Archives for category: Disruption
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Florida Senate Endorses a Fifth Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2019 //
19

 

Spurred on by Governor Ron DeSantis, Jeb Bush, and Betsy DeVos, the Florida Senate endorsed a fifth private voucher program. 

“The bill would create a new Family Empowerment Scholarship — the state’s fifth voucher program — that could help up to 18,000 students pay private school tuition with state-backed scholarships. The program would target youngsters from low-income families but could be open to more middle class ones, too, with an income limit of nearly $80,000 for a family of four….

“Every parent knows what’s best for their individual child, and at no point should we turn over that responsibility to the government,” said Sen. Manny Diaz, R-Hialeah, one of the bill’s sponsors.”

The new program would be funded with money taken from the state education budget, up to $130 million. Other vouchers programs are “tax credits” given to corporations or individuals. Because this money comes right out of the state budget, it might be subject to legal challenge since it directly violates the state constitution’s prohibition on public money for religious schools.

Republicans are betting that the state courts will ignore the state constitution and the 2012 referendum that went against Jeb Bush’s effort to change that provision of the state constitution.

More than 80% of students using vouchers attend religious schools. Voucher schools “do not have to give students state tests nor meet state standards when it comes to academics, teacher credentials or facilities.”

Florida Republicans continue their  assault on public schools.

Florida is no model for the nation.

On the NAEP, Florida ranks at the national average in 8th grade reading and math. It has large achievement gaps between black and white students. Ignore Florida’s fourth grade scores; they are tainted by the state policy of retaining third grade students who don’t pass the state reading test.

I don’t know whether voucher students are included in NAEP’s sample. The State makes sure they are not included on state tests.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Disruption, Florida, Privatization, Separation of church and state

Oakland: Remember Laurene Powell Jobs’ $100 Million Giveaway Contest to Reinvent High Schools? This One Collapsed

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2019 //
7

Remember when Laurene Powell Jobs announced that she was running a competition for ideas to reinvent the high school? She was offering $10 million to each winning proposal, which she called “Super Schools.”

Nearly 700 proposals were entered, but only 10 were chosen.

One of the winners was in Oakland, California, a district that has been subject to nonstop disruption, charters, and and constant meddling by the Eli Broad foundation. For years, the district has been led by Broadies, who have run it into a ditch and failed to revive its fortunes.

The Oakland winner planned to open a Super School that incorporated Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning online platform.

But things went poorly after Oakland’s Broadie superintendent Antwan Wilson was lured to the District of Columbia to be its chancellor (where he was soon ousted after it was revealed that he pulled strings to get his daughter into one of the best public schools, a practice that Wilson had forbidden for others. Wilson is now running an education consulting business.)

Two years ago, the Oakland Super School was abandoned before it opened. 

The turmoil in the district, which has been a near constant for years, made it impossible to open.

Summit Public Schools, which operates a chain of charter schools, with support from the Oakland school district and Mayor Libby Schaaf’s office, submitted a winning proposal for a charter school focusing on personal learning and real-world experiences. The goal was to open the new school at the California College of the Arts on Broadway in Rockridge in fall 2018.

But the effort started to fall apart over the last several months and was ultimately abandoned in recent weeks, The Chronicle has learned. Now, Summit leaders will use the money for one of their existing charter schools in Daly City.

“There are just better ways for us to help kids in the Bay Area,” said Jason Solomon, senior director of advocacy and engagement at Summit Public Schools, which operates eight charter schools in the Bay Area and three in Washington state.

Solomon noted that the team’s entry to build the new school included the support of former Oakland Superintendent Antwan Wilson, who resigned this year to lead the Washington, D.C., schools. On top of the turnover in leadership, the district is grappling with the need to close or consolidate schools given declining enrollment while juggling a $30 million budget shortfall over the next year.

Community groups were unhappy that the proposed charter would be sited very close to an existing Oakland public school that had not yet been disrupted and destroyed.

With Antwan Wilson gone, Summit charters was not sure they would have a champion so they shifted the funding to one of their schools in Daly City.

Summit substitutes computer-based instruction for real teachers, and it has driven out in places as distant as Connecticut and Kansas, by parents and students.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Technology

Indianapolis: The Purpose of School Choice is to Destroy Communities, Which Endangers Us All

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2019 //
28

 

Jim Scheurich is a professor at Indiana University and a public education activist. He writes here about how School Choice is intended to destroy community.

 

Folks, the philosophy that charter and innovation schools are built on is that your children’s school should be individualized parental choice.  This means parents individually search across the Indy area as to where to send their children, which often means leaving their neighborhood community.  Each family or individual parent is thus on her, his, or their own and not engaged with their neighborhood community.  Also, each family or individual parent is pitted against or in competition with other similar families and parents for the so-called “better” schools.

This individualistic orientation of charters and innovation schools undermines neighborhood communities and even the possibility of neighborhood communities.   Undermining neighborhood communities, according to sociological research, increases violence, including murder.  Other research shows that building community decreases violence, including murder.

This, therefore, means that charter and innovation schools are likely one of the causes of our high murder rate in Indianapolis as the individualized school choice model is broadly undermining neighborhood communities across our city. 

Of course, building community in low income areas is not easy, but not impossible.  However, many such communities have created positive community spaces.  Given the difficulty of creating such communities, we certainly do not need more policies, like charter and innovation schools, that are threats to community and community building.

If you study the neoliberal political and economic “philosophy” behind the choice school movement, you will find a strong focus on individualism over community.  If you want to understand this movement, which is driving the creation of individualistic “choice” schools, read Democracy in chains by Nancy MacLean, a Duke historian, and then read the award winningDark money by Jane Mayer, which analyzes who the Koch brothers are as they are primary supporters of neoliberalism.  Indeed, overwhelmingly, the financial supporters of neoliberalism, the people behind the curtain, the people funding Stand for Children and the Mind Trust, are conservative to rightwing billionaires.

If you don’t believe me or think I am just some conspiracy nut, I dare you to read Democracy in chainsby the highly respected Duke historian, Nancy MacLean. I dare you.

My point is that charter and innovation schools help destroy community, which according to sociological research can lead to increased violence.

 

Jim Scheurich, Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition, a multi-racial, multi-class, citywide group of Indianapolis citizens working to reverse the takeover of our school district by those funded by white, conservative or rightwing, billionaire neoliberals. Also, an activist professor of Urban Education Studies at Indiana University – Indianapolis

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Indiana, Indianapolis, Injustice, Innovation, Privatization, Safety, School Choice, Vouchers

John Thompson: What Andrea Gabor Teaches Us, Part 1

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2019 //
7
John Thompson, who recently retired as a teacher in Oklahoma, here reviews Andrea Gabor’s fine book, After the Education Wars. His review appears in two parts. He is interested in Gabor’s critique of why “reform” failed and where we go next.
He writes:
We are near the end of the 21st century’s second decade, and some fervent corporate school reformers finally seem to be understanding that their experiment turned an unconscionable percentage of schools into sped-up versions of a Model T assembly line. We need a new era of humane, holistic school improvement. A first step is reading and discussing Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars.  Now that corporate reform failed, Gabor explains, we must learn the lessons of history and “recover the road not taken.”

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrea-gabor/after-the-education-wars/

The progressive reformers who preceded the corporate reformers of the last generation operated in a manner that was consistent with the “continuous improvement” philosophy of Edwards Deming. As Gabor and Deming explain about schools and other sectors, “Variation is as ubiquitous as air and water.” Deming said, “Only the employees closest to a given process can identify the variation that invariably diminishes quality.” That is why it was necessary to shake up the systemic hierarchy and “drive fear out of the workplace and foster intrinsic motivation.”

Gabor acknowledges the inherent flaws of the pre-reform education administrative sector. Her deepest dive into that “status quo” was her account of how progressive New York City educators, like Deborah Meier, carved out the holistic and inclusive road which reformers refused to take. Meier et.al battled the district’s “compliance managers.” Their methods embodied “creative noncompliance.” Then, Meier and her era’s reformers personified a value system consistent with Deming’s call for “a participative, collaborative, deeply democratic approach to continuous improvement.”

Meier and other progressive education reformers in New York, Massachusetts, and Leander, Tx, respected the essential role of trusting relationships. They needed educators to unite for a team effort, but they also understood the folly of trying to mandate unanimity. It would have been easier to order all teachers to obey the normative dictum which was embraced by the corporate reformers, and be “on the same page.” But they knew that the alternative to open collaboration would be “resistance, secrecy and sabotage.” If Meier and other school leaders emulated the management model of New York City and other large districts, and mandated teacher compliance, “‘the braver and more conscientious [would] cheat the most, but even the most timid can’t practice well what they don’t believe in.’”

Venture philanthropists like Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg initially shared some of the values which motivated progressive reformers. Both groups initiated small schools in order to offer more personalized services, and the corporate reformers first seemed to not be bewildered by the key component of continuous improvement – building trust. In a sharp contrast to the reckless pace of change that would soon be imposed on public education, the Gates Foundation visited Meier’s Julia Richmond High School for a year before starting its small school campaign. I was shocked to learn that Gates’ Tom Vander Ark invested so much time in visiting schools. But, as Gabor discovered, “The Gates man was smitten with Julia Richmond, but he didn’t see what was actually happening there.”

A progressive principal told Vander Ark about 25 times that “small is a necessary, but not sufficient.” But, he was apparently so obsessed with “scaling up” reforms that the need for collaboration was subordinated to a focus on “design attributes” that could drive nationwide transformation. Vander Ark was more impressed with the “design coherence” of Success Academy than the Julia Richmond culture of trust. Because of their commitment to rapid transformations, Gates, Bloomberg, and other corporate reformers rejected the essence of Meier’s approach and pushed its “antithesis,” which resulted in the “no-excuses charter movement’s focus on behavioral conformity and control.”

Another factor was the Billionaires Boys Club’s hubris. The reformers “distrust of education culture” was combined with “suspicion – even their hatred – of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.” They displayed “the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators.” Eventually, Gabor wrote, “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia – never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined, if not doomed.”

It wasn’t just in New York City where the opportunity to learn from veteran, progressive reformers was lost. Across the nation, the accountability-driven, competition-driven reformers’ well-funded public relations campaigns “turned teacher-bashing into a blood sport.” They then sought to “teacher proof” the classroom. Consequently, canned curriculum and mind-numbing lessons drove much of the joy of teaching and learning out of the nation’s schools.

New York City’s lost opportunity morphed into a national tragedy as technocrats continued to worship data but not recognize that the most important educational factors are immeasurable. Their “Taylorism” was combined with a failure to recognize the dangers of “Schumpeterian” disruption on children. And the more that educators resisted reward and punish policies, the more reformers sought better hammers to force compliance. After tougher principal evaluations did not produce enough obedience, value added teacher evaluations sought to hold every single educator accountable for meeting their quantitative goals. Then, reformers overreached by simultaneously imposing Common Core high stakes tests and accountability metrics that were theoretically but not actually aligned with each other.

I entered the classroom as a 39-year-old rookie, but one who had a decade of experience in the inner city. Nearly 1/5th of my first years’ students would listen, learn, and yet refuse to do a single assignment. They didn’t disrupt our lessons as they often did the classes dominated by worksheet-driven instruction. Clearly, part of their noncompliance was a political statement, and they were glad to say why they resisted and why they would soon drop out of school. The common narrative was that they had been robbed of an education when growing up in our district’s teach-to-the-test era in the wake of “A Nation at Risk.” And they bitterly protested that the worst of the drill and kill was imposed on inner city schools.

This was the early 1990s and a new era of test-driven reform was being organized. During our discussions, I said that if reformers would read Catch 22, they would know that compliance couldn’t be forced, and that the system would respond with destructive games to make the accountability metrics come out right. One of my brightest students, who learned every day but who was so fed up with drill and kill that he would have nothing but zeros in every class when he dropped out, offered a better metaphor. During the famous scene in the comedy, I Love Lucy, Lucy fell behind when boxing chocolates on an assembly line. Teachers and students responded to test-driven reform in the same way, tossing out and even eating the product.

Back then, there was a common phrase which Oklahoma progressives repeated, “Feed the Teachers or They Will Eat the Kids,” which anticipates a second post on Gabor’s account of progressive reformers trying to change that reality in NYC, Massachusetts, and Leandor, Tx, as corporate reformers recreated Lucy’s sped-up assembly lines in NYC, New Orleans, and many or most urban schools. It will also review her proposals for a new era that needs to come After the Education Wars.”

Tune in tomorrow, same time, same place, to read the concluding section of Thompson’s review.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2019 //
20

 

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is outraged that The Audacious Project is honoring the Waterford online preschool program, which will use this platform to expand their efforts to open additional  online preschools. Early childhood experts agree that this is harmful to children. I say it is a mean and stupid idea. Efforts to put little children in online schools should be denounced, not celebrated. Children need real interaction with real human beings.

Please sign the petition.

 

For Immediate Release

Contact:
David Monahan, CCFC: david@commercialfreechildhood.org; (617) 896-9397

Early Childhood Advocates Call On The Audacious Project to Reconsider Major Award for Online Preschool
A TED philanthropy project would widen educational inequality and deprive children of the hands-on preschool experiences they deserve.

BOSTON, MA – April 12, 2019 – Early childhood advocates are calling on The Audacious Project, housed at TED and designed to fund ideas for social change, to postpone plans to designate Waterford UPSTART, an online “preschool” program, as one of the participants in its funding program for 2019.  Award winners will be announced at TED2019 in Vancouver on April 16. Last year’s award winners averaged $63 million in new funding. According to a Waterford representative, the funding will allow UPSTART to dramatically increase the number of children enrolled in its program.

In their call for The Audacious Project to postpone funding, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Defending the Early Years (DEY) point to their October 2018 Position Statement on Online Preschool, which has been endorsed by more than 100 experts in child development and early education. The experts and advocates say that online preschool programs like UPSTART are poor substitutes for high-quality early education, and that funding online programs instead of high-quality early education will make inequality worse, not better.

“There is a tremendous need for universal pre-K, and it’s admirable that The Audacious Project wants to address educational inequalities, but online preschool is not the answer,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, EdD, Professor Emerita at Lesley University and DEY Senior Advisor. “Kids learn by playing, exploring, and interacting with peers and caring adults – not by memorizing letters, numbers, and colors presented to them on screens. Children who receive UPSTART’s screen-based version of a preschool experience will be disadvantaged compared to children from more resourced communities who have play-based, experiential early education. A truly audacious project would take the funding intended for these online programs and direct it instead to giving low-income, rural, or otherwise underserved children the high quality, face-to-face education they deserve.”

UPSTART, which started with public funding from the state of Utah and has spread to at least seven other states, claims to promote “kindergarten readiness” through 15 – 20 minutes per day of online instruction. But advocates say that UPSTART’s lessons are poorly designed and developmentally inappropriate. An analysis of one UPSTART lesson by DEY found it was pedagogically unsound, “confusing” and “overloaded with distracting images.” UPSTART also recommends that children wear headphones and complete lessons alone, contrary to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that parents “co-view with your children [and] help children understand what they are seeing.”

“Online preschool should never be rewarded or considered a legitimate alternative to high-quality early care and education,” said Denisha Jones, PhD, JD, Director of Teacher Education at Trinity Washington University and Director of Organizing for DEY.  “I implore The Audacious Project to reconsider giving money to a screen-based program at a time where early childhood experts are increasingly concerned with screen time and the loss of high-quality interactions between children and educated early childhood teachers. Programs like UPSTART may be less expensive than real universal preschool, but those savings come at the expense of the low-income kids and kids of color they purport to help. We should be investing our money, time, and resources to ensure all children have access to affordable, high-quality, early childhood education.”

Last year, seven of The Audacious Project designees were granted a total of $441 million from partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. It is not yet known which groups are funding UPSTART, or exactly how much money the program will receive, but an email from a Waterford PR representative indicated that the award will be enough to “provide an opportunity for every four-year-old to be ready for kindergarten.” (Emphasis in original.)

The DEY/CCFC letter pointedly states, “We don’t believe your impressive list of funders and partners would be satisfied if their own children spent 75 minutes a week on a computer in isolation as a substitute for face-to-face preschool rooted in caring relationships and social interaction.” It also warns that a major expansion of online preschool could derail the growing movement for real universal preschool. It asks The Audacious Project to postpone the award and meet with advocates to better understand their concerns.

Added Josh Golin, Executive Director of CCFC, “Over and over, we’ve seen educational technology such as 1:1 programs, virtual charter schools, and personalized learning software falsely marketed as a panacea for inequality. Now the EdTech evangelists have set their sights on preschoolers. Isolated children on computers guided by algorithms can never replicate the joyful exploration and interactions at the core of the preschool experience. We urge The Audacious Project to rethink this award.”

The DEY/CCFC letter can be read in full here.

Categories Childhood, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Online Education

Fred Smith: New York’s Testing Regime is Mindless Disruption

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2019 //
30

If you want to know why parents in New York have opted out in record numbers for the past few years, read testing expert Fred Smith’s account of the chaos and tumult inflicted on the children of the state by the State Education Department.

Disruption! Change! Instability!

Smith, who worked for many years as a testing expert at the New York City Board of Education, writes:

Latch onto this, folks:
Let’s look at the fundamental uselessness of the testing program–a plague visited annually on 1.2 million students, teachers and schools. Several transformative changes occurred over the course of the Common Core era that render efforts to understand the results from year to year a nullity:
· Revision of the testing framework between 2011 and 2012 as part of the “education reform agenda” leading to the imposition of “rigorous” testing;
· A transition period (2012) allowing the new publisher Pearson one year to familiarize itself with the scope of New York State testing prior to full-fledged introduction of the Common Core Learning Standards;
· Initiation of core-aligned tests in 2013 and establishment of a baseline against which to measure student progress in meeting the standards;
· A shift in the statewide testing population in 2014 and 2015, with 20 percent of the students opting out of the exams;
· Removal of time limits from the tests in 2016 taking away uniformity in their administration and making comparisons with previous years of (timed) tests invalid;
· Switch to a new publisher in 2017 (Questar) after a handoff from Pearson, which is an unaccounted for source of variation in the construction of the exams and the results they yield;
· Reducing the number of testing days from three to two and altering the scoring scale in 2018, defying attempts to make sense of results or draw conclusions about progress.
So, in virtually every year from 2012 through 2018 there have been differences in the publishers, the test population and the test parameters. And we’re not even talking about the mysterious derivation of the cut off scores that define student performance level on the exams. Such discontinuity is antithetical to the establishment of a coherent testing system. SED’s admonition about the inability to draw comparisons between 2017 and 2018 actually holds true throughout the unstable Common Core span.
Categories Accountability, Disruption, Testing

Charter Schools: A Very Horrible, Terrible, Awful Week

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2019 //
42

 

This has been possibly the very worst week in the history of charter schools, which have existed for almost 30 years. It is fitting that this week coincided with Public Schools Week, reminding us of the importance of public schools, which are democratically governed, open to all who apply, and accountable, financially and academically, to the public.

Consider the trajectory of the charter idea.

What began as in idealistic proposal–experimental schools-within-schools, created and operated by teachers with the approval of their colleagues and local school board, intended to reach out and help the struggling and turned-off students—has turned into a libertarian’s dream of deregulated, even unregulated industry replete with corporate chains, entrepreneurs, billionaire backers, highly segregated schools, and a battering ram against collective bargaining.

Charter schools in the initial version were supposed to collaborate with public schools to make them better or to learn from failed experiments. That was charter 1.0.

That didn’t last long. Entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to profit from guaranteed public funding while skimping on teacher pay. Grifters saw a chance to get rich with land deals and leases. Ideologues like the Waltons and the Koch brothers saw a way to get rid of teachers’ unions.

Democrats were duped by the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools,” which was spouted by Obama, Duncan, Romney, Trump, and DeVos.

But this week, all the flowery rhetoric melted.

First came the report from the Network for Piblic Education, revealing the waste of nearly $1 billion in federal funds awarded to charters that never opened or soon closed.

Then began a three-part series in the Los Angeles Times by Anna Phillips on charter corruption and a state law that invites charter waste and abuse.

Then began a series jointly sponsored by Northjersey.com and USA Today on the ways that charter operators use public funds to build charter facilities that are privately owned, not public. Legal theft, you might call it.

Even the Onion chimed in, with a satirical piece about an innovative charter school that accepts no students.

Will the charter spin machine recover or are we seeing a new boldness on the part of the press?

Perhaps the new attention to charter scandals was encouraged when a team of reporters at the Arizona Republic received the prestigious George Polk Award for its exposes of charter scandals in that state.

The mask has fallen away.

Lets give credit where it’s due. Betsy DeVos has made crystal clear that she loves charters, hates accountability, and welcomes profit making. Thanks, Secretary DeVos, for explaining the end game of privatization.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Kentucky: Parents and Teachers Confront a Hostile GOP Legislature and State Commissioner

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2019 //
30

 

Gay Adelmann, Parent Activist in Jefferson County and Leader of Save Our Schools Kentucky, writes about the hostile actions of the Kentucky Legislature: 

 

Privatization or Potential Punishment: Are Louisville Teachers Being Forced To Choose The Lesser of Two Evils?

“The beatings will continue until morale improves,” seems to be the mantra of the Kentucky GOP when it comes to public education.

In the latest attack on its teachers, Kentucky’s new pro-charter education commissioner vowed to not punish teachers “as long as there are no more work stoppages.” It’s unclear whether the final day of Kentucky’s legislative session this Thursday will be met with another teacher-led “sick out.” It would be the 7th sickout in Jefferson County in a month. Kentucky Legislature has been on recess the last 14-days, resuming on March 28 for “sine die” and to pass any final legislation.

In addition to other terrible bills that pose a potential risk, nine resolutions stand ready to be passed by the Kentucky Senate, which would confirm the governor’s newest seven appointments to the Kentucky Board of education. The two additional resolutions appear to extend the length of current appointees’ service by swapping their seats (expiring in 2020) with two who would have been appointed to the new slots, possibly a maneuver to protect key players in the event Kentucky’s unpopular governor does mitt win reelection.

The entire 14-member board is now completely made up of privatization-friendly appointees from Kentucky’s charter-pushing, ALEC-backed governor, following an earlier round of appointments two years prior. Last year, the new board ousted the Commonwealth’s highly qualified commissioner, Stephen Pruitt, the day after they were appointed, and replaced him with an 5-year teacher and charter school ideologue who immediately called for a state takeover of the state’s largest district.

Serving nearly 100,000 students, and a $1.7 billion annual budget, Jefferson County Public Schools is by far the largest school district in the state of Kentucky, and the 30th largest in the nation.

Let’s ignore the fact that few, if any, of these board members have experience as educators or parents in the public school sector. In fact, several of the members have direct ties to charter schools and have been working behind the scenes to undermine public schools and/or position themselves to potentially profit from charters, scholarship tax credits and state takeovers of schools and districts.

KBE appointments subject to confirmation include Hal Heiner, Gary Houchens, and Ben Cundiff. Their names, along with that of their chosen commissioner, Wayne Lewis, can be found on formation documents and on boards of existing charter schools dating back to 2011, long before they worked their way into positions of conflict of interest or self-dealing.

Charters, vouchers, “scholarships” and myraid other hedge-fund darling investments have been the law of the land on 43 other states, so these well-funded privatizers know how to penetrate a market. And once they’re in, they can have their way with everything else they want. We know. We’ve heard this from allies in Indiana, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, California, West Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Iowa, Washington State, the list goes on and on.

These folks keep telling us, “whatever you do, don’t let them in. It’s much harder to get them out once you have them.” JCPS teachers see it, and they have been literally keeping these most dangerous bills at bay this session and last. “To again fail to (approve charter funding) is pretty shocking and something we’ve never seen in any other state,” according to Todd Ziebarth, a national charter school advocate who helped craft the 2017 law.

But this fight is far from over. So what legislation is still in play that could happen on Thursday?

House Bill 358 would give public universities the option to exit the Kentucky Employees’ Retirement System (KERS). The bill passed the House where the Senate “took a problematic bill and transformed it into an outright dangerous one,” according to Louisville House Rep Lisa Willner. “The Senate version would still permit public universities to opt out of the public retirement system (KERS), and would all but require that “quasi-governmental” agencies – community mental health centers, domestic violence shelters, child advocacy organizations, rape crisis centers, and all 61 health departments statewide – exit the public retirement system altogether. The Senate version of HB 358 threatens the very existence of these lifeline organizations, and could effectively dismantle the statewide system of public protection and crisis support.” The number of Kentucky workers whose inviolable contracts would be broken would expand to nearly 9,000.

Although many legislators have assured us HB205 (Scholarship Tax Credits) and HB525 (Pension Trustee Appointments) are dead this session, it doesn’t mean they won’t continue to bring them back next year and the year after that until they pass, much like they did with charter school legislation, which finally passed in 2017. Our only saving grace has been the fact that there was so much pushback, the general assembly’s been unable to muster enough intestinal fortitude to fund them again this session. The trick is figuring out if we can really trust this latest promise, because those in the minority are usually the last to know what’s going on, and those in the supermajority have broken our trust before.

The same body that passed an unconstititional “sewer bill” on the last day of 2018 session is the same body that called a special session to try to pass it again constitutionally last winter. And now we’re simply supposed to trust them when they say these harmful education bills are dead?

But those bills aren’t the only threat in the near future. As I mentioned, charter school legislation passed in 2017, but has yet to be funded. A looming state takeover of JCPS could open the door to conversion charter schools, without waiting for any funding mechanism to pass.

Could the confirmation of the KBE appointments be checkmate for Jefferson County Public Schools? Or said another way, could a disruption in the confirmation of these appointments derail the privatizers’ agenda to implement charter schools in our most vulnerable communities? If for no other reason, concerned citizens of Jefferson County need to email, call and then head to Frankfort on Thursday to put pressure on the Kentucky Senate to not confirm Bevin’s appointments to the KBE.

Jefferson County teachers are fighting against a “solution” that has been not only proven not to work, but leads to school closures, district bankruptcies, displaced vulnerable students and increased taxes.

If I were a teacher, I would be outraged at Commissioner Lewis’ latest attempts to bully and intimidate teachers. I’d love to see teachers call his bluff and reveal their collective power over him..

But I’m not a teacher. I’m a parent, community organizer, concerned citizen and taxpayer (link:https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/2019/03/26/jcps-parents-students-should-join-teacher-sickout-gay-adelmann/3269349002/) who recognized years ago that her son’s “failing” public school in a high-minority, high-poverty area of town was being groomed for a charter school takeover. And yet, here we are, six years and one helluva fight later, risking watching everything we’ve been warning folks about come to fruition.

The Friday following the last sickout, many parents also kept their children home to show solidarity with teachers who have been fighting for our students, and to exercise the only power they knew how. There is talk of another parent-led action during the week of abusive state testing. It’s time teachers and parents in these red states recognize the power they do hold, and to use it to stop the hostilities coming out of Frankfort.

Whether it’s parents or teachers doing the talking, it’s time to turn the conversation around and say to Lewis, the KBE and our state legislators, “There will be no more closures to our public schools, as soon as you stop the shady attempts to privatize them against the wishes of taxpayers and against the best interest of our most vulnerable students.”

Dear JCPS invites other concerned citizens to Frankfort on March 28 for a Rally in the Rotunda from 10 am – 12 pm. We will also have the table in the annex basement where concerned citizens like myself are happy to answer any other questions you may have about what’s really behind this movement and what are next steps.

Gay Adelmann is a parent of a recent JCPS graduate and co-founder of Dear JCPS and Save Our Schools Kentucky. She can be reached at moderator@dearjcps.com.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Kentucky, Louisville, Parents, Privatization, Students

John Rogers: School and Society in the Age of Trump

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2019 //
67

 

John Rogers and his research team at UCLA have completed a valuable study of the effect of Trump and his ideology on schools, students, and society. 

If you go to the link, you can open the report.

Here is a summary:

“This study examines how a broad set of social issues at the forefront of the Trump presidency are felt and affect students and educators within America’s high schools.  We look closely at:

  1. Political division and hostility;
  2. Disputes over truth, facts, and the reliability of sources;
  3. Opioid misuse and addiction;
  4. The threat of immigration enforcement;
  5. The threats of gun violence on school campuses.

“In addition to assessing the impact of these challenges on students’ learning and wellbeing, we also report on how high school principals throughout the U.S. are addressing these issues.  Further, we measure how the impact and responses differ across schools depending on student demographics, geographic location, or partisan orientation of the surrounding community.

“The study findings are based on an online survey conducted in the summer of 2018 by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy Education and Access (IDEA) of 505 high school principals whose schools provide a representative sample of all U.S. public high schools. UCLA IDEA also conducted 40 follow-up interviews with principals who participated in the survey selected to be representative of the larger pool of schools.

“Our findings make clear that in the age of Trump, America’s high schools are greatly impacted by rising political incivility and division.

  • Eighty-nine percent of principals report that incivility and contentiousness in the broader political environment has considerably affected their school community.
  • Eighty-three percent of schools see these tensions intensified and accelerated by the flow of untrustworthy or disputed information and the increasing use of social media that is fueling and furthering division among students and between schools and the communities.
  • Sixty-two percent of schools have been harmed by opioid abuse.
  • Sixty-eight percent of the principals surveyed say federal immigration enforcement policies and the political rhetoric around the issue have negatively impacted students and their families.
  • Ninety-two percent of principals say their school has faced problems related to the threat of gun violence

“In the face of these societal challenges, it is students themselves who bear the brunt of the impact.  Many students feel greater anxiety, stress, and vulnerability, and parental opioid misuse and aggressive immigration enforcement have both resulted in greater material deprivation for young people—unstable housing, insecure food supplies, and a lack of other necessary supports.

“School principals are also impacted. The average principal in the study reports spending six and a half hours a week addressing the five societal challenges. One in four principals spend the equivalent of one workday a week responding to the challenges.  That time represents lost opportunity costs, taking time away from efforts to meet students’ academic needs and enhance the quality of teaching and learning.

“The report closes with a call for relationship-centered schools that attend to the holistic needs of young people and their families, while building social trust and understanding.  We recommend:

  1. Establish and communicate school climate standards emphasizing care, connectedness, and civility and then create practices that enable educational systems to document and report on conditions associated with these standards.
  2. Build professional capacity within educational systems to address the holistic needs of students and communities and extend this capacity by supporting connections between school-based educators and other governmental agencies and community-based organizations serving young people and their families
  3. Develop integrated systems of health, mental health, and social welfare support for students and their families.
  4. Create and support networks of educators committed to fostering care, connectedness, and strong civility in their public education systems.”

 

 

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Disruption, Education Reform, Injustice, Principals, Racism, Students

Tom Ultican: Elites in Dallas Impose Massive Disruption on Public Schools, with Charters Schools and TFA

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2019 //
2

Tom Ultican tells a sad story about the takeover of the Dallas school board by the Dallas Chamber of Commerce and other wealthy elites, who don’t send their children to the public schools.

After their failed experiment with Mike Miles, a Broadie who surrounded himself with young but very well-compensated aides from TFA, the elites decided to buy control of the school board. It became too expensive for an ordinary citizen to compete with the money that the elites were pouring in. One candidate, Lori Kilpatrick, almost upset an incumbent, even though her resources were meager. The corporate elites decided not to take any chances in the run off. Her opponent won by outspending her 34-1.

The business elites have an agenda. Hire as many TFA as possible and drive out experienced teachers. Close public schools and replace them with charter schools. So far, none of their plans has benefitted the children of Dallas.

It is a sad story and I hope you will take the time to read it.

Tom Ultican often refers to the “Destroy Public Education” movement.

Dallas elites are in the forefront of that movement. Shame on them. They belong on the Wall of Shame.

Categories Charter Schools, Dallas, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Teach for America, Texas
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »