Archives for category: Education Industry
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Texas: Republicans Who Support Public Schools Win Big Victories

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2022 //
11

Pastors for Texas Children have worked with a bipartisan coalition to support public schools and stop privatization. Rural Republicans have been an important part of the coalition that has repeatedly stopped voucher legislation and slowed charters.

Big Night for Pro-Texas Public School Legislative Candidates

GOP Candidates Again Rebuke Extremist Insurgents Financed By Ultra-Right-Wing Billionaires

Candidates that support Texas public schools celebrated significant victories in the Republican primary last night. On the eve of Texas Independence Day, these incumbents declared their independence from the deep pockets of right-wing extremists that are trying to destroy your neighborhood schools. We congratulate those candidates: Stan Lambert, Ken King, David Spiller, Gary VanDeaver, Travis Clardy, Reggie Smith, Ernest Bailes, Giovanni Capriglione.

“Yesterday’s primary elections proved decisively, in the reelection of pro-public education incumbents, that Texans overwhelmingly support their neighborhood and community public schools – and oppose the privatization of them through vouchers and charters,” said Reverend Charles Foster Johnson, founder and Executive Director of Pastors for Children. “These House seats cannot be bought by a couple of right-wing billionaires, no matter how many millions they put up.”

Pastors For Children will continue the fight in the upcoming May runoffs and launch an unprecedented pro-public education campaign for the November General Election.

Pastors For Children stands firm for the belief that there is a moral obligation before God to educate every school kid in Texas. We are also strong proponents of Article 7 in the Texas Constitution, which mandates the State Legislature to support and maintain a free public school system. It is the only way for the Texas economy to continue to outpace the rest of the country.

Pastors For Children is a 501c4 that engages parents, teachers, and all Texans to fight for Texas neighborhood public schools through their votes in the ballot box.

PO Box 471155, Fort Worth, Texas, 76147

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Resistance, Separation of church and state, Support for public schools, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire: Who Is Driving Teachers Out of Their Profession?

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2022 //
29

Jennifer Berkshire, expert education journalist and co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, writes in The Nation about the forces driving teachers out of the schools.

She interviewed many teachers who explained why they were leaving. Some cited ”the bad teacher” narrative promulgated by Arne Duncan and his insistence that teachers be evaluated, based on their students’ test scores, which is both ineffective and inaccurate. His and Obama’s “Race to the Top” was deeply demoralizing to teachers, and it accomplished nothing positive.

She begins:

Neal Patel survived teaching in the pandemic. It was the culture wars that did him in.

In the fall of 2020, Patel added two flags to the wall of his science classroom in Johnston, Iowa. Now, alongside images of energy waves and the electromagnetic spectrum were the Gay Pride rainbow flag and a proclamation that Black Lives Matter. The flags, says Patel, represented the kind of inclusive space he was committed to creating, sending a signal to all students that even in this conservative suburb of Des Moines, there was a place for them.

School administrators supported him—on one condition. “They’re just there as decoration,” Patel says. “The only time I discuss the flags is when a student asks me about them.”

Patel assumes it was a student who snapped a picture of the display. Somehow it ended up on the Facebook page of a conservative state legislator. Representative Steve Holt, who lives 100 miles from Johnston, pointed to the flags as evidence of creeping left-wing indoctrination in Iowa’s schools and encouraged his constituents to take a stand. Patel says he was shocked by the attention, then upset: “Holt thinks it’s a political issue to try to create an inclusive environment, and he’s using that to try to further divide our community.”Johnston has grown only more divided since Patel became Facebook fodder. At a school board meeting last fall, members debated whether to ban two books on race, including one by the Native American writer Sherman Alexie, after parents complained. The president of the Iowa State Senate, who represents a neighboring county, took the mic during the public comment period, calling for teachers who assigned “obscene” material to be prosecuted. Patel was in the crowd that night, to lend support to minority and LGBTQ students who’d come to speak out against banning the books. And he had an announcement of his own to make: This year would be his last as a teacher in Johnston.

The Obama administration made matters much worse for teachers when it imposed test-based evaluation as the heart of its “reforms.”

The thinking went something like this: Make teacher evaluations tougher, and teaching would get better, which would mean higher student achievement, more students graduating from college, and ultimately a country better able to outsmart China et al. “Tougher” meant holding teachers accountable for how their students fared on standardized tests…

In 2010, Colorado became one of the first states to enact a high-stakes teacher evaluation law; by 2017, nearly every state had one on the books. While the pandemic may have disrupted everything about schooling, policies like Colorado’s Senate Bill 10, with its 18-page evaluation rubric and 345-page user guide aimed at weeding out bad teachers, remain in place.

For Shannon Peterson, an English language acquisition teacher in Aurora, that meant leading her students through a writing exercise last fall as her principal observed. Peterson’s students, many of them immigrants who live in poverty, bore the pandemic heavily, she says: “The kids are stressed, all of their writing is about anxiety, and attendance is way down.”

To her delight, the students responded enthusiastically to the writing prompt she’d come up with: comparing and contrasting the Harlem Renaissance and Black Lives Matter, and how the entertainment industries in their respective eras related to both. In a year of stress and struggle for teachers and students alike, here was something to celebrate. “Excellent writing came out of this,” Peterson says.

Her principal wasn’t convinced. Peterson, he felt, hadn’t done enough actual teaching during the observation. “I just don’t feel comfortable checking off these boxes,” he told her.

The previous year, when the cash-strapped school district had offered teachers buyouts to leave, Peterson turned it down: “I felt an enormous obligation to go back for the kids and my colleagues.” After her evaluation, though, Peterson had reached a breaking point. She quit a week later, walking away from a career that spanned 23 years, 18½ of them in Aurora. “I’m not a box,” Peterson says.

Two weeks after Peterson resigned, a major study came out: The decade-long push to weed out bad teachers had come to naught. The billions of dollars spent, the wars with teachers’ unions, and the collapse in teacher morale had produced “null effects” on student test scores and educational attainment.

Please open the link and read the study. Billions of dollars wasted on ineffective and demoralizing teacher evaluations that produced tons of data but nothing else.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

Watch Out! Koch Foundation Is Funding “New Education Models”

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2022 //
23

It is a mystery of our times why so many billionaires have assumed the power to meddle in education. Gates, Waltons, Bloomberg, Koch, DeVos, Rock, and many more like to play the role of education minister. I have an almost complete list of the billionaires who dabble in education in my book “Slaying Goliath.” I say “almost” because after the book was published, I found more billionaires who were messing up schools, like Tim Dunn in Texas and the Albertsons in Idaho. I am sure I missed others.

The Charles Koch Foundation announced that it is funding a competition for “new models” of education.

Launched on January 25, The Catalyze Challenge will bring together leading philanthropies and nonprofits to support a grant challenge that will generate new models focused on empowering learners to discover their aptitudes and develop new skills toward a more fulfilling career pathway. Consistent with its efforts to remove barriers facing learners across the country, the Charles Koch Foundation is proud to partner with the Catalyze Challenge. Brennan Brown, the foundation’s director of partnership development, will serve as an adviser.

The Catalyze Challenge will provide funding for education entrepreneurs to develop and scale learner-centric, career-connected models and experiences. The contest is managed by Common Group. Funders include the Walton Family Foundation, the American Student Assistance, the Charter School Growth Fund, and Arnold Ventures.

We know that Charles Koch has one overriding goal: to privatize education and cut costs by passing them on to families. If anyone can decipher the bromides behind hisCatalyze Challenge, give it a try.

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Privatization

Bob Shepherd: The Dirty Secret of the Standardized Testing Industry

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2022 //
31

Bob Shepherd, a frequent contributor to the blog, is an education polymath. He has authored textbooks, written assessments, developed curriculum, and was most recently a classroom teacher in Florida. He has a long history in the education industry.

He explains here why standardized testing today is neither valid nor reliable.

He begins:

The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the major textbook publishers and most of the standardized test publishers, and I know from experience that quality control processes in the standardized testing industry have dropped to such low levels that the tests, these days, are typically extraordinarily sloppy and neither reliable nor valid. They typically have not been subjected to anything like the validation and standardization procedures used, in the past, with intelligence tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and so on. The mathematics tests are marginally better than are the tests in ELA, US History, and Science, but they are not great. The tests in English Language Arts are truly appalling…

The Common Core tests, he says, are especially useless.

They are almost entirely content free. They don’t assess what students ought to know. Instead, they test, supposedly, a lot of abstract “skills”–the stuff on the Gates/Coleman Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list, but as we shall see below, they don’t even do that.

Open the link and read on. This is a very important exposé by an expert.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Standardized Testing

Nevada: Most Charter Students Enrolled in Schools Managed by Florida For-Profit Firm

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2022 //
21

Back in the early days of charter schools, their advocates imagined that most would be run by teachers or local educators with a passion to run their own school. The charters would be innovative and accountable, working closely with public schools to share good ideas.

That was then, this is now.

No one back in the late 1980s envisioned huge charter chains like KIPP.

Nor did they imagine the emergence of for-profit chains owned by entrepreneurs.

Nor did they imagine that a state like Nevada would have most of its charter school students in schools managed by Academica, a Florida-based for-profit chain.

Academica’s politically connected owners have amassed over $100 million in Florida real estate. Real estate: that’s where the profit is. Running charters schools is a lucrative business, especially if you have influential friends and family in the legislature.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Nevada

Texas: Charter $$$ Flood Race for State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2022 //
20

The charter industry has set its sights on Texas, since the state has a rightwing Governor and Lieutenant Governor and Republicans control the state legislature.

So charter money is flowing to candidates for State Board of Education. In El Paso, board member Georgina Perez decided not to run again, so the charter industry is backing a charter school leader to take her place. Perez is a charter critic who recently joined the board of the Network for Public Education.

The charter industry has donated more than $200,000 to Omar Yanar. Yanar leads a small charter called the El Paso Leadership Academy.

The money behind the money: billionaires Reed Hastings and Jim Walton.

Charter Schools Now reported spending more than $1 million on various primary candidates throughout the state from Jan. 21-Feb. 19. That includes a $1,000 donation to state Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso, who is unopposed in the March 1 primary, according to the PAC’s Feb. 22 filing.

The PAC gave to three Republican incumbent SBOE members’ reelection campaigns in addition to three Republican primary candidates and five Democratic primary candidates.

Charter Schools Now is heavily funded by two well-known charter advocates: Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Jim Walton, a member of the Walmart family.

Hastings is on the board of directors of KIPP Public Schools, a national charter school chain with campuses in Austin, San Antonio, Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was previously on the national board of Rocketship Public Schools, which is opening its first Texas campus in August in Fort Worth.

Hastings gave $1.5 million to Virginia-based Educational Equity PAC on Feb. 15, the same day that PAC gave $570,000 to Charter Schools Now. Days earlier, Educational Equity gave Charter Schools Now $70,000.

Walton gave Charter Schools Now $450,000 in December 2021. The Walton Family Foundation has invested millions over the years to support public charter schools across the country.

One way to win elections is to buy them.

Reed Hastings lives in California.

Jim Walton lives in Arkansas.

Neither lives in Texas but they arrogantly assume that their money gives them the power to buy seats on the Texas Board of Education.

The charter industry wants to eliminate public schools or keep them as dumping grounds for students the charters don’t want.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Texas

Arizona Parent: I Got a Voucher But No School Would Take My Special-Needs Child

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2022 //
31

Pamela Lang, a parent of a child with special-needs in Arizona, wrote for Public Voices for Public Schools about her terrible experience finding a school for her son.

She writes:

I may not look like your typical public school advocate. I’m not opposed to private schools, and I even use a voucher for my son. I’ve also always loved public schools and advocated for our elected representatives to do a better job of funding and resourcing these valuable community institutions. Frustratingly, I’ve watched as morally-bankrupt radical special interests have spent decades undermining our public schools, chipping away at them year after year, until they start to buckle under the shear strain.

I would love to enroll my son at our local community public school. But I live in Arizona and my son has special needs, meaning the resources to educate my child here had already been stripped away through a myriad of defunding schemes. So my school choices were taken from me and I had to look around and see what options there were to find an education for my son. It turns out that I was the one who got an education. An education in the realities of living in a state at the forefront of “school choice” with a child who has unique and resource-intensive needs.

I decided to withdraw my son from our public school and take an Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher to help find him a place where his needs would be best met. Because of his disability, he qualified for roughly $40,000 per year on Arizona’s ESA voucher program, enough to fully cover the tuition at almost any school in the state. So we had choices. Or, we thought we had choices.

An often overlooked aspect of these voucher programs is they end up being publicly-funded education discrimination programs. Everywhere we went we were told my son would not be a good fit for their school and we were discouraged from even applying. We visited highly-rated private academies that touted their resources for special needs students only to be told his needs were too great, or that they weren’t right for us, and that they ended their special needs enrollment, while others who demanded to view my son’s files beforehand refused to even see us.

This entire situation is exacerbated by the reality that people pushing these privatization schemes and destroying public schools also require families like mine to give up federal protections for their children, as I had to do for my son because of his needs. We had to waive our federal Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) rights to be allowed to use the vouchers, meaning any private school that did accept him wasn’t legally required to provide him with adequate services. These issues could be addressed simply with minor legislation, but the lawmakers pushing these vouchers, while often parading special needs families around as the face of their privatization campaigns, have shown no interest in fixing these obvious problems. And that’s because they don’t really care about us. They didn’t care about my son when they diminished our public school’s capacity to care for and educate him, and they don’t care about my son when he’s using their prized vouchers.

We eventually found a microschool, one of the latest privatization schemes, that would take my son, only to find they were essentially abandoning him throughout the day and providing negligently minimal supervision, and this took us almost three years of continual searching to find.

It’s almost impossible to understand the environment that these “choice” programs create for desperate families. The amount of work I’ve had to invest just trying to find a private school simply willing to let my son in their doors has been exhausting. And that’s in addition to all the other resources necessary to make a private school work. I have to provide or secure transportation every day my son is in school. The workload is a lot for any family to take on, and in some cases the assault on public schooling is driving us to have no satisfying options.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Special Education

Tennessee Charter Scandals: Tweets by Amy Frogge

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2022 //
6

Amy Frogge was elected twice to the Nashville Metro school board. She is a lawyer, a public school parent, and executive director of Pastors for Tennessee Children.

As a board member, Amy quickly learned about the big money behind charter schools, especially when she was outspent 5-1 when she ran for office. Tennessee received a grant of $500 million from Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top competition and spent $100 on its “Achievement School District.” The ASD gathered the state’s lowest scoring schools into a new district and handed them over to charter operators. The leader of the ASD promised that within five years, the schools at the bottom would be in the top quarter of schools across the state. The ASD was a complete failure. None of the lowest performing schools reached that goal and remained at the bottom.

Amy Frogge posted the following thread on Twitter about the charter scandals in Tennessee.

Tennessee is considering opening 100 new charter schools, removing ALL local control of charter approvals, and giving charter schools free access to public school buildings. Last week, I shared charters’ dismal performance rates. Now let’s consider 10 horror stories:

1. Memphis Academy of Health Sciences closed after 3 leaders were indicted for stealing $400k for personal use- for Vegas trips, a hot tub, NBA tickets, auto repair, etc. 750 students were displaced.

2. The Executive Director of Legacy Leadership Academy was charged w/2 counts of theft and 3 counts of forgery after the comptroller found she inflated amounts on phony invoices to steal $4595 from the school.

3. New Vision Academy in Nashville shut down after state and federal investigation into financial irregularities and failure to comply with federal laws re: EL students and special needs students. Its leaders- a husband/wife team- earned $563k per year to oversee a school serving only 150 students. New Vision also violated the fire code by cramming too many kids into classrooms.

4. Knowledge Academies in Nashville failed to pay teachers, used uncertified teachers, lost hundreds of thousands in an online phishing scheme, changed grades and transcripts, understaffed the school, forced poor kids to buy expensive uniforms, failed to properly serve. special needs and EL students, ran for-profit businesses out of the school, posted terrible academic results, and more. After $ went missing, its CEO/founder disappeared. Nashville shut it down and THE STATE FORCED IT BACK OPEN. It’s now operating w/a $7.9 million deficit.

5. Two KIPP charter schools in Memphis abruptly closed without notice or community discussion, displacing about 650 students.

6. Gateway University Charter School in Memphis shut down after it falsified grades, used uncertified teachers, gave credits for a geometry class that didn’t exist, and pulled children out of class to clean school bathrooms, classrooms, and hallways. (!)

7. Southwest Early Charter School in Memphis closed after using uncertified teachers, failing to serve special needs students, losing its partnership with a community college and having “no institutional control,”according to the district.

8. Rocketship in Nashville forced open a brand new ASD school, even though its school was in the bottom 3% of schools statewide. (The ASD is supposed to bring up low-performing schools, not open new ones.) This new school closed after only one month. Rocketship, based in CA, is amassing millions in TN tax dollars through substantial management fees, facilities fees and “growth” fees. It also accessed a nearly $8 million tax-free bond for facilities through a back room deal.

9. Drexel Preparatory Academy in Nashville closed after using unlicensed teachers, a carbon monoxide leak that impacted students, and ongoing poor performance.

10. Boys Preparatory Academy in Nashville shut down after only 2 years after district officials found flaws in its special education services, manipulation of enrollment data and “other troubling patterns.” – And this is just a sampling. THERE’S MORE.

Charter schools are unregulated, and there is essentially zero oversight into their use of public tax dollars. Meanwhile, only 5 TN charter schools (out of over 100) has a success rate over 20%, according to the state Report Card.

Wake up, Tennessee! It’s a scam.

Ask our senators to vote no on SB2168. Please contact: Sen. Akbari @SenAkbari; Sen. Mike Bell; Sen. Rusty Crowe @RustyCroweTN; Sen. Farrell Haile; Sen. Joey Hensley @joey_senator; Sen. Brian Kelsey @BrianKelsey; Sen. Jon Lundberg; Sen. Bill Powers; Sen. Dawn White @VoteDawn @MarkWhiteTN

BONUS: A friend reminded me of perhaps the most egregious charter scandal in Nashville- Nashville Global Academy. It was poorly planned from the start and delivered students home after midnight on the first day of school. Then it forgot a student on a bus, leaving the child on the bus parked offsite all day. An investigation of the school revealed poor communication, a non-workable transportation plan, inadequate board oversight, poor administration of exceptional education, failure to meet accepted standards of fiscal management & accounting practices, failure to administer required state assessments, failure to pay teachers, etc. The school misappropriated funds to the tune of $149k and failed to pay food services ($35k), gas charges ($14k), bus leases (over $23k) and employee benefits ($200k). It also failed to reconcile Charter Startup Program Grant funds totaling $81k. It collapsed nearly $500k in debt, leaving the district, teachers and vendors holding the bag. Guess who paid? Us- the taxpayers (not once, but twice).

My comment: Despite this long record of failure and fraud, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and the Legislature want more charter schools! Gov. Lee has invited conservative Hillsdale College of Michigan to open 50-100 Christian-themed charters. Who knew that Republicans despise local control? Why would they want to outsource Tennessee public education to a Michigan college?

Categories Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Tennessee

John Oliver Explains the Link Between “Critical Race Theory” and School Choice

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2022 //
50

John Oliver explained the Republican hysteria over “critical race theory.” At bottom, as he shows, the GOP goal is to persuade parents to escape “CRT” by abandoning their local public schools and enrolling in charter schools or seeking vouchers. The leading anti-CRT crusader, Chris Rufo, made this linkage explicit, as Oliver demonstrates, as did Betsy DeVos. The big money supporting the anti-CRT campaign is coming from the same people funding school choice. And, as Oliver explains, “school choice” has its roots in the fight to block school desegregation in the 1950s.

The fight against CRT is being used to silence any teaching about racism today. Teachers are supposed to teach slavery and racism as a strange aberration from our founding principles and to pretend that it no longer exists.

But if it really were the terrifying problem that people like Rufo describe, why was there no uprising against it in the past 40 years? Why didn’t George W. Bush speak up about CRT? WhY was Trump silent about it until 2020? Why now? Is it mere coincidence that the anti-CRT madness took off after the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests against racism?

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fake News, Fraud, History, Lies, Privatization, Race, Racism, School Choice, Vouchers

Texas: Pastors Fight for Public Schools Against Heartless Privatizers

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2022 //
8

The well-organized Pastors for Texas Children is engaged in rhetorical battles with the well-funded privatizers. Whether by Tweet, in the media, or on the lecture platform, Pastor Charles Foster Johnson and his colleagues lead the battle on behalf of public schools, taking on the rich and powerful and their political lackeys.

After Congressman Chip Roy attacked Pastors for Texas children and classroom teachers on Twitter, Pastor Johnson responded forcefully:

On Twitter, the group responded to Congressman Roy: “Congressman @chiproytx, your repeated lies about our [public school] teachers & the pastors who support them, are shameful, embarrassing, and shockingly immoral. You may mock them and us with your political lies against these servants. But you cannot mock God.”

Pastors For Texas Children, a Fort Worth-based organization, says it is an independent organization that advocates for public schools…

Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accused “left-wing educators” of showing children “explicit pornography” in schools.

Cruz would not cite specific examples, according to Business Insider, “but instead pointed to books that have made parents angry at school board meetings in general.”

“Take a look at some of the portions from books that parents are going to school boards and reading out loud; this is what my child is being taught,'” the senator told the on-line publication.

Rev. Johnson said it’s all a political smokescreen to create chaos.

“If CRT (critical race theory) is a problem, if pornography is a problem, you guys have been in charge in Texas for 27-years,” Johnson said. “Are you just now discovering it? Are you producing it? What if we were to go all over the state and say that you were pornographers? You’re more responsible than our public school teachers. Obviously, we’re not going to do that, but you get the point.”

“We’re in this program of sheer destructive chaos,” he added. “That’s their only agenda. The only agenda. And that is wrong.”

Teachers are an easy target, Johnson continued, because the far-right knows that educators are too busy in the classroom to push back. Many school districts also drew the ire of Texas Republican leaders during COVID-19 when some – even in conservative areas – refused to ban masks like the governor ordered.

In an op-ed last week for Baptist News Global, publisher Mark Wingfield argued that “it’s time to stop the insanity that is killing public education.”

“It is disgusting, dismaying and disheartening to see the continued attack on public education from conservative evangelical Christians and people who pretend to be evangelical Christians but couldn’t find John 3:16 in the Bible if you asked them,” Wingfield wrote. “It is time to stop being shocked at this behavior and stand up against it.”

You see why I admire, respect and love Pastors for Texas Children? They are fearless, wise, and animated by a sense of mission.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Supporting public schools, Texas
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