Archives for category: Education Industry
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Jan Resseger: The Tragedy of “Portfolio Districts”

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2019 //
19

Jan Resseger writes here about the damage that “portfolio districts” do to students, schools, and communities. The original concept for “portfolio districts” was developed by Paul Hill of the Gates-funded Center for Reinventing Public Educatuon at the University of Washington. The fundamental idea was that the school board would act like a stock portfolio manager, closing low-performing schools, replacing them with charter schools, keeping open the schools with high test scores. Students would choose where to go to school. The concept was adopted by many districts as the latest thing, and many beloved neighborhood schools serving black and brown communities were shuttered. If their replacement got low scores, it was also closed. The students were collateral damage.

She writes:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein launched this scheme in New York City by creating district-wide school choice, breaking up large comprehensive high schools into small schools with curricular specialties, encouraging the opening of a large number of charter schools, co-locating many schools—small specialty public schools along with charter schools—into the same buildings.  Those running the school district would consider all of these schools of choice as if they were investments in a stock portfolio. The district would hold on to the successful investments and phase out those whose test scores were low or which families didn’t choose.

Portfolio school reform has created collateral damage across the school districts which have experimented with the idea. After the Chicago Public Schools, another district managed by portfolio school reform theory, closed 50 schools at the end of the 2013 school year, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, and separately a University of Chicago sociologist, Eve Ewing tracked widespread community grieving when neighborhoods lost the public school institutions that had anchored their neighborhoods.

But there have been other kinds of collateral damage beyond the tragedy of school closures. In a new piece for the NY Times, Eliza Shapiro documents how district-wide school choice in New York City has contributed to inequity along with racial and segregation.

One problem is inequitable access to information. Parents who can afford to pay for consultants and who have the skills and position to understand how to navigate the system are able to privilege their own children with access to the schools widely thought to be desirable.  Shapiro explains: “There is a trick to getting to the front of the lines that clog sidewalks outside New York City’s top public high schools each fall. Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours. On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour. Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.”

Resseger adds:

My own children graduated from a racially and economically diverse public high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.  Articles like Shapiro’s cause me to appreciate our family’s privilege in a way I had never really previously considered.  From the time they entered Kindergarten, our children knew they would someday go to the big high school at the corner of Cedar and Lee.  At a week-long summer music camp in our school district, middle school students play side-by-side with some of the members of the high school band and orchestra. Our daughter learned to know the high school tennis coach when he worked with younger students in the city recreation program. And the summer before his high school freshman year, our son, knowing that the high school cross country team worked out in a city park during August, went to the park and asked the coach if he could start working out with the team. High school for our children was a natural, predictable, and exciting transition. How lucky we were.

 

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Portfolio District, School Choice

News: Big REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) Exits the Charter Real Estate Sector

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2019 //
3

Carol Burris writes about the latest news from the charter industry. This is the same company that Valerie Strauss wrote about, called “Entertainment Properties Trust.” It’s CEO, Dennis Brain, told an interviewer that charter schools were a sound investment, had long waiting lists, and were guaranteed government revenues.

But that rosy picture has dimmed. The long waiting lists are fictional. Charters are likely to close down suddenly. In some states, charter enrollment is declining. The REIT lost confidence in the future of charter schools and liquidated its charter school holdings.

Burris writes:

EPR Properties (NYSE:EPR) is a  triple net lease real estate investment trust (REIT). What that means is that it buys properties and then rents them with the tenant picking up costs like insurance, improvements, and all utilities. Therefore, every dollar EPR makes off the lease is profit. 

EPR used to love the charter sector. It would buy buildings and then rent them to charter schools. In 2017 it had 66 charter schools in its portfolio. By 2018, that number dropped to 60. 
 
EPR had a special relationship with Imagine Charter Schools. School House Finance, Imagine’s related organization, would buy the property. It would sell it to EPR. EPR would lease it back to School House, which would then lease it to one of Imagine’s charter schools at very high rates. 
 
EPR also had a special relationship with the for-profit charter management firm CSMI. It would buy their charter school’s buildings and then lease them to the schools. 

One of the CSMI schools wasCamden Community Charter School.  CSMI paid $300,000 to buy the land from the Camden Redevelopment Agency—the agency responsible for redevelopment efforts in the city. On April 9, 2013 CSMI sold the property to Education Capital Solutions LLC for $500,000, netting CSMI a two-week $200,000 profit.

Education Capital Solutions is the wholly owned subsidiary of Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR).  

In 2016 the school’s “operating lease” was $1,711,368. The next year it jumped to $1,871,506, which represents 17 percent of all school revenues. 

The school folded. But another charter came into the building for which the company could collect rent. 

Now EPR is getting out of the charter school business. It realized it was just too unstable. They have sold off their buildings to Rosemawr Management, LLC.

“Management cited competitive financing alternatives, which induced increasing earnings volatility of the charter school portfolio as the primary reason to sell it.  Additionally, the sell-off will improve overall rent coverage from 1.89x to 1.94x. ” 
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/636862/epr-properties-epr-disposes-charter-school-assets-for-454m
Where is EPR going? It is going to start buying up casinos instead. 
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Tennessee: “Achievement School District” Continues to Show Very Low Test Scores

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
11

Back in 2012, Tennessee introduced its “Achievement School District” and hired YES Prep charter founder Chris Barbic to run it. The ASD was funded with $100 million from the state’s Race to the Top grant. Barbic said he would take the state’s lowest-performing public schools, hand them off to charter operators, and catapult them into the top 25% in the state within five years. Year after year, the ASD showed no improvement. After four years, Barbic had a heart attack and left (he went to work for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation). The ASD never reached its lofty goals.

The latest report on the ASD continues to reflect the failure of the state takeover.

Caroline Bauman wrote in Chalkbeat about the now familiar poor results as the school semester started:

At a make-or-break moment for Tennessee’s turnaround school district, its 30 schools have collectively delivered another round of low test scores.

Only 3.4% of high schoolers in the Achievement School District met the state’s proficiency standards on this year’s math and English exams, while 12.6% of elementary students reached that benchmark, according to data released by the state education department Thursday.

The news is not surprising: The Achievement School District oversees 30 of the state’s lowest-performing schools, the majority of which are in Memphis.

Still, the scores deliver another blow to the credibility of the turnaround effort once heralded as a national exemplar. This year, the district — whose low-performing schools are taken over by charter school organizations tasked with improving them — lost its third leader, had its poor performance analyzed by an academic study, and came under scrutiny from the state’s new education chief. Commissioner Penny Schwinn says she plans to announce major changes to the district soon.

Those changes will target a district where only a handful of students meet the state’s standards in reading and math.

Only 7.5% of the achievement district’s elementary and middle school students scored on grade level in English, down slightly from last year. In math, 12% of students scored at grade level or higher, which represented an increase. Both remain well below state averages.

In the district’s five high schools, scores in Algebra I, Geometry, and English rose but remained very low, while U.S. History scores slightly dipped.

About 3% of high schoolers in Algebra 1 and 4% in English 1 scored on grade level. (Two of the five high schools are alternative schools that serve students who have already fallen behind in high school).

Open the link to see the comparisons between the ASD and the state.

It is sad that other states, such as Nevada and North Carolina, created state-takeover districts modeled on Tennessee’s ASD without waiting to see the results.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Tennessee

Steven Singer: White Billionaires Should Not Buy the Charter Debate

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
9

Teacher Steven Singer writes here about the protest at an Elizabeth Warren debate in Atlanta. 

He notes that a reporter for The Intercept, Ryan Grim, attended the rally and wrote that the protestors were funded by the Waltons, who have never shown any support for civil rights issues and are actively hostile to unions, which lift low-income workers out of poverty.

He also quotes Intercept journalist Rachel Cohen, who wondered why charter parents would object to higher transparency standards.

Singer points out that the billionaire Waltons have used their money to advance for their policy goals.

Carol Burris and Kevin Welner wrote in another article that Warren’s plan would mean additional funding for both public schools and charter schools without closing any charter schools. The Waltons object to her wealth tax proposal, as well as her promise to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, meant for startups but used now by Betsy DeVos to fund big corporate charter chains like KIPP, IDEA, and Success Academy..

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Walton Foundation

California Democratic Party: Charters Should Have Elected Boards

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
6

Here is an excellent idea from the California Democratic Party: Charter schools should be governed by elected boards, just like real public schools.

California is a bellwether for the nation. This strong stance shows that teachers are reclaiming their profession from billionaires and hedge fund managers.

Edsource reports:

Taking aim at the majority of charter schools in the state, the California Democratic Party has included language in its platform declaring that these schools should be overseen by publicly elected boards, in contrast to the self-appointed boards that run most of them.

The new language, adopted at the state party’s annual convention in Long Beach over the weekend, was promoted by the 120,000-member California Federation of Teachers and strengthens an already strongly worded section of the California Democratic Party’s platform on charter schools.

It is especially significant because it comes from a state with by far the largest number of charter schools in the nation, enrolling just over 10 percent of all the state’s public school students. It also underscored the ongoing divisions within the party over charter schools, which have become about one of the most contentious issues on the nation’s education reform agenda.

“We need to keep certain services public, and education is one of them,” said California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas.

The party platform includes this new language:

CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY PLATFORM

Urges “support for those charter schools that are managed by public and elected boards, not for profit, transparent in governance, have equitable admissions, adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality, and supplement rather than supplant existing public education program.” — Adopted by California Democratic Party, November 2019

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: After Multiple Failures, Why Doesn’t the Gates Foundation Leave K-12 Schools Alone?

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
31

Mercedes Schneider reviews the Gates Foundation’s long and costly list of failed interventions into K-12 schools and points out, quoting the words of the Foundation, that it has never admitted any failure and never apologized.

Gates paid for the interventions but the real cost was borne by teachers and public schools.

He tried breaking up big schools into small schools, convinced as he was that big schools are ineffective, but when the small schools didn’t produce higher test scores, he abandoned that idea.

He prodded Arne Duncan to include the untested of evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, and he launched his own experiments in seven districts and charter chains. That too was a flop.

He poured uncounted millions into boosting the charter industry, despite the fact that charters do not get different results from public schools when they enroll the same students.

He spent millions promoting a charter law in his home state of Washington, which passed on the fourth state referendum only after he overwhelmed the opposition by spending 16 times as much as they did; the charters he fought so hard for have struggled to get enough enrollment to stay open (four of the original dozen have already folded), and a CREDO evaluation concluded that they don’t get different results than public schools in the state.

Gates provided almost all the funding necessary for the Common Core State Standards, which required districts and states to spend billions of dollars on new tests, new textbooks, new software, new teacher training, new everything.

When the backlash grew against the Common Core, Gates simply didn’t understand it, since he compares education to an electric plug with standard current into which all possible appliances can be plugged in and get power.

This year, the Gates Foundation awarded 476 grants, but only seven went to K-12, mostly to promote charter schools, a passion he shares with the rightwing Walton Foundation and Betsy DeVos and her foundations.

Read the Gates Foundation’s statement that Mercedes includes in her post. You will see that the foundation acknowledges no failures, no errors, no miscalculations. It doesn’t even own its almost total responsibility for CC, nor for its disastrous reception by teachers and the public.

The legacy of Bill Gates: Teachers and principals who were fired based on a phony measure of their “effectiveness.” Schools in black and brown communities closed because of their test scores. A demoralization of teachers, and a dramatic decline in the number of people entering the profession. A national teacher shortage. The elevation of standardized testing as both the means and the ends of all education (tests that were never used in the schools he and his own children attended).

Here are a few things that Bill Gates NEVER funded or fought for: class size reduction; higher salaries for teachers; a nurse and social worker and librarian in every school; higher taxes to support public schools.

Mercedes concludes:

It may be too much to expect Bill Gates to completely exit K12 education. After all, we have been his hobby for years.

But the fewer Gates dollars, the smaller the petri dish.

Unfortunately the lingering effects of his failed experiments continue to ruin schools, such as the value-added measurement of teachers by test scores, still written into law in many states; the Common Core persists, often under a different name to disguise it; and of course charter schools continue to drain students and resources from underfunded public schools.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

New Orleans: Nearly Half of the District’s Charter Schools Receive a D or F from State

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
17

Ouch!

New Orleans is the nation’s first all-charter district.

New Orleans is supposed to be the shining star of the charter movement, proving the value of school choice and market-based reforms, closing schools and replacing them with new schools, then closing failing schools, ad infinitum.

But newly released state grades reveal that nearly half of the district’s charter schools (49%) received a grade of D or F, meaning failing or near failing.

Della Hasselle writes in the New Orleans Advocate:

The release of the state’s closely watched school performance scores earlier this month offered an overall update on New Orleans schools that seemed benign enough: A slight increase in overall student performance meant another C grade for the district.

But a closer look reveals a startling fact. A whopping 35 of the 72 schools in the all-charter district scored a D or F, meaning nearly half of local public schools were considered failing, or close to it, in the school year ending in 2019. Since then, six of the 35 have closed.

While New Orleans has long been home to struggling schools, the data released this month are concerning. There was an increase of nearly 11% percentage points in the number of schools that received the state’s lowest grades from the 2017-18 school year to 2018-19.

Someone, please let Betsy DeVos know.

Let Cory Booker and Democrats for Education Reform know.

Let Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad know.

Let the Mind Trust and City Fund know.

Tell the Walton Foundation, which has poured over $1 billion into charter school proliferation.

Wow. Some model for the nation to follow!

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Will Pinkston: Time for School Districts To Set Standards for Charter Applications, not the Charter Industry’s Lobbyists

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
27

Will Pinkston, who served on the elected school board of the Metro Nashville school district, writes here that school districts should not outsource their charter application process to the charter industry’s lobbyists.

The timing is right because the Koch Network has targeted four states for unlimited charter school proliferation: Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.

Up until now, many school districts are using the guidelines and standards developed by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which wants minimal oversight of charter schools.

But NACSA, Pinkston notes, is not a neutral arbiter, but an organization dedicated to the growth and expansion of the charter industry.

Asking NACSA for advice about how to grant charters is akin to asking the Tobacco Industry Association whether cigarettes are good or bad for your health.

Many districts, Pinkston notes, are having budget problems because of the expansion of charters.

He advises:

Strengthening public school districts’ charter application reviews is a logical first step toward disrupting the school privatization movement…

Charter application review practices vary greatly between states and local school districts — and charter operators over the years have capitalized on this confusion in the field to push into existence scores of unneeded and unwanted charters.

Many districts have fallen into the trap of letting the charter sector exert undue influence on their review process. The most egregious example: For more than a decade, an innocuously named Chicago-based nonprofit organization — the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) — has led the national charter sector’s campaign to set ground rules for how K-12 public school districts should review charter applications…

In fact, NACSA is a thinly veiled charter advocacy group largely funded by the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — the two biggest pro-charter philanthropies in the U.S. Moreover, NACSA’s board and staff is exclusively populated with charter school advocates. According to an Internal Revenue Service filing, NACSA’s mission is simple: “Promote establishment” of charter schools.

With a multi-million-dollar annual budget, NACSA carries out its mission through a range of activities, including: Hosting conferences and workshops to train public school district employees on implementing pro-charter review standards; awarding grants to sway districts’ opinions on charters; and lobbying state policymakers to advance a pro-charter agenda in legislatures and statehouses…

The carefully branded name of NACSA’s standards assumes that charter school “authorizing” will happen. But districts’ default position should be that authorizing may happen — or not.

NACSA describes its standards as “a rich base of knowledge built on deep experience, study, deliberation, and refinement that reflects collective insights on best practices among authorizers of all types and portfolio sizes across the country.” But a closer examination reveals that NACSA’s standards are just a finely manicured PR product devised by the charter sector, for the charter sector.

Pinkston urges districts to take control of the charter authorizing process and consider such factors as:

Audits (they should be conducted by independent auditors, not self-audits);

Class size (NACSA is silent on this but district authorizers should not be);

Facilities and transportation (Districts should require charter applicants to submit detailed transportation plans that mirror best practices among districts. Moreover, districts should require charter applicants to submit robust facility plans — including the address of the proposed charter location, development or redevelopment plans, letters of commitment by funders or financial institutions, and other documentation that would be expected before any district opens a new school);

Licensed teachers (NACSA is silent, but districts should not be);

Salaries and benefits (NACSA is silent, but districts should not be).

As Pinkston says, it is up to districts to decide whether to award charters and to set conditions. They should not ask the charter lobbyists how to do it.

 

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

Jan Resseger: Why I Will Not Vote for Michael Bloomberg for President

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2019 //
7

When Jan Resseger writes, she does so with authority and clarity.

In this essay, she explains why she will not vote for Michael Bloomberg, based on his record of disrespecting educators in New York City when he was mayor. Bloomberg as mayor employed all the same principles as No Child Left Behind: testing, accountability, school closings, charter schools, school choice, all based on “the business model.”

She writes:

Michael Bloomberg does have a long education record. Bloomberg served as New York City’s mayor from January of 2002 until December of 2013. In 2002, to accommodate his education agenda, Bloomberg got the state legislature to create mayoral governance of NYC’s public schools. In this role, Michael Bloomberg and his appointed schools chancellor, Joel Klein were among the fathers of what has become a national wave of corporate, accountability-based school reform. Bloomberg is a businessman, and Joel Klein was a very successful attorney. Neither had any experience as an educator. They took aggressive steps to run the NYC school district, with 1.1 million students, like a business. Their innovations included district-wide school choice, rapid expansion of charter schools, co-location of a bunch of small charter and traditional schools into what used to be comprehensive high schools, the phase out and closure of low-scoring schools, evaluation of schools by high stakes standardized test scores, the assignment of letter grades to schools based on their test scores, and a sort of merit pay bonus plan for teachers.

In her 2018 book, After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor, the New York business journalist and journalism professor, comments on Bloomberg’s educational experiment: “The Bloomberg administration embraced the full panoply of education-reform remedies. It worshiped at the altar of standardized tests and all manner of quantitative analysis. The Bloomberg administration also had a penchant for reorganizations that seemed to create more disruption than continuous improvement among its 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools.” ( After the Education Wars, p. 75)

Gabor describes Bloomberg’s expansion of charter schools: “Harlem, in particular, has become the center of an unintentional educational experiment—one that has been replicated in neighborhoods and cities around the country.  During the Bloomberg years, when close to a quarter of students in the area were enrolled in charter schools, segregation increased, as did sizable across-the-board demographic disparities among the students who attended each type of school. An analysis of Bloomberg-era education department data revealed that public open-enrollment elementary and middle schools have double—and several have triple—the proportion of special needs kids of nearby charter schools. The children in New York’s traditional public schools are much poorer than their counterparts in charter schools. And public schools have far higher numbers of English language learners… In backing charter schools Bloomberg and other advocates pointed to one clear benefit: charters, it was widely accepted, would increase standardized test scores. However, years of studies showed little difference between the test-score performance of students in charter schools and those in public schools.” After the Education Wars, p. 95)

And there is more. Open the link and read it to understand why the “business model” did not work.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Testing

Jeff Bryant: Why Teachers Are Striking for More Than Wages, as per Oakland

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2019 //
2

Jeff Bryant reports here about the recent strike in Oakland. Teachers won concessions from the school board but they were fighting for much more than higher pay. Like their peers in Chicago and other districts, they were striking to fend off the Modern Disruption/Corporate Reform Narrative of failing schools, closing schools, and privatization.

Even after the strike ends, the struggle continues.

He writes:

Teachers and public school advocates in Oakland and elsewhere are showing that strikes don’t end systemic forces undermining public education as much as they signal the next phase in the struggle.

When their recent strike concluded, Oakland teachers had won a salary increase and bonus, more school support staff, a pause on school closures and consolidations, and a resolution from the board president to call on the state to stop the growth of charter schools in the city.

While those were significant accomplishments, the core problem remaining is that policy leaders in the city continue to take actions that “hurt students,” Oakland Education Association president Keith Brown told me in a phone conversation.

“Students continue to experience pain and trauma in our schools due to lack of resources, over-policing, and continuing threats of school closures,” Brown said.

Despite gains from the recent strike, teachers and public education advocates have continued to show up at school board meetings to press their cause.

The coalition recently formed the group Oakland Is Not for Sale, which seeks to extend the moratorium on school closures and consolidations to summer 2022, institute financial transparency in the district, end the district’s policy of expanding charter schools, and redirect money for school police and planned construction of a probation camp for juveniles to pay for a rollout of restorative discipline practices in schools.

The board’s recent announcement to close higher-performing Kaiser Elementary and merge the students and teachers into an under-enrolled and struggling Sankofa Academy raised yet more agitation in the community, especially when news emerged that students from Kaiser would receive an “opportunity ticket” giving them priority to attend schools ahead of neighborhood students not already enrolled in those schools. In other words, the district’s rationale for merging the two campuses for the sake of fiscal efficiency was being undermined by its own proposal to make transferring to Sankofa optional and, thus—as Zach Norris, a parent leader of Kaiser parents resisting the move, told California-based news outlet EdSource—keep Sankofa under-enrolled and thereby also an eventual target for closure.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Oakland, Privatization
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