Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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California: How the Charter School Association Bought Power and Democrats with $$$

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2017 //
57

Ten percent of the children in California attend privately-managed charter schools. But that small number of students has the most powerful and richest lobby in the state, funded by billionaires.

The overwhelming majority of charters are non-union, which appeals to the Walton family, the richest family in America, with a net worth of $130 billion or more, produced by their non-union Walmart stores. It appeals to billionaire Eli Broad, who never saw a charter he didn’t like. It appeals to billionaire NETFLIX founder Reed Hastings, who wants to eliminate the nation’s school boards.

The charter lobby gives large sums to individual candidates, both Democrats and Republicans. Their major adversary, the California Teachers Association, spends most of its lobbying money on issues, not individual candidates. When there is more funding, both charter schools and public schools benefit.

The charter lobby uses its influence to increase its power and its numbers. It wants more: more money, more schools, more students. It wants less accountability, less regulation, less transparency, and less oversight.

In the past, the charter lobby relied on Republicans to sponsor its bills. Because of its spending, it now has Democrats on board too.

“Though the union gave nearly $29.5 million in political contributions in 2015 and 2016, most of it supported measures on the November 2016 ballot, and only $4.3 million of that went toward candidates and other committees. Conversely, the charter association spent more than $17 million in those years to help finance the campaigns of 137 local and state candidates, plus an additional $340,000 on various local and state measures.

“The teachers union instead focused most of its financial fire power on ballot initiatives, having spent roughly $21 million in 2015 and 2016 to support Proposition 55 – the successful measure that sustained past increases on income taxes to raise funds for schools – and an additional $1.7 million in 2016 on Proposition 58, which largely overrode restrictions on bilingual education in public schools.

“The charter school association committed just $4,678 to Proposition 55’s passing in 2016, state records indicate. Charter schools are also major beneficiaries of the revenues generated by Prop. 55’s passage…

“And while in past years the association partnered with Republicans to craft legislation, this year’s slate of sponsored bills was drafted entirely by Democrats. “That’s a big change for us,” Rand Martin, a lobbyist for the charter school association, told the March conference.”

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

Los Angeles: Karen Wolfe Unravels the Unified Enrollment Scam

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2017 //
31

Karen Wolfe is a parent activist in Los Angeles who fights for public schools against the behemoth that is the California Charter Schools Association and even against the Los Angeles Unified School District.

She recently discovered that the school district was considering spending $24 million to install a Unified Enrollment system. She became curious and began digging. After all, Los Angeles was the district that (almost) committed to spend $1 billion on obsolete iPads loaded with Pearson content.

The decision will be made on Tuesday at a board meeting.

Karen smelled a scam in the making. She was right.

The first thing she learned was that a common enrollment system is being pushed hard by the charter lobby, because it puts public schools and charter schools on an equal footing. The cheerleading for unified enrollment, where students have “one-stop shopping,” was funded by the Walton Family Foundation in New Orleans and Denver, which tells you almost everything you need to know.

The next thing she learned was that in a unified enrollment system, the school makes the choice, not the student. This also works out well for the charters.

Third, the OneApp system (as it is called in New Orleans) increases inequity and segregation.

Karen did research and wrote three posts. You should read all of them. The third post in the series has links to the other two.

Perhaps most alarming, Karen learned that the unified enrollment proposal was being pushed by insiders who were connected to the Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation.

She writes:

In this post, as promised, we’ll introduce the privatizers who have infiltrated the school district to advance the interests of the charter lobby.

Conspiracy theory? Hardly. This just looks like the new business model. Since the iPad scandal, privatizers have had to find new ways to move their agenda. The scandal made direct corporate lobbying behind the scenes too risky. But there’s no need, if you have managed to plant your sales force inside the school system itself.

The District personnel pitching the Unified Enrollment scheme are not just any LAUSD employees. They are Broad and Walton acolytes, trained and placed in the school system to move the corporate reform agenda forward from the inside.

Peter Greene wrote about these “cyber shenanigans” here.

Just goes to show that you can neither slumber nor sleep when the charter industry is seeking a new angle to legitimize privatization and money.

Great job, Karen!

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

A Teacher in Newark Writes: “Chaos by Design” Is Not Good for Students or Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2017 //
7

Ryan Heisinger is teaching in Newark. He is in his fourth year. He loves teaching. He wants to spend his career as a teacher. But he and everyone else in Newark has been subjected to constant disruption, on purpose.

For me, this year is mainly speeding by because of how much I’ve enjoyed it. This school year has reinvigorated me, further convinced me that I want to spend my career around kids. But after four years of teaching at three different schools with four different principals, I’d love to find a school at which I could settle in and make a long-term difference. The education landscape in my city, however, has left me worried that no such opportunity exists.

I’ve noticed a similar concern among many of my friends who became teachers around the same time I did. Indeed, my friends and I—and we’re not alone—feel that to stay in urban education and make a meaningful impact, we must make a major sacrifice: leave behind the kids who need the most support or forfeit our job stability.

These concerns are relatively new, the products of an alarming trend in urban education through which public school systems have become increasingly unstable as charter schools continue to take up a greater share of students in cities…

Lasting relationships with teachers and peers aren’t forged over just a few months. An amazing arts program takes years to build. It takes a long time to develop a wide variety of student-led extracurricular opportunities. School pride comes when students feel they are a part of a community in which they’re able to express themselves and show off their talents. But in a marketplace in which schools compete for test scores, narrowed priorities and school closures erode the stable soil teachers and administrators need to put roots down and grow an enduring culture of success and school community and pride.

I began my teaching career in a public high school just down the road from my current school, and while I remember it fondly and miss it in many ways, I have no illusions about the education my kids were receiving there. It was a mess. But the higher-performing charter I taught at last year had no art, no music, and no physical education, yet somehow the network was lauded as a model for urban schools. Indeed, in the marketplace, this is the model.

So while reformers tout my city as a school choice success story, I know the improved reading and math scores they cite as proof have come at a tremendous expense. The very system that produced those higher test scores is also denying my students and others like them across the city vital experiences and opportunities.

There must be a better way.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

Can Schools Cure Poverty?

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
29

Jennifer Berkshire posted this interview with economist Harvey Kantor in response to a column in the New York Times by David Leonhardt suggesting that schools were the best way to address poverty.

Leonhardt wrote that education “is the most powerful force for accelerating economic growth, reducing poverty and lifting middle-class living standards.” He then goes on to argue that vouchers don’t work, but charters do. This runs contrary to Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie’s study of charters in Texas, where they found that attendance in charter schools had no effect on future earnings.

What Kantor has to say is crucial in this discussion.

Kantor says what I have come to believe is bedrock truth. Poverty should be addressed by reducing poverty. No matter how high the standards, no matter how many tests, no matter how swell the curriculum is, those are not cures for homelessness, joblessness, and lack of access to decent medical care. This realization explains why I changed my mind about the best way to reform schools. It is not by turning schools over to the free market but by seeing them as part of a web of social supports for families and children.

Here is part of a fascinating discussion:

One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that we’ve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead we’re asking education to do things it can’t possibly do. The result has been increasing support for the kinds of market-oriented policies that make inequality worse.

If we really want to address issues of inequality and economic insecurity, there are a lot of other policies that we have to pursue besides or at least in addition to education policies, and that part of the debate has been totally lost. Raising the minimum wage, or providing a guaranteed income, which the last time we talked seriously about that was in the late 1960’s, increasing workers’ bargaining power, making tax policies more progressive—things like that are going to be much more effective at addressing inequality and economic security than education policies. That argument is often taken to mean, *schools can’t do anything unless we address poverty first.* But that’s not what we were trying to say.

Berkshire: But isn’t part of the attraction of today’s education reform movement, that it holds out the tantalizing possibility that we can correct the effects of poverty without having to do anything about, well, poverty?

Kantor: That’s right. What’s interesting about our our contemporary period is that we’re now saying schools can respond to problems of achievement and we don’t need to address any of these larger structural issues. When you think about these larger questions—what causes economic inequality? What causes economic insecurity? How are resources distributed? Who has access to what?—they’ve been put off to the side. We’re not doing anything to address these questions at all.

Please read the entire discussion. It is very important in understanding the attack on schools and the fruitlessness of corporate reform, which ignores the causes of poor student achievement.

It will help you understand why billionaires and right-wingers love corporate reform. It enables policymakers to forget about the necessity of social policy that affects the conditions in which many families live.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

James Meredith to Trump: Please Don’t Claim the Mantle of Civil Rights When You Betray Its Purpose

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
14

In a recent article, civil rights icon James Meredith expressed his frustration with Trump and DeVos claiming that education is “the civil rights issue of our time” and that school choice is the remedy.

He writes:

Today, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are attempting to improve our schools with “school choice,” vouchers, charter schools, cyber-charters, privatization, putting uncertified “temp teachers” with six weeks training into our highest-needs schools, and shackling public schools to the mass standardized machine-testing of children.

This represents a doubling-down on a quarter-century of failed bipartisan efforts at education reform, few of which have a track record of success, even when measured by the dubious metric of standardized test scores. The achievement claims of Potemkin-style “miracle schools” rarely stand up to serious scrutiny. Education is an exquisitely difficult and complex system, and there are few magic bullets, quick-fixes or shortcuts….

The main problems in American public education are poverty, decades of neglect and segregation of our high-poverty schools, and a system that is today driven not by parents and teachers but by politicians, bureaucrats, ideologues and profiteers with little if any knowledge of how children learn.

The education system has been hijacked by money, much of which is being squandered. We are wasting tens of billions of dollars annually on failed experiments, bloated bureaucracies, unproven and unnecessary technology products, and ineffective teacher professional development. A dystopian culture of constant, pointless, mass standardized machine-testing of children is crippling the schools and students it is supposed to help. The continuation of these trends threatens to hollow out and destroy our urban schools, and pull the rest of the system down with them.

Meredith goes on to explain what children today need, and what would constitute genuine reform in education.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Tennessee: Parents Explain Why National PTA No Longer Represents Them

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
9

This is a must-read.

The Momma Bears of Tennessee are ferocious in protecting their children against corporate reform.

In this post, they excoriate the National PTA for selling out the interests of real parents and deferring to the powerful.

The National PTA supports Common Core and high-stakes testing; it opposes opting out of tests.

“As Momma Bears, we are beyond frustrated with TNReady testing. Every year, it’s one testing fiasco after another. Already, reports are coming in this year that the test booklets and answer sheets don’t line up. It’s just another source of frustration for our children. So, its no wonder that more and more parents are wanting to opt their children out of testing. Unfortunately, the Tennessee Department of Education refuses to recognize that parents do have opt-out rights.

“​So, wouldn’t it be great if we had a state law that settled things once and for all by giving parents the explicit right to opt out of standardized testing?

“YEAH!!! Momma Bears would love to see a law giving parents explicit opt-out rights!!! But guess what?

“​If you are a Momma Bear PTA leader, you are not allowed to publicly advocate for legislation allowing parents to opt out of standardized testing. That’s right. A couple of dozen uppity-ups in the National PTA all got together last year and decided that parents didn’t want the right to opt their children out of testing.

[National PTA said:] “National PTA does not believe that opting out is an effective strategy to address the frustration over testing. Mass opt-out comes at a real cost to the goals of educational equity and individual student achievement.”

“We know, parents are scratching their heads on that one!! When did dues paying PTA members vote to oppose a parent’s right to opt their children out of abusive standardized testing?

“Oh, yeah, they didn’t. Nope. There wasn’t a vote. PTA members did not approve this position statement.

“Instead, the PTA uppity-ups aligned with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose parents who wanted the right to protect their children from abusive testing. While the PTA attempts some lame plattitude about supporting parental rights, it’s clear the PTA thinks that parents only get to decide what’s best for their kids when it doesn’t run afoul of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.”

Why did National PTA become cheerleaders for Common Core? Was it right after receiving a grant from the Gates Foundation in 2009 to promote Common Core?

The Mama Bears say:

“Now, we know why the PTA likes to say, “it’s not your Momma’s PTA” because our Momma’s PTA actually taught parents to advocate for the best interests of their children. Today’s PTA is nothing more than a corp-ed shill who wants to push parents right out of the decision-making process.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Parents, Resistance, Special Education, Tennessee, Testing

Christine Langhoff: The Corporate Reformers Are in Control of Massachusetts Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
11

Christine Langhoff teaches in Massachusetts and is a member of the Network for Public Education.

She writes:


Massachusetts public education is being run by a cabal of reformsters, many of them affiliated with a local thinkster tank, The Pioneer Institute. Jim Peyser, state Secretary of Education, is a former director of The NewSchools Venture Fund, having run the Pioneer Institute from 1993-2000. Gov. Weld named him as undersecretary of education in 1995, shortly after the introduction of charters to the state, for which Peyser was – and is – an advocate. In charge of higher education is perennial gadfly Chris Gabrieli, failed gubernatorial candidate, who has developed no fewer than three reformy edu-businesses. (Time on Learning – extended day and year no extra pay; TransformEd – measuring grit and feelings; and Empower Schools, which seeks to destroy union contracts and impose a “third way” in urban districts – so far 3 and counting). So, to use the local dialect, all of them are wicked reformy.

Things have not been going so well for Chester. He signed on as chairman of PARCC, but that boat sank under the weight of the Common Core. This past November, when he thought the charter cap would be lifted and privatization could proceed apace, that too went down to an ignominious 2-1 defeat, in the process awakening parents and taxpayers to the charter scam. He has lately signed on to be a Chief for Change. Reformsters, unlike teachers, don’t need tenure because they have sinecures.

I think this latest peevish salvo stems from Chester’s frustration at being unable to simply sign executive orders and command the world as he would have it. Recently, after testimony from Lisa Guisbond of Citizens for Public Schools, he was forced to revise a punitive policy for students opting out:

“On the related issue of state testing, I thought you should know that some teachers are being given these instructions for handling students whose parents have chosen to opt them out:

‘When a student opts out they will remain in the classroom, listen as the test directions are being read and given the test. If after 15 minutes the student doesn’t write anything down, then, and only then, may the teacher remove the test.’

A 4th grade teacher shared her reaction:

‘This is public shaming, will cause emotional harm, and is a travesty to the precious relationship between teachers and students. Remember we cannot say anything except the scripted words on the test document or we are threatened with job termination, legal and or criminal action.’

So we have a fourth grader embarrassed and crying and a teacher who could lose his or her job for consoling the child. The teacher must ignore this child in need and say nothing.

I trust that these instructions are in error, and that your humane instructions from last year, Commissioner Chester, that students should not be pressured or punished for opting out, remain in place. I urge you to communicate this to the field.”

Delay and Revise MA ESSA Plan to Help, Not Harm, Struggling Schools

At the April 18 board meeting, one of the topics under discussion was the use of the scores from this year’s round of testing. Chester proposed to have 2017 scores included in the average for determining school levels. That was nearly unanimously rejected by the Board due to the use of several variants of tests in the past three years. Previously, it had been agreed that schools would be “held harmless” during the transition to a new test.

A recess was called, during which time Secretary Peyser expressed his belief that if the 2017 scores were not included, teachers would deliberately have students tank the exams so that they could increase scores in future years. In other words,he believes teachers across the state would INTENTIONALLY have thousands of children do poorly on tests in order to create a low baseline. NB: At the time of the discussion, we were already halfway through the testing period.

These people have no respect for the work teachers do. They do not believe we have any integrity. They do not treat us as professionals. It is indeed shameful.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Massachusetts, Students, Teachers and Teaching

Will Birmingham Be the Next New Orleans?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
12

Public education activists in Birmingham are afraid that their school board is getting ready to appoint a Broadie–or worse–to be the next superintendent of schools. They fear that the plan is to deliberate this crucial decision in complete secrecy, then spring someone on the schools who wants to demolish them and turn them over to profit-driven, unaccountable charter schools. They are aware of what has happened in New Orleans, where academic gains–if any–are limited, segregation remains intact, and communities and are disempowered and silenced.

Read here to see the lengths the board will go to so as to shield their superintendent search from public view.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Alabama, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Orleans, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: The Management Company That Owns the #1 High School in the Nation is in Deep Trouble

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
9

Mercedes Schneider has done a deep dive into the financials of the BASIS Schools. It is an eye-opener.

BASIS charter schools won the top spots in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the nation’s high schools.

BASIS Scottsdale was rated number 1 in the nation.

If you were thinking of sending your son or daughter there, think twice.

This is not a typical American high school. It is focused to an extreme on AP exams.

Turns out that AP test scores matter much in the US News high-school-ranking system, and BASIS high schools require their students to take at least eight AP courses and six AP exams. In 2016, the average BASIS graduate took over 11 AP exams. BASIS contends that “AP exam scores are by no means the focus of our curriculum”; however, the same page boasts that “many BASIS.ed graduates take as many as 20 AP Exams.”

These are the demands that make BASIS #1, but these are clearly not models for other high schools. They are for students who are academically driven.

But what about those financials?

The owners of the BASIS chains pay themselves millions. Yet BASIS is in debt.

Schneider asks: “Which Is Higher at BASIS Schools: Its AP Scores, or Its Debt?”

Which Is Higher at BASIS Schools: Its AP Scores, or Its Debt?

Categories Arizona, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Missouri: Legislature Likely to Pass a School Choice Bill, Despite State Constitution

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
19

Legislators in Missouri are about to pass an expansive school choice bill that paves the way for vouchers and privatization of public education.

Here is the language of the Missouri state constitution:

“Section 5. The proceeds of all certificates of indebtedness due the state school fund, and all moneys, bonds, lands, and other property belonging to or donated to any state fund for public school purposes, and the net proceeds of all sales of lands and other property and effects that may accrue to the state by escheat, shall be paid into the state treasury, and securely invested under the supervision of the state board of education, and sacredly preserved as a public school fund the annual income of which shall be faithfully appropriated for establishing and maintaining free public schools, and for no other uses or purposes whatsoever.

“Section 8. Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other municipal corporation, shall ever make an appropriation or pay from any public fund whatever, anything in aid of any religious creed, church or sectarian purpose, or to help to support or sustain any private or public school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other institution of learning controlled by any religious creed, church or sectarian denomination whatever; nor shall any grant or donation of personal property or real estate ever be made by the state, or any county, city, town, or other municipal corporation, for any religious creed, church, or sectarian purpose whatever.”

But what does the constitution mean anyway when you want to put kids into private and religious schools with public funds?

NPR reports:

“A wide-ranging education bill is expected to make it through: one that would establish a tax credit program known as education savings accounts, or ESAs, which could be used by foster children, children with disabilities, and children of military personnel to enroll in private schools. It would also expand Missouri’s student transfer law, allowing students in unaccredited districts to attend a public school in another district, or go to a private nonreligious school, charter school or virtual school.

“Backers of the measure say that the bill, known as a “school choice” measure, allows parents to make the best choices for their kids. But opponents believe it’s a way to put public money toward private schools instead of better-funding public schools.”

However, the legislature is not likely to increase charters outside of St. Louis and Kansas City.

In Arizona, voucher supporters started with the same limitations and expanded the program bit by bit to extend vouchers to almost everyone.

Why should a detail like the state constitution get in the way?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Missouri, Privatization, Vouchers
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