in the hands of third parties or given a blank check to a Secretary who disparages our people.

• GOVERNOR: ENOUGH!

• Do not criticize the Control Board when your actions are so aggressive towards teachers and our students. We are paying too high a price for the irresponsibility of the Government.

• Paulo Freire, said “teaching demands to know how to listen”.

• Governor, you have an obligation to hear the voices of thousands of teachers, parents, students, small businesses, whose lives will be marked by the closing of 35% of schools. Listen to the mayors.

• Governor, listen.

• The Association, as the exclusive representative of the Magisterium will continue taking firm actions to protect the future of our education system. The voices of children, parents and teachers are silenced by NO ONE

• Therefore, teachers, parents, students and communities, join us to create a human shield to protect our education, next Wednesday, April 25 from 3:30 in the afternoon, at the Capitol. To defend our schools!

• The voice of the people must be heard because the future of our children depends on the present they live.

May God bless and protect Puerto Rico

To see and hear her speak, you can watch the video.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Good News! Colorado Democratic Party Overwhelmingly Passes Motion Against DFER

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2018 //
19

 

The group that calls itself “Democrats for Education Reform” represents hedge fund money and Wall Street and advocates for charter schools and high-stakes testing. Although it has no evident connection to education other than its name, it has funneled campaign contributions and Dark Money into state and local elections to support privatization of public schools. It has strongly backed test-based evaluations of teachers, despite the evidence against it.

Today, the Colorado Democratic Party voted on a minority report critical of DFER. The motion required a 2/3 voice vote. It passed easily.

The motion said:

”We oppose making Colorado’s public schools private, or run by private corporations, or segregated again through lobbying and campaign efforts of the organization called Democrats for Education Reform and demand that they immediately stop using the Party’s name, I.e., “Democrat” in their name.”

To learn about DFER, read this:

Click to access IntendedConsequencesofDFER.pdf

 

 

Categories Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER

Tom Ultican: The Problem of Fake Teachers, Fake Administrators, Fake Schools

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2018 //
20

 

Tom Ultican has been chronicling the doings of the Destroy Public Education Movement, as it tears a path through urban districts across the nation.

In this post, he tackles the DPE invention of new credentials for people who didn’t have time to get real ones.

He begins like this:

”The destroy public education movement (DPE) has given us teach for America (Fake Teachers), Relay Graduate School (Fake Schools) and the Broad Superintendents Academy (Fake administrators). None of these entities are legitimately accredited, yet they are ubiquitous in America’s major urban areas.

“There was a time in the United States of America when scoundrels perpetrating this kind of fraud were jailed and fined. Today, they are not called criminals; they are called philanthropists. As inequitable distribution of wealth increases, democratic principles and humane ideology recede.

“It is time to fight the 21st century robber-barons and cleanse our government of grifters and sycophants.

“Philanthropy in America is undermining the rule of law and democratic rights. Gates, Walton, Broad, DeVos, Bradley, Lily, Kaufman, Hall, Fisher, Arnold, Hastings, Anschutz, Bloomberg, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Dell and the list goes on. They have afflicted us with teach for America (TFA), charter Schools, vouchers, phony graduate schools, bad technology and bogus administrators implementing their agendas.

“Without these “philanthropists” and their dark money schemes none of this would exist. Public schools would be healthy and teen-age suicide rates would be going down; not up. Instead we have mindless testing, harmful technology and teaching on the cheap.

“This “philanthropy” is about profits, reducing tax burdens on the wealthy, imposing religious dogma and subjugation of non-elites. It is harmful to America’s children. The attack on public education was never primarily about benefiting children. It certainly was never based on concern for minority populations.”

Read the rest.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Teach for America TFA

Peter Greene on Arne Duncan’s April Fools Day Joke

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
13

Peter Greene does his very best close reading of Arne Duncan’s bizarre article in The Washington Post in which he insists that his policies have NOT failed, contrary to the evidence and public opinion.

He begins:

Lately, a wave of apostasy has swept through Reformsylvania, and reformsters have stepped up to say that ed reform kind of, well, failed. Yesterday, just in time for April Fools Day, former secretary of education Arne Duncan (and current thinky tank fixture) took to the pages of the Washington Postto try his hand at some non-reality-based history and argue that ed reform has been a resounding success.

How has he managed this feat? Well, there are several tricks.

This damn guy

First, move the goalposts. All the way back to 1971. Fourth grade math and reading scores on the NAEP are up since then!! Why focus on fourth grade scores? Maybe because 17-year-old scores haven’t really moved much at all. And of course, reform hasn’t been in place since 1971– and most of that growth happened before modern ed reform ever took hold– you know, prior to those days when Secretary Duncan was explaining that American schools actually sucked? And all of this assumes that a single standardized math a reading score is a good proxy for the quality of the entire educational system.

Duncan has an explanation for those flat 12th grade scores– because the graduation rate is up, more weak students are taking the NAEP, and so keeping the scores flat is a win. Yay? Anyway, graduation rates are up, so that’s more proof of ed reform success, except that, of course, whether those diplomas actually mean anything other than districts have learned how to game the system with credit recovery and other baloney– well, never mind. There’s probably some real gain there, and that’s not a bad thing. The numbers are up, so woohoo…

[His] notion that test-based accountability “revealed” achievement gaps is baloney. Educators knew where the gaps were. We’ve4 always known where the gaps were. We’ve screamed about the gaps. I don’t believe any teacher in this country picked up test results and said, “I’ll be damned! I had no idea these non-white, non-wealthy students were having trouble keeping up!” At best, test-based accountability was a tool to convince policy makers who would listen to data spreadsheets before they would listen to teachers. And even then, policy makers didn’t look at the data and say, “Well, we’d better help these schools out.” Instead, all the way up to Duncan’s office, they responded with, “Well, let’s target this school for closure or conversion or a growth opportunity for some charter operators.”

This, it turns out, is another thing Arne “Katrina’s Destruction of NOLA Public Ed Is a Great Thing” Duncan counts as success- three million students in charter school. He cites Boston as a win (again, debateable) but ignores the widespread fraud, corruption and failure that charters have been prone to nationally…

Duncan has tried a variety of history rewrites for his administration (only politicians hated Common Core! charter school magic unleashed! ESSA was not a reaction against his work! CCSS should have been rolled out faster!) But all of his reflections stumble over the same problem– Duncan simply refuses to acknowledge the damage that his policies have done to public education. Here he is acting puzzled again–

[Duncan wrote:] Some have taken the original idea of school choice — as laboratories of innovation that would help all schools improve — and used it to defund education, weaken unions and allow public dollars to fund private schools without accountability.

No, Arne! Not “some.” Not some faceless mysterious group of folks. You. You and the people that you empowered and encouraged and cheered on and backed with your policies. You did that.

Well, as we have come to expect, Peter is right on target.

Charter schools are the gateway to vouchers. It is now widely understood that Arne Duncan and his friends paved the way for Betsy DeVos and her all-out war on  public schools. That is now widely recognized, even if Duncan doesn’t admit it.

Reform is failing, failing, failing. The public is wise to the reformers’ real goal, which is to privatize public schools and disparage teachers instead of confronting the real issues of poverty and segregation.

And nothing that Arne writes here changes that fact.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Arne Duncan: American Schools Are the Worst–No, the Best–Ever

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
11

 

For his entire seven years as Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan repeated the mantra that American public schools were the worst ever. They were falling behind the global competition, they needed radical change, they needed privatization, they needed radical transformation. He thought that the remedies were testing, more testing, high-stakes testing, charter schools, and technology. Now he works for Laurene Powell Jobs at the Emerson Collective, where he is supposedly re-imagining the American high school, or something like that.

Having listened to his daily rants about failure for so long, it is startling to see his opinion piece in the Washington Post declaring that American schools are definitely on the right track because they have followed the advice of “reformers” like himself. He claims credit for every gain in test scores and graduation rate since 1971! Even though he was only 7 years old in 1971.

The funny thing is that I used many of the same data in my book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, to refute the claims of Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and the rest of the corporate reform wrecking crew, who insisted that America’s public schools were failing and obsolete. Their favorite word was failing.

Now, Arne doesn’t admit that he was wrong, but instead he claims credit for everything good.

No mention of the D.C. graduation rate scandal or the spread of credit recovery, which enables students to take an online course for a week and get credit for a semester that they failed. No mention of cheating scandals. No mention of the 2015 flatlining of NAEP scores.

But, you see what is really happening is that all the reforms he championed have made no difference at all. They are failing. There is not a single district controlled by reformers that is a shining example of success. The shine is off New Orleans, where most of the charters are rated C, D, or F. The District of Columbia has been firmly in the grip of “reformers” and we now know that most of its claims are illusory. Rick Hess, one of the chief reformers, chastised his fellow “reformers” that they had refused to recognize the D.C. realities and spun a tale of success out of their own fantasies.

Teachers and parents hate the high-stakes testing, and school officials are bullying them into taking the mandated tests.

But go back to 1971, and it is clear that we have made great progress. It is just clear that Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad had nothing to do with it.

Let’s credit the successes of our teachers and principals, our democratically controlled public schools.

The real struggle is not to double down on failed strategies but to protect our public schools from the rapacious grasp of privateers and profiteers.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance, Testing

Mercedes Schneider: John White Is Nervous about NAEP Scores

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
14

 

NAEP scores will be released April 18. They have already been released to state Superintendents so they can study their state’s scores and get their press release ready.

The 2015 scores were flat. Some states saw declines. This was widely viewed as a rebuke of the test-obsessed federal policies of the previous 15 years. Intensive test prep produced gains, but they had come to a halt.

Mercedes Schneider writes that Louisiana John White is already worried and has sent out a pre-emptive letter complaining that the scores may have been pushed down by NAEP’s switch to online testing.  This is not a statement by a man who is looking forward to the score release. He is already making excuses.

White, a Broadie who got his start in TFA, has promised dramatic improvements. He has promoted charters and vouchers. He has hailed the New Orleans “miracle.”

We watch for the NAEP release.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Louisiana, NAEP, Testing

Julia Sass Rubin: The Newark Charter School Wait-List is a Myth

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2018 //
3

I posted earlier today about Chris Christie’s poison pill for Newark, having approved in advance of his retirement an additional 7,000 charter spaces on the basis of a long waiting list.

Rutgers Professor Julia Sass Rubin explains that the current charter schools have openings, and the wait list is a myth:

If current patterns hold, many of the Newark charter school seats approved by Governor Christie are unlikely to be filled by Newark residents because there appears to be an oversupply of charter seats for the level of demand in Newark.

Over the last four years, Newark residents have filled only about 80% of the approved seats in Newark charter schools. This may have been a factor in the Christie Administration’s decision to close several Newark charter schools last year, as doing so would create more demand for the remaining charter schools.

This pattern of weak demand for charter schools is also seen in other New Jersey cities with large charter enrollments.

The data showing a gap between supply and demand throws into question the claims of a 35,000 student waitlist that the NJ charter industry has used to push back against any slow down in approvals. The 35,000 figure is self-reported and unverified. It is created by the charter school trade association. If a student’s family applies to 10 charter schools, the waitlist would count her as ten students. Analysis of specific individual charter waitlists also confirms that they may include students who have moved away or who applied in prior years and are no longer interested.

Mark Weber and I will be releasing a second charter school research report next month that goes into greater detail on these and related issues.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

Tom Ultican: Oakland Is California’s Petri Dish for Destroying Public Education

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2018 //
8

 

In this stunning review of Oakland’s recent history, retired teacher Thomas Ultican shows how that city’s school district was completely captured and nearly destroyed by a succession of Broadie Superintendents.

The “Destroy Public Education Movement” was launched in 2001 by then-Mayor Jerry Brown, who started Oakland’s first charter school.

The district fell into debt, and the state took control. Under state control, Oakland schools were managed and mismanaged by a series of Broad-trained Superintendents. Oakland became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Broad Foundation, and each superintendent opened more charter schools than his predecessor.

“Like the Republican politicians in Detroit, Democratic politicians in California pushed OUSD into financial disarray. And like Detroit, Oakland’s financial issues were driven by declining enrollment stemming from the same drivers; privatization, gentrification and suburban development.”

Broadies, writes Ultican, have a long-established track record of disruption, discord, and fiscal mismanagement.

In Oakland, one Broadie followed another, driving demoralization and disarray.

There is at last, he writes, a new superintendent who is not a Broadie. Her name is Kyla Johnson-Trammell. If the billionaires get out of her way, she might be able to restore stability in the district.

Ultican writes:

“A constant theme promoted by the DPE movement is “every student deserves a high-quality school.” When you hear a billionaire or one of his minions say this, you and your community are targets and your about to be fleeced.

“The United States developed a unique education system that was the envy of the world and the great foundation upon which our democratic experiment in self-governance was established. Over two centuries, we developed a system in which every community had a high-quality public school.

“These schools had professionals who earned their positions by completing training at accredited institutions. Government rules and oversight insured that school facilities were safe, and the background of all educators was investigated. In urban areas like Oakland there was a professionally run public school in every neighborhood.

“Could it have been improved? Of course, and that is exactly what was happening before the deceitful attack on public education and teachers.”

He is hopeful that the new homegrown leadership might extract Oakland schools and students from the billionaires’ Petri dish.

 

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Oakland, Privatization
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