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Los Angeles: UTLA Blasts Beutner Plan to Accelerate Privatization

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2018 //
7

The United Teachers of Los Angeles blasted Superintendent Austin Beutner’s “secret plan” to break up the district into “networks,” which may be part of his long-range plan to downsize and privatize the district. Beutner, a non-educator, comes from the financial sector, where large corporations are routinely broken up and sold off. The point of this strategy becomes clear when you see the “corporate reformers” that Beutner has hired.

The LA Times leaked the plan and revealed the names of the consultants that Beutner is relying on. The two major consulting firms are Kitamba and Ernst & Young. The LA Times describes them:

Kitamba partner and chief executive Rajeev Bajaj, while heading different companies, became a major consultant in 2010 and 2011 for the school-reform effort in Newark, N.J. The companies in which he was involved attracted media attention because of potential conflicts involving business ties to state and local officials.

His partner at Kitamba, Erin McGoldrick Brewster, served as chief of data and accountability for the District of Columbia Public Schools, under hard-charging former Supt. Michelle Rhee. In 2009, McGoldrick Brewster, along with Rhee, came under scrutiny for not pushing harder to investigate credible allegations of cheating at schools that showed huge gains on standardized tests.

The work of Ernst & Young and Kitamba is being paid for by the recently established Fund for Equity and Excellence, which pools philanthropic resources for local education. Donors include the Ballmer Group, the California Community Foundation, the California Endowment, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Weingart Foundation.

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-lausd-school-networks-20181105-story.html

The UTLA said in a press release:


Austin Beutner’s secret plan to break LAUSD into ‘32 networks’, as leaked to the LA Times, is a reflection of Beutner’s short tenure as superintendent. Just as he continues to hide from public scrutiny, this plan was developed with no transparency and without the authentic involvement of parents and educators.

‘Decentralization’ is a common refrain in so-called portfolio districts — like New Orleans, Newark and Detroit —cities that are riddled with a patchwork of privatization schemes that do not improve student outcomes. They do, however, degrade the teaching profession and create chaos for parents and students trying to navigate the system. In New Orleans, there are no public schools left. In Detroit, a sea of charters has decimated democratically-run public schools.

In a competition-based portfolio model, clusters of schools compete against each other for resources and support, creating a system of haves and have nots and exacerbating segregation and equity issues. Rating systems are installed to justify closing “low-performing” neighborhood schools.

Beutner is working closely with the charter lobby–backed School Board members (the same ones who pushed through Beutner’s secretive hiring) while he is shutting out the voice of other elected board members who represent tens of thousands of voters.

“Austin Beutner should be figuring out how he spends the record-breaking $1.86 billion in reserves on urgent student needs, instead of spending time with high-priced, unaccountable consultants plotting the downsizing of a district that serves all students,” said UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl.

The people working on this secretive plan for a portfolio district are being paid off the books through a more than $3 million discretionary fund financed by known privatizer Eli Broad and others. They are exercising power at the highest levels in LAUSD, without any accountability or scrutiny by the public. Beutner is surrounding himself with the same architects of the privatization schemes in Detroit, New Orleans and Newark:

ThirdWay Solutions founder Cami Anderson was superintendent in Newark, New Jersey, from 2011 to 2015. Her billionaire-bankrolled “One Newark” universal enrollment scheme led to numerous neighborhood school closures, mass firings, and multiple complaints of civil rights violations. Parent outrage led to her resignation.
Erin McGoldrick Brewster is a partner at “portfolio district” specialists Kitamba. She helped then-Washington, DC, schools chancellor Michelle Rhee stonewall an investigation into higher-than-typical erasure rates on multiple-choice standardized tests during Rhee’s controversial test score-linked merit pay program.

Last week, Rebecca Kockler stepped down as Beutner’s Chief of Staff. She previously oversaw the massive charterization of New Orleans public schools.
Getting rid of central oversight and accountability would allow the unchecked spread of the worst of the charter sector abuses: not serving all students, financial scandals, misuse of public funds, and conflict-of-interest charges.

“There is no evidence that Beutner’s network approach would save any money—in fact, it likely would cost millions of dollars more as each network builds its own bureaucracy with redundant jobs and duplicative services,” Caputo-Pearl said. “Once this plan is enacted and the protections for our students are compromised, it will be open season for the privatization industry.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Newark, Privatization

Valerie Jablow: DFER, Fake Democrats, Spent More Than $500,000 for “Reform” in D.C.

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2018 //
10

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is an organization of faux Democrats. Some are Democrats, some are Republicans, all of them give generously to undermine public schools and the teaching profession.

D.C. parent blogger Valerie Jablow gives an overview of how DFER in pouring obscene sums of money into education races in D.C.

DFER was denounced formally by the Democratic party conventions in Colorado and California; both called on DFER to stop corrupting the term “Democrat” by using it in their title, since they are a front for Wall Street and corporate America.

She writes:

How much money have you–as a parent, teacher, or student in DC’s publicly funded schools–given to political causes around public education in 2018: $5? $50? $500? $5000?

How much money did your spouse/parents/children/relatives give?

How much money did any union at your public school give?

It is not easy to know all these answers–but chances are good the total is less than $522,393.74.

That amount–$522,393.74–is what I calculated was given between January 1, 2018 and October 26 to the independent expenditure committee (IEC) of the DC chapter of the education advocacy organization Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). If you add in what was given to DFER DC’s political action committee (PAC) in the same time–about $7,400–you get almost $530,000 donated in just 10 months in the name of education reform in DC. Most of those 2018 donors appear to be outside DC.

Some familiar names appear, like the Waltons (of course) and Reed Hastings’ wife, who lives in California. The Waltons were the single biggest funder of charter schools in D.C. The Waltons own Walmart, which does not pay its workers a living wage. I seriously doubt that they are Democrats.

After listing the donors and recipients of DFER money (which does not add up to over $500,000), Jablow writes:

If wealthy people giving to a cause to tilt public education away from the public seems deeply undemocratic, it’s helpful to recall two recent, undemocratic, actions in our public schools:

–No DC citizen voted to have charter schools in our city. While many DC families are happy with their charter school(s) and appreciate the horizons these schools have opened, it is well worth recalling that we did not get charter schools because of popular will or votes. We got them because Congress–a body in which no DC citizen has representation equal to that of the rest of the country–said we had to. (And charmingly decreed that we had to pay for them, too.)

–No unelected DC citizen voted for mayoral control of DCPS. (In fact, there were only 9 people in the entire world who voted for mayoral control of DCPS. They were all members of the city council.)

Through this lens, one could construe DFER DC’s 2018 wealth gathering and deployment not merely as success, but custom!

Too bad for taxpayers and democracy.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, District of Columbia, Education Reform

District of Columbia: Biggest Campaign Money Coming from Pro-Charter DFER

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2018 //
6

D.C. blogger Valerie Jablow reports here on the election spending for the school boards in the District. There is a district board and a state board.

Much to no one’s surprise, the biggest funder is the pro-charter group “Democrats for Education Reform,” most of whose members are hedge fund managers.

They won’t be satisfied until there are no public schools anywhere.

Categories DFER, District of Columbia

Valerie Jablow: How the Mayor of D.C. Tried to Pack the Chancellor Selection Committee with Charter Allies

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2018 //
4

Valerie Jablow, a D.C. public school parent, keeps close watch on the politics of the District of Columbia schools. In this post, she shows how the Mayor, Muriel Bowser, ignored the letter of the law, which says that the Chancellor Selection Committee should be composed of teachers, parents, and students of the D.C. public schools; why a judge allowed her to ignore the law; and how she added a significant number of people (8 of 19) who are closely identified with the interests of the charter lobby.

The selection panel meets today.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization

D.C.: Mayor Picks Private School Parent and Privatizer as Deputy Mayor for Education

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2018 //
4

Thanks to G.F. Brandenburg for alerting me to this important post by Valerie Jablow, public school advocate in D.C.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser picked a bona fide corporate reformer as her deputy mayor for education. Even the pro-charter Washington Post Thought the choice was “odd.” Jablow thinks the correct word was not odd but conflicted.

The new deputy mayor Paul Kihn is a private school parent. He has close ties to the power structure. He previously worked in Philadelphia where Jablow notes some of his less than admirable feats, which make his appointment to oversee the D.C. public schools very odd:

Also odd is how the Post article did not mention a few things about Kihn that are, well, downright strange–if you believe in public schools BY, FOR, and OF the public:

–Kihn apparently made changes in a teacher contract in Philadelphia to eliminate guarantees about water fountains–because teachers wanted to ensure every school would have functional water fountains. (Not to mention what we know this means for kids’ developing brains.)

–Kihn also was apparently behind an idea to increase public engagement in Philadelphia’s public schools by allowing parents at a few underfunded district schools to vote to turn their schools into charters–or accept no additional funding. Now that’s school choice–with teeth!

[Confidential to Paul Kihn: As a DCPS parent, I really don’t wake up at night thinking about how I need to have even less engagement in my kids’ schools by turning them into charter schools that are not subject to FOIA; that can use annual facilities allocations for anything without any public accountability; and whose plans are not a matter of public knowledge until after the fact. But I do think about stranded costs and empty seats and civil rights violations created by the uncontrolled growth of charter schools in our city. Do you?]

–The wife of Scott Pearson (head of the charter board) is the boss of Kihn’s wife–at a think tank started by Pearson’s wife, called JPMorgan Chase Institute (associated with the financial institution of the same name).

Even more odd is that Paul Kihn, his wife, and Scott Pearson are all former employees of McKinsey, which applies business thinking to every activity.

If all of this sounds incestuous, well, it is.

The mayor has controlled D.C public schools since 2007. We are still “waiting for Superman” to land in D.C. So far, the biggest change has been to hand over half the kids to charter schools, most funded by the rightwing Walton Family Foundation and to introduce a failing voucher program. This looks more like floundering than strategy. Abandoning public responsibility for public schools is retreat, not success. Soon, Betsy DeVos is likely to name D.C. as one of her demonstration districts.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization

D.C.: Help Elect an Ally to the State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2018 //
7

Emily Gasoi is running for a seat on the D.C. State Board of Education. She co-authored a book recently with Deborah Meier called ”These Schools Belong to You and Me.”

DFER has funded her opponent. They are outspending Emily 4-1. Please help her. Let’s crowd source her campaign with whatever you can afford to donate. She is far better equipped to serve the children of D.C. than her DFER-funded opponent, who will push more charters (the city’s schools are already 50% charter). Emily has promised to end the Rhee teacher evaluation system IMPACT. DFER favors more top-down punishments for teachers.

This is her website:

https://emily4education.com

My friend Joan Snowden in D.C. writes:


Dear Friends

I hope this note finds you well after a hot but enjoyable summer. I am writing because I need your help. My dear friend Emily Gasoi is running for a seat on the DC State School Board of Education from Ward 1. Emily is an accomplished educator, DC parent and social activist. She has a PhD in education policy, teaches at Georgetown University, runs a non-profit called Artful Education and previously trained teachers in DC at the Center for Inspired Teaching. Her most recent book, co-authored with world renown educator and MacArthur Prize winner, Deborah Meier, “These Schools Belong to You and Me-Why We can’t Afford to Abandon our Public Schools” makes an important and compelling argument on why we must stop the privatization of public education.

This is a critical election for the DC community. Privatizers have designs on our schools. Privatizing the schools in the Nation’s capitol would be a feather in their cap. Despite these privatizers best efforts, report after report has indicated that the hoped-for education miracle under Mayoral control and other policies have been a bust. Finally members of the DC Council and others are now beginning to listen to parents and teachers about what is wrong and what better reforms would look like. We are starting to have a more honest conversation about whether the top-down, standardized test-driven strategies long pursued by DC “reformers” are the right ones.

DC needs an educator and parent on the State Board now more than ever. But Emily’s challenger is a bank manager with absolutely no education experience and no children in the DC system. Until very recently he served on the board of Directors for DFER (Democrats for Education Reform-DC). If you don’t know about DFER, this link should help. Wall Street hedge fund managers started DFER in 2008 to promote the privatization of public education in key districts nationally and to counter the influence of teacher unions. They overwhelm local elections with outside cash. With DFER’s help, Emily’s opponent has already raised $60,000 for this race. Emily needs help to counter this negative, outside influence. You can be a big help.

Emily is the experienced educator, parent and underdog candidate. She may not have a big political machine behind her, but she is well organized, has the support of an army of committed parents and educators and is a serious contended.

Please join us 6-7:30 on Thursday, September 20, 2018 at my home in D.C. to meet Emily. If you can’t make it, please contribute to her campaign. She needs your support so that she can print literature and build out her campaign infrastructure to assure a win. If you can, please make a contribution Here. The maximum amount is $200 per contributor, which means she needs as many people contributing at that level as possible. Please share this request with your networks.

We must stop privatization efforts and preserve public education in the District of Columbia. Please get involved and enlist your friends. Thanks in advance.

Please RSVP to j-snowden@rcn.com. I look forward to seeing you on the 20th.

Joan Baratz Snowden

Categories Democrats for Education Reform, District of Columbia, Education Reform

D.C.: Prominent Charter Chain is Abandoning Its D.C. School, Can’t Make it Work

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
24

Democracy Prep is leaving the District of Columbia. Its charter school is a failure. Interestingly, Democracy Prep was chosen to take over the Andre Agassi Charter School in Las Vegas after that well-funded school failed.

Charters come, charters go. Kids, go find another school. Tough luck. Better luck next time. Walmart opens and closes stores all the time. What’s the big deal? You know, disruption.

A prominent Southeast Washington charter school with more than 600 students announced Friday that the coming school year will be its last.

Leaders of Democracy Prep Congress Heights said in an email to parents that the school, which has students in preschool through eighth grade, was unable “to provide Congress Heights scholars the school they deserve.”

The letter said Democracy Prep will seek a new organization to run the campus for the 2019-2020 academic year. School leaders said they are confident they will find a new operator and that students will not have to be displaced.

Democracy Prep, a New York-based charter network, made big promises when it entered the District in 2014 to take over Imagine Southeast, which was on the cusp of being shut down over poor performance.

The charter network had built a reputation for lifting test scores among poor children from low-income families in New York’s Harlem neighborhood and promised to bring its model of college prep and civic education to Washington. The network operates nearly 20 schools across the country, and the D.C. school is the only one it is closing.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization

D.C.: Teacher Fired by Rhee Wins Arbitration After 9 Years of Delays, Will Receive Lost Compensation and His Job Back

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2018 //
32

Michelle Rhee always boasted about how many teachers she fired. She was sure that “bad teachers” were the root of the low academic performance in D.C. She loved her IMPACT program, which weeded out teachers, and many good teachers were fired and went elsewhere, where they were not ineffective.

Here is one teacher who fought back and won. It took nine long years, but he won. Michelle Rhee ruined his life.

For nine years, Jeff Canady lived in a cash-strapped limbo. The D.C. Public Schools teacher was fired in 2009 after 18 years in city classrooms, the school system deeming him ineffective.

Canady, 53, contested his dismissal, arguing that he was wrongly fired and that the city was punishing him for being a union activist and for publicly criticizing the school system.

For nearly a decade, Canady, jobless and penniless, waited for a decision in his case — until now.

Earlier this month, an arbitrator ruled in favor of the fired teacher, a decision that could entitle him to hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay and the opportunity to be a District teacher again. The school system can appeal the ruling, which was made by an arbitrator from the American Arbitration Association, a nonprofit organization that settles disputes outside of court.

“I’ve been a hostage for nine years,” Canady said. “And the District wants to keep it that way.”

School system spokesman Shayne Wells said DCPS “just received the arbitrator’s decision and is in the process of reviewing it.”

Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said Canady isn’t the only one fighting to get his job back. Other educators who were fired years ago and allege unjust dismissals are waiting for their cases to be settled with the school system.

Canady was one of nearly 1,000 educators fired during the 3½ -year tenure of Michelle Rhee — the controversial former D.C. schools chancellor who clashed with the union and instituted a teacher evaluation system that dictated teachers’ job security and ­bonuses. About 200 of those teachers lost their jobs because of poor performance, 266 were laid off amid a 2009 budget squeeze and the rest failed to complete new-employee probation or did not have licensing required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The union, which had assailed Rhee’s evaluation system, filed a series of grievances in a bid to salvage the lost jobs.

In 2016, a teacher won a case against the school system after claiming he was wrongly fired in 2011 for a low score on Rhee’s evaluation system, known as ­IMPACT. The educator won on procedural grounds and the arbitrator’s decision did not address IMPACT, but the union still hailed it as a victory in its battle over the teacher evaluation system.

“We are certain that there are still a number of cases pending, unresolved, which were first filed during Michelle Rhee’s tenure as chancellor,” Davis said in an email.

Canady was a third-grade teacher earning about $80,000 a year when he was fired in 2009 from Emery Elementary, a school in the Eckington neighborhood that later closed. The school system, according to the arbitrator’s decision, said Canady scored low on an evaluation system that preceded IMPACT.

But Canady and the teachers union argued that his third-graders performed well and that he had previously posted strong scores on his evaluations. They said they suspected his low score was linked to his public criticism of the school system and not to his performance in the classroom. They also argued that the city did not follow proper protocol when evaluating him.

In defending its action, the school system claimed that the union had included Canady’s case as part of a larger class action complaint and had waited years to proceed with his case individually. By that point, the school system said it no longer had documents or email exchanges in the case.

Davis said she could not discuss specifics of the class action filing because parts of it are ongoing.

The arbitrator said the school system was responsible for many of the delays in the case. The ruling also said D.C. schools improperly evaluated Canady and showed “anti-union animus toward him.”

Canady said in an interview last week that he was confident he would prevail and that he had a moral imperative to keep fighting.

He said that he had ambitions to be a top official in the school system and that his firing stymied career opportunities. He imagines that by now, his salary would be substantially higher than $80,000 had he not lost his job.

“I’ve been fighting for justice for people for years,” Canady said. “Surely if I am going to fight for others, I am going to fight for myself.”

Canady remained in the District and continues to attend political and community meetings but has not held a steady job. With no income, he has moved around the city frequently and said his firing has extracted a physical and emotional toll and “devastated relationships.”

Even if the arbitrator’s decision holds, he said he is unsure if he will return to the classroom. He said he still disagrees with how the District operates its schools.

“I love teaching where they are actually trying to help people,” he said. “And I’ll do it at the appropriate time and in the appropriate situation.”

rhee

 

Categories Accountability, District of Columbia, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations

Mercedes Schneider to Emily Langhorne: New Orleans is NOT a National Model

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2018 //
12

Mercedes Schneider responds here to an article in The Washington Post by one Emily Langhorne of the “Progressive Policy Institute,” which is one of those DC advocacy groups that champions charter schools.

Langhorne seems to be the designated point person at PPI assigned to churn out pro-charter propaganda. She was last seen writing about the graduation rates of D.C. charter schools, falsely claiming that they are higher than the graduation rates of the D.C. public schools. That claim was shot down by a genuine expert, Mary Levy, a civil rights lawyer who has been tracking the travails of education in D.C. for many years.

Recently, asserted that New Orleans has become a national model. As Schneider explains, this is simply not true, unless you are a fan of separate and unequal schools.

“When one writes an op-ed on the post-Katrina success of New Orleans schools, one should consider what one is trying to sell as success. Continued racial inequity, low school grades for almost half of the charter replacements for once-community schools, abounding fiscal corruption, and community exploitation are all components of the true narrative that is almost-all-charter New Orleans schools 13 years post-Katrina.

“Anyone omitting these sad and frustrating realities from an op-ed on the New Orleans charter miracle is either ill-informed or allied to promoting a flashy, market-based-ed-reform agenda likely from headquarters hundreds of miles away from those Katrina-swept streets.”

A note to Emily Langhorne: Be careful not to develop a reputation as a propagandist. The money is good, but think about your reputation.

Categories Charter Schools, District of Columbia, New Orleans

G.F. Brandenburg: D.C. Is Losing Large Numbers of High School Students

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2018 //
6

In recent years, reformers have decided that the District of Columbia is their best model, even though it remains one of the lowest performing districts in the nation (but it’s scores are rising) and the D.C. achievement gaps are double that of any other urban district. Remember that D.C. has been controlled by dyed-in-the-wool corporate reformers since 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty took control and installed Michelle Rhee as chancellor.

Nearly half its students are in charter schools, and the charter schools make bold claims about both test scores and graduation rates. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the D.C. public schools actually have higher graduation rates than the D.C. charter schools, despite charter propaganda.

G.F. Brandenburg cites an analysis of graduation rates by blogger Valerie Jablow, which confirms the superior performance of D.C.’s public schools.

But what should be a larger concern, as he points out, is that both charter high schools and public high schools are losing a large number of students. Wouldn’t it be nice if the education leaders of D.C. stopped the competition for bragging rights and joined together to figure out why they are losing so many young people?

Categories Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Graduation rates
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