Archives for category: Disruption
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Tom Ultican: Beware of TNTP, a Core Element in the Destroy Public Education Movement

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
17

Tom Ultican has written a series of posts about the Destroy Public Education Movement.

His latest post analyzes the nefarious role of TNTP in that movement.

This movement exists solely to disrupt public education and the teaching profession.

TNTP is one of several organizations that only exist because billionaires have financed them. Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Project) in 1997. She assigned Michelle Rhee, who had recently finished a two year Teach For America (TFA) tour, to run TNTP. Along with TNTP and TFA there are also the uncertified Broad Superintendents Academy, the fake schoolfor professional educators, Relay Graduate School and others forming a significant part of the infrastructure instilling a privatization mindset into the education community.

TNTP says it mission is to partner with educational entities to:

  • “Increase the numbers of outstanding individuals who become public school teachers; and
  • “Create environments for all educators that maximize their impact on student achievement”

These are laudable goals but why would any school district or state education department turn to an organization with minimal academic background and experience to train teachers and school leaders? Michelle Rhee earned a B.A. in Government from Cornell and a master’s in public policy from Harvard with no education studies. In the Book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider observes that “Wendy Kopp was a child of privilege”. She left her exclusive Highland Park neighborhood in Dallas to study International Affairs at Princeton. Kopp had no education experience or training and Rhee had five weeks of training to go along with two years experience teaching elementary school in Baltimore…

Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they were unqualified. If policy makers in New York wanted to create and alternative teacher certification path, they would have turned to an established institution like Columbia University’s Teachers College to create and manage the program. If Washington DC schools wanted to develop a teacher professional development program, they would have likely looked to the University of Maryland. These are places with more than a century of experience studying education and training its leaders…

Working for these want-to-be oligarchs is lucrative. The last tax return from TNTP (Sep. 2017) listed the top 12 paid employees and all of them made more than $200,000 per year. “Thirty pieces of silver” is not worth undermining democratic rights and free universal public education.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, Teach for America

Mercedes Schneider: Charter Chaos in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2019 //
9

 

Mercedes Schneider has been watching the slow train wreck in New Orleans. As she puts it in her latest post, “Add another car.” 

School closings, graduation scandals, confused parents.

The great experiment in complete privatization is going into a ditch. There are thousands of children. Who will save them now?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Orleans, Privatization

Tim Slekar Interviews Carol Burris about Charter Scandals

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
3

 

Carol Burris is one of the best-informed observers of the charter industry. Tim Slekar interviewed her on his podcast #BustED Pencils.

New #BustEDPencils Episode 85: Charter School Scandal with @Network4pubEd and @carolburris https://bustedpencils.com/episode/episode-85-charter-school-scandal/
 

Feature Interview:

The Network for Public Education’s Executive Director Carol Burris talks about the lack of “accountability” at the Federal Department of Education regarding charter school funding.  After publishing Asleep at the Wheel the charter school industry felt dissed.  So they complained.  So Carol went back to check NPE’s facts and found out the Charter industry might even be more than just Asleep at the Wheel.

This was such an awesome interview so I asked Carol if she might be interested in doing a semi-regular interview to keep  #BustEDPencils listeners informed about the scandalous world of charter schools.!  Guess what she said?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Privatization

Capital & Main: Who Gutted California’s Charter Reform Bill?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
20

 

Bill Raden of Capital & Main identifies the culprit who stripped charter reform bills of anything that offended the powerful charter lobby: Ann O’Leary, Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff.

O’Leary previously served as senior education Advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and made sure that the candidate stuck to the charter industry script (for-profit bad, nonprofit good). She has a long Association with the Center for AMERICAN Progress, the DC think tank that still adheres to the failed ideas of Race to the Top, including charter advocacy.

And so a bold effort to roll back the legal protections for an unregulated industry that is ridden with scandal and corruption  is blocked by faux progressive Democratic insiders.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Democrats, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

Tom Ultican: Is Reform of the Charter Law in California Still Possible?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
5

 

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced math and physics in San Diego, is a dogged investigator. In this post, he traces the ongoing efforts to reform the weak charter law in California.

California has more charter schools than any other state, with more than 1,300. The original law capped the number at 100. Since then, the money of the California Charter Schools Association has blown away the cap as well as all previous efforts to regulate charters. Billionaire Reed Hastings served as chair of the state board and demolished the meager limits that existed.

In this huge state, the law allows a district to authorize a charter in another district hundredsof miles away and collect a commission for every student who enrolls. It allows charter applicants to appeal all the way to the state board and ignore the needs and wishes of the local district. The law assures that charter schools will have little or no oversight, since the state education department does not have the staff to oversee them.

The current law is an invitation to fraud, embezzlement, and corruption. This is not to say that all charters are run by corrupt individuals, but the constant revelation of financial scandals in the charter industry demonstrates the need for revision of the law to protect the public interest. Only a few weeks ago, eleven people in the charter industry were indicted for stealing more than $50 million.

Yet, as Ultican shows, the road to charter reform has been rocky. Governor Jerry Brown, whose leadership was admirable in many other ways, adamantly refused to rein in the charter industry. Governor Newsom is indebted to powerful families in the charter industry, and his chief of staff is a charterista.

Yet Ultican holds out hope that some actual reform might yet survive. Anything, he says, is better than the complete deregulation that has currently allows unscrupulous grifters to feast on the money intended to pay for education.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

California: Charter Schools Are the Day Lilies of Education

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2019 //
17

 

Larry Buhl of Capital and Main writes here about the transient nature of charter schools. In California, as in other states, they open with bold promises but many close with short notice to patents due to under enrollment  or financial problems or both.

As Buhl writes, parents are left scrambling and students’s lives are disrupted when their charter school closes suddenly.

Buhl begins:

IN LATE AUGUST OF 2018, Donald and Christine Fergusson were looking forward to the start of their daughter’s second year (second grade) at the International Preparatory Academy. The school, part of the Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC Schools), is located in the northeast Los Angeles suburb of Eagle Rock. But three weeks before the start of school, iPrep’s new superintendent, a PUC national board member and the PUC CEO held an emergency meeting where they told parents they would need to bring in more students or the school would close. The Spanish-Mandarin dual immersion school originally aimed to enroll 275 in grades K-2 and 6-8, although the organization told parents it could get by with 200. Panicked parents began distributing fliers in the neighborhood and urging neighbors to register for iPrep immediately.

“They gave us until September 24th to bring in more students,” Donald Fergusson said. “That’s not the parents’ job.”

After scrambling for a few days, the Fergussons decided iPrep was a sinking ship and enrolled their daughter in a Los Angeles Unified School District school with Mandarin immersion, which had been their main reason for choosing iPrep. It turned out to be a good decision. Three days after iPrep opened for its second year of operation — with only 114 students — PUC’s board voted to shut it down.

“Our school was under-enrolled from the very start,” Christine Fergusson said. “They told us it would grow and add one grade per year. I think [the board was] going to close the school anyway. They just strung us along.”

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

G.F. Brandenburg on the Strange Case of the D.C. Editorialist Who Still Loves Michelle Rhee

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2019 //
21

 

G.F. Brandenburg cannot understand the Washington Post editorial writer Jo-Anne Armao. When Michelle Rhee started her job as chancellor of the D.C. schools in 2007, Armao interviewed her and decided that she was the greatest educator ever. Nothing that has happened in the past dozen years has changed her views. To this day, she still writes lovingly, respectfully about the Miracle that was Michelle Rhee. All her initiatives have failed. A huge cheating scandal was covered up and forgotten. Charter scandals have come and gone. A high school boasted of its 100% graduation rate, but it was a fake.

No matter. The Washington Post editorial board has Rhee’s back, almost a decade after she left.

For a fun trip down memory lane, read the comments on the John Merrow post from 2013 that is included.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Rhee, Michelle

Did Jeb Bush Choose Your District’s Superintendent?

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2019 //
25

 

Jeb Bush created an organization called Chiefs for Change, whose original membership consisted of state superintendents who shared Jeb’s ideas: high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, school grades of A-F, and school choice (charters and vouchers).

Chiefs for Change has now become a clearinghouse for district superintendents.

You can be sure that anyone recommended by Chiefs for Change is dedicated to disrupting and privatizing your district.

Here are some of the district superintendents that Chiefs for Change points to with pride.

Lewis Ferebee, the new Superintendent of the schools of the District of Columbia.

Susana Cordova, the new Superintendent of the Denver schools.

Jesus Jara, Superintendent of the Clark County (Nevada) Schools. Nevada’s State Commissioner Steve Canovera is a member of Chiefs for Change.

Donald Fennoy, Superintendent of Palm Beach County, Florida.

Deborah Gist, Superintendent of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Schools, along with Andrea Castenada, the district’s “chief innovation officer.”

There are more.

This is the Jeb Bush pipeline, the leaders committed to his vision of disruption and privatization. Of course, you won’t find those two words on Jeb’s website, but those are the results of his convictions, and the proof of those convictions can be found in Florida, the state whose education policy he has controlled for 20 years.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, School Choice, VAM, Vouchers

Red Queen in LA: Deciphering the Charter Chaos and Shape-Shifting

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2019 //
6

 

This is another brilliant post by Sara Roos, known as Red Queen in LA.

She read the report of the leaked emails among charter advocates. She notes their double talk, their rhetorical legerdemain, their organizations that pop up like mushrooms, then morph into new organizations.

Behind this seeming chaos is a steady purpose: to disrupt and destroy public education.

Behind the chaos is the steady flow of millions from the billionaires who despise the commons.

The connect between the chaos and the billionaires are outstretched hands for hire.

She begins:

Charter schools in California band together as an embattled group, agitating for hostile takeover of the Public Commons. They serially convene, dissolve and reform a plethora of working groups to bombard public schools with “messaging” and disinformation.  The groups as well as charters themselves of course, drain resources from schools, necessitating capital (monetary and human) defending what should be protected by the people, for the people.

One of these itinerant ideologues is Ben Austin, founder of the “Parent Trigger”, who in 2014 resigned from his astroturf group to foment a new one, Kids Coalition. A collection of emailsmade public by the municipal-transparency site michaelkolhaas.org uncovered a set of strategies developed among this cabal, reported by Howard Blume at the LATimes hereand here.

The collusion, as one of them explains elsewhere, is “all about the messaging”. And the message revealed in aggregate over 5000+ emails, lays out a very stark code-shift. The catchy phrase, “kids first”, is a logical fallacy. Iterated unceasingly by charter advocates, it simultaneously casts aspersions on a presumed alternative (‘a time or place when kids were not first’) even while kids in schools have always been “first”. But consistent with the ideology of long-standing and now charter-mega-fundersKoch and Walton (among others), that term “kids first” effectively codes for “anti-union”. Because if formerly it were true that kids were not first, it would be the fault of the system that transposed their status, their teacher’s union. ‘If the proper order of kids is not upheld, it must be the fault of their teachers’ is the sly message.

Likewise there is a constant drum-beat against “bureaucracy” and “adult issues” but that too is simply code for “anti-regulation”. Charter schools aren’t really about finding a better way around bureaucracy. It is reviled incessantly, but the rules they denounce are precepts of democratic transparency, safety, efficiency, equity – cumbersome perhaps but the tenets of our republic. Instead the path they forge is of non-accountability: government funding without regulation. And this, even while the maxim “another day another charter school scandal” has been commonplace for decadesnow.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Los Angeles, Privatization

St. Louis: Can the District Recover After Years of “Oppressive Rule”?

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2019 //
4

 

Jeff Bryant writes about the obstacles faced by districts where state control is coming to an end. 

He takes St. Louis as his prime example.,

One urban district that faces an especially steep climb out of the abyss of oppressive rule is St. Louis.
 
When I first reported from St. Louis in 2017, I found a school system which had been designed to be the gem of the Midwest had instead been decimated.
 
First, waves of policies from local, state, and federal governments imposed racial segregation on the system. Chronic underfunding hobbled progress. When the system eventually crashed, a wave of “reforms”—hiring consultants, cutting services, outsourcing to corporate contractors, and opening the system to privately operated charter schools—plundered what was left.
 
At the lowest point in the decline, in the early 2000s, St. Louis was the number one most shrinking city in the world. Today, the school system is a shell of its former self, down to fewer than 29,000 students compared to 115,543 at its peak in 1967. The district lost its accreditation in 2007, which led to a state takeover that nullified the authority of the locally elected school board and handed governance over to officials appointed by the state, who often ruled with impunity.
 
But on July 1, St. Louis has a historic opportunity to turn a corner when governing authority transitions from the state-appointed board to a locally elected one. With a newly elected board, a return to full accreditation, and a supposed clean slate to write its future, can St. Louis show how democratic governance can overcome years of corrosive politics and genuinely reflect the desires of local citizens?
 
In my conversations with locals, answers are mixed.
 
‘Very Concerned About the Future’

“I am very concerned about the future,” Susan Turk tells me. Turk, a former St. Louis public school parent and a relentless school board watchdog, has been a studious observer of the past 25 years of district history. Her periodic newsletter is a brash alternative to a generally uncritical local press.

When I first interviewed Turk nearly two years ago, she described local politics as “run with an iron fist” with “only certain people” in the local power structure. She welcomed the return of the district’s accreditation but lamented the lack of significant improvement in academic performance. “We’re no better than we were ten years ago,” she said. “It’s really hard to see something positive.”

Today, she sees in the elected board an opportunity for real progress but has concerns that years of state-appointed oversight and corrupt influencers still entrenched in the system will thwart authentic democratic governance.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, St. Louis
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