Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

An Urgent Message to the Citizens of North Carolina

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2017 //
6

Public education is in jeopardy in North Carolina.

Please take action now!

The North Carolina Senate introduced SB 603, a bill creating a new voucher program that would give $9,000 a year to students with disabilities going to non-public schools.

Send an email to tell your house member to vote NO for SB 603.

SB 603 is a bill that:

Expands opportunities for fraud

Costs more to administer than traditional voucher programs

Takes funding from our public schools, with particularly negative impacts for public school programs for students with disabilities

Drains the state budget

Lacks accountability

If passed, parents of eligible students get a debit card loaded with approximately $9,000 per year that they can spend on private school costs, tutoring, technology and even account fees!

In addition, SB 603 would allow parents to double- or triple-dip into North Carolina’s already existing voucher programs. Parents could also receive $4,200 from the Opportunity Scholarship program (for students meeting certain income requirements), an additional $8,000 via the Disabilities Grant Program and $9,000 from this program the new proposed program.

Like the Arizona ESA program on which it is modeled, it is ripe for fraud. Arizona’s program has resulted in parents buying televisions, groceries, cell phones and family planning services. Vendors have also been caught overcharging parents. Monitoring of purchases would rely on self-reporting.

Under the proposed bill, even if an audit uncovers fraud, there is no requirement that the parent be forced to repay the taxpayers.

Worst of all, when a parent misuses these debit cards, their children go undereducated.

This is, in our opinion, just one more attempt to defund and attack public education. And it is shameful.

Send this email today to your representative telling them to oppose SB 603.

We make it easy. Just click here.

Then pick up the phone and call on Monday. You can find their number here.

Then post this link on your Facebook page and share it will all of your friends and family in North Carolina.

https://npeaction.org/2017/05/12/north-carolina-alert-stop-super-voucher/

Thanks for all you do!

Carol Burris

Executive Director

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers

L.A. Times Endorses Trump-DeVos Ticket for School Board

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2017 //
39

I was curious to see whether the L.A. Times editorial board would stand up for public education or would join the chorus of privatization and greed.

Would the editorial board be offended that billionaires are swamping the district with millions to promote the privatization candidates?

Would they recall all the stories about charter scandals and corruption that the newspaper has reported? Would they forget about the Celerity charter chain, whose CEO used the school credit cards for resorts, fancy hotels, lavish meals, couture clothing, and chaffer-driven limousines?

Could they possibly endorse the candidates benefitting from the money poured in by the likes of the Walton family and other out-of-town Republicans and rightwing corporate Democrats?

They could and they did.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that they endorsed the candidates who are best equipped to promote the Trump-DeVos privatization agenda. And I won’t attribute it to the fact that the newspaper accepts $800,000 a year from Eli Broad for its education coverage, the elderly billionaire who has a fetish about stamping out public education. The editorial board has the chutzpah to refer to puppets of the charter industry as “independent thinkers.” If those two fit the L.A. Times’ definition of an “independent thinker,” they must be reading from a script provided by the billionaires who pull their strings.

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

Los Angeles: Outside Money Continues to Pour in to Buy Control of LA School Board for Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2017 //
4

If you live in Los Angeles in one of the districts where there is a run-off, please vote for Steve Zimmer or Imelda Padilla.

Don’t let the billionaires buy control of the public schools. They don’t want to improve them. They want to turn them over to the unregulated, scandal-ridden charter industry.

Don’t be fooled: charters and choice and privatization are the Trump-DeVos agenda!

Howard Blume reports in the Los Angeles Times on the flood of outside money that is flowing into the high-profile run-offs for two crucial seats on the Los Angeles school board. The charter billionaires are dumping millions into the campaign to defeat Steve Zimmer, president of the school board, and into the race between Imelda Padilla and charter supporter Kelly Fitzpatrick Nonez.

The election is May 16. It will determine whether the charter industry can buy control of the nation’s second largest school district.

The owner of Netflix, billionaire Reed Hastings, has gifted $5 million to the California Charter School Association. Hastings memorably told a meeting of CCSA that he looks forward to the day when there are no more elected school boards in the nation. Democracy is a problem for corporate reformers. It is so much easier to just buy up the competition, instead of giving ordinary people a vote that is equal in power to the vote of a billionaire.

Two members of the billionaire Walton family from Arkansas have given to the charter candidates. They are part of America’s wealthiest family, whose riches were gained by paying low wages to their non-union employees.

Teachers unions have supported Zimmer and Padilla, but the unions’ money comes from their hard-working members, not from a family fortune or billionaires with no limits on what they spend.

Outside spending for Melvoin has surpassed $4.25 million; for Zimmer, $2.16 million.

Both charter-backed candidates have raised more money for their own campaigns than their opponents have.

Charters are privately operated public schools that are exempt from some rules that govern traditional campuses. Most are nonunion.

CCSA Advocates can use donations for any political purpose, but the L.A. school board race — the most expensive in the nation — has been its primary project.

Besides having money, Hastings is a desirable donor for the charter side in left-leaning California. He’s been a regular and reliable contributor to Democratic causes and candidates. That’s a valuable attribute given the state’s anti-Trump political climate — because the Trump administration has made increasing the number of charter schools a central goal.

Like Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Hastings is an ardent, longtime advocate for charters and a major donor to charter causes. (California Gov. Jerry Brown also strongly supports charters, though not as a big-money contributor.)

The teachers union casts donors such as Hastings in the role of outside billionaire trying to buy a local election. Hastings has insisted he simply wants to support meaningful steps to improve public education.

The “outsider” tag also applies to some other donors; some are notably associated with conservative or anti-union politics, or both.

Major CCSA Advocates donors since last September include:

Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan: $1 million. (Riordan gave another million to a second, allied campaign to defeat Zimmer.)
Conservative GAP co-founder Doris Fisher: $1.05 million
Walmart heir Jim Walton: $500,000
Philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs (whose late husband, Apple founder Steve Jobs, was assertively anti-union): $250,000
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: $200,000
Walmart heir Alice Walton: $200,000…

United Teachers Los Angeles ended 2016 with about $366,000 in a political action committee established to support its candidates, according to public filings.The union also had $286,000 in a fund for “issues” messages. That latter fund has been tapped to put out flyers with messages such as, “Thank Steve Zimmer for student recovery day.”

Issues advertising cannot refer to an election or an election date. Nor can it urge voters to vote a certain way. But there’s a clear political benefit for the union-backed candidates.

UTLA also collects an average of $9.50 a month from the 22% of its 32,000 members who have agreed to contribute, totaling about $67,000 a month from January onward, said union political director Oraiu Amoni. This money is split about 60-40 between candidate and issues messages.

And last week, union members voted to borrow $500,000 from their strike fund for such messages. Past debts to the strike fund will not be paid off until 2020, according to Amoni.

UTLA also is spending a smaller but undisclosed amount as part of a “We Are Public Schools” media campaign, which includes billboards with positive messages about public schools. Some feature pictures of Zimmer or Padilla.

Besides the American Federation of Teachers, other unions have kicked in for those candidates — notably the National Education Assn. with $700,000 and the California Teachers Assn. with $250,000.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Sue M. Legg: Charters Bomb in Florida

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2017 //
9

The Florida Department of Education, firmly in the hands of the Jeb Bush team, tried to spin the “success” of the charter industry, but Sue M. Legg of the League of Women Voters in Florida says, “Not so fast.”

In this post, she explains that charter schools enroll a lower percentage of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch, of English language learners, and of students with disabilities.

She asks:

Is the formula for successful charters to weed out students whom they cannot help? Should traditional public schools do the same? Where does this road lead?

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

Andrea Gabor: Why Are the Few Veteran Teachers of New Orleans Demoralized?

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2017 //
9

Andrea Gabor reviews research produced by the Education Research Alliance of New Orleans about veteran teachers, those who taught before Hurricane Katrina and returned.

“ERA’s analysis provides an important before-and-after-the-storm glimpse of the city’s schools from a unique perspective—the small group of pre-Katrina teachers who returned to teaching following the storm, and who have remained in the classroom for over a decade. As New Orleans looks forward, the views of these returning pre-Katrina teachers are key; they are the survivors.

“In the wake of the mass firings following the storm, the teachers who returned to New Orleans and were still teaching at the time of the study, in the 2013/2014 school year, almost surely represent the city’s most experienced educators—and those with the closest community ties. While teachers with greater than 20 years of experience made up nearly 40 percent of the teaching force before the storm, that number has dropped to about 15 percent, according to another ERA study. Conversely, the number of inexperienced teacher with less than 5 years experienced now make up the majority of teachers, up from about 30 percent before the storm….

“Indeed, important characteristics of New Orleans reforms, including a high-rate of school closings and at-risk students cycling through multiple schools, are more likely to adversely impact high school students who, unlike their younger peers, are more likely to resist no-excuses culture of the non-selective New Orleans charters, and eventually to drop out. New Orleans also has done a terrible job of keeping track of kids who “fall between the cracks.”

“Education reformers like to say that “teachers are the single most important” school variable in a child’s education. As with so much else in the ed-reform debates, this is misleading. For surely, school stability and culture, which is controlled by school leaders—in the best cases, by cadres of teacher leaders—is as important as the role of individual teachers. School culture also helps determine just how much influence teachers have over curriculum, discipline and other policies. In my research, both quality education and teacher job satisfaction are highly correlated with schools that include teachers in such key decisions.

“In New Orleans, with a teacher cadre plagued by high turnover and sparse classroom experience, veteran teachers should be treasured. That so many say they have less job satisfaction than during the pre-Katrina years, suggests that they are not, which is surely a failing with implications far beyond just teacher morale.”

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Orleans, Privatization, Teachers

Sue M. Legg: Florida’s Budget Bill is a Train Wreck for Public Schools, a Boon for Charter Operators

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2017 //
5

Here we go with the Great Money Heist in Florida.

HB7069 passed both houses of the legislature and will go to Governor Rick Scott for his signature.

In two posts, Sue M. Legg of the League of Women Voters analyzes the devastating impact of this budget bill for public schools. She hopes that Governor Scott will veto the bill. As she explains, money is being shifted to charter organizations and taken away from traditional public schools. Ten percent of the students in the state are enrolled in charter schools, but the needs of the ninety percent are ignored. The bill reduces base student funding, so that it is lower than it was a decade ago.

She writes:

The provisions to require local districts to share capital outlay with charter schools is untenable. It will cost districts already struggling with aging facilities, millions of dollars. The Schools of Hope proposal allocates $140 million for charter school takeovers of low performing public schools.

Creating charter systems that control groups of charters surely must stress the Florida constitutional requirement for a ‘uniform system of high quality schools’. These systems become their own local education agencies. This is a legal term that is now allocated to elected school boards. The systems would be able to receive funding directly with no oversight from districts.

The shift in the allocation of Title I funds for low income students also is adversely affected by the bill. Low performing schools would get the bulk of the money which then would go with Schools of Hope. The implications are far reaching if money is spread too thinly to support extra reading, tutoring and other services many children need.

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

Georgia: Governor Deal Vetoes Legislation to Allow Opt Out from Testing

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2017 //
29

Rightwing corporate reformers like to go on and on about parental choice. Choice. Choice. Choice. The one choice they will not tolerate is parents who want their children to refuse the state tests. No choice! Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia vetoed a bill that would make it easier to parents to opt their children out of state standardized tests. He also blocked the possibility of students taking the tests using paper and pencil, instead of a computer. Deal was immediately hailed by Jeb Bush, who pushes computerization and digitization whenever possible. Jeb is a big support of school choice if it means vouchers and charters. He opposes parents’ right to opt out of testing. He is also a major supporter of computer-based instruction and computer-based assessment. His “Foundation for Educational Excellence” is largely funded by the software corporations that profit from standardized testing and data mining online. It has long been a goal of the corporate reform industry to use tests to “prove” that public schools are failing, that there is an “achievement gap,” and that parents should pull their children out of public schools and send them to charter schools or demand vouchers. Once that happens, the test scores don’t count anymore, because neither charters nor vouchers raise test scores or close achievement gaps. It is all a massive hoax to promote privatization.

This article appeared in Politico Pro. I am not a s

By Aubree Eliza Weaver
05/09/2017 01:52 PM EDT

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal today vetoed a bill that would have made it easier for students to opt out of taking standardized tests.

House Bill 425 included provisions discouraging disciplinary action against those students who do not participate in federal, state or locally mandated standardized assessments. Additionally, it would have allowed students to complete the exams using paper and pencil, instead of a computer.

“First, as I stated in my veto of SB 133 last year, local school districts currently have the flexibility to determine opt-out procedures for students who cannot, or choose not to, take these statewide assessments and I see no need to impose an addition layer of state-level procedures for these students,” Deal said in a statement.

He also said that reverting to paper-and-pencil exams would make it harder for the state to return test data to districts quickly and goes against the state’s priority of reducing opportunities for students to cheat.

Deal’s decision was lauded by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

“The proposal would have harmed students and teachers by denying access to measurements that track progress on standardized assessments,” the advocacy group, founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said in a statement. “Maintaining a transparent and accountable measurement systems is critical to ensuring students are on track to succeed in college and beyond — and indicates how successful schools are in preparing students for the future.”

To view online:
https://www.politicopro.com/education/whiteboard/2017/05/georgia-governor-vetoes-opt-out-measure-087474

This article appeared in Politico Pro. I am not a subscriber because it costs $3,500 a year, the last time I checked. Too rich for my taste.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Georgia, Hoax, Opt Out, Parents, Privatization, Standardized Testing, Technology, Testing

As New York Rebrands Its Common Core Standards, What’s in a Name?

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2017 //
8

Newsday offers an amusing reflection on the change in the name of the Common Core state standards, which became toxic and set off the powerful opt out movement across the state, and especially on Long Island (which Newsday serves). In the last round of state testing, 50% of the eligible students on Long Island opted out of the English Language Arts state test, and 54% on Long Island opted out of the just concluded math tests.

Some teachers question in what way they “bought in,” as suggested below. Many are so familiar with the PR tactics of the State Education Department that they see this as yet another exercise in illusion.

From Newsday:

Pointing Out

Puzzle us this

Here’s a short quiz to start your week: The big news today is NGELAMLS.

What is it?

a) A newly diagnosed tropical disease that has alarmed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

b) A pharmaceutical breakthrough for melting body fat. Ask your doctor about NGELAMLS!

c) An obscure tribe living on the Ilha de Queimada Grande off the coast of Brazil.

d) A new name for the Common Core learning standards in New York.

The correct response is d. That tangle of letters stands for the Next Generation English Language Arts and Mathematics Learning Standards. State education officials have rechecked the standards, as well as the tests they first rolled out in the 2012-13 school year, this time with buy-in from teachers.

For all the controversy, the changes are small. But the messaging is big. By rebranding, the Education Department hopes to start fresh and reduce opt-outs from the tests.

Long Island, the national opt-out epicenter, had nearly 54 percent of eligible students sit out math exams last week. Will NGELAMLS change that?
Anne Michaud

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York, Opt Out, Standardized Testing, Testing

Sue M. Legg Sends an Even Better Post about Erik Fresen and His Likelihood of Going to to Jail

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2017 //
4

Well, this is a new one for me. After I posted Sue Legg’s piece about Erik Fresen, Sue contacted me and told me she had mistakenly sent me her notes, not the finished post.

So, here is the finished post. I must admit. It reads better. And there is a picture of Erik Fresen.

It begins like this:

Remember Representative Fresen, whose sister Magdalena Fresen is Vice President of Academica, Florida’s largest for-profit charter management company? He term limited out of the legislature this year. His next step is to go to jail?

Ethics Florida Style: Go Directly to Jail

The buzz about Florida is that there is more self-interest than public interest than in any other state. Are such allegations warranted? Information is not difficult to find. The Center for Public Integrity ranked states on a corruption index in 2012. Florida was rated an ‘F’ on ethics enforcement agencies. It appears there are rules that are easy to bend and break.

Take the case of former Florida House Representative Erik Fresen who served in the House for eight years. It looks like he will serve in a Florida prison next year. He was Chair of the House Education sub-committee on Appropriations, and a former property consultant for Civica, a real estate company with ties to Academica. Fresen’s sister and brother-in-law operate Academica, the largest for-profit charter management firm in Florida. Their charter school real estate holdings generate over $20 million per year.

Fresen pled guilty this week for failure to file federal income taxes for eight years. During the same period, his House financial record disclosures do not match the IRS income reports. This is simply a culmination of years of questions about Fresen’s ethical behavior.

I just noticed that the words “For-Profit,” “Florida,” and “Fraud” are consecutive in my list of categories. Kind of like “Testing” and “Texas.”

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

Wendy Lecker: The War on Public Schools and the Public Good

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2017 //
5

Like Jan Resseger, Wendy Lecker paid tribute to the political philosopher Benjamin Barber. She acknowledged his work on behalf of democracy and the public good, which is currently under attack by a bipartisan coalition of corporate reformers.

She writes:

Political theorist Benjamin Barber, who died April 24, wrote about the importance of education as a public good. “Education not only speaks to the public, it is the means by which a public is forged.”

As he noted, education transforms individuals into responsible community members, first in their classrooms and ultimately in our democracy. Local school districts are also the basic units of democratic government.　

Michigan professor Marina Whitman recently noted that the essence of a public good is that it is non-excludable; i.e. all can partake, and non-rivalrous; i.e. giving one person the good does not diminish its availability to another.　

Some school reforms strengthen education as a public good; such as school finance reform, which seeks to ensure that all children have adequate educational resources.　
Unfortunately, the reforms pushed in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations attack education as a public good. For example, choice — charters and vouchers — is a favorite policy of all three administrations. Choice operates on the excludable premise of “saving a few.”

In operation, choice makes education rivalrous. As a New York appellate court observed, diverting funds from public schools to charters ‘benefit a select few at the expense of the ‘common schools, wherein all the children of this State may be educated….’”　

Across this country, public money is diverted from public schools to charters with no consideration of need, quality or the impact on the majority of public school students. The result is invariably the creation of exclusive schools, out of the reach of voter oversight, at the expense of public schools that serve everyone.　

Charter advocates claimed charters would be superior without the constraints faced by local districts. However, after more than 20 years, charters are no better than public schools.

Moreover, they leave public schools without resources to serve the most vulnerable and communities disenfranchised by unelected school boards. 　
As Barber predicted, “What begins as an assault on bureaucratic rigidity becomes an assault on government and all things public … (destroying) a people’s right to govern themselves publicly … (and) to establish the conditions for the development of public citizens.” Reforms that gut public education attack democracy.

You will enjoy reading the full article, which appeared in the Stamford Advocate. Lecker goes into detail about the ways that charter schools are draining resources from public schools and causing fiscal distress to schools that accept all students.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Inequity, Injustice
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »