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Jeff Bryant: Why Many Democrats and Progressives Are Abandoning Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2019 //
34

 

 

Jeff Bryant explains why many Democrats and progressives are backing away from the charter school idea. It is not just because Trump and DeVos are pushing charters, though surely that is one reason.

Arne Duncanpromoted charters as enthusiastically as DeVos. But something has changed.

Bryant writes:

The politics of charter schools have changed, and bipartisan support for these publicly funded, privately controlled schools has reached a turning point. A sure sign of the change came from Democrats in the House Appropriations Committee who have proposed a deep cut in federal charter school grants that would lower funding to $400 million, $40 million below current levels and $100 million less than what the Trump administration has proposed. Democrats are also calling for better oversight of charter schools that got federal funding and then closed.

This is a startling turn of events, as for years, Democrats have enthusiastically joined Republicans in providing federal grants to create new charter schools and expand existing ones.

In explaining this change in the politics of charter schools, pundits and reporters will likely point to two factors: the unpopularity of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, an ardent charter school proponent, and teachers’ unions that can exert influence in the Democratic Party. But if the tide is truly turning on bipartisan support for charter schools, it is the charter industry itself that is most to blame.

Read on.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization

Was the Common Core Successful?

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2019 //
107

 

It is probably far too soon to know whether the Common Core succeeded or failed, but the studies are beginning to appear.

The adoption of the Common Core standards was a central requirement of the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top program. States had to agree to adopt the Common Core if they wanted to be eligible to compete for $5 billion in federal funds. The Gates Foundation paid for the Common Core, from its writing to its implementation, at a cost estimated between hundreds of millions to $2 billion. (If anyone can determine how much money Bill Gates plowed into the CCSS, I will salute them on this blog). Arne Duncan could not pay for them because federal law bars any federal official from influencing curriculum or instruction. But Duncan did pay $360 million to pay for two testing consortia to develop new tests for the CCSS. PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.  Almost every state signed up for Race to the Top. Almost all adopted the Common Core. Almost all signed up to use one or both of the new tests.

The whole venture cost the states many billions of dollars. New standards. New tests. New materials. New software and hardware. New professional development.

The Common Core came with dramatic promises about improving test s ores and closing achievement gaps.

Were these promises kept?

No.Since 2007, NAEP scores have gone flat. The lowest achieving students lost ground.

Matt Barnum reports here on a study that found that the Common Core made no difference.

“A new study, released in April through a federally funded research center, shows that states that changed their standards most dramatically by adopting the Common Core didn’t outpace other states on federal NAEP exams. By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.”

Most states have dropped out of the two federally-funded testing consortia, which arbitrarily set their passing marks so high that most students were certain to “fail.”

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Race to the Top, Testing

Jeff Bryant: What is the U.S. Department of Education Hiding?

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2019 //
5

Jeff Bryant was co-author, with NPE executive director Carol Burris, of the report “Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride.” In this post, he asks why the U.S. Department of Education can’t answer three straightforward questions. 

The DeVos Department of Education stonewalled his questions, giving no answers.

This non-response, he notes, was not unique to DeVos. Arne Duncan’s ED was equally non-responsive when questioned by previous researchers in search of answers in 2015.

Bryant wanted to know whether the Department had made any changes following the report of the Center for Media and Democracy, which had also criticized the non-existent standards used when judging applications for federal funding of charter schools.

So he asked these questions on March 8:

This is to inquire about the current grant application review process used for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities. Specifically, in 2015, the Department published an “Overview of the 2015 CSP SEA Review Process.” My questions:

  1. Can you provide a similar document describing how the grant review process is currently being conducted for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities?
  2. If not, can you briefly comment on how the grant review process used for the Charter Schools Program Grants to State Entities aligns with or varies from the Overview referenced above?
  3. Regarding a “Dear Colleague”letter sent to State Education Agencies in 2015 emphasizing the importance of financial accountability for charter schools receiving federal dollars, was there any follow-up by the Charter School Program to ascertain how many SEAs complied with this request and what was the nature of the new systems and processes put into place by SEAs to provide for greater accountability?

He got a voicemail from a communications officer and returned her call. She chastised him and told him he was creating “havoc” among the staff.

The NPE report that Bryant co-authored appeared at the same time that members of the House Appropriations Committee were grilling Secretary DeVos about her budget proposals, which included steep cuts in many programs but an increase for the scandal-ridden Charter Schools Program.

Bryant recounts what happened at the hearings:

When Representative Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, asked DeVos what was being done to recover the $1 billion in alleged financial mismanagement involving charters, DeVos said she “would look into the matter.”

On the issue of how a federal agency could allow charter operators to rip off American taxpayers with impunity, and generally suffer no adverse consequences for their acts, DeVos acknowledged that waste and fraud in the charter grant program had been around for “some time.”

That much is true.

It was under Arne Duncan’s watch that the federal charter grants program was greatly expanded, states were required to lift caps on the numbers of charter schools in order to receive precious federal dollars, and the administration Duncan served in insulted public school teachers by proclaiming National Charter School Week on dates identical to what had always been observed as Teacher Appreciation Week.

And most of the wanton charter fraud we detailed in our report that ran rampant during the Duncan years is now simply continuing under DeVos, with little to no explanation of why this is allowed to occur.

Isn’t it interesting how the U.S. Department of Education demands accountability from schools and districts and states, but provides no accountability whatever for its own incompetence.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

California: Charter Advocates Rally to Fight Accountability and Regulation

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2019 //
34

 

While the State Board of Education was deliberating the fate of the low-performing Thrive Charter Schools, which they voted to close down,  the charter lobby rallied thousands of allies in front of the State Capitol in Sacramento to fight any new laws. 

One of the speakers was Margaret Fortune, who is president of the powerful California Charter Schools Association and also a member of the state’s task force that is supposed to decide whether to reform the state’s weak charter law and whether charter schools have a negative fiscal impact on public schools.

The charter industry sees any effort to restrict its actions or regulate its policies as a mortal threat to its existence.

“Dubbed the “Stand for All Students Rally,” it was hosted by the California Charter Schools Association and was a highlight of the organization’s annual four-day conference that ends in Sacramento on Thursday. Speakers included Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education during the Obama administration.

“At the rally were charter school administrators, teachers, parents and students, many of whom came by bus from schools across the state. They held signs that said “#kidsnotpolitics” and “Defend Great Schools” and were led in chants by adults on a stage flanked by giant screens projecting their images across the park.”

Since charters enroll about 10% of the students in the state, they should have had a slogan “Stand for 10% of Students,” since they have no concern for non-charter students, who are the vast majority of students in the state.

In addition to Arne Duncan, the CCSA had Steve Perry as a keynote speaker. Perry, who has one or two charter schools, is noted for his vehement hatred of teachers’ unions, whom he has likened to cockroaches.

The rally was a response to four proposed bills that would establish regulations for charters.

“The introduction last week of four new pieces of charter school legislation has aroused passions among charter school advocates. It has raised fears among advocates that California’s charter school sector will face the greatest restrictions on its growth since the state’s first charter law was enacted a quarter century ago.

“If approved, the bills would eliminate the right to appeal to the county or the state if a district denies a charter application; place an unspecified cap on charter schools; allow charter applications to be rejected based on their financial impact on a district; and prevent charter schools approved in one district from setting up in another.”

Charter advocates claim that these reasonable restrictions would “eliminate” charter schools.

Why should a district in the mountains have the power to open a charter in another district hundreds of miles away?

Why shouldn’t the fiscal impact on public schools limit where charters are allowed to open?

Last week, they said that a law banning nepotism and conflicts of interest was a “scorched earth” policy.

How many public school districts are they allowed to destroy before they are reined in?

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization

Will Pinkston: How “Race to the Top” Turned into a War Against Public Schools in Tennessee

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2019 //
19

Will Pinkston is a member of the elected board of the Metro Nashville public schools. He has a long history of working in state and local government. He was there when Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen brought all the major education groups in the state together to apply for Race to the Top funding. He was there when optimism was high that Race to the Top would launch a new era of collaboration and progress. He was there when Bill and Melinda Gates came to congratulate the Volunteer State on winning $501 million to redesign its education system and when Arne Duncan hailed it as a state that was ready to move forward in a “dramatic and positive” direction. He heard Tennessee described as “Arne Duncan’s Show Horse.” Initially, he had high hopes.

He was there for every twist and turn in education policy in Tennessee for the past decade. He watched the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of State Commissioner Kevin Huffman. He saw the war break out between Huffman and the state’s teachers, when Huffman ratcheted up his efforts to punish teachers when test scores didn’t go up. He was there for the disaster of the Achievement School District. He saw Michelle Rhee bring her pro-voucher crusade to Tennessee. He saw the state’s testing system turn into a fiasco. He witnessed a backlash from teachers and parents against everything associated with Race to the Top.

He saw Race to the Top turn into Race to the Bottom. The legacy of Race to the Top was divisiveness, rage, and chaos.

This is a long article, but well worth the time it takes to read.

Initially open to the promise of charter schools, he began to see that there were stripping the district of resources.

He writes:

When I ran for and got elected to the school board in 2012, I did it for what I thought were the right reasons. As a public-school parent and alumnus of Metro Nashville Public Schools, I saw an opportunity to represent the part of town where I grew up. After leaving state government, it seemed like a logical extension of public service — and a chance to see how the still-nascent Race to the Top reforms might help propel a large urban school system struggling with persistent achievement gaps. In retrospect, I was terribly naïve.

As it turned out, I ended up on the front line in the war over public education in America. In part because of Race to the Top, it would take years and countless political battles before we could begin focusing on large-scale school improvement in Nashville. The school system was, and still is, chronically underfunded. When I took office, the superintendent at that time was near the end of his career and had been operating for years with no strategic plan. Board members knew he was overwhelmed by the intensity of the reform movement.

Instead of being able to focus on academic standards, effective school turnaround strategies and other key tenets of Race to the Top, the school board faced a tidal wave of charter applications from national operators seeking to rapidly dismantle the school system. Our biggest problem: Haslam’s so-called “open-enrollment law” stripping away caps on charter schools, a rare legislative victory for the governor fueled by Race to the Top’s irrational exuberance.

As it turned out, I ended up on the front line in the war over public education in America.

Haslam’s 2011 law creating a wide-open spigot of charters came just two years after my former boss, Gov. Phil Bredesen, supported a loosening of charter caps in the run-up to Race to the Top. In a sign of Tennessee’s importance to the national reformers, then-Secretary Arne Duncan in 2009 personally lobbied Democrats in the state legislature for the loosening of caps. The eventual effect in Nashville was total chaos.

To put it in perspective: In 2009, Music City had just four charter schools. Following the loosening of state charter caps, the number quickly swelled to a dozen. By 2014, as a result of Haslam’s post-Race to the Top open-enrollment law, the number ballooned to 27 — a nearly seven-fold increase in just five years. During that time, cash outlays for charters by Metro Nashville Public Schools soared more than 700 percent — rising from about $9 million to more than $73 million. Within a few short years, annual cash outlays for charters would soar to more than $120 million.

As an aide to the previous governor who struggled to deal with runaway Medicaid costs a decade earlier, I knew it was impossible to grow any part of government at an unchecked rate without destabilizing the budget in other areas of government. And at a time when our existing schools were universally considered to be underfunded, I wasn’t going to feed charter growth at the expense of zoned schools.

Whistleblowers later told me that charter advocates were plotting to create what they called “New Orleans without the hurricane,” referring to the nearly wholesale charterization of the Crescent City’s school system following Hurricane Katrina. I found their plan to be reckless and shameful, not to mention fiscally and operationally unsustainable. By 2015, three years into my school board service, I stopped voting for new charter schools altogether.

13

Die-hard charter advocates pride themselves on using simplistic poll-tested messaging to push their agenda. I know because from 2010 to 2012 I served on the founding board of a so-called “high-performing” charter school in Nashville — an experience that led me to question the entire movement.

In the charter sector’s vernacular, the main objective is creating “high-quality seats.” Frequently, in Nashville and around the country, charter advocates accuse urban school board members of protecting “adult jobs” at the expense of kids — a swipe at teachers’ unions. They place a premium on charter schools that are “no excuses” by design and that emphasize “grit” as a top characteristic for students.

According to their world view, charters are the silver-bullet solution to improve K-12 education. What they don’t acknowledge is a growing body of evidence that proves charters, on the whole, aren’t doing better than traditional schools. They also don’t admit that charters cherry-pick in admissions in order to enroll students who are more likely to succeed, and then “counsel out” kids who aren’t making the grade. Each spring in Nashville, school board members are inundated with reports from principals complaining about charter schools sending kids back to zoned schools prior to testing season.

Even if you accept the false notion that charter schools are better than traditional schools, the financial math just doesn’t work. Because of Haslam’s ill-conceived policy, charter growth in Nashville by 2013 was consuming nearly every dime of available new revenue for the school system — leaving little new money for our underfunded traditional schools.

Each spring in Nashville, school board members are inundated with reports from principals complaining about charter schools sending kids back to zoned schools prior to testing season.

After working in and around state and local governments for nearly 20 years, I also was suspicious of the legality of charter laws relative to overall school funding. For example, in Tennessee our state constitution guarantees a “system of free public schools.” But in my view, charters were taxpayer-funded private schools.

Using my position on the Nashville School Board, I pushed for a legal analysis that found the state’s 2002 charter law imposes “increased costs on local governments with no off-setting subsidy from the State … in violation of the Tennessee Constitution.” Put differently: Charters were unconstitutional due to the negative fiscal impact on traditional schools. The legal theory hadn’t been tested in court, but I predicted it would be only a matter of time.

Rabid “charter zealots,” as I began calling them, had enough. Beginning in fall 2013, the national charter movement unleashed an army of paid political operatives and PR flacks to harass the local school board as payback for raising fiscal and legal questions. Nationally, charter advocates saw the situation in Nashville as an existential threat.

The Tennessee Charter School Center, the attack arm of charter schools in Memphis and Nashville, organized a bullhorn protest on the front lawn of Metro Nashville Public Schools’ central office to shout down school board members deemed hostile to charters. A blogger on the group’s payroll attacked the board under the blog handle “Lipstick on a Pig” — shamefully likening our majority-minority school system to a swine. Charter students, pawns in a carefully orchestrated smear campaign, earned extra-credit points by leafletting school board meetings with negative fliers attacking board members.

As a veteran of two statewide gubernatorial campaigns, I recognized the bare-knuckled political tactics. The goal of the charter zealots was to provoke school board members and other opponents into public fights in order to create distractions and draw attention to their cause. For a while, it worked. Skirmishes played out regularly in the boardroom, and spilled into the local news and social media.

When the “charter zealots” ran their own slate of candidates for the board, they targeted Pinkston, who barely squeaked through. But the other anti-charter, pro-public education candidates won, and the board was able to focus on the needs of the public schools, not just squabbles over how many charters to open.

This is an important story that deserves a wide audience.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Nashville, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee, Testing

Nathan Robinson: Race to the Top was a Disaster That Should Never Be Repeated

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2019 //
55

 

 

This article by Nathan Robinson, editor of “Current Affairs,” brilliantly explains why Race to the Top was not only a failure but a disaster.  

Schools in Detroit were crumbling, but Detroit got not a penny of the windfall.

Here is a sample:

“There is something deeply objectionable about nearly every part of Race To The Top. First, the very idea of having states scramble to compete for federal funds means that children are given additional support based on how good their state legislatures are at pleasing the president, rather than how much those children need support. Michigan got no Race to the Top money, and Detroit’s schools didn’t see a penny of this $4.2 billion, because it didn’t win the “race.” This “fight to the death” approach (come to think of it, a better name for the program) was novel, since “historically, most federal education funds have been distributed through categorical grant programs that allocate money to districts on the basis of need-based formulas.” Here, though, one can see how Obama’s neoliberal politics differed in its approach from the New Deal liberalism of old: Once upon a time, liberals talking about how to fix schools would talk about making sure all teachers had the resources they needed to give students a quality education. Now, they were importing the competitive capitalist model into government: Show results or find yourself financially starved.

“The focus on “innovation,” data, and technology is misguided, too. Innovation is not necessarily improvement—it’s easy to make something new that isn’t actually any better. The poor learning outcomes of online courses are evidence that sometimes the old methods are best. An Obama administration report on how schools innovated in response to RTT is mostly waffle about “partnering with stakeholders” but also contains descriptions of “21st century” measures like the following:

The majority of Race to the Top states reported to the RSN that they are using or expanding their use of social media communication to keep stakeholders engaged and informed. Ohio, for example, embraced Twitter to communicate with teachers, principals and district leaders during its annual state conference in 2012. “One of the keys to success on Twitter is tweeting a lot — five to seven times a day — morning, noon and at night,” said Michael Sponhour, executive director of communications and outreach for the Ohio Department of Education (ODE). Ohio measures its success on Twitter by the number of tweets that are “retweeted” by its followers; about 70 percent of ODE’s tweets are retweeted, he said.

“So people at state departments of education are being paid to tweet morning, noon, and night, with nearly ⅓ of the tweets not getting so much as a single retweet, while St. Louis’ beautiful old public school buildings are closed, abandoned, and auctioned off. Delaware “was able to use RTT funds to place data coaches in every school,” even as the steam pipe kept leaking onto that playground in Detroit.

“The pro-RTT literature promotes the education reform line of Bill Gates and charter advocates, stressing the need for “accountability” and “evaluation.” There is a mistrust of teachers: The premise here is that unless teachers have the right incentives, they will perform badly. There is an underlying acceptance here of the free market principle that government services do not perform well because they lack the kind of economic rewards and punishments that exist in the private sector. So we should introduce competitive marketplaces in schools (i.e., charterize the system) and do constant assessments of teacher job performance to weed out the Bad Teachers. Race To The Top literature talks about “turning around failing schools,” not “fixing inequality in schools,” and some civil rights activists criticized the program for failing to consider school segregation and inequality in its picture of the country’s educational woes. …

”RTT was wrong in a thousand ways. It prioritized data collection for its own sake, and in spite of its focus on “achievement” and evidence-based policy, didn’t actually boost achievement and wasn’t based on evidence. It was just free market ideology. Instead of talking about adding yet more assessments of teacher performance, we should be talking about the fact that teachers across the country have to buy their own school supplies, and the profession offers too much work for too little pay to attract good candidates who will stay for the long term. No more races to the top. What we need is a race to make sure every school has a music teacher, every building is safe and beautiful and well-maintained, every child is well-fed, every classroom is full of books and supplies, and every teacher has what they need in order to help children discover the world of knowledge.“

 

 

 

 

Categories Data, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top

Chicago Teachers Union Blasts Duncan for His Criticism of UTLA

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2019 //
27

This statement was released today by the Chicago Teachers Unuon, the pioneers of #RedForEd in 2012.

Now is a good time to remember CTU President Karen Lewis and her inspirational leadership of the 2012 strike.


Duncan take on LA educators’ strike shows he knows nothing of real student needs

CTU blasts former U.S. education secretary for arguing Los Angeles teachers’ should back off demands in face of ‘lack of resources’ in state with fifth largest economy in the world.

CHICAGO, January 15, 2019—

Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey issued the following statement today in response to public pronouncements – including in The Hill – by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Los Angeles educators, who began a strike on Monday.

“Arne Duncan has never taught a day in his life. He sent his children to an elite private school with small class sizes and great resources. He landed his job as CEO of Chicago Public Schools through insider ties – where he pushed policies that hurt our public school students’ access to the very same resources his own children had. He’s pushed endlessly for school privatization, and he’s been a national proponent of the teacher blame game as a way to dodge the real need for more resources for public education. Now he wants to silence Los Angeles teachers who are demanding the very supports for their students that Duncan’s children received. That’s the height of hypocrisy.

“LA teachers know what their students need: smaller class sizes, more staff for special education and bilingual education, and the resources and wrap-around supports that allow low-income students of color to thrive as life-long learners and productive adults. Duncan has instead promoted the opposite, by starving neighborhood public schools, promoting privatization and austerity, and purging Black educators from our classrooms. Public education is a right. Duncan has treated it like an afterthought, and has zero credibility with the parents, educators and community residents who care about equity for ALL public students.

“When he’s shilling for management, nowhere does Duncan mention the toxic impact of right wing tax policy on Los Angeles’ Black and Latinx students. He conveniently fails to mention Eli Broad or the Broad Foundation and their scheme to orchestrate the mass privatization of Los Angeles public schools. Instead, Duncan says the union should ‘cooperate’ more with the very management that is seeking to undercut public schools through mass charter expansion. That mirrors his statement almost a decade ago that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was the ‘best thing’ to happen to New Orleans’ public schools, because it opened the ground for mass charter privatization. As in Chicago under Duncan and his successors, privatization in New Orleans has slashed the number of Black teachers, and more than ten years on, New Orleans’ Black working class parents, students and residents charge that the experiment has failed them. Duncan’s policies profit private operators – and undermine parent voice, public accountability and the educational needs of students.

“Just as Duncan regularly shortchanged CPS by refusing to identify and raise progressive sources of revenue that our schools need, he massively expanded selective enrollment schools for well-off white students. He continued those policies as education czar, to the detriment of school districts across the nation.

“The educational policies he put in motion in Chicago and pushed in Washington have helped drive out thousands of Black families from Chicago, families who struggled to find stable schools for their children at the same time they confronted racist, classist city policies in housing, policing and economic development. As a principal architect of Chicago’s disastrous school closure experiment, Duncan was CEO during the first wave of massive charter expansion in Chicago – forcing neighborhood public schools that had been under-resourced for decades into brutal educational hunger games that have left neighborhood schools starved for resources. As US Education Secretary, he promoted the misnamed ‘Race to the Top’, publicly blaming teachers for the dire consequences of racist school funding practices and endless austerity. He’s dismissed class size as an issue – an excuse to purge thousands of Black public educators in Chicago, at a time when a growing body of research shows that our schoolchildren need more, not fewer, educators of color.

“We need the opposite of what Duncan brought to the table in Chicago and what he proposes in LA. We need smaller class sizes, respect for veteran teachers of color, progressive forms of revenue to adequately support public school students, adequate staffing for special education and bilingual education, and a school nurse in every school. We need an end to the failed school privatization experiment. And we need respect for the voices of parents and educators who are sick of being shortchanged by the political elites that Duncan serves. Instead of asking Los Angeles teachers to shut up and accept less for their students, Duncan should be denouncing the very policies he implemented that have so profoundly harmed public education across the nation.”

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Class size, Duncan, Arne, Funding, Los Angeles, Unions

Arne Duncan Blasts UTLA and Opposes Strike

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2019 //
69

Glenn Sacks, a high school teacher, read Arne Duncan’s editorial blast at the UTLA teachers’ strike and concluded that the former Secretary of Education really knows nothing about conditions of teaching in the Los Angeles public schools.

Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan Slams LA Teachers for Strike 

Sacks begins:

“The closer we get to a strike, the more pressure is put on us to call it off. In a recent article in The Hill, pro-charter/anti-union former Education secretary Arne Duncan criticizes United Teachers of Los Angeles, citing the Los Angeles Unified School District’s alleged financial problems. Yet the neutral, state-appointed factfinder on the dispute contradicts many of LAUSD’s (and Duncan’s) claims.

“For example, Duncan tells us LAUSD “is headed toward insolvency in about two years if nothing changes…It simply does not have the money to fund UTLA’s demands.” But arbitrator David A. Weinberg, the Neutral Chair of the California Public Employment Relations Board fact-finding panel, while noting the challenges LAUSD faces, found that the District’s reserves skyrocketed from $500 million in 2013-2014 to $1.8 billion in 2017-2018. Three years ago LAUSD projected that their 2018-2019 reserve would be only $100 million—it’s actually $1.98 billion. We’ve heard these alarming claims for many years–for LAUSD, the sky is always falling, but somehow it never falls.

“Duncan tells us LAUSD “has an average of 26 students per class. Of the 10 largest school districts in California, only one has a smaller average class size than Los Angeles.” These numbers are disputed by UTLA. Moreover, even if 26 is correct on paper, Duncan should know that student-to-teacher ratios count special education and other specialized teachers who normally have much smaller classes than regular classroom teachers. Class sizes are significantly larger than standard student-teacher ratios indicate.

“At my high school, for example, we have over 30 academic classes with 41 or more students, including nine English/writing classes with as many as 49 students, and three AP classes with 46 or more students. One English teacher has well over 206 students—41+ per class. A US Government teacher has 52 students in his AP government class. Writing is a key component of both classes—the sizes make it is impossible for these teachers to properly review and help students with their essays.”

Duncan makes clear that he sides with management and against UTLA. Betsy DeVos and Duncan are on the same side. Why are we not surprised.

Categories Class size, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Union

Nancy Bailey: Arne Duncan Can’t Stop Peddling the Dangerous Corporate Reform Dogma

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2019 //
47

Nancy E. Bailey is turning into a superstar of education blogging. She is a retired teacher and she has a firm understanding of corporate reform and its dangers.

In this post, she reviews Arne Duncan’s stubborn embrace of dangerous corporate reform.

I will copy only a portion of the post. I urge you to read it all, because it is priceless as an evisceration of failed “reformer” ideas. You should also see her links, which are many.

She writes:

With Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, it might be tempting to see Arne Duncan as an educational expert, but Duncan has never formally studied education, or been a teacher. Duncan paved the way for DeVos.

EdSurge recently brought us Arne Duncan’s 6 lessons about education. They are nothing but the same old corporate reforms that have destroyed public schools and the futures of children for years.

The lessons are wrong.

Here are his claims and my anti-arguments.

He emphasizes early childhood education and the economy.

While there’s a school-to-work connection, especially with older students in high school, teaching young children should be about their development, not promoting the economy.

Too often this message results in pushing young children to work at a higher level than they’re capable.

The report of which Duncan refers is by James J. Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. It highlights the economy and the nation’s workforce.

Here are the subheadings of the article.

*Early childhood development drives success in school and life.
*Investing in early childhood education for at-risk children is an effective strategy for reducing social costs.
*Investing in early childhood education is a cost-effective strategy for promoting economic growth.
*Make greater investments in young children to see greater returns in education, health and productivity.

His thoughts about equity are misleading.

Duncan argues that poor children need something different than what wealthy students find in their schools.

But poor children deserve well-run schools, with resources and qualified teachers, not strict charter schools run by management companies and novices.

Most charter schools care more about their bottom line.

Feeding poor children and health screenings should be a part of every school plan.

If Duncan cared so much about grief and trauma in children, why didn’t we see an increase in counselors, school nurses, and school psychologists under his watch?

He claims class sizes don’t matter.

This has been the refrain by reformers like Bill Gates for years and it is false.

Here’s the STAR study as one example in favor of lowering class size.

Lowering class sizes would help teachers have better overall classroom management.

Students would be safer, and children would get a better grasp of reading and other subjects in the early years.

He says teachers matter more than class size.

Real teacher qualifications matter. But that’s not what Duncan is talking about.

He is promoting the faulty idea that a “good” teacher can manage huge class sizes. Of course, this makes no sense.

This is also connected in a roundabout way to replacing teachers with technology. Imagine one teacher teaching thousands online.

Duncan has always been on the side of Teach for America fast-track trained teachers. Consider that they will likely become charter school facilitators, babysitters, when students face screens for their schooling.

He uses teachers as the fix for poverty.

This is an old and dangerous refrain. This message drove No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It made standardized testing and one-size-fits all common practice.

Teachers can help students, but economic forces are greater than anything a child can learn at school.

Blaming teachers for the problems in the economy, has always been about getting the public to take their eyes off the real culprit of economic woes, the greed of those who run corporations!

Please read on. This is a great post!

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Class size, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Economy, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, Teachers, Testing

Caleb Rossiter Reviews Arne Duncan’s Book About “Lies” and the Liars Who Tell Them

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2018 //
36

Caleb Rossiter taught in both the charter schools and public schools of Washington, D.C.

In this post, he reviews Arne Duncan’s recent book about his seven years as Secretary of Education.

He came away from the experience convinced that everyone lies.

Rossiter wonders what he learned.

“”Duncan says he first encountered school lies 30 years ago, when during college he tutored at his mother’s after-school program in a poor black neighborhood in Southside Chicago. Duncan, who is white, also lived on the Southside, near his father’s job as a professor at the elite University of Chicago. His tutee was a black high school basketball star who assumed that his “B” average guaranteed a college scholarship. Duncan soon realized that the boy’s pathetic academic level meant he had no hope of even getting into college.

“The memoir makes it clear that schools are still at it, hiding from poor parents their children’s low effort, achievement, and readiness for college or work, which will keep them trapped in the underclass. That’s a depressing conclusion coming from someone who presided over a generation of accountability policies as head of the Chicago schools and then as President Obama’s secretary of education.”

Apparently, he sees nothing wrong about the high-stakes Testing and accountability regime that he promoted and has no regrets. Reflection is not his thing. He remains all in for the principles behind No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing
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