Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Rob Levine: The Walmart Plan to Kill Public Schools in Minneapolis

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2017 //
42

Rob Levine describes in this post the concentration of corporate reformers on Minneapolis, where millions of dollars are pouring in to the city to turn it into the New Orleans of the north, a mecca for charter operators without public schools.

He writes:

In Minneapolis there are now 34 operating charter schools that enroll almost 12,000 students. In St. Paul there are now 37 operating charter schools enrolling more than 13,000 students. By comparison both districts currently enroll about 36,000 students. While it’s obviously true that students who enroll in a charter school in one city don’t necessarily hail from there, the numbers are a good benchmark.

The Walton Family Foundation has started 46% of all open charter schools in Minneapolis

And charter advocates are hard at work enlarging that total, in Minneapolis, at least. The charter advocacy and startup organization Charter School Partners (CSP – now Minnesota Comeback), is in the middle of a five year plan to open 20 new charter schools in Minneapolis. Last year Comeback announced that it had secured $30 million in commitments from philanthropies, which it plans to use to create “… 30,000 new rigorous and relevant seats – particularly for students of color and low-income students” by 2025 in Minneapolis.

Though it has existed for barely a year Comeback has already collected $1.4 million in grants from the Minneapolis,Joyce and WEM (Whitney MacMillan) foundations.

Whatever “rigorous and relevant” means, 30,000 new “seats” in a district that has a student population of about 36,000 students is essentially a plan to kill that public school district. As Alejandra Matos wrote in the Star Tribune a year ago, some Minneapolis education officials “…suspect Minnesota Comeback is out to undermine the traditional public school system by replacing it with a vast network of charter schools, like in New Orleans or Washington, D.C.”

How might that happen? In 2013 Moody’s Investors Services issued a report warning that charter schools could drain enough money from regular school districts to in effect create a mini death spiral. It warned that in response to lost revenue districts might “…cut academic and other programs, reducing service levels and thereby driving students to seek educational alternatives, including charter schools…”

It’s worth remembering that in 2016 the Minneapolis school district experienced an unexpected $20 million shortfall.

So the corporate reformers plan to add “30,000 new rigorous and relevant seats.” Where is the store that sells those seats? Can anyone buy one? Or are those high-quality seats sold only to charter operators?

Funny that so many evaluations show traditional public schools outperforming charter schools, even though the charters say they have a monopoly on those special chairs. Maybe it is because the traditional public schools are staffed by real teachers, not TFA.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Privatization, Teach for America, Walton Foundation

Pennsylvania: Call Your Legislator at Once to Stop “Horrible” Charter Bill

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2017 //
3

Pennsylvania’s state auditor said not long ago that the state has the worst charter legislation in the nation.

It is about to get worse if HB97 passes. Public school advocates at the Keystone State Education Coalition say the bill is in trouble and can be defeated. If you live in Pennsylvania, get on the phone at once and contact your legislator.

EdVotersPA: PA House Poised to Ram Through Horrible Charter Bill

Education Voters PA

We need your help to stop HB 97…

We had hoped that the PA House would work toward charter reform that would protect taxpayers and students and improve PA’s system of public education.

Our hopes were misplaced.

On Tuesday this week, members of the House Education Committee passed HB 97 out of committee on a vote of 17 to 10. Before they voted, lawmakers were assured that HB 97 was a work in progress and would be amended to address many significant problems and deficiencies in the bill.

That didn’t happen.

During the House session on Wednesday, Republican leadership and most Republican lawmakers opposed nearly every substantial amendment that was introduced to fix HB 97.

Tell your state representative to oppose HB 97. The House will be in session next week and is poised to ram through HB 97 without any further improvements.

· HB 97 does not address the $100 million profit (and growing) that charters reap off students with disabilities each year from the broken special education funding system.

· HB 97 does nothing to address the continued abysmal academic performance of the state’s cyber charter schools — none of which have met the minimum proficiency standard on the state’s school performance profile.

· HB 97 creates separate performance standards by which to evaluate charter/cyber charter schools and district schools, making a comparison of education quality between the two sectors impossible. Cyber charter performance won’t look as bad if cyber charters are compared only to other charter schools, many of which are also very low-performing.

· HB 97 strips local control from school boards. If HB 97 becomes law, local school boards would be prohibited from requesting any information from charter applicants beyond the information in a state-created application form; local school boards would be subjected to the whim of charter operators to amend their charter; and local school board decisions regarding charter applications and renewals would be at the mercy of the state’s Charter Appeal Board, which would be stacked with charter school supporters.

HB 97 improves ethics and transparency standards for charters and temporarily makes very small reductions in school district payments to cyber charters. In exchange for these modest modifications to the current law, legislators are handing charter lobbyists their wish list with a bow on top.

Making charters play by similar rules as other publicly funded entities should not earn the PA legislature high praise. These are necessary and important changes to the PA legislature’s broken law that should have been made years ago.

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

Florida: Stop the Charter Theft of Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2017 //
8

Kathleen Oporeza, executive director of Fund Education Now in Florida, urges all Florida citizens to contact their legislators–by email, by telephone, in person–and urge them to vote against any legislation that refers to “Schools of Hope,” which is a blatant effort to hand public schools over to charter entrepreneurs.

Urge the House & Senate to oppose any bill containing “Schools of Hope/HIgh Impact Charters” language

This dangerous concept has worked its way into at least a dozen bills, making it intentionally harder to track. All of this activity feeds the goal of making it easier to slip this bad public policy into one of several massive “train” bills far removed from public view.

Take action now. Tell our Senators and Representatives to oppose all bills, including HB 5105, SB 796, and SB 1552, that contain “Schools of Hope/High Impact Charter Networks” language.

“Schools of Hope”/“High Impact Charter Networks” create two separate, unequal publicly funded school systems – one under the control of duly elected school boards and the other controlled by outside private corporations under the direction of the appointed State Board of Education.

The deck is stacked. The BOE picks and chooses which district turnaround plans are accepted or rejected while at the same time exercising oversight authority over competing High Impact Charter Networks.

Because the BOE determines cut scores on state assessments and the calculation of school grades which can be manipulated to increase the number of D and F district schools this language will clearly drive the expansion of “Schools of Hope/High Impact Charter Networks.”

Use your voice now! One click easy. Please do not let “Schools of Hope/High Impact Charter Networks” trigger the immediate transfer of 115 “D & F” public schools and their 77K students into private, for-profit hands.

This isn’t about helping our most vulnerable students; it’s about promoting unmitigated charter school growth in an effort to erode district schools.

The Charter “Schools of Hope/High Impact Charter Networks” exponentially expand the effort to allow for-profit charters to keep grabbing tax dollars and tapping new markets to beef up the annual reports of corporate charter chains. None of this has been proven to help students or improve education.

Please tell the Florida Legislature to vote no on the “Schools of Hope/High Impact Charter Networks” language, SB 796, SB 1552 and HB 5105 with its $200M slush fund and block its inclusion in the Senate Budget and prevent it from being slipped by either chamber into a “train” bill.

Your voice has power. Our children are depending on us

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

NPE Toolkit: School Privatization Explained

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2017 //
9

The Network for Public Education has created a toolkit to equip you to fight privatization of our public schools. In it, you will find concise summaries of important issues, with links to research, and ways that you can join with your colleagues , friends, and neighbors to block the Trump-DeVos agenda.

For the full report click here.

npe

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Resistance, School Choice, Testing

Mark Miller: How Pennsylvania Charters Cash in

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2017 //
10

The Auditor General of the state of Pennsylvania once declared that Pennsylvania has”the worst charter school law in the nation.”

Mark Miller shows how hard it is to fix that law. Operators of charter schools and cyber charters are reaping huge profits. One cyber charter founder was found guilty of tax evasion on his huge profits. A charter owner built a massive mansion in Palm Beach.

Yet the legislature can’t rein them in. Every dollar they collect means a dollar less for public schools.

http://www.markbmiller.com/2017/04/20/charter-deform-made-its-way-to-pa-house-floor-today/

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Texas: The True Goal of the School Choice Movement

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2017 //
20

This article was written by Dan Currie, a member of Pastors for Texas Children. He explains that the real goal of the school choice movement is to eliminate public schools.

He writes:

Many years ago, Jerry Falwell articulated the goal of the school choice movement well when he said, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

Since the beginning of the religious right movement with Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson and others, the aim has been to destroy public education in America. Today they are closer than ever to achieving their goal because it is now being promoted by the president, his education secretary Betsy DeVos and Republican leaders in Texas government including the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, agriculture commissioner and land commissioner.

This is what you have elected in Texas, my friends, by choosing party over sanity.

Vouchers, school choice, education savings accounts — they are all code words intended to mask the real aim of this movement: destroy public education in America and turn all schools into institutions of religious indoctrination.

Trump’s intentions are clear. His first choice for Secretary of Education was Jerry Falwell, Jr., according to Falwell himself. Trump sent his own children to private schools where the tuition is $50,000 a year or more. No voucher would allow a student to attend those schools.

Currie writes about the destructive effect that vouchers would have on public schools in his own home county:

I live in the Wall ISD. If 20 students get $5,000 apiece to leave the public school to attend a private school, Wall ISD will lose close to $130,000 that can’t be replaced. That money is just lost. No teacher can be fired, no bus route stopped, no money on utilities saved — they just lose the money.

So let me speak bluntly to my friends in the Wall ISD (and you can apply this to any ISD in our area) — when you keep electing right-wing, religious right Republicans at the state and national level, you are voting to close our schools. Please figure that out before it’s too late.

The Texas Senate passed voucher legislation, by a vote of 18-13. It was defeated overwhelmingly by a bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives. Given that vouchers are the personal obsession of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, expect this zombie to rise again.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Texas, Vouchers

Michael Fiorillo: The Not-So-Secret Agenda of the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2017 //
12

Reader Michael Fiorello commented on an article about charter schools. It is no accident that the Walton family (the richest family in America, thanks to Walmart) is spending $200 million annually on charter schools. It is not about children; they could do a lot with $200 million to help children in their home state of Arkansas. They could build health clinics or provide nurses for every school in a poor community. They could pay their parents $15 an hour. But, no, they want charter schools, and they will give $200 million a year for five years (that is $1 billion) to create new charter schools. Why? They hate unions. As Michael notes below, more than 90% of charters are non-union.

He writes:

There are issues of control woven throughout the charter issue, separate from the looting they are prone to.

There is the desire to have iron control of the labor force, explaining why charters are over ninety percent non-union: the desire, as seen virtually everywhere else in the labor markets, to replace full-time employment with temporary/ contingent labor, the desire to pay teachers less, and the desire to have them under the thumb of management, which is much more difficult to maintain in a union, career-oriented environment where institutional memory has value. Thus, it’s no accident that charters have such extreme staff turnover, and often have teachers working from scripted lessons. As has occurred in so many other industries, the de-skilling of the workforce is a management axiom.

There is also a social engineering aspect of charter schools, especially prevalent among the “no excuses” chains (KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon Schools, et. al.), which are obsessed with herding and controlling children in punitive, Skinner Box- type environments. It’s about training children, not educating them, to be docile and obedient, no matter the oppressiveness of the environment, prepping them for the lack of autonomy they’ll face in the adult workforce, and preventing them from having even an inkling that another world is possible.

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

Mercedes Schneider on Tenure at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2017 //
23

If you were irked by Checker Finn’s article calling for an end to teacher tenure, you will enjoy Mercedes Schneider’s biting commentary on “tenure” at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. She opens up the tax returns of TBF and reveals executive salaries. Working for a think tank in D.C. pays far more than teaching.

I was a founding board member of TBF, back when it started. Checker’s father was chairman of the board, and Checker was chosen to be executive director. Mr. Thomas B. Fordham was an executive in Dayton, Ohio, and Mr. Finn, Sr., was his lawyer. When Fordham’s widow died, Mr. Finn Sr. created the foundation in accordance with the will. Mr. Fordham had invested in blue chip stocks many years ago and never sold them, so he left a considerable estate.

As TBF became increasingly ideological and rightwing, and as I turned against the rightwing agenda of privatization and high-stakes testing, I left the board. That was 2009. I opposed TBF becoming an authorizer of charter schools in Ohio. I lost. I opposed seeking funding from Gates, on the grounds that it would compromise our freedom to criticize Gates. I lost. There comes a time when you realize it is time to part ways.

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

How Jeb Bush and His Foundation for Educational Excellence Profited Their Corporate Sponsors

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2017 //
31

This is not a new article but it remains timely and worthy of your attention.

Jeb Bush runs an organization called the Foundation for Educational Excellence. Betsy DeVos was a member of his board. FEE receives corporate contributions. It works closely with ALEC, the rightwing corporate-sponsored organization that lobbies for charters, vouchers, and against teachers’ unions and tenure.

In the Public Interest was able to obtain a trove of emails that revealed the influence of FEE in several states, including Florida, New Mexico, Maine, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Rhode Island.

The e-mails are between the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) and a group Bush set up called Chiefs for Change, whose members are current and former state education commissioners who support Bush’s agenda of school reform, which includes school choice, online education, retention of third-graders who can’t read and school accountability systems based on standardized tests. That includes evaluating teachers based on student test scores and grading schools A-F based on test scores. John White of Louisiana is a current member, as is Tony Bennett, the new commissioner of Florida who got the job after Indiana voters rejected his Bush-style reforms last November and tossed him out of office.

Donald Cohen, chair of the nonprofit In the Public Interest, a resource center on privatization and responsible for contracting in the public sector, said the e-mails show how education companies that have been known to contribute to the foundation are using the organization “to move an education agenda that may or not be in our interests but are in theirs.”

He said companies ask the foundation to help state officials pass laws and regulations that make it easier to expand charter schools, require students to take online education courses, and do other things that could result in business and profits for them. The e-mails show, Cohen said, that Bush’s foundation would often do this with the help of Chiefs for Change and other affiliated groups.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing

Busted Pencils on the New Documentary: “Backpack Full of Cash”

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2017 //
16

Tim Slekar regularly posts podcasts of high value to the resistance, to those fighting privatization and high stakes testing.

This episode features an interview with Sarah Mondale and Vera Aronow, the veteran filmmakers whose new documentary tells the story of the organized assault on public education. Please take the time to listen.

In 2001, Sarah Mondale and Sarah Patton made a four-part documentary called “School,” which ran on PBS and was turned into a book.

The new film is titled “Backpack Full of Cash,” the term corporate reformers use to describe their goal: every child with a backpack full of cash, taking it anywhere he or she chooses.

It is narrated by Matt Damon.

We should all call PBS, which recently ran a series opposing public schools and touting the glories of the free market, and urge them to give airtime to this documentary. PBS is probably trying to curry favor with the Trump administration to stop the defunding of public television. It is sad, don’t you think, that public television gives airtime to a show attacking public education?

Send emails to: http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback/

Categories Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, School Choice
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