Archives for category: Disruption
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Los Angeles: LAUSD Ponders Dumb Plan to Grade Schools

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2019 //
37

The reason that parents and teachers are giving Nick Melvoin a rating on YELP is in response to his plan to rate teachers, mainly by the test scores of their students.

Jeb Bush invented the template for grading schools from A-F, based mainly on their test scores. It became a convenient way to close public schools and turn them over to charter operators. It is an dumb idea for many reasons, because schools are complex institutions with many staff and many functions. Students are not randomly assigned.

In state after state, school grades reflect the proportion of needy kids enrolled. The lowest scores go to schools with high proportions of students who are poor, don’t speak English, and have special needs. Schools with the greatest challenges are wrongly labeled an stigmatized as “failing schools.”

So now Los Angeles is considering a school grading scheme in which most of the grades will depend on standardized test scores.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-13/lausd-schools-ranked

Even the Los Angeles Times ridiculed this bad idea.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-16/grading-los-angeles-schools

According to documents obtained by Times reporters, the proposed measurement system, which hasn’t come before the board yet, would include a rating for each school on a scale of 1 to 5, based mostly on test scores. In the case of elementary and middle schools, the scores themselves and students’ improvement on them would make up 80% of the ranking. In high schools, it would be 65%, and since the state’s annual standardized test is given in only one grade in high school, it would show nothing about whether any particular cohort of students is improving on the tests as they move from 9th to 12th grade….

But what’s wrong might not be the quality of the teaching or the running of the school. The reality is that students in some neighborhoods face considerably more challenges of poverty, family disruption and the like, and those issues often affect their academic performance and test results.

Charter schools and magnet schools draw their enrollment from parents who go out of their way to find out about different schools and who have the time and ability to sign up their children for possible acceptance. Even if those students are poor and enter school not yet knowing English, they tend to have a leg up on students whose parents are less involved, perhaps because they’re ill or working too many jobs. Neighborhood schools shouldn’t be made to look comparatively bad over factors they can’t control.

Why is Los Angeles copying Jeb Bush’s bad ideas?

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Disruption, Education Reform, Florida, Fraud, Los Angeles

Kentucky: The State’s Attacks on Its Teachers Are Outrageous!

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2019 //
10

 

Clifford Wallace and Leigh Wallace, a father-daughter team of professional educators, lambaste state officials for their relentless attacks on the state’s public school teachers. 

They begin:

Leadership matters. It has the potential to influence student outcomes. Clearly, there is a lack of leadership in Frankfort. Kentucky State Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis is taking pages from the flawed and unsuccessful playbooks of his neoliberal, pro-privatization counterparts in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin. From no longer requiring master’s degrees for teachers to maintain certification to promoting privatized for profit “charter schools” as the panacea to save the “failing public schools” – our “commissioner” is helping dismantle our public schools – and the teaching profession – in Kentucky.

Lewis continues to disparage professionally prepared – and experienced – educators through diminishing the significance of the complex work they do on a daily basis, insulting their commitment and expertise, threatening their pensions, and cutting programs and budgets. Recently, in addition to painting a negative narrative around our public schools and the professionals that work in them, he proposed a “pay for performance” incentive for Kentucky Public School teachers as a means to motivate them to “work harder” and ensure every student has access to a “quality public school.” While this may sound promising on the surface – especially if you have not read the numerous studies conducted by scholars on this practice over the past 30+ years – it is a failed solution.

Lewis’s proposal for merit pay or performance bonuses is absurd. It has been tried repeatedly and failed everywhere. It was tried in Nashville, with a bonus of $15,000 for middle school math teachers who raised test scores. It failed. It has been tried again and again over the past 100 years and has NEVER worked.
Lewis is no “Reformer.” He is being paid to demoralize professional educators and find excuses to privatize public schools. This is not “leadership.” This is Disruption.
The teachers and students of Kentucky deserve better leaders who are dedicated to improving conditionsof teaching and learning.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Reform, Kentucky, Merit pay, Nashville, Pensions, Teachers

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
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »