Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Did U.S. Performance on PISA Decline Because of Common Core?

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2017 //
28

Every time that international test scores are released, there is a predictable clamor to “do something.”

President Obama said that our ranking on an international test was “a Sputnik moment” and reason to push harder for the “remedies” in Race to the Top. We now know that Race to the Top was a failure that had no positive results. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, many new charter schools opened, and performance on the NAEP in 2015–five years after the launch of Race to the Top–went flat.

Now we have the results of the latest international test, the Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the news for fourth graders in the U.S. was not good.

The United States tumbled in international rankings released Tuesday of reading skills among fourth-graders, raising warning flags about students’ ability to compete with international peers.

The decline was especially precipitous for the lowest-performing students, a finding that suggests widening disparities in the U.S. education system.

The United States has traditionally performed well on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, an assessment given to fourth-graders in schools around the world every five years. In 2016, however, the average score in the United States dropped to 549 out of 1,000, compared to 556 in 2011. The country’s ranking fell from fifth in the world in 2011 to 13th, with 12 education systems outscoring the United States by statistically significant margins. Three other countries roughly tied with the United States; they scored higher, but the differences were not ­notable.

What happened?

The Common Core (aka Common Core State Standards) was introduced across the nation in 2010-2011. The students now in fourth grade were the first cohort to get Common Core, starting in kindergarten.

Their reading scores went down, and it appears that the children who were likeliest to see declines were the lowest performing students.

The Common Core standards were written hurriedly, funded entirely by one man (Bill Gates), and rushed into implementation without any field testing whatsoever. Gates not only paid the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the writing of Common Core, but he spent many more millions (some have estimated as much as $2 billion) to persuade advocacy groups and education organizations to support the adoption and implementation of the standards.

Would the FDA approve a drug for national use without field testing?

Of course not.

Our children were guinea pigs, and the experiment failed.

Almost every state in the nation has adopted Common Core. Some have rebranded it, but it is still Common Core.

What will states do now?

One of the most prominent advocates for Common Core was Jeb Bush, who is close to Betsy DeVos. They loved Common Core, because they expected it would cause widespread failure and hasten support for the privatization of public schools.

DeVos reacted to the declining scores on PIRLS by advocating for more school choice, more charters and vouchers.

In 2012, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice wrote a report claiming that public schools were so awful that they endangered national security. Their recommendations: more charters, more vouchers, and Common Core.

Friends, we can’t let these nihilists destroy our democratic system of public education.

Schools improve when they have adequate funding, not competition. Schools improve when students live stable lives, with access to food, medicine, and decent living conditions. Schools improve when they are staffed with professional teachers, not temporary, untrained teachers.

Common Core has failed our nation and our students. So have the privatizers.

Since the passage and signing of No Child Left Behind on January 8, 2002, the U.S. has been on the wrong track.

Can the “reformers” please admit their errors and change their ways? Or are they determined to keep pushing the same failed strategies without regard to evidence?

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, International, Privatization, Testing

Andrea Gabor: Why We Should Be “Terrified” of Eva’s Success Charters

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2017 //
22

Andrea Gabor is the Michael Bloomberg Professor of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York. She is also a deeply knowledgeable scholar of corporate education reform. She debunked the alleged “New Orleans miracle” in the New York Times.

In this post, she expresses her concern about the fawning praise for Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools and explains why Eva’s charter schools are not a model for public education.

She writes:

It is we—that is American citizens—who should be terrified because Success Academy is entirely in-sync with the Trump era. It is unapologetically anti-democratic, anti-union, segregated and relentlessly test-driven. And, it should be noted, the CMO has not yet graduated a single high school student.

At a time when we are facing an existential threat to our democracy—one enabled by a decades-long obsession with standardized tests that narrowed curriculum and helped kill off civics education—the championing of Success Academy by writer as influential as Elizabeth Green, she is the founding editor of ChalkBeat and author of Building a Better Teacher, is worrying indeed.

Let’s be clear. Judging by its roster of 46 schools, there are potentially thousands of families who are happy with the education Success Academy provides, and many more who might have been if they had won the network’s lottery—though parents have complained of the CMO’s harsh, and even abusive, ‘boot-camp-like” culture—see here and here. Indeed, hundreds, if not thousands of children have been pulled out by their families (or forced out) because of the network’s strict demands for behavioral compliance and its single-focused pursuit of high test scores…

But Green fails to address key questions about the kind of education Success kids get—and at what cost. She certainly doesn’t question whether the ever-changing, bubble-in test-scores are the best—or even a good–measure of learning. While she acknowledges giving up on democratic control of schools and districts, she never considers the historic, foundational role of public education in a democracy—and the civic cost of autocratic education systems. Nor does Green consider the successful public-school networks amid what she, rightly, describes as the crushing bureaucracy that has often stifled New York City schools—even though she has published stories about them!

Green also glosses over—and, in some cases, omits entirely—the considerable problems with the Success Academy model, including widespread creaming and credible allegations of abusive behavior toward children. Although Green’s own book points out that the best teachers have years of experience, she says not one word about Success Academy’s high teacher attrition rate. Some Success Academy schools lose over half of their teachers each year; few last more than three years.

Gabor writes that there are excellent models within public education of success, and she refers specifically to the New York Performance Standards Consortium, which has used a progressive model of education with great results.

Gabor despairs of those who think that democracy is the problem, and charter schools are the answer. To give up on democracy is to fall into the snare of the Trump agenda. Let the authoritarian leader solve all problems.

Why anyone believes that a strict authoritarian school is just right for all or most American children is a puzzle. It may be right for some, but it is not a model for public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Discipline, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization, Testing

Mercedes Schneider: Study Says State Takeover of Low-Performing Schools in Tennessee Failed

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2017 //
18

Mercedes Schneider reports on a study funded by the Race to the Top program of the U.S. Department of Education and the Walton Family Foundation which concludes that state takeovers of low-performing schools in Tennessee made no difference. The schools remained low performing. That is, the takeovers failed. The schools taken over did not vault from the bottom of state rankings to the top. The so-called Achievement School District failed. The study can be found here.

This finding is no surprise to readers of this blog, as Gary Rubinstein has followed the progress–or lack thereof–of the ASD since its inception and has regularly reported that the low performing schools were not making any gains. Rubinstein said after six years of watching that the ASD was “a colossal failure.”

This is the abstract of the study by Ron Zimmer, Gary T. Henry, and Adam Kho:

In recent years, the federal government has invested billions of dollars to reform chronically low-performing schools. To fulfill their federal Race to the Top grant agreement, Tennessee implemented three turnaround strategies that adhered to the federal restart and transformation models: (a) placed schools under the auspices of the Achievement School District (ASD), which directly managed them; (b) placed schools under the ASD, which arranged for management by a charter management organization; and (c) placed schools under the management of a district Innovation Zone (iZone) with additional resources and autonomy. We examine the effects of each strategy and find that iZone schools, which were separately managed by three districts, substantially improved student achievement. In schools under the auspices of the ASD, student achievement did not improve or worsen. This suggests that it is possible to improve schools without removing them from the governance of a school district.

Schneider’s post includes additional quotations from the study.

And she finds it amusing, as do I, that the study was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, which is spending $200 million a year on new charters, every year. Add that to the $263 million that Betsy DeVos handed out from the U.S. Department of Education and that is a half billion a year to open new charters, from only two of the many sources committed to privatization.

After 25 years of the charter “experiment,” there is a growing body of evidence that they do not have a “secret sauce,” other than selection and attrition. That is not a replicable model for American education.

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

Jeff Bryant: Democrats Should Back Off Corporate Education Reform if They Want to Win Elections

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
13

Jeff Bryant has a warning for Democrats: Beware of corporate education reform.

Leave it to the Republicans.

Don’t promote privatization and charters. Don’t bash teachers. Don’t beat up on unions. You erode your base.

He points to Denver and Virginia. In Denver, a candidate for school board won, even though she was outspent nearly 5-1.

In Virginia, Ralph Northam made clear his opposition to charters.

Listen, Democrats.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Denver, Privatization

Good News! Newly Elected Douglas County, Colorado, School Board Kills Voucher Program!

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
4

The Douglas County School Board voted unanimously to shut down its voucher program, the only one in the nation authorized by a school district. This was a big setback for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which lavished funding on the DougCo schools.

Douglas County is one of the wealthiest districts in the nation.

Anti-voucher parents and educators swept the rightwing school board out of Office in the November elections.

“The Douglas County school board Monday put to bed the district’s controversial Choice Scholarship program, ending a six-year battle to set up the nation’s only district-approved voucher program.

“The vote to end the voucher program, and the legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, was unanimous: six to nothing. One board member, Kevin Leung, did not participate in the deliberations or the vote, fulfilling a campaign pledge that he would sit out the vote because he is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the school district.

“Leung is one of four board members elected on a campaign pledge to end the voucher program. He initially asked to be excused from Monday’s meeting but was asked to be present as the board would also discuss its search for a permanent superintendent.

“The other three — Chris Ciancio-Schor, Anthony Graziano and new board Secretary Krista Holtzmann — all voted to end the program along with board President David Ray, Vice President Wendy Vogel and Board Treasurer Anne-Marie Lemieux.

“The Choice Scholarship was authorized in March 2011 by a conservative majority elected in 2009 and backed with tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from wealthy pro-voucher Republicans including Alex Cranberg of Aspect Energy and Ed McVaney, founder of software company JD Edwards.

“The program would have given a taxpayer-funded voucher, valued in 2015 at around $5,000, to up to 500 Douglas County students who lived in the district and attend Douglas County public schools for one year.

“The Choice Scholarship was the first in the nation to be authorized by a school district. Most voucher programs are created by state legislatures and are targeted to low income students in failing schools.

“Douglas County, the fifth wealthiest county in the nation, did not include an income qualifier for its voucher.

“Until recently, school board races have generally been low-key (and low-dollar) campaigns. But the big dollars spent in Douglas County and Denver on this year’s races signaled the beginning of radical change in those two school districts around the issue of school choice. In Douglas County, the hot button issue was the voucher program; in Denver, it was charter and “innovation schools.” The Denver school board hiked the number of charter schools from 17 to 60, beginning in 2010, and the number of innovation schools, similar to charters, from seven to 49.

“In June 2011, the parents group Taxpayers for Public Education filed for an injunction against the school district to block the program’s implementation. The case wound its way to the Colorado Supreme Court, which in 2015 ruled the program unconstitutional based on the state’s Blaine amendment, which bans the use of taxpayer dollars for religious purposes, including religious education.

“The district, the third largest in the state, with more than 60,000 students, received $1.8 million in donations for its legal expenses from the Daniels Fund and the Walton Family Foundation. The district appealed the Colorado high court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the Colorado Supreme Court last June.

“Prior to Monday’s board vote, which took place just after 7 p.m., the board listened to more than an hour of pleas from those who wanted to make sure the new board members held to their pledge, as well as from those who wanted the voucher program to have a chance to work.

“During the board’s public comment period, every speaker who addressed the voucher program asked the board to end it.”

Here is the report from Chalkbeat Colorado.

“Public funds should not be diverted to private schools, which are not accountable to the public,” said board member Krista Holtzmann.

“The state Supreme Court, which during the summer was directed by the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the case, will have the ultimate say in whether the legal challenge will end.

“However, the court usually does not consider moot cases, said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, a plaintiff in the case.

“The board’s action is a blow to conservative education reform advocates and voucher supporters in Colorado and across the country. Proponents of vouchers had hoped a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court would set a national precedent.

“The legal question at the center of the voucher debate is whether a local school district can send tax dollars to private-religious institutions. A majority of the schools that enrolled in the Douglas County voucher system, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, were religious.

“The state Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that the district could not because the Colorado Constitution forbids it. The U.S. Supreme Court gave voucher supporters renewed hope this year when, in a similar case, it issued a narrow ruling for a preschool run by a church.

“A network of voucher supporters has argued that such constitutional prohibitions, known as Blaine Amendments, are rooted in Catholic bigotry and are outdated.

“Americans for Prosperity, a political nonprofit [the Billionaire Koch brothers] that advocates for free-market policies including private school vouchers, announced Friday it was spending “five figures” to warn Douglas County parents about the board’s decision to end the program.

“The new school board must put the needs of school children before any political belief,” Jesse Mallory, the group’s Colorado director, said in a statement. “Ending this program before it even has a chance to succeed and provide real change in our communities would be extremely shortsighted. If the board believes they should deny children more educational opportunities, AFP-Colorado will hold them accountable.”

“Opponents of vouchers, who showed up in force Monday night, presented a lengthy list of claims against private schools and vouchers. Some argued that private schools discriminate against students. Others suggested vouchers were part of a scheme to privatize education.

“What happens to the educational quality of children in the community school where there is less money to work with because of the voucher outflow?” said one speaker, Barbara Gomes Barlow, who has grandchildren in Douglas County schools. “It is diminished. It’s a fiction to believe that vouchers open up choice for all students. They do not.”

“Monday’s meeting comes nearly one month after four anti-voucher candidates — Holtzmann, Anthony Graziano, Chris Schor and Kevin Leung — resoundingly won seats on the board. Their opponents campaigned to keep the legal fight alive.”

Categories Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Koch Brothers, Privatization, Vouchers

Laura Chapman on “Educators for Excellence”

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2017 //
26

Laura Chapman writes:

“E4E requires teachers to sign a “pledge” that endorses VAM as a component of their evaluation. I do not understand why anyone would sign a pledge to any organization that billionaires fund. This is a variant of the infamous Gates Compact that called for school districts run by elected officials and with public accountability to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would allow charter schools, privately run and often by out of state franchises, to use resources they did not pay for, occupy public school buildings, avoid the full costs of a district services such as those providing food and transportation. The charters were supposed to share their “best practices” with the district. The E4E pledge and the Gates compact are duping teachers and leaders of district in the same way…with contract-like arrangements totally out of bounds of professional work ing education.

“Imagine a hospital or medical practice that signed a ledge or a “compact” to prescribe only the drugs/treatments that a billionaire donor wanted, and under conditions where those drugs/treatments were known to be toxic for parents and the medical personnel.

“I am reminded of the pledge that I had to sign to be employed in Florida, mid-century last. The document asked if I had every been a member of the Communist Party or a member of one of the groups labelled “communist sympathizers”–with the list on legal paper, both sides, two pages two columns.

“I think the E4E pledge is intended to function much like a loyalty oath, but now it is one aspect of market-based thinking. It also draws on the actual and implied threats in a non-compete clause in some employment contracts.

“There is probably nothing that E4E can do to legally enforce compliance with the terms of the pledge–a pledge of loyalty to an agenda set by the billionaires. The whole point is to use teachers as marketers for the bad ideas of E4E and make them accomplices in their own demise.

“If you sign the pledge, you confirm that you are easy prey. Do not be duped or used.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Steven Singer: The Staggering Naivete of Critics of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2017 //
27

Steven Singer holds up to daylight the “staggering naivete” of the critics of public schools. Most have never been teachers; some have never actually been inside a public school. But they have an answer: Blow everything up! Turn education over to for-profit corporations.

Singer writes (with many links):

There is a popular idea going around that public schools need to change because they’re outmoded, obsolete and passé.

While public schools certainly could do with a great deal of change to improve, this criticism is incredibly naïve.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of displaying a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses prominently on your bookshelf without actually having read it.

It’s like demanding everything you eat be gluten free without actually having celiac disease or a wheat allergy.

It’s the conceptual analogue to learning a trendy “word of the day” and trying desperately to fit it into your every conversation regardless of need or propriety.

America’s public school system is incredibly complex. And like most complex things, any criticism of it is at least partially correct.

There are ways in which the system is antiquated and could use updating. But to claim that the entire system should be scrapped in favor of a largely untested, disproven and – frankly – profit-driven model is supremely stupid.

The criticism seems to be well encapsulated in a flashy animated video from Big Picture Learning, a Rhode Island-based charter school network operating 165 schools in 25 states and nine countries. The organization has been heavily praised by the likes of former President Barack Obama and philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates.

He goes point by point through the major criticisms and refutes each one.

He starts with the absurd claim that public schools have been around a long time, so they must be obsolete. He points out that the Constitution has been around even longer, and no one suggests that we should junk. It has been amended periodically, but then so have public schools, even moreso than the Constitution.

For instance:

The criticism goes like this. The public school model was created in the Industrial Age and thus prepares students to be factory workers. All day long in public schools students follow orders and do exactly what they’re told. Today’s workers need different skills. They need creativity, the ability to communicate ideas and collaborate.

First, while it is true that the American public school system was created during the Industrial Revolution, the same thing can be said for the United States, itself. Beginning in 1760 and going until 1840, manufacturing began to dominate the western economy. Does that mean the U.S. Constitution should be scrapped? Clearly our form of government could do with a few renovations, but not by appeal to its temporal genesis, to when it was created.

Second, IS it true that America’s public schools expect students to do nothing but listen to orders and follow them to the letter?

Absolutely not.

In fact, this is exactly what teachers across the country DON’T want their students to do. We work very hard to make sure students have as much choice and ownership of lessons as possible.

We often begin by assessing what they know and what they’d like to know on a given subject. We try to connect it to their lives and experiences. We try to bring it alive and show them how vital and important it is.

Do we exclude creativity, communication and collaboration from our lessons?

Absolutely not.

In my class, creativity is a must. Students are required to write journals, creative fiction, and poetry. They draw pictures, maps, posters, advertisements. They make Keynote presentations, iMovies, audio recordings using Garage Band, create quizzes on Kahoot, etc. And they often do so in small groups where they are required to collaborate.

The idea that students are somehow all sitting in rigid rows while the teacher blabs on and on is pure fantasy. It betrays a complete ignorance of what really goes on in public schools.

And there are five more big points. He takes on each of them and demolishes the critics.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Karen Wolfe: The School Wars in California Heat Up as 2018 Approaches

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2017 //
21

Karen Wolfe, parent activist in Los Angeles, writes here in response to an ill-informed article in the Napa Valley Register by columnist Dan Walters. I read Walters’ article and it did not reflect what I knew about California. He thinks that the angels of light are on the side of privatization, battling the mighty “education establishment.” He thinks that “civil rights groups” support the privatization of public schools. This doesn’t make sense, inasmuch as the billionaires and privatizers are out to destroy public education in California. Rather than say so myself, from a distance of 3,000 miles, I turned to someone, Karen Wolfe, who is up to date on the state of the “school wars,” to respond to Dan Walters’ views.

She wrote:

California’s school war flares up on three fronts

Dan Walters is right that there is a fierce battle over public education in the state of California that is sure to heat up as the 2018 elections draw nearer. However, the framing of an entrenched establishment pitted against altruistic reformers is naive or misleading.

The real fight is over who gets the money in the state’s second largest budget line and what that means for our notion of government.

Do we update our public school system around the protections and oversight built into its foundation? Or do we privatize the system, handing over money and children to a free-market of charter school choices on little more than a promise to be responsible and effective?

Setting aside for the moment that the purpose of public school is more than achievement on standardized tests, one factor to consider is that the charters aren’t doing any better than the traditional public schools, according to the often-cited CREDO study (Urban Charter Schools in California, 2015).

Cal State Sacramento’s Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Julian Vasquez Heilig, told me that in many cases California charters have a negative impact on student learning. Even where any impact is positive, it is minuscule, he said. This is especially important when the push for more charters is compared to other education reforms like universal pre-kindergarten or class size reduction. Both of these have been found to show far larger positive impacts.

In fact, those are among the reforms sought by the Equity Coalition, a group referred to in the op ed. But the author doesn’t mention those reforms. Nor does he tell readers the primary objective of the group’s lawsuit: A larger overall education budget.

It seems no matter the topic of education policy, the so-called reformers claim that charter schools are the only answer.

This view puts them in close alignment with US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Her home state provides a stark example of the failure of privatization. Education historian and author Diane Ravitch writes, “Since Michigan embraced the DeVos family’s ideas about choice, Michigan has steadily declined on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.” From 2003 to 2015, the state’s NAEP rankings on fourth grade reading and math have dropped from 28th to 41st, and from 27th to 42nd, respectively, she writes.

And what about the money?

Every day, new reports of financial scandals at charters are posted by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. A study last year by consumer watchdog In the Public Interest, found that California taxpayers have paid $2.5 billion for charter school facilities alone. Much of that went for buying or leasing facilities in areas that already had surplus classrooms. The Spending Blind report also underscored the CREDO findings, stating that the education offered at three fourths of the charters was worse than that provided at nearby district schools.

Walters also asserts that civil rights groups are behind the push for more charters. This, too, is a talking point of the privatizers. While it’s true that there is an affinity for charters among many civil rights groups, the nation’s oldest and foremost civil rights organization, the NAACP, has called for a moratorium on new charter schools. Following a nationwide series of public hearings, the NAACP said it “rejects the emphasis on charter schools as the vanguard approach for the education of children, instead of focusing attention, funding, and policy advocacy on improving existing, low performing public schools…”

In any discussion about education policy or politics, the well-informed will recognize the talking points in the carefully constructed narrative meant to accelerate the transfer of one of the most important functions of government into a market-based enterprise.

California’s election of a new State Superintendent next year will amplify the school wars. That race pits Tony Thurmond, a former school board member on the pro-public schools side, against Marshall Tuck, formerly of Bain Capital, on the privatizers side.

There is even more at stake in the race for Governor. Both front runners, Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom, have ties to charter funders. Villaraigosa has a long track record of trying to advance the corporate reform agenda and Newsom’s education platform is less clear. Current State Treasurer John Chiang has called for greater transparency and accountability for charters to even the playing field with pure public schools.

The future of public education is at stake in the 2018 elections. Underneath the stories the candidates tell, the issue is, who do we trust more with California students: profit-seeking corporations or locally elected school boards?

Karen Wolfe is the Director of PSconnect, a community engagement program for public schools in Los Angeles.

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

Peter Greene: A Libertarian Explains Why Schools Should Be Run by Corporations

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2017 //
44

Peter Greene has unearthed another libertarian, this one writing for CATO (founded by the Koch brothers), who explains why government should not run schools, but private corporations should.

Corey DeAngelis is a scholar (I know because he says so) who has had a busy couple of years suckling off various Libertarian teats. He’s a Fellow for the Cato Institute, policy adviser for the Heartland Institute, and a Distinguished Working-on-his-PhD Fellow at the University of Arkansas, all of this built on a foundation of a BBA (2012) and MA (2015) in economics from the University of Texas in San Antonio (because nobody understands education like economists). And while plugging away on that Masters, he worked first as the Risk Management Operations Coordinator and then the Fraud Coordinator for Kohl’s. So yet another education expert with no education background.

He also hangs out with the fine folks at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE, not to be confused with the Jeb Bush FEE), where he writes pieces with catchy titles like “Legalizing Discrimination Would Improve the Education System” and “Governments Shouldn’t Even Certify Schools, Much Less Run Them.” So we should not be surprised to find his name attached to an article arguing that schools should belong to businesses.

A “Fraud Coordinator” for Kohl’s? Is that a security guard? Someone checking to see if customers are shoplifting? An accountant in the main office?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Jeb Bush’s Privatization Ball: You Are Not Invited

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2017 //
10

Jeb Bush is a seminal person in the privatization movement. He developed high-stakes testing and accountability, A-F school grades, so as to produce a steady supply of failing schools every year, ripe for privatization. He and his friends in the Florida legislature are alert to every opportunity to demean the teaching profession and to shovel public money to private interests.

Today begins the annual conference of His Foundation for Educational Excellence [for none]. Betsy DeVos was a member of the board but stepped down when she became Secretary of Education.

Review the agenda, and you will see who is on the train (it includes Clay Christensen, advocate of disruption, and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, independent evaluator of vouchers in Milwaukee and D.C.).

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing
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