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David C. Berliner: What I Learned at the NPE Conference

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2022 //
4

When the Network for Public Education met in Philadelphia April 30-May 1, I was surprised and delighted to encounter David Berliner. He had never attended one of our conferences, and he flew from the West Coast to do so. David Berliner is the most eminent education researcher in the United States, a giant in his field. He is now retired but continues to write and contribute to education studies and debates. His most recent book, which he edited with Carl Hermanns, is Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy. It contains 29 essays about the importance of public education, written by well-known scholars and educators.

I recently received this note from Dr. Berliner about his reaction to the NPE conference.

Dear Diane,

It was so nice to see you and Carol Burris at the annual meeting of our Network for Public Education. I know how hard you and others worked to make it a success. I write to tell you and Carol that it was exactly that for me.

As I think you know, I live pretty much by myself since my wife’s illness necessitated a move from Tempe to Oakland. Thus, I no longer have the same support group that I had in Arizona. Reading your posts, and NPE articles, is certainly edifying. Both sources of information do inform me, but they do more than that. They also signal me that there are many others who share our beliefs in the necessity for, and importance of, a successful system of public education.

My attendance at the recent annual meeting of NPE, in Philadelphia, was so very affirming of our common values. It reminded me that others with similar beliefs exist and are doing important work. I got to meet some of the published heroes of mine, whose work I often read, and with whom I share common purpose. But I also got to meet heroes I had not known about before. These folks often work at the local level, doing the hard work of keeping public schools public, decently funded, and building programs that improve the outcomes for America’s most impoverished youth. They do the hardest work, I think, and I was so happy to listen to them and know that we have so many like-minded folks on the ground, at the local level.

Everyone I met at the meetings I thought of as heroes trying their best to stop the onslaught of the privateers and our slide into plutocracy. I thought everyone I met believed, as I do, in words written by the late Paul Wellstone. I keep Wellstone’s words nearby to me when I work, as a reminder of what should be reflected in my own work. He said: “That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children, including poor children, is a national disgrace. It is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination, that we do not see that meeting the most basic needs of so many of our children condemns them to lives and futures of frustration, chronic underachievement, poverty, crime and violence. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose, allied with one another in a common enterprise, tied to one another by a common bond.”

At the recent NPE meetings I witnessed participants called to common purpose, allied to each other in a common enterprise: To support and enhance America’s systems of public education. We shared our common bond. It was so satisfying to be there. I already look forward to attending again next year.

David C. Berliner

Regents’ Professor Emeritus,

Arizona State University

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund

Texas: State Leaders Said That 2022 Was the Year of “Protecting the Children”

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2022 //
61

Christopher Hooks wrote in The Texas Monthly about the boundless hypocrisy and moral vacuousness of Texas’ elected leaders.

In the run-up to the 2022 primaries and election, they made a big show of “protecting the children.”

They obsessed about the danger of transgender children, even insisting on criminalizing parents’ efforts to get medical help for their children. They obsessed about teachers allegedly “grooming” children for lives of deviant sexual behavior. They obsessed about “obscene” books that might normalize sexual behavior they—these men of high righteousness— deplored. They obsessed about “critical race theory” and demanded the banning of books that taught children about racism, whether past or present, or anything about human sexuality.

Yes, the children of Texas would be protected from any teaching about race or sexuality.

But they would not be physically protected. They would not be protected from an 18-year-old with two AR15s.

When the bad man with a powerful weapon came into their classroom, the children were left to fend for themselves while 19 police officers stood in the hallway. The bad man killed their teachers. He killed children. Little girls called 911 and begged for help. One said 8 or 9 children were still alive. But the police remained in the hallway.

The parents in the schoolyard pleaded with the police to save their children, but the police had their instructions: keep the parents away.

Almost an hour passed before the police broke into the classroom and shot the murderer.

The Governor called a press conference , where he commended the police for their courage and bravery. He commended the men who waited in the hallway for almost an hour, while the children were dying, one after another.

Hooks writes:

Texas, a friend used to say, is hard on women and little things. That would come to mind over the years when reporting seemed to bear it out. In 2015, I watched a foster mother testify in court, via telephone from her daughter’s hospital bedside, that state cuts to the Medicaid acute therapy program were having disastrous consequences for her child’s incurable, debilitating genetic disorder. In 2021, an eleven-year-old boy in Conroe suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after seeing snow for the first time, as his family tried to keep their home warm after the collapse of a horribly mismanaged electrical grid. And then there were the perennial horror stories from the state’s spike-pit child welfare system—a three-year-old found dead, bleeding from the ears, after his day care repeatedly warned state agents about signs of abuse by his foster parents; a teenage girl who killed herself the moment she could despite orders that she was never to be left alone; and countless others who survive through the heavy prescription of psychotropic meds before being kicked out to the streets at the age of eighteen.

Each revelation of new misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, the revulsion starts to fade, and it becomes a dull undercurrent to an awareness of the world instead of something sharp that pokes through. As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders have been immunized from caring to an even greater degree. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Legislators make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes and resist looking at problems head-on. The Texas Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride in itself as an institution, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.

On Tuesday, though, something poked through. For me, it wasn’t the knowledge that there had been another school shooting. Who could be surprised by that? Every detail was familiar. A once-bullied eighteen-year-old, two AR-15s, 22 dead, and 19 injured. The thing that shocked was the pictures of the dead when they lived. They were so little! Do you remember what it was like to have a body that small? A round fired by an AR-15 at close range enters the human body at three times the speed as those fired by a handgun, disintegrating and liquefying bones and organs around it. “It’s like a grenade goes off in there,” one trauma surgeon told Wired. Parents had to submit DNA samples so their kids could be accurately identified.

This spectacular violence, it sometimes feels, has not left much of us. At his initial press conference, Governor Greg Abbott wore his traditional white disaster-response shirt and offered details of the massacre as if reading a weather report. At a press conference the next day, where the governor sat alongside Texas senator Ted Cruz and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Abbott told Texans that the disaster “could have been worse,” and the primary flash of anger shown by elected officials came when Beto O’Rourke, who appeared in the crowd, tried to talk over them.

Appearing on Newsmax TV the day of the shooting, state attorney general Ken Paxton suggested that more armed guards at schools would help, “because it’s not going to be the last time.” Can you believe that, as a response from one of the most powerful elected officials in the state to a massacre of fourth graders? “It’s not going to be the last time.” There used to be at least a perfunctory mourning period, some hugs given in front of cameras, before those in power turned to one another other and shrugged. But in truth, leaders are only handling this the way they think about the foster care system they oversee, and every other death trap run by the state. The revulsion dulls, the novelty fades, and it becomes normal.

The shooting took place on the day of the Texas primary runoff. The composition of the Legislature and the rest of state government for the next two and a half years was set that night, barring extraordinary circumstances, by the conclusion of the Republican primary, which in Texas is more influential than the general election. Paxton, who had shrugged off the Uvalde shooting on Newsmax while wearing a campaign T-shirt, won renomination and almost certainly a third term in office.

It is a grotesque and cruel irony that the Republican primary this year, and several years of political activity before it, have been dominated by an all-consuming and comically misdirected argument about the “protection” of children and by a war on public schools. There was essentially no policy contested in the GOP primary that could affect the practical and economic circumstances of all Texans. (There rarely is.) There was, however, ceaseless argument about the well-being of children, their morals, their internal lives.

The most acute panic was over transgender children. In February, Paxton’s office issued a formal opinion holding that the prescription of puberty blockers to transgender children represented “child abuse.” Shortly after, Abbott tasked the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, an overworked and underfunded agency he had overseen for close to eight years, with investigating the families of transgender children for child abuse.

The more widespread crisis concerned books. The panic was conjured by parents and elected officials in equal measure. The first target was books with “divisive” material about race. Then, elected officials began to panicabout “pornography” in schools, a category that mostly included literature featuring queer characters and sexuality. Lawmakers proposed lists of books to be banned. In November, Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate cases of “obscene material” in public schools and prosecute those responsible “to the fullest extent of the law,” because, as he wrote, it had to be a top priority to “protect” Texas students.

Public school teachers and children’s librarians—two professions that offer a strongly beneficial service to society for little pay—became villains for parents and candidates alike. They were called “groomers” and pedophiles on social media. In a press release, Abbott called for criminal charges to be brought if librarians were found to have put “pornography” in front of children. In Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, half a year later, one woman lodged a criminal complaint against the librarians of Hood County ISD, prompting a police investigation. At a subsequent school board meeting, she condemned the fact that a committee brought together to review troublesome books had “too many” librarians instead of “people with good moral standards.”

The deterioration spread. A record number of public school teachers, already weary from the pandemic and now faced with a sort of siege, started quitting en masse—and forfeiting their licenses, indicating they probably wouldn’t come back. “I’m tired of getting punched. It shouldn’t be like this,” ninth grade math teacher Gloria Ogboaloh told Texas Monthly. As more teachers left, the quality of life for remaining educators got worse. Then, just four months after ordering that libraries be investigated, Abbott ordered the TEA to create a task force to investigate why so many teachers were quitting.

Hooks goes on to describe politicians who are liars, braggarts, cruel, indifferent to the safety of children, callous. How long can they continue to fool people with their charade and their fake concern? They don’t care about thechildren

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Censorship, Education Industry, Failure, Guns, Hypocrisy, Lies, Texas

Videos Attacking Disney and Pearson for Sexually “Grooming” Children

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2022 //
17

The same organization that produced the Glen Beck video in the previous post also produced videos attacking the Disney Corporation and Pearson for their alleged role in “grooming” children to change their gender identity.

With the recent rash of horrific school shootings, you would think that these zealots could think of better uses for their time and resources.

How about making videos about the need for gun control? Reduced class sizes? Health clinics in school for families?

No, these people are obsessed with sex. That’s all they think about.

The good news is that parents are on to them. They don’t love Pearson, but they love their teachers. They are not fooled by nutty propaganda.

The Destroy Public Education crowd is in league with some seriously whacky people.

Categories Childhood, Curriculum, Education Industry, Parents, Pearson, Students

Texas: Why Rural Communities Oppose School Choice

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2022 //
4

Vouchers are a big issue in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott recently announced he would promote them. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick—the Rush Limbaugh of Texas—is a voucher fanatic. Senator Ted Cruz said that school choice is the most important issue of our time.

But vouchers have died every time they are introduced in the legislature. Legislators from rural communities stand firm against vouchers. Jay Leeson explained why in the Dallas Morning News.

He wrote:

Vouchers are unpopular in places where public schools are the lifeblood of community.

With Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement that he’ll pursue “school choice” in the upcoming Legislature, there’s political math to be done.

The governor’s proposal is pencil whipping his previously reliable rural voting base, presuming that rural communities will stick with him as he looks past the November match-up against Beto O’Rourke, and moves to the next problem of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a probable 2024 presidential foe. But in rushing to check off another box on the national GOP purity exam, questionable work has been submitted.

Out where rural public schools constellate expansive Lone Star landscape, out where the real Texas economic miracle of food, fuel, and fiber is produced, there’s pencil scratching being done.

Rural folks know school choice will come at their expense. Almost like the same-old bait (moral convictions) and switch (economic interests) over and over. It’s been that way for more than 30 years, since the GOP came to power promising term limits and local control — and how has that gone?

We’ve voted for plenty of slippery-as-slop-jar scenarios, like numerous federal officials who vote against subsidies for the state’s $25 billion annual agriculture industry. In 2018, cotton had fallen out of a federal funding program to help producers break even, and it was Abbott who single-handedly stalled restoration from Austin. We’ve closed 26 hospitals since 2010. Now just 163 hospitals provide care for 85% of the state’s geography, many with limited services. We’ve incrementally upped local property taxes to fill state budget holes over three decades. And Abbott’s routing of state infrastructure, including pivotal rural telecommunications by his commissioned appointees, could make Santa Anna blush.

But the missing variable in the slippery school choice proposal is the importance of public schools to respective rural communities — and the pillars of community within those schools. I know because I attended them.

Gid Adkisson, a gargantuan man, long in kindness as he was physique, was a retired school superintendent in Abernathy (population 2,904, about 25 miles north of Lubbock) with a bad lifelong cotton farming habit. He’d head out from his homestead to the high school for Gid Night Lights to voluntarily tutor us in algebra on Mondays and Thursdays, so we could play under the Friday Night Lights.

Children, even deviant teenagers like I was, know goodness when they see it. When I first think of Gid, I don’t picture him physically; I think of his heart. The physical trait I most remember is the big dent on his forehead that shone in the lights of Ms. Hardin’s classroom.

Bettie Hardin was a petite, put-together woman — pristine white perm, horn-rimmed glasses, mock turtleneck. She played the Methodist piano every Sunday morning with the same precision she expected from our math during the week.

Sports were our world. And Ms. Hardin could end that world with the swipe of a red pen.

But Gid came to the rescue, helping us understand it all. The first time I figured out ratio and proportion equations, Gid was right there, two huge knuckles on the desk behind me, affirming and encouraging me as my mind translated through pencil what Hardin and he had worked so hard to cultivate. When the problem was solved, the huge knuckles rose above the suspenders past the dent and to the lights, “Good, golly. You got it.”

I don’t today use an acquired high school skill — from on or off the field — more frequently than that equation.

Sitting in Wayne Riley’s 6th Grade Sunday School with half a dozen others was the first time I ever first-hand witnessed a grown man weep; we’d know him later as Coach Riley, our varsity basketball coach.

When my grandmother passed, I was destroyed and my band teacher Harold Bufe took a knee and consoled me about the loss of my world and his longtime friend.

When Gid died, many of us learned what we didn’t know all along: he’d been rescuing people for a long time. He led the 317th Regiment, 80th Infantry Division up Utah Beach where dented-head man earned, but later refused, a Purple Heart. Too many missing human variables under his command for him to accept such an award.

Public education gave us a tutor who defeated Hitler, coaches who earned our respect, and band teachers who helped us outside the notes. And Ms. Hardin who played Amazing Grace as the soundtrack.

My story isn’t uncommon, which is the point.

We’ll vote against ourselves on a myriad of issues, but not our schools.

Add to it all, rural folks know a little grammar as well.

“Choice” is a political synonym for “consolidation” and “consolidation” is another way of saying “closing” our communities — and our organists, Purple Hearts, and Sunday school teachers.

The political math for Abbott and statewide Republicans is they desperately need rural Texas votes to overcome deficits in the likes of Dallas, Tarrant, Travis, and Harris Counties. Their campaign commercials running longer loops every four years are evidence.

And while Oltons, Borgers, Ballingers, Floydadas, Abernathys, and the 85% of Texas geography won’t become Beto O’Rourke Country anytime soon, if ever, these places might just not vote.

Pull the lever, do your duty, get the sticker, but leave the gubernatorial box left open.

The collective rural Republican state representative silence on the governor’s initiative is already telling. Silence from electeds who backed Abbott’s $118 million for pre-K public education funding in 2015, only to have Abbott abdicate in subsequent far-right primary challenges.

Mr. O’Rourke may well come for some of our guns, but that’s highly unlikely with a legislative and judicial GOP stronghold.

But Abbott’s open threat is against the lifeblood of our communities: our schools. And he’s making it with a three-branch majority.

That’s Abbott’s math now. And Gid’s currently unavailable to tutor.

Jay Leeson is a freelance writer and artist in Lubbock. He wrote and illustrated this for The Dallas Morning News.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Republicans, Rural Schools, Supporting public schools, Texas

Steve Hinnefeld: Charter Schools and “Educational Blackmail”

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
7

Steve Hinnefeld blogs about education in Indiana. Indiana is a state that has been a target for privatizers for more than a decade due to Republican governors like Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence.

Hinnefeld reviews a very provocative article by two scholars at the University of Connecticut.

Hinnefeld writes:

Are charter schools like polluting industries? That’s a provocative analogy, but two University of Connecticut researchers explore it in a recent paper. They contend that, while some charter schools may help students, the sector needs stronger regulation to prevent harm to students and school districts.

“I would argue that, even if there are benefits, that does not give you carte blanche to not regulate or mitigate the harms that occur,” Preston C. Green III, the paper’s lead author, told me.

The paper, “Beware of Educational Blackmail: How Can We Apply Lessons from Environmental Justice to Urban Charter School Growth?,” is pending publication in South Carolina Law Review and is online at the Social Science Research Network. Authors are Green, the university’s John and Maria Neag professor of urban education, and doctoral student Chelsea Connery.

Pursuing the connection between schools and polluters, the authors argue that environmental justice principles can be used to mitigate risks from unchecked expansion of charter schools.

The concept of environmental justice arose from concern that factories and waste facilities targeted low-income, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods where they would face less effective opposition. Often, the projects promised benefits that didn’t materialize: Jobs were few or went to workers from other communities. But the harms — pollution and health risks — were real. The take-it-or-leave-it nature of the transaction gave rise to the term environmental blackmail, hence the title of the paper.

The paper notes that charter schools often locate in economically marginalized communities where families are dissatisfied with the local public school district. (It cites polling that finds charter schools are much more popular with Black and Hispanic Democrats than with white Democrats). Research is mixed on whether charter schools produce the benefits they promise, the authors write.

The paper identifies three types of harm that can be caused by the growth of charter schools:

  • Increased stress on financially troubled school districts.
  • Predatory real estate deals that divert resources to for-profit businesses.
  • Loss of rights for students who enroll in charter schools.

When students leave district schools for charter schools, state operating funds typically follow, sometimes leaving the districts strapped. Over time, districts can cut costs by reducing staff and closing schools. But Green and Connery say districts often have fixed costs – for example, pensions, retiree health care and debt – that can’t be easily reduced when they lose students.

In Indiana, the biggest growth in charter schools has been in Gary and Indianapolis. District enrollment has declined by 57% in Gary Community Schools and 31% in Indianapolis Public Schools since the state began expanding charters a decade ago. The state took over Gary schools in 2017 because of money problems. (IPS recouped some of its lost enrollment via “innovation” agreementswith charter schools).

Predatory real estate deals often involve charter schools paying inflated prices, sometimes to businesses that have a relationship with the schools. The paper cites an Ohio auditor’s report that found some charter schools were paying twice the normal rent for buildings and a New Jersey newspaper investigation that found charter operators charged exorbitant rents and loan rates.

Indiana has seen some of that, but the state’s major charter school scandal involved two online schools, Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy. A state audit found the schools received $68.7 million in state funds by inflating their enrollment figures and improperly paid $85.7 million to vendors with ties to officials and employees of the schools.

Loss of student rights often involves matters of discipline, including high rates of suspension and expulsion at “no-excuses” charter schools. Another issue is the use of dress codes to prohibit Black girls from wearing Afrocentric hair styles. State Rep. Vanessa Summers, D-Indianapolis, filed a bill in 2022 to ban “race discrimination based on hair,” but it didn’t get a hearing.

Green and Connery conclude that it will take stronger laws to limit the harm that can result from charter school expansion, just as it took stricter laws and regulations to make gains in environmental justice.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry

Denis Smith: Ohio Charter Lobby Cheers Choice of New State Superintendent

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
7

Denis Smith retired from the Ohio Department of Education, where he worked in the charter school office and saw fraud after fraud. Ohio’s charter schools (which the state calls “community schools,” which they are not) are unusually low-performing; a large number are failing schools.

Smith wrote about the scandalous selection of the new state superintendent in the Ohio Capital Journal.

Smith writes:

At its May meeting, the State Board of Education voted to employ Steve Dackin as Ohio’s new Superintendent of Public Instruction. But the hiring of the veteran school administrator has raised some concerns that require further reflection.

The state board’s decision occurred in the middle of National Charter Schools Week and prompted questions about the processes used in the appointment and the search that led up to the board’s action.  

To those familiar with the behavior of some charter school boards, where the members are usually hand-picked by the school’s operating company and where tales of conflicts of interest and self-dealing are legion, the state board’s action will need to be more closely examined lest it acquire the same reputation of so many conflicted charter school boards.

In covering the search process and appointment of a new state superintendent of schools, the Cleveland Plain Dealer summarized the situation succinctly:

“Steve Dackin was vice president of the State Board of Education and led the search for a vacant superintendent position before resigning and applying for the job three days later. The deadline to apply was the following day.”

You don’t have to read that Plain Dealer paragraph again to realize there was something wrong in the practices of a state board that allowed a board member to conduct the search for a superintendent, resign so that he could apply at the deadline for the position, add his resume to those already received from other candidates, and then months later be hired for the very position he oversaw as vice president of the board and head of the search committee that was charged with filling the position.

If a public board is concerned about optics, its actions might demonstrate that in addition to suffering from myopia, it’s also tone deaf as shown by its hiring of the new state superintendent.

Catherine Turcer, who directs Common Cause Ohio, an organization which promotes “transparency and accountability in government,” also examined the process that led up to Dackin’s candidacy and had concerns.

“The thing that’s important about this is that we have as much transparency as possible so that we can understand what happened and whether he was attempting to get himself the job inappropriately,” she said. “Right now, we have a lot of questions and things look odd. It’s not enough to do the pro forma, ‘I put my resignation in before I applied.’ You dotted one ‘i’ but what about all the ‘t’s?’ she told the Plain Dealer.

The appointment of a new state superintendent during National Charter Schools Week drew praise from the state charter school lobby, including kind words from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an organization that promotes these publicly funded, privately operated, underregulated entities and, like the schools it promotes, is conflicted in its purposes. That makes Fordham a comfortable and perfect fit in the midst of charter world.

The conflict that is Fordham was described last year in the Ohio Capital Journal. Fordham serves simultaneously as a charter school authorizer, promoter, and so-called “think tank,” crafting studies that unsurprisingly promote public school privatization, which it calls school choice. But with all of its “think tank” research, apparently Fordham hasn’t studied one of the major design flaws in charter schools. 

That flaw doesn’t allow the democratic election of board members by qualified voters in a community. Instead, in many instances we have seen self-dealing by hand-picked board members, conflicts-of-interest by operators, and all of the ethical issues that surround organizations that are not fully transparent in their operations. 

The most classic example of this was seen several years ago, where the chairman of a charter school board was also a part-owner of the company which owned the building where the school was located. The school made an overpayment of $478,000 to the company without any board approval. A number of individuals associated with the charter school were indicted, including the school founder, his wife and brother, the board chairman and school treasurer.

Which brings us back to the recent action of the State Board of Education in choosing a new state superintendent.

Because of a history of scandal in the state charter school industry, where more than $1 billion in public funds alone went to ECOT in the largest online charter school scandal in the country, and where the wreckage of more than 300 closed Ohio charters have further depleted the state treasury due to lax oversight caused by few controls, the State Board of Education itself should not be acting like a challenged and conflicted charter school board with few rules, policies, or any sense of institutional memory. 

Moreover, the enthusiasm for Dackin’s appointment expressed by the charter school industry and the Fordham Institute should also raise even more concerns.

As someone who has experience in providing oversight of charter schools as well as service on non-profit boards, it is my view that the processes used in the Dackin appointment are troublesome. For example, some boards have policies that require at least a one-year separation by a board member before applying for employment with the organization. Such a board policy protects an organization and lessens the possibility of a conflict or self-dealing situation by any member. 

And what about the State Board of Education? Why isn’t there policy which prohibits the employment of a former board member for an extended period of time after separation from the board? For that matter, are there any state boards that have a “time-out” policy before a board or advisory committee member seeks employment?

The Ohio Ethics Commission and its three-page review of the situation before the state board’s hiring of the new superintendent was, to put it mildly, inadequate for the circumstances in the Dackin situation. The appearance of a conflict of interest or any ethical question related to actions that employ past board members recently separated from a public board should be a serious issue.

There is no doubt that the State Board of Education can do better at policy formulation and practice. So too can the Ohio Ethics Commission, which should start a discussion about strengthening its guidelines to go beyond minimalist interpretations of statute and offer more robust models to boards and public agencies that promote greater transparency and accountability. 

After all, a state public board by its actions should not mimic charter school boards that love to receive public money but hate regulation.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Ohio

James Harvey: The Lies Promoted by NAEP’s Absurd Benchmarks

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2022 //
71

James Harvey recently retired as executive director of the National Superintendents’ Roundtable. He is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education. In this post, he describes how the benchmarks used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress are misused to attack American education. The “achievement levels” were created in 1990 when Chester Finn Jr., an enemy of public schools, was chair of the National Assessment Governing Board. They were designed to make American student achievement look worse than it was. The media and the public think that “proficient” means “grade level.” It does not. It is equivalent to a solid A. Yet how many hundreds or thousands of times (e.g. the charter propaganda film “Waiting for Superman”) have you been told that most American students score “below grade level”? It’s not true. To be blunt, it’s a lie.

James Harvey wrote on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog at The Washington Post:

Every couple of years, public alarm spikes over reports that only one-third of American students are performing at grade level in reading and math. No matter the grade — fourth, eighth or 12th — these reports claim that tests designed by the federal government, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), demonstrate that our kids can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s nonsense.


In fact, digging into the data on NAEP’s website reveals, for example, that 81 percent of American fourth-graders are performing at grade level in mathematics. Reading? Sixty-six percent. How could this one-third distortion come to be so widely accepted? Through a phenomenon that Humpty Dumpty described best to Alice in “Through the Looking Glass”: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean.”


Here, the part of Humpty Dumpty was played by Reagan-era political appointees to a policy board overseeing NAEP. The members of the National Assessment Governing Board, most with almost no grounding in statistics, chose to define the term “proficient” as a desirable goal in the face of expert opinion that such a goal was “indefensible.”

Here’s a typical account from the New York Times in 2019 reporting on something that is accurate as far as it goes: results from NAEP indicate that only about one-third of fourth- and eighth-graders are “proficient” in reading.


But that statement quickly turns into the misleading claim that only one-third of American students are on grade level. The 74, for example, obtained $4 million from the Walton and DeVos foundations in 2015 by insisting that “less than half of our students can read or do math at grade-level.”


The claim rests on a careless conflation of NAEP’s “proficient” benchmark with grade-level performance. The NAEP assessment sorts student scores into three achievement levels — basic, proficient, and advanced. The terms are mushy and imprecise. Still, there’s no doubt that the federal test makers who designed NAEP see “proficient” as the desirable standard, what they like to describe as “aspirational.”


However, as Peggy Carr from the National Center for Education Statistics, which funds NAEP, has said repeatedly, if people want to know how many students are performing at grade level, they should be looking at the “basic” benchmark. By that logic, students at grade level would be all those at the basic level or above, which is to say that grade-level performance in reading and mathematics in grades 4, 8 and 12, is almost never below 60 percent and reaches as high as 81 percent.
And the damage doesn’t stop with NAEP. State assessments linked to NAEP’s benchmarks amplify this absurd claim annually, state by state.

While there’s plenty to be concerned about in the NAEP results, anxiety about the findings should focus on the inequities they reveal, not the proportion of students who are “proficient.”
Considering the expenditure of more than a billion dollars on NAEP over 50-odd years, one would expect that NAEP could defend its benchmarks by pointing to rock-solid studies of their validity and the science behind them. It cannot.


Instead, the department has spent the better part of 30 years fending off a scientific consensus that the benchmarks are absurd. Indeed, the science behind these benchmarks is so weak that Congress insists that every NAEP report include the following disclaimer: “[The Department of Education] has determined that NAEP achievement levels should continue to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted with caution” (emphasis added).


Criticisms of the NAEP achievement levels
What is striking in reviewing the history of NAEP is how easily its policy board has shrugged off criticisms about the standards-setting process. The critics constitute a roll call of the statistical establishment’s heavyweights. Criticisms from the likes of the National Academy of Education, the Government Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Brookings Institution have issued scorching complaints that the benchmark-setting processes were “fundamentally flawed,” “indefensible,” and “of doubtful validity,” while producing “results that are not believable.”
How unbelievable? Fully half the 17-year-olds maligned as being just basic by NAEP obtained four-year college degrees. About one-third of Advanced Placement Calculus students, the crème de la crème of American high school students, failed to meet the NAEP proficiency benchmark. While only one-third of American fourth-graders are said to be proficient in reading by NAEP, international assessments of fourth-grade reading judged American students to rank as high as No. 2 in the world.

For the most part, such pointed criticism from assessment experts has been greeted with silence from NAEP’s policy board.


Proficient doesn’t mean proficient


Oddly, NAEP’s definition of proficiency has little or nothing to do with proficiency as most people understand the term. NAEP experts think of NAEP’s standard as “aspirational.” In 2001, two experts associated with NAGB made it clear that:
“[T]he proficient achievement level does not refer to “at grade” performance. Nor is performance at the Proficient level synonymous with ‘proficiency’ in the subject. That is, students who may be considered proficient in a subject, given the common usage of the term, might not satisfy the requirements for performance at the NAEP achievement level.”

Lewis Carroll’s insight into Humpty Dumpty’s hubris leads ineluctably to George Orwell’s observation that “[T]he slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

NAEP and international assessments


NAEP’s proficiency benchmark might be more convincing if most students abroad could handily meet it. That case cannot be made. Sophisticated analyses between 2007 and 2019 demonstrate that not a single nation can demonstrate that even 50 percent of its students can clear the proficiency benchmark in fourth-grade reading, while only three could do so in eighth-grade math and one in eighth-grade science. NAEP’s “aspirational” benchmark is pie-in-the-sky on a truly global scale.
What to do?

NAEP is widely understood to be the “gold standard” in large-scale assessments. That appellation applies to the technical qualities of the assessment (sampling, questionnaire development, quality control and the like) not to the benchmarks. It is important to say that the problem with NAEP doesn’t lie in the assessments themselves, the students, or the schools. The fault lies in the peculiar definition of proficiency applied after the fact to the results.

Here are three simple things that could help fix the problem:


• The Department of Education should simply rename the NAEP benchmarks as low, intermediate, high, and advanced.

• The department should insist that the congressional demand that these benchmarks are to be used on a trial basis and interpreted with caution should figure prominently, not obscurely, in NAEP publications and on its website.

• States should revisit the decision to tie their “college readiness” standards to NAEP’s proficiency or advanced benchmarks. (They should also stop pretending they can identify whether fourth-graders are “on track” to be “college ready.”)

The truth is that NAEP governing board lets down the American people by laying the foundation for this confusion. In doing so, board members help undermine faith in our government, already under attack for promoting “fake news.” The “fake news” here is that only one-third of American kids are performing at grade level.

It’s time the Department of Education made a serious effort to stamp out that falsehood.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Fraud, Lies, NAEP

Oklahoma: Billionaires Pushing Charter Schools and Vouchers Underwrite Salary of State Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2022 //
33

Thank goodness for independent media! Oklahoma Watch published an investigative report that detailed a secret slush fund that supplements the salary of the state Secretary of Education.

(This story was produced in partnership with the Oklahoma nonprofit newsroom The Frontier.)

Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed legislation that would have required cabinet members to file public reports to disclose their finances.

If Stitt had signed the bill last month, Oklahomans would learn that Secretary of Education Ryan Walters makes at least $120,000 a year as executive director of a nonprofit organization that keeps its donors secret. Walters is also paid about $40,000 a year by the state, according to state payroll data.

The nonprofit, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, has refused to disclose its largest donors.

But a joint investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch has found that much of the organization’s funds come from national school privatization and charter school expansion advocates, including the Walton Family Foundation and an education group founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

As Secretary of Education, Walters serves as Stitt’s top advisor on public education policy and is the governor’s liaison for dozens of state boards and programs.

Walters’ outside employment with a nonprofit funded by advocacy groups could be a conflict of interest, said Delaney Marsco, senior attorney for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group that focuses on government transparency and accountability.

“If you are responsible for making decisions in a certain area of the government and you are being paid by an outside organization that has an interest in that, that absolutely can be a conflict of interest,” Marsco said. “If you are a public servant, your duty is to the public, and anything that kind of calls that into question, even raises the appearance of a conflict of interest, is a problem.”

Under Walters’ leadership, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma was the public face of Stitt’s program that distributed $1,500 grants to families in 2020 funded with $8 million in federal coronavirus relief money. The money was intended to buy tutoring and educational supplies. But a lack of safeguards allowed parents to use some of the funds to buy TVs, gaming consoles and home appliances, an investigation by Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier found. Emails and other recordsshow that Walters helped secure the no-bid contract with a Florida company to distribute the money. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General has opened an audit into how the state used those funds.

Walters, who declined multiple interview requests, is now running for state superintendent, an elected position overseeing the state Department of Education and a budget of over $3 billion. Unlike in federal elections, candidates for state office in Oklahoma are not required to fill out financial disclosures until after they are elected.

Please open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Oklahoma, Scandals, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Valerie Strauss: What President Biden Should Say to the Charter Industry About His Proposed Reforms

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2022 //
12

Valerie Strauss is an outstanding journalist who writes “The Answer Sheet” blog about education for The Washington Post. She understands the great heist that is being foisted on American public education by privatizers and their powerful lobbyists. She knows better than the editorial boards of the nation’s leading newspapers that school choice exacerbates the problems of American education and that test scores are not a worthy measure of the worth of a school.

In this article, she offers valuable advice to President Biden about the absurd claims made by the charter industry about the regulations proposed by the Department of Education to reform the federal Charter Schools Program. That program doles out $440 million a year to underwrite new charter schools. Biden has not cut it (even though it is not necessary, since new charters are supported by many billionaires, including the Walton family, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, John Arnold, Dan Loeb, and Michael Bloomberg.)

The Department offered modest regulations, like barring for-profit corporations from applying for federal funding and asking those who seek federal funding for new charters to do an impact analysis of why their charter is needed and whom it would serve. The charter industry and its allies reacted with lamentations, outrage, and hysterical denunciations of Biden (even though Biden said during the 2020 campaign that he would stop funding for-profit charter management organizations).

Strauss writes:

The Biden administration recently released proposed reforms to a nearly 30-year-old federal program that has provided billions of dollars in grants for charter schools, and predictably some charter supporters have launched an unrestrained attack.


The bipartisan charter lobby alleges, among other things, that President Biden wants to “gut” the Charter School Programs, is kowtowing to unions and is willfully harming marginalized students. One magazine piece has this headline: “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools” — as if that were something to behold — and this subtitle: “The Education Department chooses teachers unions over poor kids.”


That’s not what’s happening — for one thing, the administration hasn’t proposed cutting a dime from the program — but that hasn’t stopped the attacks on the proposals, which are being supported by Roberto Rodriguez, a strong charter school supporter who was an education adviser to President Barack Obama and is now Biden’s assistant education secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development.


[Biden proposes tougher rules for charter school grants]


“There is a bit of a mythology that this is an attempt to do away with charter programs or curb the programs or curb the growth of charter schools,” said Rodriguez in an interview. Sure, he could have turned against charters, but he hasn’t: “The administration supports high-quality schools, including high-quality charter schools.”


Charter schools are funded by the public but privately operated. They are not monolithic — no more than schools in traditionally operated public districts are. Each state has its own rules, some resulting in better-quality charter schools than others.


Charters enjoyed bipartisan support for years — and still do — but support within the Democratic Party has lessened because of real problems in parts of the sector that supporters don’t like to publicly address. They include repeated scandals of financial fraud and waste, mismanagement, segregation, and under-enrollment of students with special needs. Charter schools in some places also drain resources from school districts that educate most of America’s schoolchildren.


Before the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, about 6 to 7 percent of U.S. schoolchildren attended charter schools. Enrollment jumped during the pandemic — with most of the gain in virtual charters, which are the worst-performing schools in the sector — but new data shows the increases starting to fall.


The White House has been silent about the over-the-top protests — including an actual protest outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW with charter school students. The Education Department published tweets last week that, instead of calling out its critics for promoting falsehoods about its proposed reforms of the program, tried to explain what it was doing by saying, essentially, “It’s not as bad as you think.”


[What Biden’s proposed reforms to U.S. charter school program really say]



So here’s what Biden should have said to charter school supporters who are savaging the proposed changes to the Charter School Programs, which should be made final in the next few months after consideration of public comment:


Hey guys:


Look, I didn’t expect you to love the changes my administration is proposing to the Charter School Programs. You have never been good at accepting criticism — but really, isn’t your reaction a bit much?


A bunch of you said I want to “gut” the program. Gut the program? Charter critics would love that, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have proposed to Congress that we keep funding at the same amount as last year — $440 million. So much for gutting.


I’ll add that the Education Department, even under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, couldn’t spend all of the money allocated to the program by Congress in 2019. That’s when more than $12 million was reallocated from the program to other federal education priorities due to a lack of demand for new charter schools in state and individual grants. During the coronavirus pandemic, some program money was allowed to be used for other purposes.


I have said my administration supports high-quality charters because it does. Charter opponents would rather we didn’t, but we do. But there are a lot of problems in the charter sector, and we can’t find any acknowledgment of that in your scorched-earth assault on us.


I expect that from Republicans — as George Will showed in a Washington Post column — that falsely said charters must “get permission” from a traditional public school to operate if our proposed reforms become official. They don’t — but let’s not let the truth get in the way.


And I expect that from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which sent out missives to supporters to speak out against the proposed reforms and launched media ads that accuse my administration of proposing changes that will hurt students of color.


Unfortunately, Democrats for too long have been part of this let’s-never-admit-there’s-a-charter-school-problem chorus. I read the op-ed that Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who started a charter school network in 2004, wrote in The Washington Post, which alleged that our proposed reforms would “create chaos and limit public school choice by instituting new rules that would gut” the program. As we said, we haven’t proposed cutting a dime, but, legally the money has to be paid out annually, whether there are good proposals for charters or not. We know full well that some applications that don’t adhere to all of the priorities we have set out in the proposed reforms will get federal money anyway.
I also read the letter that three Democratic senators, Cory Booker (N.J.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) sent, along with Republicans, to my education secretary, Miguel Cardona, warning that our proposed program reforms “would make it difficult, if not impossible” for charter schools to build new facilities or expand. Love bipartisanship, but that’s just wrong.


I’ve also read editorials from charter school-supporting editorial departments. A Wall Street Journal editorial accused the Biden administration of sabotaging charter schools; a Washington Post editorial accused the administration of pandering to teachers’ unions and school district leaders. The headline of that piece calls our proposed changes to the charter funding program a “sneak attack.” A sneak attack in broad daylight?


I expect Republicans to accuse us of caving to teachers’ unions, but we’ve never understood the same from Democrats. My wife, Jill, and I, are big union supporters — she proudly belongs to the National Education Association — but let’s not kid ourselves about the power of the unions. If they had their way, do you think schools would look the way they do? Would teachers be forking out money of their own to buy basic supplies? Would we be worrying about Republicans — many of them racist — taking over Congress this fall? Would schools have broken HVAC systems and, in some places, unconscionably low teacher pay? Knock it off.


Do Democrats really think it’s a good time — with crucial midterm elections coming up — to ignore reality and falsely accuse a Democratic president of wanting to harm marginalized kids to kowtow to unions?
Your union accusations make it sound like unions are the only ones that support our changes. Far from it. House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.) wrote a public comment letter about what she called a “well-funded misinformation campaign incorrectly claiming” that a proposed reform “would prevent federal funds from going to any charter school that uses a contractor for any discrete service” — another claim by the charter lobby. Civil rights organizations such as the Southern Education Foundation have weighed in to support the proposed program changes; the foundation wrote:


Public funds are intended for public education, so we must invest in the charter schools that will serve their communities, provide equal access to high-quality instruction, and collaborate with the public school system to share successful innovations in teaching and learning that improve outcomes and opportunity for all students.


You talk about charters as if they were all the same, and you know they aren’t. Some are great. Some are awful. In 2016, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, called for better regulation of virtual charter schools, a rare acknowledgment of big problems in the charter sector, but we haven’t heard much since.


Bottom line: The Charter School Programs division needs reform. I have read reports by a nonprofit advocacy group that say since 2019, up to a billion dollars of federal taxpayer money has been wasted on charter schools that did not open or were shut down — and that the Education Department failed to adequately monitor federal grants to these schools. The advocacy group, the Network for Public Education, opposes charter schools. But that doesn’t make their research any less valid. If you want to take the time, you can read about that here and here.


If you don’t care for that, you can read the report the NAACP — one of the longest-standing civil rights organizations in the country — wrote after it called for a ban on charter school expansion until the charter sector is reformed and traditional public school districts are not financially harmed by the spread of charter schools. It says in part:


“Charter schools were created with more flexibility because they were expected to innovate and infuse new ideas and creativity into the traditional public school system. However, this aspect of the promise never materialized. Many traditional inner city public schools are failing the children who attend them, thus causing parents with limited resources to search for a funded, quality educational alternative for their children. …With the expansion of charter schools and their concentration in low-income communities, concerns have been raised within the African American community about the quality, accessibility and accountability of some charters, as well as their broader effects on the funding and management of school districts that serve most students of color.”


By the way, despite some of your protestations, charter schools are draining critical funding from some school districts with policies that make little sense. In Oklahoma, for example, numerous school district leaders got furious about a funding decision made last year by the state Board of Education that forced them to share funding for school buildings with virtual charter schools that don’t have school buildings.
Meanwhile, states including New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey public school districts must pay tuition to charter schools costing them far more than they would pay if the student stayed in the district. Districts have lost millions of dollars in funding that has been sent instead to charter schools. Pennsylvania law funds charter schools as if 16 percent of all of their students are in special education — which costs more than students not in special education — but charters aren’t required to count so nobody really knows. School districts count each special education student.


So let’s talk about what my administration is trying to do with the federal Charter School Programs and why. The changes, as Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler wrote in a piece we read about the proposed reforms, “go a long way to fulfilling” a vow that Biden made while running for president. He said he wanted to eliminate federal funding of for-profit charter schools because that part of the charter sector has been riddled with financial scandal, private enrichment and other problems. The biggest change we are proposing would affect for-profit management companies that often run charter schools. We want those companies that run entire charter operations to be ineligible for grants.


Scandals in the for-profit sector of charters have contributed to some that disillusionment; for example, you can read here about how many for-profit management companies evade state laws banning for-profit charters — by setting up nonprofit charters and then directing the schools’ business operations to related corporations.


[The story of a charter school and its for-profit operators]


In our proposed charter program changes, we also would like to see applicants for federal grants prioritize charter schools that already have their charter school approved — yes, as it is now, applicants can get federal money without an actual school — and that would collaborate with school districts.


My education team and I know there is a great deal of discontent over our priority that charter school funding applicants show that there is some interest in the community for a new or expanded charter school — which, really, doesn’t seem unreasonable. Why should the public fund a school where there is no demand? School districts don’t do that.


The “community impact analysis” we would like to see from applicants includes a priority that the charter would not further school segregation. You say we are insisting that charters serve diverse student populations. We’d like that, but let’s be clear what the proposed reform actually says: that an application from “racially and socioeconomically segregated or isolated communities would still be eligible for funding.”


You may not realize this — or just don’t publicly admit it — but in some places, charter schools are being used as white-flight academies, like decades ago when the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling said segregated schools were unconstitutional.


In 2018, the federal Charter School Programs awarded a grant of $26.6 million to North Carolina to support “high-quality schools focused on meeting the needs of educationally disadvantaged students.” Thirty of the 42 charter schools that received CSP grants via the North Carolina Department of Education reported demographic information — and of those schools, more than one-third have significant overrepresentation of White students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located. One overwhelmingly White private school, located near a public school with mostly Black students, was turned into a charter with the help of federal funding after making a pitch to families that included: “No current law forces any diversity whether it be by age, sex, race, creed.”


[Is federal charter school funding financing white-flight academies?]


I think it makes sense to ensure that federal funding isn’t being used to create white-flight academies. Do you?


There’s a lot more we could talk about that we haven’t addressed in our regulations. For example: Charter schools are supposed to be open to all students, but many of them employ more than a dozen tactics that allow them to shape their student enrollment. And did you know charter schools can be bought and sold and people can get rich from the sale of publicly funded schools?


[13 ways charter schools restrict enrollment]


[Charter schools are publicly funded — but there’s big money in selling them]


So, finally, can we move forward and keep our eye on the prize: making sure that America’s schoolchildren all go to high-quality schools? That’s what my administration and I are trying to do.

Categories Biden, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda

FAIR: Jonathan Chait Should Have Disclosed Conflict of Interest When Writing About Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
9

A progressive media-watch organization called FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) criticized New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait for failing to report his wife’s role in the charter industry when writing about (and defending) charter schools and attacking teachers’ unions.

On several occasions, Chait has written about education issues, usually to defend charter schools, although he is a political journalist with no particular expertise about education policy. He claims that he doesn’t have to disclose his wife’s role in the charter industry, because he is an opinion writer. FAIR does not consider that an appropriate justification for not disclosing his conflict.

It’s strange to see a journalist who calls himself “liberal” attack teachers’ unions. As a rule, liberals are not anti-union.

Chait’s article at the center of the controversy criticized President Biden and his Department of Education for proposing regulations that would prohibit for-profit charter management organizations from receiving federal funds. For-profit charters are typically low performing and should be an embarrassment to the entire sector, yet the charter industry lobbyists have rallied round the sleaziest of the charter chains. Since Joe Biden promised during his campaign to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charters, no one should be surprised that he is following through.

The proposed regulations also ask charter operators to submit an impact analysis, summarizing the likely effect of their charter on the existing public schools and the need for the new charter, as well as spell out their plans to collaborate with the district where they would locate. The charter lobbyists consider this idea of collaboration with district schools to be abhorrent.

FAIR did not analyze the argument about the value or harm of the regulations. It did address Chait’s failure to disclose his wife’s connection to the federal Charter Schools Program.

FAIR wrote:

NPE executive director Carol Burris, in a post on fellow education expert Diane Ravitch’s blog (5/13/22), laid out a convincing case that Chait’s latest article oversteps even the limited disclosure he had put in the article’s footnote aside.

[Burris wrote]:

Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writerwhen that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for WestEd, which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, WestEd, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

FAIR’s research confirmed—and expanded upon—those claims.

WestEd, where Robin Chait has worked since October 2018, has received CSP funding from the Department of Education, most notably an open grant that’s already paid out $8.1 million to evaluate CSP and work with grantees. The contract, issued in September 2020, is one of a number of high-value DOE grants received by WestEd.

Also objectionable, although FAIR does not discuss it, was Chait’s characterization of the Network for Public Education as an organization funded by the teachers’ unions, which is false. That was his way of disparaging NPE, although for the life of me, I see nothing objectionable about taking funding from unions representing the nation’s teachers. It’s not like taking money from foundations of billionaires pushing privatization of the nation’s public goods, like the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and Betsy DeVos.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit
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