Archives for category: Education Industry
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David R. Taylor: What Would Four More Years of Trump Mean for Public Education?

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2020 //
12

David R. Taylor is a veteran teacher and blogger. He asks the important question of what to expect the consequences to be for public education if Trump is re-elected.

Very likely, it means four more years of Betsy DeVos and her crusade to destroy public education and shower federal money on charter schools, private schools, and religious schools.

Taylor reviews some of her worst actions, such as favoring predatory lenders and favoring for-profit colleges that rip off students. Such as, abandoning the kids who need her most by downplaying civil rights complaints and stripping transgender students of any protections. Such as, trying to starve her own department of funding.

Between the return of DeVos and a voucher-loving majority on the Supreme Court, public schools are in for a rough ride. We can’t change the composition of the Supreme Court (unless there is a genuine effort to expand it and add balance), but we can vote to make sure Betsy goes back to Michigan and her ten yachts.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, Trump, Vouchers

North Carolina: Segregation and Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2020 //
6

The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, recently released a major study of segregation and charter schools by Dr. Helen Ladd and Muvzana Turaeva of Duke University.

Dr. Samuel Abrams introduced it here.

The issue of school choice and segregation has been central to education policy debates for decades. In his initial argument for vouchers, published in 1955, Milton Friedman conceded that segregationists stood to employ vouchers to enroll their children in all-white private schools instead of public schools mandated to integrate a year earlier by Brown v. Board of Education. But to Friedman, the answer was not regulation but moral suasion. Friedman’s opinion was rendered technically moot in 1976 by Runyon v. McCrary, which barred private schools from making admissions decisions based on race, yet it nevertheless indicated a fundamental problem with systems of school choice.

With the introduction of charter schools in the early 1990s, commentators raised concerns about school location, inadequate transportation, contracts mandating significant parental involvement, and shared parental proclivities as implicit mechanisms or pathways to segregation. In “Parental Preferences for Charter Schools in North Carolina: Implications for Racial Segregation and Isolation,” Helen F. Ladd and Mavzuna Turaeva add substantially to the literature validating these concerns.

Using data for the nearly 11,000 North Carolina families who transferred their children from traditional public schools to charter schools in 2015-16, Ladd and Turaeva document that the migration of white, though not minority, switchers from traditional public schools to charter schools increased segregation. “We find that by switching to charter schools that are whiter than the traditional public schools they leave behind,” they write, “white switchers contribute to racial segregation across schools.” At the elementary level, 67 percent of white switchers enrolled in charter schools with lower shares of minority students; at the middle-school level, 72 percent of white switchers did so.

To buttress their analysis, Ladd and Turaeva employ a conditional logit model to estimate revealed preferences. To infer parental preferences by race as well as socioeconomic status, Ladd and Turaeva use five criteria to define the value of charter schools for parents: racial composition; proximity; academic achievement; availability of transportation and lunch; and mission. Ladd and Turaeva conclude that with these dimensions considered together, it is clear that white parents disproportionately favored white charter schools and exhibited a pronounced aversion to significantly minority charter schools.

With this working paper, Ladd, a professor emerita of public policy and economics at Duke University, and Turaeva, a doctoral candidate in public policy (with a specialization in economics) at Duke as well as a research associate at the Duke Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, build on research Ladd did with Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein for an article published by Education Finance and Policy in 2017 on growing segregation across the charter sector in North Carolina from 1999 to 2012. In addition, Ladd and Turaeva’s analysis complements a 2019 NCSPE working paper on charter schools in Kansas City by Patrick Denice, Michael DeArmond, and Matthew Carr, who found a disproportionate number of white students transferring from traditional public schools to new charter schools from 2011 to 2015.

Lucid, rigorous, and supported with eight tables of telling data, this study advances our understanding of school choice and raises important questions about how choice systems should be designed.

Samuel E. Abrams
Director, NCSPE

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation

Join Katherine Stewart and Me Tonight to Discuss the Assault on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2020 //
19

[intro]

The rise of the Religious Right has coincided with the privatization movement in public schools. While some may feel that this is coincidental, there is reason to believe there is a directly causal relationship between these two factors. Two scholars, from different disciplines, will discuss how their work comes together to help explain the history and current state of efforts to diminish, if not dismantle, the American public education system. Katherine Stewart has written on the rise and increasing power of the Religious Right in her book The Power Worshipers. She will be joined by Diane Ravitch who has written extensively on education and, in her recent book Slaying Goliath, explores the history of the school privatization movement and the efforts to oppose it.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

Link to register: https://18308a.blackbaudhosting.com/18308a/Will-Public-Education-Survive-A-Look-at-the-Threats-to-Education-Systems-from-Privatization–Reli
Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state

Billionaire Reed Hastings Gives $925,000 to Charter Candidate for LAUSD

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2020 //
13

Once again, control of the Los Angeles Unified School Distict school board is up for grabs, and once again the billionaires hope to buy control so they can expand the number of charter schools. The latest financial disclosures show that Reed Hastings of Netflix has contributed $925,000 to try to defeat veteran educator Scott Schmerelson. Billionaire Jim Walton of the Walmart family added another $300,000. The charter lobby is flush with money to buy TV ads and flyers that smear Schmerelson and use vicious anti-Semitic tropes in their attack ads. The charter lobby is angry at Schmerelson for two reasons: 1. He fights fearlessly for the 80% of students in public schools. 2. He released the explosive fact that 80% of Los Angeles’ charter schools have vacancies, not waiting lists. His opponent Marilyn Koziatek has no experience in the public schools; she holds an administrative job in a charter school.

Download the .pdf here.

cec57_78008Download
Note: Sara Roos of Los Angeles (blogger Red Queen in LA) prepared the graph of political expenditures based on public records.
Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Lies, Los Angeles, Privatization

Chalkbeat: GreatSchools Revises Its Rating System But It’s Still Tied to Test Scores

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2020 //
22

Chalkbeat reports that the rating agency GreatSchools has revised the way it measures school quality. Critics have long complained that its reliance on test scores as the measure of school quality disadvantages schools that enroll children of color and encourages housing segregation by steering white parents to white neighborhoods.

In the future, GreatSchools will rely on test score growth, not just scores alone.

This, of course, puts pressure on teachers and schools to raise test scores. Test scores thus continue to be the single most important criterion of school quality, instead of school climate, experienced teachers, class size, a rich arts program, and other consequential elements.

Matt Barnum writes:

America’s most widely used school rating system is overhauling its approach with a series of changes that will weaken the link between race, poverty, and school scores.

The website GreatSchools is rolling out the changes nationwide Thursday after introducing them for schools in California and Michigan in August. They are part of an effort by the site to make its ratings better reflect how much schools help students learn, rather than things like students’ prior academic achievement and poverty levels that schools don’t control.

“The new system is better because there is more of a focus on learning and growth and what’s actually happening in schools,” GreatSchools CEO Jon Deane said. “We know that’s more important.”

The move comes amid growing scrutiny of GreatSchools’ system of judging schools, including a Chalkbeat investigation that found that its ratings effectively steered families away from schools serving more Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

GreatSchools says the average school will see only a modest score change. Still, the shifts mean that the tens of millions of people who find the ratings on real estate sites like Zillow will now see a different measure of school quality, potentially affecting enrollment patterns that contribute to school segregation.

Notice how the rating agency conflates test scores with learning. The changes for schools’ rating will indeed be modest because they are still measuring schools by test scores, which are highly correlated with wealth and poverty, special education status, and LEP status.

*sorry about the error in the original headline. I write most posts on my cellphone so I did not see the last words in the heading. My error and my apologies.

Categories Education Industry, Race, Segregation, Testing

Florina Rodov: Virtual Charter Schools Are an Educational Disaster

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2020 //
7

I have posted many times about the corruption embedded in the for-profit virtual charter industry. The founder of Pennsylvania’s largest virtual charter school was sentenced to prison for misappropriating $8 million. The single biggest scam in U.S. history involved an online charter chain in California called A3, whose owners managed to make $50 million in state funding disappear. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) in Ohio collected $1 billion over its nearly two decades, its owner paid his companies for supplying services, he made generous gifts to elected officials, but ECOT declared bankruptcy in 2018 to avoid repaying the state for phantom students. The stories of corruption, embezzlement, and scamming go on and on.

Therefore I was delighted to find this excellent summary by journalist Florina Rodov, who gathers many of the scandals and research reports in one place to demonstrate the woeful failure of virtual charters. As she points out, the virtual charter industry has beefed up its already massive marketing budget to take advantage of the pandemic and try to gather market share.

One detail that I found fascinating was the link to executive compensation for K12 Inc., the for-profit virtual chain that has the largest enrollment in the nation. The top five executives receive a total of $28 million in compensation. Beats teaching!

She begins:

“Instead of going to school every morning, what if school could come to you?” an ad asks enticingly, promising students “online personalized learning” tailored to their specific needs. It’s one of hundreds of active Facebook ads run by K12 Inc., the largest for-profit virtual charter school provider in the United States. As public schools rose to the challenge of educating students online during the pandemic, corporations like K12 Inc., whose stock price has been climbing since mid-March, were licking their chops at the prospect of moving kids online permanently. Though virtual charter schools perform dismally academically and are plagued by scandal, the goal is for them to replace traditional brick-and-mortar public schools in an effort to privatize education. While this would harm students, it would most egregiously damage Black and Latino children, who’ve already been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, due to structural inequities such as lack of access to computers and internet service, as well as inconsistent health care and crowded housing.

The article has many important links and I urge you to read it in full. The virtual charter industry has the full-throated support of Betsy DeVos, who lied about their results at her confirmation hearings in 2017, claiming they had 100% graduation rates, when their graduation rates are abysmal.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Jan Resseger: Ohio and the Fight to Save Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2020 //
11

Jan Resseger describes a grassroots effort to stave off the persistent assaults on public schools by the Republican-controlled legislature and state officials. Ohio has a large and low-performing charter sector, as well as a well-funded voucher sector that has produced no gains for students.

The privatization movement has harmed the public schools that most students attend without providing better schools. While the nation has struggled to survive the pandemic, Ohio’s legislators have remained focused on expanding their failed choice plans.

Resseger describes the work of the Northeast Ohio Friends of PublicEducation and their decision to create a website to educate the public.

Resseger writes:

In this leaderless situation with schools struggling everywhere, no matter their efforts to prepare, questions of policy have just sort of faded away—except that the privatizers are doggedly trying to co-opt the chaos in every way they can. In Ohio, the Legislature has taken advantage of the time while the public is distracted by COVID-19 to explode the number of EdChoice vouchers for private schools at the expense of public school district budgets, to neglect to address the injustices of our state’s punitive, autocratic state takeovers of the public schools in Youngstown, Lorain and East Cleveland, and to put off for over a year discussion of a proposed plan to fix a state school funding formula so broken that 503 of the state’s 610 school districts (80 percent) have fallen off a grossly under-funded old formula.

In recent years, most Ohio school districts have been getting exactly as much state funding as they got last year and the year before that and the year before that even if their overall enrollment has increased, the number poor children has risen, or the number of special education students has grown. And all this got even worse under the current two-year state budget, in which school funding was simply frozen for every school district at the amount allocated in fiscal year 2019. That is until this past June, when, due to the revenue shortage caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Governor cut an additional $330 million from the money already budgeted for public schools in the fiscal year that ended June 30, thus forcing school districts to reduce their own budgets below what they had been promised. With much hoopla in the spring of 2019, the new Cupp-Patterson school funding plan was proposed. A year ago, however, research indicated (see here and here) that—partly thanks to the past decade of tax cuts in Ohio and partly due to problems in the new distribution formula itself—the new school funding proposal failed to help the state’s poorest schools districts. The analysis said that a lot of work would be required to make the plan equitable. New hearings are planned this fall, but nobody has yet reported on whether or how the Cupp-Patterson Plan has been readjusted.

In this context, discussions in the Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education focused on our need to help ourselves and the citizens in our school districts find our way. What are the big issues? What information will help us explore and advocate effectively for policies that will ensure our schools are funded adequately and that funding is distributed equitably? In Ohio, how can we effectively push the Legislature to collect enough revenue to be able to fund the state’s 610 school districts without dumping the entire burden onto local school districts passing voted property tax levies? How can we help stop what feels like a privatization juggernaut in the Ohio Legislature? And how can federal policy be made to invest in and help the nation’s most vulnerable public schools?

The idea of a website emerged, with the idea of highlighting four core principles—with a cache of information in each section: Why Public Schools? Why More School Funding? Why Not Privatization? and Why Educational Equity? Although we have noticed that much public school advocacy these days emphasizes what public school supporters are against, we decided to frame our website instead about what we stand for as “friends of public education” even though our opposition to charter schools and private school tuition vouchers is evident in our website.

Educating the public is a crucial step in reclaiming the narrative from entrepreneurs, libertarians, and cultural vandals.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Ohio, Parent Groups, Privatization, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Now Here Is a Balanced Discussion of Teachers Unions!

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2020 //
37

The Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance is led by Professor Paul Peterson, an advocate for school choice. It would not be off the mark to say that PEPG exists to promote the DeVos agenda. Soon after she was confirmed, PEPG invited her to speak, and her speech was disrupted by Harvard students not affiliated with PEPG. Peterson has been the mentor for a generation of pro-school choice academics, including Jay Greene (University of Arkansas, Department of Education Reform), Patrick Wolf (same, also served as “independent evaluator” of Milwaukee and DC voucher prigrams), and Martin West (Harvard Graduate School of Education). Peterson recently appeared at the White House to support Trump’s call to reopen schools and co-wrote an oped with Dr. Scott Atlas (both are senior fellows at the rightwing Hoover Institution). Dr. Atlas supports Trump’s views that mask-wearing should not be mandatory, that children and adolescents don’t get the virus, th ast schools should reopen without delay, and that lockdowns are unnecessary. In many articles about Dr. Atlas, Peterson is his reliable defender.

The event today asks whether teachers unions can be part of the solution. Michelle Rhee and George Parker. Parker was head of the Washington Teachers Union when Rhee was chancellor. When he stepped down, he went to work for Rhee. He now works for a charter school lobbying group. More than 90% of charters are non-union.

Fall 2020 Colloquium Series: Can Teachers Unions Be Part of the Solution?

The PEPG Colloquium series continues Thursday, Sept. 24, with “Can Teachers Unions Be Part of the Solution?,” a talk by Michelle Rhee, Founder and CEO, StudentsFirst, former Chancellor for District of Columbia Public Schools, and George Parker, Senior Advisor, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, former President, District of Columbia Teachers Union.

Thursday, Sept. 24
12-1:15 p.m.
Register to attend the Zoom webinar

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, Teachers, Unions, Vouchers

South Carolina: Oral Arguments about Vouchers

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2020 //
2

Have you ever wondered what really goes on in the courtroom? Would you like to have a front-row seat as lawyers argue for and against vouchers before the South Carolina Supreme Court?

Here is your chance.

Tonight at 7:30 pm EST, I’m having a Zoom conversation with University of South Carolina professor Derek Black. He will talk about his new book, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, and about the case discussed in this video.

Please sign up here and join us. It’s like a seat in a graduate seminar in vouchers and school choice, offered by a top-notch constitutional lawyer.

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, South Carolina, Vouchers

Thomas Ultican: Will Plutocrats Buy Control of California’s Schools?

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2020 //
10

Thomas Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, has been researching the tentacles of the Destroy Public Education movement in various cities.

In this post, he reviews the plutocrats’ lavish spending in California. It’s tapered of since 2018, he writes, but it’s still enough to outspend and overwhelm citizens who want to have a role in choosing their local school board.

The biggest battle in the state this year is the competition to control the board of the Los Angeles Unified School district. Ultican gives a succinct overview of the candidates, then examines the spending of the plutocrats.

The issue in L.A., again, is whether the plutocrats will win control so they can expand the charter sector or whether advocates of public education will overcome the money spent by the plutocrats and limit privatization.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization
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