A few days ago, I had a Zoom meeting with educators at Rutgers University, where I was invited to talk about education and social justice. Of course we talked about the pandemic and what happens next. But the theme of the day was equity.
Archives for category: Education Industry
More than 200 advocates of public education endorsed this open letter to Joe Biden, which was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post.
They call on presumptive Democratic nominee Biden to reject the stale and failed policies of the past 20 years.
Their letter (our letter, since I signed it) begins with this preamble and then offers a list of specific proposals that together represent a fresh vision for American education:
Dear Vice President Biden:
As the Democratic Party presumptive nominee, you have the power to fight for the public schools and colleges and universities that our students deserve. We are concerned educators, public education advocates, union members, parents, and students, writing to request that you demonstrate your commitment to that agenda.
Over the past decade, politicians on both sides of the aisle have made devastating cuts to public education, while privatizing public schools, scapegoating educators, and providing massive tax breaks to corporations and the rich.
These attacks have resulted in a national teacher shortage and reduced educational opportunities for many of our students — especially students of color, those from low-income households, LGBTQ students, and students with disabilities.
The public health and economic emergencies resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have only made public education more vulnerable. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of public education itself is at stake.
Read the list of sensible, research-based, intelligent policy proposals, which would inspire students and teachers and improve education for all students.
Please open and read.
Tweet with the hashtag #EducationIsAPublicGood and @JoeBiden
The Center for American Progress is identified by the mainstream media as a “liberal think tank” and as the think tank of the Democratic establishment. It protects the Obama legacy, including the toxic legacy of Arne Duncan’s failed Race to the Top. Billions were squandered for a program that was built on the foundation of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. Twenty years have been wasted by investing in high-stakes testing and charter schools. CAP refuses to acknowledge this education disaster and continues to peddle the same tired Bush-Obama remedies.
Our reader Laura Chapman writes here about CAP’s May 27 event, featuring charter school leaders, even the executive director of the hedge funders’ charter advocacy lobby, DFER.
Please read! Take her advice and send in your questions. Ask them why they support the DeVos agenda. Let’s hope that CAP and its neonservative allies do not influence Joe Biden.
Laura writes:
“DeVos has a long and notorious record of using agency guidance and regulatory action to undermine equity.”
Yes. And this power is why, in addition to getting rid of Trump and DeVos, voters who care about public education must pay attention to Biden and who he is courting for advice. We need to let him know that more attention must be paid to public schools, not charter schools
Charter schools have a non-stop campaign for money, with a major pitch that they are the only schools that care about black and brown children. That is non-sense. Charter schools originated in and perpetuate racially segregated schools.
Here is an example of that campaign pitch, from Center for American Progress, founded by Hillary Clinton’s John Podesta, and an outfit that also gets money from both teacher unions. It is not a supporter of public schools. It is an apologist and promoter of them,
If you have nothing better to do, submit some questions for CAP’s May 27 event, staged with speakers who love charter schools. The title is “Beyond the Talking Points: Charter School Policy and Equity. Ensuring a Quality Education for Every Child Web Series.”
Here is the pitch
“Charter schools have been the source of some contentious debates in the education policy space, often centered on the growth of charters and their impact on traditional public school systems. Yet beyond these debates are a number of issues and policy choices that have deep impacts on the equity effects of charter schools.”
“This interactive conversation will cover a range of issues, with a focus on less commonly discussed topics in charter school policy such as
–enrollment issues around student backfill policies,
–lottery systems, and
–the perceived notion that charters are able to self-select students for attendance.”(This in not merely a perception. )
“Additionally, the discussion will explore operations issues that affect equity in charter schools, such as
–transportation for students to and from school,
–participation in meal programs, and
–how schools receive and use funding for facilities and resources.
(Operations issues are those wherein charter schools want to raid public schools fund even though they are supported by billionaires and have been gifted special federal funds from ten-yacht Betsy DeVos).
Finally, the panelists will discuss the ability of charters to serve all populations of students, particularly those who need additional services such as students with disabilities, English learners, and foster or homeless youth.” (This is just shy of an admission that charter schools, unlike public schools, may choose not to serve students with special needs).
“Please join the Center for American Progress to discuss charter policy in a broader context than the often debated talking points. This discussion aims to step back and examine the current state of the charter debate and where we might go from here, with an emphasis on how equity can be infused more holistically into charter policy.
“We would love to hear your questions.
Please submit any questions you have for our panelists using the hashtag #QualityEdChat on Twitter or via email to CAPeventquestions@americanprogress.org.
There certainly are issues with charter schools, a whole bunch. The CAP sponsors seem to think those listed above are “less commonly discussed.” If so, the sponsors are too much involved in cheerleading for charters and repeating talking points from the billionaire-funded 74Million news. They may also be indifferent to scholarship about charter schools especially the evidence-based criticisms in Diane Ravitch’s latest book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, or her earlier Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement, the Danger to America’s Public Schools, and then another, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
The discussants in this affair are cheerleaders for charter schools who seem to have some mental inventory of criticisms of charter schools, are floundering, and also pondering “how equity can be infused more holistically into charter policy.” Informed critics will see through this promotional exercise with participants who claim to be MORE concerned with “equity” and in greater measure than supporters of traditional public schools.
Panelists:
Sharhonda Bossier. Deputy Director, Education Leaders of Color (EdLoc), prior work with Education Cities, a national promoter of charter schools
Laina Cox. Principal, Capital City Public Charter Middle School (for about 8 years). Holds a Master in Education in Teaching and Curriculum from Harvard University.
Shavar Jeffries. National President, Democrats for Education Reform, a PAC that promotes charter schools and stricter teacher evaluations. Lawyer, board member fro KIPP, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Newark, NJ.
Joshua P. Starr. CEO of PDK International former Superintendent of Schools in Montgomery County, MD; Stamford CN. Also worked briefly for NYC Department of Education, served one month on Board of Directors, Center for Teacher Quality.
Moderator:
Neil Campbell, Director of Innovation, K-12 Education Policy, Center for American Progress, former director of Jeb Bush’s FEE–Foundation for Excellence in Education, Broad resident 2009-2011 while serving as Education Program Analyst with USDE.
https://www.americanprogress.org/events/2020/04/29/484224/charter-school-policy-equity/
I hope that readers of this blog will submit a generous supply of questions. I will submit one: Why is there so much documented fraud, waste, and abuse in the charter school industry?
This is an enjoyable podcast where I chatted with three veteran Montgomery County, Maryland, educators.
We talked about the pandemic, the Disrupters, and SLAYING GOLIATH.
Their podcast is called “Ed’s Not Dead.”
Listen in.
Yesterday, the United Teachers of Los Angeles scores a big victory, and so did the teachers in five charter schools, who won the right to unionize.
For Immediate Release
May 22, 2020
Media Contact:
Anna Bakalis, 213-305-9654
PERB rules in UTLA’s favor, the union will now represent all educators at five Alliance charter schools
After a two-year legal battle, on Thursday, May 21, the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) certified UTLA as the exclusive collective bargaining representative of educators at the five Alliance charter schools that filed for union recognition:
Alliance College-Ready Middle Academy 5
Alliance Judy Ivie Burton Technology Academy High School
Alliance Gertz-Ressler/Richard Merkin 6-12 Complex
Alliance Leichtman Levine Family Foundation Environmental Science High School
Alliance Morgan McKinzie High School…
“Now that PERB has made it clear that we filed appropriately at our schools, we’re ready to sit down at the bargaining table,” said Kemberlee Hooper, a Physical Education teacher at Gertz-Merkin. “ I’m excited that we’ll have an equal voice in decision making, and I look forward to bargaining over issues like professional developments and a fair and meaningful evaluation process.”
Alliance has been fighting PERB certification since educators at three schools filed for union recognition in May 2018, with two more filing in 2019. But now with this decision, Alliance educators have prevailed after a two-year legal delay intended by Alliance to deny educators their right to bargain and to organize with UTLA. Alliance educators are ready to move forward. They urge Alliance to start setting a better example for their students and the Alliance community by respecting PERB’s decision and its own educators.
Particularly in this unprecedented time, it’s more important than ever that educators have an equal voice in decisions impacting their students, their schools, and their profession. Alliance educators simply want to sit down with Alliance as real decision-making partners and together decide what will make their schools the best place to work and learn.
Alliance educators look forward to bargaining at five union schools and are committed to organizing at all Alliance schools.
Stan Karp has written a brilliant critique of federal policy and Betsy DeVos’s audacious and vicious assault on our nation’s public schools and their students. Don’t believe those who say that Congress has blocked her most horrendous actions. She has used her authority and exceeded the intent of Congress to advance her single-minded and narrow-minded pursuit of privatization. When Congress tries to blunt or control her actions, she simply ignores Congress. She is out of control. She treats members of Congress like her household help.
Karp reviews the failures of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
Then he shows how the pandemic has given DeVos the tools to wreak havoc on our public schools, which enroll the vast majority of children.
He writes:
The emergency CARES Act, passed without a single dissenting vote and signed in March, was the first of several massive pieces of federal legislation rushed through Congress in response to the pandemic. While the CARES Act didn’t include the same kind of signature federal initiative that RTTT represented for Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, it did give Duncan’s successor, the wildly unpopular, right-wing billionaire Betsy DeVos, extraordinary powers in a host of important policy areas.
There will be additional federal action affecting schools in the months ahead, including attempts to address the financial tsunami that is already engulfing school budgets. But even a cursory comparison between the federal response in 2009 and the initial response to the current crisis provides some clues about the extended emergency ahead for public education.
The CARES Act included $13.5 billion for K–12 schools, $14 billion for higher education, and another $3 billion that governors can split between the two as part of $31 billion in “stabilization aid” for state budgets. But while the total $2.2 trillion legislative package was several times larger than the $800 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009, the initial amounts provided for education in the CARES Act were much smaller.
The Recovery Act sent $54 billion in education aid to states primarily for K–12 programs and the implementation of RTTT. Moreover, as noted by Education Week, the “2009 stimulus didn’t just shore up education budgets; its unprecedented windfall of education aid also helped the Obama administration put financial muscle behind its priorities. Those priorities focused on areas like standards and accountability.” To promote those policies, the funds came with prescriptive regulations about their use, including provisions that drove an expansion of charters, standardized testing, and test-based teacher evaluation. States and school districts desperate for federal dollars had to commit to this agenda to receive RTTT’s “competitive grants.”
“The CARES Act doesn’t take the same approach,” Education Week’s analysis concluded. “It’s hard to see discrete elements of a Trump education policy agenda driving current coronavirus aid — although U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos indicated last week she wants to change that.”
DeVos Given Tools of Destruction
The CARES Act gives DeVos multiple tools to do so. It gives the secretary of education authority to waive many requirements outlined in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the omnibus federal education legislation that replaced NCLB. The first — and undoubtedly most popular — use of this authority came when all 50 states sought and received in a matter of weeks a waiver to suspend federally required annual standardized testing for the current school year. The educational irrelevance of these tests and their existence as an obstacle to serving the real needs of students was one of the first lessons of the pandemic.
But DeVos’ new authority has much more sinister potential. The CARES Act gives her the power to waive Title I funding regulations, which govern the largest federal education program supporting children from low-income families. It also allows her to suspend Title II rules defining professional development and Title IV requirements to “provide students with a well-rounded education” including the arts, mental health services, and training on trauma-informed practices — all crucially important in the current crisis. The CARES Act specifically allows schools to shift money from these areas to purchase “digital devices.” By early April, 28 states had received waivers to reallocate ESSA spending.
In the guidelines for distributing the first pot of CARES funding, the $3 billion Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, DeVos blocked any use of funds to support DACA recipients or international students. She also said any monies awarded to teacher unions to provide services defined in the CARES Act would be “inconsistent with statutory requirements,” although last year she authorized church and religious groups to receive federal funds to provide similar services.
DeVos has a long and notorious record of using agency guidance and regulatory action to undermine equity. One of her first acts after being confirmed as secretary was to support the repeal of protections for transgender students, including their right to choose restrooms. She was sued for rolling back protections against predatory lenders at for-profit colleges and threatened with jail by a federal judge for “intentionally flouting” a court order to stop collection proceedings for such loans. DeVos rescinded sexual assault guidance issued under Title IX, a move the National Women’s Law Center said would have a “devastating” impact, and in May released new guidance that weakened protections for victims of sexual harassment and assault. She proposed allowing schools to use federal “student enrichment funds” to purchase guns and used a school safety commission formed in the wake of the Parkland school shootings to recommend repeal of regulations on school discipline practices that were rooted in civil rights concerns. Similarly, DeVos tried to rescind Obama-era rules that required districts to track racial disparities in special education classification rates, an effort a federal judge blocked as “arbitrary and capricious.” In April, DeVos relaxed oversight and accreditation rules for higher education online programs at a time when the pandemic was massively expanding the scale of such programs.
Trump and DeVos on Feb 14, 2017 in Washington D.C. Photo: Olivier Douliery/Pool
Beyond putting her very rich thumb on the wrong side of the scales of justice, DeVos is now in position to be a key gatekeeper for a new and crushing era of austerity for school budgets. To access the CARES Act’s stabilization funds, states must nominally commit to maintaining recent levels of education funding for fiscal years 2021 and 2022. But DeVos can waive that requirement and no doubt will. Already, she has issued guidelines for distributing CARES Act funds that drive more dollars to private schools and wealthier students by circumventing requirements to allocate the funds according to more progressive Title I formulas.
DeVos undermines equity. She flouts the Will of Congress. She seeks to dismantle civil rights protections.
Unlike Trump, she is not incompetent. She is not stupid. She is very clever. She is diabolical. Trump will never fire her because she sows chaos as surely as he does, but without bluster and braggadocio.
If you need a reason to vote for Joe Biden, think about Betsy DeVos.
Peter Greene recognizes one of the great education heroes of our age, Dr. Lester Perelman, who retired a few years ago from MIT, where he taught writing. Les Perelman carefully and thoroughly debunked “robograding” of student essays. ETS had a robograder that allegedly graded thousands of essays in a minute or less.
Perelman showed that students could write nonsensical paragraphs containing blatant inaccuracies yet get a high score from the robograder.
Greene points out that Perelman singlehandedly shot down Australia’s plan to adopt robograding for student essays.
Perelman reviewed the Australian writing assessment and summarized how to get a high test score:
Learn a bunch of big spelling words, and throw them in. Don’t worry about meaning, but do worry about spelling them correctly. Repeat the ideas in the prompt often.
Five paragraph essay all the way. Every paragraph should be four sentences; don’t worry about repeating yourself to get there. Start the last paragraph with “In conclusion,” then repeat your thesis from graph #1. Somewhere work in a sentence with the structure “Although x (sentence), y (sentence). (Perelman’s example– Although these instructions are stupid, they will produce a high mark on the NAPLAN essay.)
Use “you” and ask questions. Use connectors like “moreover” or “however.” Start sentences with “In my opinion” or “I believe that” (not for the first or last time, Strunk and White are spinning in their graves). Repeat words and phrases often, and throw in passive voice (whirrrrr). Throw in one or two adjectives next to nouns.
For narrative essays, just steal a story from a movie or tv show– markers are explicitly instructed to ignore that they recognize a story.
And the final and most important rule– never write like this except for essay tests like the NAPLAN.
For his role in junking the Australian fascinating with robograding and helping to undermine its obsession with national testing, Perelman was honored by the New South Wales Teachers Federation as a “Champion of Public Education.”
In his acceptance speech, Perelman said:
Free public education is the cornerstone of a stable democratic and free society.
The main problem with edu-business [for profit entities in education] is that the most important products of education, such as critical thinking and analysis, are both the least tangible and the least profitable. They are expensive both in staffing and in assessment. Edu-business wants to MacDonald-ize education, make it cheap to produce and distribute, highly profitable and with little nutritive value. It wants, like Dickens’ Gradgrind, to focus on relatively unimportant facts and rules that can literally be mechanically taught and mechanically counted. Edu-business values psychometricians over practitioners, testers over teachers, reliability over validity.
Peter Greene observed:
It’s a little long for a t-shirt, but it might be worth the effort.
Valerie Strauss writes in the Washington Post about a class-action lawsuit filed against the College Board:
A class-action lawsuit has been filed in federal court on behalf of students who took online Advanced Placement tests last week and ran into technical trouble submitting their answers. It demands that the College Board score their answers instead of requiring them to retake the test in June, and provide hundreds of millions of dollars in monetary relief.
The lawsuit, dated Tuesday, says that students’ inability to submit answers was the fault of the exam creators, and it charges that the College Board engaged in a number of “illegal activities,” including breach of contract, gross negligence, misrepresentation and violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. It also seeks more than $500 million in compensatory damages as well as punitive damages.
The College Board owns the AP program, although the AP tests are created and administered by the Educational Testing Service. Both of those organizations were named as defendants in the lawsuit, which was filed in a U.S. District Court in California.
Peter Schwartz, College Board Chief risk officer and general counsel, said in a statement: “This lawsuit is a PR stunt masquerading as a legal complaint being manufactured by an opportunistic organization that prioritizes media coverage for itself. It is wrong factually and baseless legally; the College Board will vigorously and confidently defend against it, and expect to prevail.” He also said, “When the country shut down due to coronavirus, we surveyed AP students nationwide, and an overwhelming 91 percent reported a desire to take the AP Exam at the end of the course. Within weeks, we redesigned the AP Exams so that they could be taken at home. Nearly 3 million AP Exams have been taken over the first seven days. Those students who were unable to successfully submit their exam can still take a makeup and have the opportunity to earn college credit.”
The College Board said last week that it had found the problems students faced submitting answers were largely caused by outdated browsers and students’ failure to see messages announcing the end of an exam.
This is the first time that AP tests have been given online at home, a result of the shutdown of schools because of the coronavirus pandemic. The tests were previously given at school.
But the College Board said it had surveyed students and that most wanted to take the tests online, noting that the scores can factor into college admissions decisions and that students can receive college credit for high scores. The online tests, in numerous subjects, were shortened from several hours to 45 minutes.
Critics had warned that online testing is not fair to students who have no computer, access to Internet or quiet work spaces from which to study and work, or to students with disabilities who do not have appropriate accommodations — challenges the College Board acknowledged and said it tried to ameliorate. Critics also questioned the validity of the shortened exams.
The lawsuit was filed by parents on behalf of students who could not submit answers, as well as by the National Center of Fair and Open Testing, a nonprofit organization known as FairTest that works to end the misuse of standardized tests. (The lawsuit cites a post on The Answer Sheet blog with news about the problems students were facing.) “
The College Board was warned about many potential access, technology and security problems by FairTest and other groups that had documented crashes when other computerized tests were introduced,” said FairTest interim director Bob Schaeffer. “Nevertheless, the board rushed ‘untested’ AP computerized exams into the marketplace in order to preserve its largest revenue-generating program when they could no longer administer in-school tests.”
The College Board, a nonprofit organization that operates substantially like a business, said that students last week took 2.186 million AP exams in various subjects during the first week of the two-week May testing window, and that “less than 1 percent of students were unable to submit their responses.”
The College Board did not provide the exact number of students who had problems but did note in an email that some students took more than one test. That makes it impossible for the public to know exactly how many students were affected.
Most of the students who had problems found that they could not submit all or some of their answers. Many took photos or videos of their responses, but the College Board told them their responses could not be scored and that they would have to retake their exams in June.
Then, on Sunday, the College Board announced that students taking exams during this week of testing could email responses if they found they had trouble submitting. Students who took the tests last week, however, could not submit their answers for scoring and still had to retake them in June.
The lawsuit asks that the College Board accept any test answers from last week’s AP tests that can be shown to have been completed in time by time stamp, photo and email.
It charges that the College Board ignored warnings that giving AP tests online would discriminate against students with disabilities and those who did not have access to technology or the Internet at home to take the exams.
The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages of more than $500 million and “punitive damages in an amount sufficient to punish defendants” and “to deter them from engaging in wrongful conduct in the future.”
The suit was filed by Phillip A. Baker from Baker, Keener & Nahra LLP in Los Angeles and Marci Lerner Miller from Miller Advocacy Group in Newport Beach.
The charter industry lobbied to make sure that privately-managed charter schools would be eligible to apply for and receive federal coronavirus relief funds that were intended to save small businesses. An unknown number of charter schools have indeed received large federal monies from the stimulus money, despite the fact that no charter school has suffered any loss of funding due to the pandemic.
The charter industry likes to say that charter schools are public schools, and they even call themselves “public charter schools,” which is an oxymoron. Real public schools were not allowed to tap into the coronavirus relief funds for small businesses. But charter schools were eligible, which proves the point that such schools are not public schools. They are operated by private boards under contract.
More importantly, they had no need for the money. Many thousands of private businesses do have a genuine need. At least 100,000 small businesses have closed forever.
The coronavirus pandemic is emerging as an existential threat to the nation’s small businesses — despite Congress approving a historic $700 billion to support them — with the potential to further diminish the place of small companies in the American economy.
The White House and Congress have made saving small businesses a linchpin of the financial rescue, even passing a second stimulus for them late last month. But already, economists project that more than 100,000 small businesses have shut permanently since the pandemic escalated in March, according to a study by researchers at the University of Illinois, Harvard Business School, Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Their latest data suggests at least 2 percent of small businesses are gone, according to a survey conducted May 9 to 11.
The carnage has been even higher in the restaurant industry, where 3 percent of restaurant operators have gone out of business, according to the National Restaurant Association. T
earful, heartfelt announcements about small-business closures are popping up on websites and Facebook pages around the country. Analysts warn this is only the beginning of the worst wave of small-business bankruptcies and closures since the Great Depression. It’s simply not possible for small businesses to survive with no income coming in for weeks followed by reopening at half capacity, many owners say.
The charters still receive public funding. They are not at risk. But an unknown number have sought and received some of the money that was supposed to save mom-and-pop stores that have had no revenues since mid-March.
Perry Stein of the Washington Post tried to find out how many charter schools in DC had taken the money meant for failing businesses, and the charter industry was evasive.
Maybe they are embarrassed. They should be.
Stein writes:
D.C. charter schools received federal aid intended to keep nonprofits and small businesses afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, drawing criticism from public school advocates and others who say the money should be reserved for businesses hit harder by the crisis’s economic toll.
It is unclear exactly how many applied for the money. Officials across the District’s expansive charter sector — 63 operators that educate almost half of the city’s 100,000 public school students — have largely remained quiet about which schools have received help from the federal Paycheck Protection Program.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board, the city board that regulates the schools, said it doesn’t know, and the D.C. Council’s Education Committee chair said the same.
FOCUS, a leading D.C. charter advocacy organization, has been the public contact point for schools interested in applying. But its director, Anne Herr, said she also does not know. Oversight of the relief money “belongs to the federal government,” she said.
Contacted by The Washington Post, most charter operators declined to say. But some acknowledged applying — and defended the decision. “These kids are wearing the brunt of everything that goes bad in the city,” said Shawn Hardnett, founder and executive director of Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys in Southeast Washington, which received a $300,000 loan. “Everything we can do to protect the most vulnerable children in the city we are doing.” [
Wealthy private schools in the region have gotten pushback for taking the money. Top universities have, too. Some businesses, including Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, ultimately decided to return the money after public scrutiny.
Charter schools now face similar blowback. That’s because their main revenue source — per-pupil government funding — is so far unaffected by the pandemic. Meanwhile, other companies and organizations across the district have lost nearly all of their revenue, said D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who chairs the Education Committee and has questioned whether charter schools should apply.
“I think it’s really an abuse of funds,” said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “They are not losing their funding stream.”
So, the charters take the money that was supposed to save America’s small businesses, which are in desperate trouble, because…because…they can.
Valerie Jablow, parent advocate in the District of Columbia, has untangled a tangled knot of obscure real estate deals, all derived from what is supposedly public property.
It begins with a large D.C. public school building formerly known as Taft junior high school.
At 201,000 square feet, Taft is a very large, DC-owned former DCPS junior high school adjacent to a public recreation area. It was closed in 2008 and since leased to charters–first Hyde, then its successor, Perry Street Prep, which holds a lease for the entire space.
But Perry Street Prep is hardly the only school located at Taft.
Perry Street sublets a portion of the building to LAMB. Perry Street also sublets another portion of the building to the private (and wealthy) nonprofit Charter School Incubator Initiative (CSII), which was founded (per its tax return) to provide new charter schools with facilities at below market rates. And Perry Street sublets yet another portion of the building to a small private school, St. Jerome.
In turn, CSII sublets its rented portion of Taft to LAMB.
And now, LAMB is proposing to rent a portion of its subleased space to Sojourner Truth (presumably in anticipation of moving its entire school out of Taft in the next few years to a new facility in Ward 4).
That lease between LAMB and Sojourner is in the materials on the charter board website for the charter board’s February 2020 meeting.
But the posted lease is missing exhibits A, B, and C. In their place are blank pages.
Jablow works on the old-fashioned assumption that the public has a right to know what is being done with its money and its public facilities.
The D.C. officials have different ideas. To whom are they accountable as they ransack and dispose of the public trust?
Jablow asks the money question:
Why is our city seemingly not ensuring that the greatest monetary benefit from subletting and leasing a publicly owned building goes directly to the public?
Diane Ravitch's blog 