Archives for category: Education Industry
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Philadelphia: Charter School Excludes Student Because She Is ADHD

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2019 //
6

 

It is illegal for public schools to refuse admission to students with disabilities.

A charter school in Philadelphia admitted a six-year-old, then rejected her when the parent told the school the child had special needs.

 

An education advocacy group sued a Philadelphia charter school on Thursday, alleging it barred a 6-year-old from enrolling after learning she required services for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder.

The Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter School in July accepted the girl for first grade this fall, according to the lawsuit brought by the Education Law Center. But when she and her mother, Georgette Hand, went to the school later that month with her documents, Veronica Joyner, the school’s founder and chief administrative officer, said she could not enroll the child because of her special needs.

Joyner told Hand the school “did not have the class or teacher to provide the services required” by the girl’s Individualized Education Plan, which specifies how schools must meet her needs, according to the lawsuit filed in Common Pleas Court Thursday. The suit seeks to have the girl immediately enrolled at the charter and awarded “compensatory education services” for the time she was excluded from the school. It also asks the court to order the school to include students with disabilities, and to contract with a provider to train staff on inclusion and diversity.

Margie Wakelin, a staff attorney for the Education Law Center, called the case “explicit” discrimination.

Charter schools say they are “public schools,” but they act like private schools.

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

Massachusetts: Waltons Spend Millions to Block New Funding for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2019 //
43

 

Maurice Cunningham, a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, is renowned for his practice of “following the money” in Massachusetts. He naturally keeps encountering the Walton money that flows generously to torpedo public spending for public schools in Massachusetts. Maurice Cunningham is one of the heroes in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH.

In this post, he identifies the malign tentacles of Walton money that is currently engaged in trying to block legislation to increase the funding of public schools in the Bay State.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and Cunningham provides the scorecard. The name of the organization is less important than the source of the money. If you spot a group called Latinos for Education, remember they are a Walton front.

When you think of the name Walton, think of a family that has accumulated over $150 billion but abhors unions, detests the minimum wage, and likes to keep their workers underpaid and tightly controlled. And think of a family that is intent on destroying the public schools that 85% of American children attend. How would you describe them? Avaricious. Greedy. Selfish.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Washington State: Another Charter School Closes Due to Dwindling Enrollment

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2019 //
6

 

Do you remember the prolonged battle over charter schools in Washington State? There were four referenda in the state, starting in the late 1990s, and the pro-charter forces lost the first three. On the fourth try, in 2012, Bill Gates and his friends bundled millions of dollars to buy the election. They outspent civil rights groups, PTAs, and teacher associations by a margin of 16 to 1. Sixteen to one!

And Gates and friends won the election by about 1% of the vote. Then the losing side appealed to the state courts to block charter funding, which would divert money from the state’s underfunded public schools. The State Supreme Court ruled that charter schools are not “common schools,” as defined in the state constitution, because their boards are not elected. Thus, charters are not eligible to take money from the public school, fund.

Gates and friends then waged a campaign to defeat the Supreme Court judges who ruled against them, but they were re-elected despite the money thrown into the coffers of the candidates who opposed them.

Gates then put pressure on the Legislature to fund his charters. After much lobbying, the Legislature gave lottery money to sustain the billionaire’s charters (surely, you don’t expect Bill Gates to fund them himself!)

Governor Jay Inslee decided bravely not to take a stand. He neither signed nor vetoed the law diverting lottery money to support charter schools, and the law was enacted.

Gates spent millions more encouraging charters to open.

(This story, with all the details, the data, and the footnotes, is included in my new book, SLAYING GOLIATH, which will be published on January 21, 2020.)

However, it turns out that there is not a lot of demand for charters. Three closed this year due to low enrollments, which made them financially unsound.

Just this week, another charter announced that it was closing, due to dwindling enrollments and staff flight.

The Charter was approved in 2018, opened in August 2019, and is now closing.

Ashé Preparatory Academy welcomed its inaugural class of 140 students in kindergarten, first, second and sixth grades when it opened in August. Within four years, the school hoped to grow to more than 400 studentsacross grades K-8.

But within a month of opening, several staff quit or stopped showing up to work. And by Oct. 4, the day the school’s oversight board voted unanimously to close the school, enrollment had been sliced in half. Ashé’s last day of classes was Friday…

But this fall, the school’s ambitious mission was quickly overshadowed by practical problems in the classrooms. Ashé (pronounced ah-SHAY) relied on an “inclusive” classroom model, which means that students with special needs and those with advanced abilities worked alongside their peers. Teaching all levels of students can be tough for any teacher, Sullivan said, but this was particularly true for staff new to the profession.

About six of the school’s nine teachers and paraprofessionals were new, she said. In hindsight, she added, she should have hired a full-time instructional coach to aid junior staff members. The school’s principal and several staff could not be reached for comment.

On Sept. 24, the school’s oversight board held an emergency meeting after three staff resigned or stopped coming to work, meeting minutes suggest. One option the board discussed: Stop serving sixth graders.

The board convened again three days later; at that meeting, staff pleaded for more help. A first-grade teacher asked for more professional coaching, and a sixth-grade paraeducator remarked that similar calls by sixth-grade staff had gone unanswered.

Then more staff resigned and students left, too. By Oct. 1, just 90 students were enrolled, according to board-meeting minutes. And by Oct. 4, enrollment sank to 70 students.

Charter schools in Washington are publicly funded, but privately run. Sullivan said Ashé raised close to $1 million in grants and was also eligible for state funding based on the number of students enrolled. Because so many students left, the school was expected to run a $700,000 deficit this year.

The fledgling charter-school movement in Washington has grown in fits and starts. Nine are still operating, and several have plans to open over the next few years. This month, a state charter-schools nonprofit won nearly $20 million from the federal government to help new charters get off the ground. But three charters have closed this year — and with the closure of Ashé, charter-school advocates and officials say they intend to take a hard look at what went wrong.

Good old Betsy DeVos to the rescue, giving $20 million in federal funds to open new charters in a state where there is little demand for charters.

One other interesting side note: CREDO analyzed charter performance in Washington State based on three years of data and determined that there was no difference overall between charter schools and public schools.

The findings of this study show that on average, charter students in Washington State experience annual growth in reading and math that is on par with the educational gains of their matched peers who enroll in the traditional public schools (TPS) the charter school students would otherwise have attended.

Question: If both sectors get about the same results, why did Bill Gates spend millions of dollars to open a privately managed sector? Was it sheer vanity?

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Washington State

Valerie Jablow: Teacher Attrition in D.C. Reaches Crisis Level

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2019 //
9

Since 2007, when the flamboyant Disrupter Michelle Rhee took charge of the schools of D.C. with an unlimited grant of power—no checks, no balances, no constraints—the cheerleaders for Disruption (aka “Reform”) have made bold claims about the D.C. “miracle.” This despite a major cheating scandal that Rhee swept under the rug and despite a graduation rate scandal that followed a nonsensical, false  claim by a high school that 100% of its students graduated.

Now this.

Blogger Valerie Jablow reports that the D.C. public schools face a major crisis of teacher attrition. 

In the wake of years of testimony about horrific treatment of DC teachers, SBOE last year commissioned a study by DC schools expert Mary Levy, which showed terrible attrition of teachers at our publicly funded schools, dwarfing attrition rates nationally.

An update to that 2018 study was just made available by SBOE and will be discussed at the meeting this week.

The update shows that while DCPS teacher and principal attrition rates have dropped slightly recently, they remain very high, with 70% of teachers leaving entirely by the 5-year mark (p. 32). Retention rates for DC’s charter schools are similar to those at DCPS–with the caveat that not only are they self-reported, but they are also not as complete and likely contain errors.

Perhaps the most stunning data point is that more than half of DCPS teachers leaving after 6 years are highly rated (p. 24). This suggests that the exodus of teachers from DC’s publicly funded schools is not merely a matter of weeding out poor performers (as DCPS’s response after p. 70 of this report suggests). Rather, it gives data credence to the terrifying possibility that good teachers are being relentlessly harassed until they give up and leave.

Sadly, that conclusion is the only one that makes sense to me, given that most of my kids’ teachers in my 14 years as a DCPS parent have left their schools–with only a few retiring after many years of service. Most of my kids’ teachers were both competent and caring. Perhaps not coincidentally, they almost always also lacked basic supplies that they ended up buying with their own money; were pressured to teach to tests that would be the basis of their and their principals’ evaluations; and feared reprisal for saying any of that.

(I’m hardly alone in that observation–read some teacher testimony for the SBOE meeting here, including that of a special education teacher, who notes that overwork with caseloads; lack of supplies; and increased class sizes for kids with disabilities are recurring factors at her school that directly lead to teacher burnout.)

In other words, high teacher attrition in DC’s publicly funded schools isn’t a bug but a feature.

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Data, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Shortage

Charter Advocates Outraged by Warren K-12 Plan

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2019 //
44

Politico Morning Education reports that charter advocates are furious in response to Warren’s K-12 education plan , especially her intention to cut off federal funding for charters. They are especially frustrated because she is not accepting corporate donations for her campaign, and they can’t buy her support.

CHARTER ADVOCATES BLAST WARREN’S PLAN: While drawing praise from teachers unions, Warren’s hard-line approach to charter schools in a new K-12 plan is under fire from a Democratic group that says her stance is “out of touch” with voters and will hinder opportunities for black and brown students.

— The plan, which would cost some $800 billion over 10 years, would ban for-profit charter schools, end the main source of federal funding for all types of charter schools, and end federal funding for their expansion.

— “While we agree with the Senator that for-profit charters should be banned and that public charter schools should be held to high standards, limiting high-quality options that have been proven to increase equity within the public school system is the wrong plan for Democrats,” said Shavar Jeffries, Democrats for Education Reform’s national president, in a statement

In case anyone from Politico reads this, the Network for Public Education isnot funded by unions and is not a union front. DFER is funded by Wall Street and should be identified as such.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

New Hampshire: Democrats Block GOP Effort to Gut Local Control

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2019 //
0

 

New Hampshire’s Republican Governor, Chris Sununu (his father John Sununu was Chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush), appointed a man who homeschooled his children to be State Commissioner of Education. Commissioner Frank Edelblut has dedicated his time in office to undermining public schools. His big idea is called “Learn Everywhere,” which would allow the State Board of education to allow graduation credits for anything they wished, whether it was for-profit, or commercial, or lessons with Miss Sally, or anything else. Local school boards now have that authority, and they rightly complained that Learn Anywhere infringed on their realm.

Edelblut wants to put public schools out of business by allowing anything and everything to count for credit.

He is the Betsy DeVos of New Hampshire.

But Democrats in the legislature threw a big obstacle in front of Edelblut’s plan.

Lawmakers on New Hampshire’s legislative rules committee voted Thursday to reject the proposed “Learn Everywhere” program from the state’s Department of Education, in the latest blow to a months-long effort by Commissioner Frank Edelblut. 

In a 6-4 vote led by Democrats on party lines, members of the Joint Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules voted to issue a final objection to the proposed rule change. 

But the action doesn’t kill the program for good. Under state law, the Department of Education can proceed with the rules over the objections of lawmakers. Doing that, though, would be risky. The department would assume all liability in the case of legal action, according to lawyers for the state’s Office of Legislative Services on Thursday.

If the citizens of NewHampshire want to save their public schools and prevent massive fraud with their tax monies, they have to replace Governor Sununu when he runs again and insist that the new governor put an educator in charge of the State Education Department.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Hampshire, Privatization, School Choice

North Carolina: Leaders of Charter Chain Disappear into Thin Air

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2019 //
5

 

A few years ago, Oregon businessman John Bryan gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to make sure that the state had a welcome mat for charter schools. He coincidentally opened 17 charter schools across the state, under the aegis of a management corporation called TeamCFA. He also pushed the legislature to create an “Opportunity School District,” modeled on Tennessee’s failed Achievement SchoolDistrict, which would gather the state’s lowest scoring districts and give them to a charter operator. By happenstance or design, Bryan’s TeamCFA received the contract to run the district. Districts fought hard to prevent the state from taking over their schools, and eventually only one school was sucked in. The first evaluation of the OSD showed that its one school did not improve, and the district had a revolving door of superintendents and principals.

TeamCFA runs 17 charters with 11,000 students in North Carolina and another four in Arizona.

When a reporter at the Raleigh News & Observer tried to find out who was in charge, no one answered the phones or returned his messages.

The reporter did reach a board member.

“I want to clear up one misconception,” C. Bradley Miller, a member of TeamCFA’s board of directors, said in an email Friday to The News & Observer. “TeamCFA Foundation is not closing. We remain committed to supporting schools and their students and helping them achieve academic excellence.”

Miller said staff members still work at TeamCFA, but he didn’t provide any details. No one answered the phone at TeamCFA’s headquarters on a recent weekday and a voice mail from The News & Observer wasn’t returned.

The staff directory, email and telephone contact information on TeamCFA’s website was gone Monday afternoon.

Staff members who left and were contacted by The N&O would not say why they left.

Amid the uncertainty, two new schools that opened in August — Bonnie Cone Classical Academy in Huntersville and Community Public Charter School in Stanley — no longer plan to have TeamCFA run their day-to-day operations.

They just picked up and left without so much as a “by your leave.” It’s an innovative way to supply high-quality seats and academic excellence.

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article235919992.html#storylink=cpy

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, North Carolina, Privatization

Kentucky: Don’t Be Fooled! Charters and Vouchers Harm Children.

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2019 //
3

 

Rev. Sharon Felton, coordinator of Pastors for Kentucky Children, warns parents and other members of the public not to be fooled by the rhetoric. Charters, vouchers, and tax credits are not good for children, and they drain resources from the public schools that educate most children.

She writes:

Educating our children is the most important thing we do in the commonwealth. Educating all of our children no matter their family’s economic status, their address, the color of their skin, is so critical to our society and our future that our constitution requires it!

Section 183 of the Kentucky Constitution states, “The General Assembly shall, by appropriate legislation, provide for an efficient system of common schools throughout the State.”

People are pouring money and rhetoric into our state to convince us all that privatization, school choice, scholarship tax credits (vouchers), and charter schools are the answer to all our public school issues. What they are NOT telling us is that these programs often tend to harm students, public schools, families and our communities…

It is time we tell the privatizers no, once and for all. Our children are not commodities, available for the wealthy and corporations to profit…

Every time some high-dollar lobby group creates some new scheme to take money out of public schools, scholarship tax credits being the latest example, we take money away from the 648,369 children in public schools and make the job that much harder. We do not need to fund more than one educational system.

We do not need to give wealthy people tax breaks for donating to the private school of their choice. Instead, imagine the return if we invested everything we could into the great school system we already have going. Imagine how all our students would flourish if we provided for their teachers.

Imagine the future of our commonwealth with a fully funded public school system where teachers were paid what they deserve and had the resources to do their jobs and our children were afforded the highest quality education in the country. We will make this a reality when we choose to invest in our children and their public schools.

Join Pastors for Kentucky Children as we advocate for all of Kentucky’s children and our public schools.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Kentucky, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Class Size Matters: The Cost to New York City of Paying Rent for Charter School Facilities

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2019 //
5

 

Leonie Haimson and her colleagues Patrick Nevada and Emily Carrazana of Class Size Matters released a report on the cost that New York City pays for charter school facilities, even for richly endowed charters like Success Academy. The city is now spending more than $100 million a year to pay the rent for charters. This includes almost $15 million a year paying for rent where the charter or its management organization is the landlord!

In 2014, Governor Andrew Cuomo advanced legislation that required the City to pay the rent for charter schools in private buildings when the city was unable to provide suitable space in public school buildings. At the time, he declared himself the champion of charter schools, which helped him raise campaign funds on Wall Street. Charter students are 4% of the state’s students, and 10% in the City.

Here is the press release:

On Monday, October 21, Class Size Matters released a new report revealing how the NYC Department of Education has spent more than $377 million on charter school facility costs from FY 2014 to FY 2019.  This amount includes both matching funds for facility upgrades for public schools, co-located with charter schools that spent more than $5000 for this purpose, and on paying the rent for new and expanding charter schools in private space. Nearly $15 million of that total since FY 2015 was spent by DOE to help charter schools to help pay for their space, even though their buildings are owned by their Charter Management Organization, affiliated foundation or LLC.

In FY 2019, DOE spent about $25 million last year on matching funds to public schools co-located with charter schools.  Yet between FY 2014 and FY 2019, more than $22 million in charter school expenditures on facility upgrades were not matched in 175 public schools that shared their buildings, according to spreadsheets provided by DOE, in apparent contradiction to astate law passed in 2010. By FY 2019, only one third of co-located DOE schools received their full complement of matching funds.  

The two schools which experienced the largest shortfalls were both District 75 schools that serve students with serious disabilities: Mickey Mantle School (M811), located in two sites in Harlem, which lacked $1.5 million, and P.S 368 (K368), located  in two sites in Brooklyn, which lacked about $1.2 million. All four sites are co-located with different branches of the Success Academy Charter schools.

Mindy Rosier is the UFT chapter delegate from Mickey Mantle School, which enrolls students with multiple disabilities, including autism, emotional/behavioral difficulties and/or significant language and communication disorders.  As Mindy pointed out, “The $1.5 million in matching funds for facility upgrades would have been incredibly helpful to our school.  Our District 3 site needs new wiring, since the internet is very slow, and much of our curriculum is online. Our site in District 4 needs new bathrooms and water fountains, and nine classrooms out of ten badly need repainting.”

The DOE currently holds leases for 12 private buildings that house 15 charter schools, with a cost to the city of $17.1 million during FY 2019 alone. In addition, there are 88 charter schools that receive a per student “lease subsidy” to help pay for their own private space, which has increased by 72 percent since FY 2017. In 2019, DOE was projected to spend about $83.6 million in lease subsidies for charter schools, with an estimated $50 million of that total reimbursed by the state.

By analyzing property records, charter school financial reports, and sales records, the authors found that the payments made by DOE included $14.8 million for eight charter schools which are housed in buildings owned by related parties of these schools, that is, their own Charter Management Organization or an affiliated LLC or foundation.  

For example, DOE provided lease subsidies of $2.2 million in FY 2019 for two Success Academy charter schools even though the Success CMO owns their space in the Hudson Yards complex on the west side of Manhattan, reportedly the most expensive real estate development in US history. In another case, the city paid $461,965 in lease subsidies in FY 2019 towards the rental costs of Beginning with Children II charter school, despite the fact that the Beginning with Children Foundation bought this Brooklyn building for only ten dollars in 2017 from the Pfizer Corporation. More examples are provided in the report.

Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education said: “It is outrageous that the taxpayers of New York City and the state are required to pay $2.2 million a year to house two Success Academy charter schools located in a building in the Hudson Yards that the Success Academy Charter Management Organization owns. And Success is not alone. This report documents eight charter schools for which taxpayers are footing the facilities bill in buildings owned by the charters themselves or affiliated organizations. The Network for Public Education has studied all of the various charter laws and their loopholes.  I have never seen any other that requires the district to cover the costs of private facilities like this one does. One wonders whether this is about educating children or building a real estate empire at taxpayer expense.” 

“NYC has more than 500,000 students in overcrowded public-school buildings, as well as class sizes far higher on average than classes in the rest of the state.  Yet we are also the only district obligated to cover the cost of private space for charter schools, or offer them space in public school buildings,” said Leonie Haimson, one of the co-authors of the report. “The cost of providing space for charter schools in private buildings has risen sharply over the last five years.  If the current trend continues, the amount spent annually may soon exceed the cost of the payments that the city spends to finance the construction of new public schools.”  

Concluded Diane Ravitch, celebrated education historian, “The findings of this report, if validated, should shock the conscience of the Governor and Legislature.  They should amend the law as soon as possible so that the city is no longer forced to subsidizethe acquisition of private space by charter schools, even as our public schools continue to be badly underfunded and overcrowded. “

The powerpoint can be downloaded here.

The document can be downloaded here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, New York City, Privatization

Warren Releases K-12 Education Plan, Wallops Charters

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2019 //
96

Rachel M. Cohen has the scoop on the Elizabeth Warren K-12 education plan, just released. 

Warren would quadruple federal funding for Title 1 schools.

She would eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, which has been a colossal failure and which Betsy DeVos has turned into a slush fund for corporate charter chains.

Cohen writes:

ELIZABETH WARREN RELEASED a wide-ranging education plan Monday, pledging to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into public schools if she wins the presidency, paid in part through her proposed two-cent tax on wealth over $50 million. Sen. Warren’s plan is infused with her broader campaign themes of reducing corruption and fraud; she backs measures like new taxes on education lobbying, limiting the profiteering of tech companies that sell digital products to schools, and curbing self-dealing within charter schools.

And it builds on some of her earlier campaign proposals, like pledging to appoint aformer public school teacher as Education Secretary, supporting schools in teaching Native American history and culture, and expanding early learning opportunities for infants and toddlers.

In May, fellow Democratic hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders’s own education plan sent shockwaves when he endorsed the NAACP’s call for banning for-profit charter schools and holding nonprofit charters to the same transparency and accountability standards as traditional public schools. In her new plan, Warren joins Sanders in embracing these positions.

Warren goes further than Sanders in calling not only for a for-profit charter school ban, but also extending the ban to any non-profit charter that “actually serve[s] for-profit interests.” Warren said she would even direct the IRS to investigate non-profit charters for potential tax status abuse and recommends referring “cases to the Tax Fraud Division of the Department of Justice when appropriate.”

This is great news for all of us awaiting the K-12 plan of the candidate who has a plan for every other issue. This is a strong plan.

Supporting privatization lite (charter schools) is no longer a bipartisan issue. Republicans support charter schools.

I am especially pleased to see that her plan proposes elimination of federal support for charters, which now stands at $440 million a year and is used to grow KIPP, IDEA, Success Academy, and other big chains as they replace democratically controlled public schools.

NPE’s Report “Asleep at the Wheel” demonstrates that 1/3 of federally funded charters either never open or close soon after opening. Carol Burris has updated that report and is in Washington, D.C. today reporting to members of Congress on the waste of at least $1 billion on failed charters.

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