Archives for category: Education Industry
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Gary Rubinstein: The All-New, Rebranded Achievement School District

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2019 //
18

 

Gary Rubinstein has been following the progress—or lack thereof—of Tennessee’s Achievement School District. Funded with $100 million from Race to the Top money, led by a top-drawer charter school operator from YES Prep, it was supposed to take the lowest-performing schools in the state and catapult them into the top performing, in only five years. The secret ingredient for their promised success wasturning them over to charters operators.

Sadly, it didn’t work.

Gary Rubinstein writes here about the latest gambit. Rebrand the failed ASD!

Legerdemain!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Have You Heard: What Do Parents Think About “No Excuses” Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2019 //
40

 

Jennifer Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider conduct a very interesting discussion with scholars who have written about no-excuses charter schools and public Montessori schools. 

They interview Mira Debs of Yale and Joanne Golann of Vanderbilt about their research.

They wonder, what do parents want? The answers might surprise you.

Incidentally, I communicated to Berkshire and Schneider that the origin of the term “no excuses” for strict schools was not the book by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom with that name, which was published in 2004, but a small book by a writer named Samuel Casey, which was called “No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Poverty, High-Performing Schools.” 

The publication date on the paperback copy is 2000, but I remember going to a dinner at the Heritage Foundation where Mr. Casey presented his findings, and it must have been in the late 1990s. Conservatives were thrilled to learn that the answer to the education of poor black children was not more money, but strict discipline. It fit their preconceptions.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline, Education Industry, Education Reform, Parents

Peter Greene, Van Schoales: Education “Reform” Is Dead, but Zombie Ideas Persist

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2019 //
41

Peter Greene, retired teacher (thirty-nine years in the classroom and blogger extraordinaire) and Van Schoales (Colorado reformer) agree: education reform as we know it now is over.

Greene reminds us (as if we need reminding) that not so long ago, charter schools were considered a bipartisan reform; today, with Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos singing the praises of charter schools, there is a widespread recognition that charter schools are a big step on the path to privatization. First charters, then vouchers.

Van Schoales participated in the reform ferment in Colorado, which consumed much money and energy and produced very little. Schoales writes:

The education reform movement as we have known it is over. Top-down federal and state reforms along with big-city reforms have stalled. The political winds for education change have shifted dramatically. Something has ended, and we must learn the lessons of what the movement got right—and wrong.

The era of inspiration, edicts, and coercion from Washington to improve our public schools is in the past. The Every Student Succeeds Act is a paper tiger with no new funds or accountability for results. The U.S. Department of Education under Betsy DeVos has dismantled efforts to push states to improve school systems while tainting all education reform with a far-right agenda for vouchers as it defunds public education. Yet, a growing number of high school graduates are not prepared to work or to continue their education.

The era of the nontraditional “no excuses” urban superintendents is finished. Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Tom Boasberg have all moved on. There are few comparable replacements. The vision of a radically transformed public education system with virtual schools, new charter models, and online personalization has crashed on the shores of reality.

He continues to have some hope for “portfolio districts” like Indianapolis and San Antonio but it is only a matter of time until he realizes that they too are a mirage, just shifting students from public schools to charters changes nothing.

Peter Greene understands that all the shiny promises have failed to produce the transformation that was supposed to happen. It didn’t.

After twenty years, almost every trick in the education reform tool box has been tried, including charters and choice. When your product has failed, you have more than just a branding problem, and for the nominally lefty-tilted education reformers, the current administration provides none of the protective cover that Obama and Duncan did.

Van Schoales says it is time to listen to those closest to the problems—teachers, principals, students, families, and community leaders—to build a movement that is focused on preparing most or all of our students for the world that they live in, that promotes lasting change. 

Frankly, for reformers, that is a new idea, because they have spent twenty years imposing mayoral control, state control, so as NOT to listen to anyone but themselves.

Peter Greene has another idea, not so very different from that of Van Schoales:

Instead of asking, “How can we convince more left-leaning folks to support the privatization of public education,” maybe progressives could ask, “If charters and choice really aren’t the answer, what are some better ways to improve U.S. public education?” Maybe someone could build a coalition around that.

Unfortunately, the billionaires do not know as much as either Greene or Schoales. They are still dishing out hundreds of millions to professional “reformers” to create groups like the City Fund ($200 million on the day it opened) to continue promoting charter schools in a dozen or so urban districts. The Walton Family Foundation will spend hundreds of millions to prop up failing charter schools. Betsy DeVos will have another $400 million to hand out to well-funded corporate charter chains next year. Charles Koch has announced that he will pick five unlucky cities to target as “low-hanging fruit” for his dreams of voucherizing everything in sight. And legislatures like those in Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee are still diverting money to voucher programs, even though there is no hope that they will provide better education.

Reform as we have known it is dead, but the zombie continues to terrorize our cities, even our suburbs and rural districts.

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

Pennsylvania: ALERT: Phony Voucher Reform Bills in Legislature!

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2019 //
2

Pennsylvania citizens! Watch out! There are phony “charter reform” bills under consideration in the Legislature! Don’t be fooled!

The “reform” bills were written by charter lobbyists.

The State Auditor said that Pennsylvania has the worst charter law in the nation. These bills will solidify the charter frauds in your state.

Speak up!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Resistance

Oregon: While Teachers Strike, Corporate Reformers Kill Bills to Stop Testing Pre-K-2 and to Expand Opt Out

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2019 //
14

 

Corporate Reformers in Oregon joined with their allies in the business community to kill a bill (HB 2318) called “Too Young to Test,.” Modeled on laws in New York and New Jersey, the bill would have prohibited mandatory standardized testing from pre-k through grade two. Most of the testimony favored the bill.

The purpose of HB 2318:

Prohibits State Board of Education from requiring, and school districts from administering, certain assessments to students enrolled or preparing to enroll in prekindergarten through grade two. Makes exception for assessments administered for diagnostic purposes as required under state or federal law.

The Corporate Reformers and the business community killed it. 

No one, the Corporate Reformers insist, is ever too young to test.

They also focused on killing a bill to strengthen Oregon’s opt-out law.Then they killed a bill to strengthen Oregon’s opt out law. (SB 433). Here is their letter of opposition to SB433.

They claim they need the test scores so they can effectively advocate to meet student needs. No one should be allowed to opt out of testing, no matter how young.

Apparently they don’t know that standardized testing is highly correlated with family income and family education. They should read Daniel Koretz’s The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.

Stand for Children was part of the pro-testing lobby. SFC is heavily funded by the Gates Foundation and other pro-testing, pro-privatization foundations. Stand for Children advocates for high-stakes testing, charter schools, and test-based evaluation of teachers. Dana Hepper of “The Children’s Institute” also lobbied against these bills and in support of standardized testing of kindergartners; she previously worked for Stand for Children. In addition to endorsing the joint statements, here is her testimony supporting mandated standardized tests for children of all ages and opposing opt out.

They say they need the scores so they know what children need.

BUT, THE CORPORATE REFORMERS HAVE THE TEST SCORES NOW AND THEY ARE NOT ADVOCATING FOR STUDENT NEEDS.

Teachers in Oregon are on strike to advocate for smaller classes, nurses, mental health counselors, librarians, and social workers.

Where are the corporate reformers?

Fighting for more standardized testing, even for kindergartners! Fighting parents’ right to opt their children out of standardized testing!

Are they joining the teachers to demand more investment in schools? No.

Are they on the picket lines demanding smaller classes? No.

Are they lobbying for increased funding for nurses, social workers, librarians, and mental health counselors? No.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Class size, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Opt Out, Oregon, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: Data Analytics Firm Knewton Bites the Dust

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2019 //
22

Well, here is a nice development for those of us who object to depersonalized learning. The data analytics firm called Knewton is going out of business. Knewton was acquired by Pearson and was supposed to be the ultimate refinement of data mining.

Peter Greene describes the rise and fall of Knewton here.

The founder and CEO of Knewton was Jose Ferreira, who believed he was bringing Big Data into the classroom. He claimed in a video that with his techniques, his company knew more about students than their parents did. Here is an article from 2013 in which his vision is portrayed as the wave of the future, one of those inevitable phenomena that would envelop us whether we liked it or not.

Here he is, extolling the virtues of data mining. 

Knewton sounded too much like Brave New World to me, and I resented the fact that investors were creating a technology to spy on our children.

Peter Greene writes:

Adaptive learning. Computer-enhanced psychometrics. Personalized learning via computer. Knewton was going to do it all. Now it’s being sold for parts.

Knewton started in 2008, launched by Jose Ferreira. By 2012, Ferreira led the ed tech pack in overpromising that sounded both improbable and creepy. In a Forbes interview piece, Ferreira described Knewton as “what could become the world’s most valuable repository of the ways people learn.” Knewton could make this claim because it “builds its software into online classes that watch students’ every move: scores, speed, accuracy, delays, keystrokes, click-streams and drop-offs.”

Developments like this offer hope that other massive invasions of privacy, which are inherently dehumanizing, will fail. I’m on the side of flawed and fallible human beings. Teachers and parents, not machines.

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology

How Andre Agassi and His Partner Are Profiting in the Charter Sector

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
6

 

Andre Agassi was once a famous tennis star. Several years ago, he decided to open a charter school in Las Vegas, with his name on it. It was going to be a national model for sending poor kids to elite colleges. But it failed and was eventually taken over by charter chain Democracy Prep. During the school’s first decade of operation, it went through six principals and multiple teachers. Former teachers said there was “a chaotic learning environment.”

Then Agassi went into partnership with an equity investor who put up $750 million for a new company that would build and lease charter schools. This is a very profitable venture.

Unfortunately, the charter schools it builds are forced into financial straits by the burden of the rent they must pay to Agassi and Turner.

In Detroit, a school built by their firm is closing, in part because of the crushing debt required to pay the landlords, Agassi and Turner.

A Detroit charter school is shutting down amid financial woes brought on by its lease agreement with an investment fund headed by tennis star Andre Agassi.

The closure of Southwest Detroit Community School, which was announced to teachers at an emergency meeting at the school Tuesday afternoon, caps a six-year existence marred by academic struggles and, more recently, dissatisfaction among parents and the teaching staff over the school’s direction. 

“I feel one part betrayed, but also, I think it was inevitable,” said Mitzy Tripp, who has two children at the K-8 school, including one who will soon graduate from eighth grade. “But I honestly didn’t think that they would do this to the families.”

When Michigan lawmakers lifted the cap on new charter schools in 2011, it sparked a spree of more than a dozen school openings within a few years. Several have since closed, including Delta Preparatory Academy for Social Justice, which shut down abruptly at the beginning of this school year.

It’s the latest upheaval for a city where the school landscape has become severely fractured, forcing schools to compete for teachers, students, and resources without some of the safeguards that bring order to charter school systems in cities like New Orleans and Washington. Efforts to put such controls in place in Michigan have been stopped by well-funded political opposition…

The closure means the families of 347 students, many of them Spanish-speaking, will have to find a new school for their children. School changes have been shown to hurt student learning and behavior at school…

In the end, though, any hope for the school’s future collapsed under the weight of its lease with Turner-Agassi, an investment fund connected to the retired tennis legend that helped open the school as well as 89 others across the country.

The lease was designed like a residential rent-to-buy plan. The school would pay rent for the first few years, then, once it had enough students, it would buy the building outright. Turner-Agassi would make roughly $1 million on the deal, according to the lease agreement.

These arrangements aren’t unheard of in the charter sector. Michigan charter schools get no money from the state for facilities, often forcing them to rent buildings. Traditional schools generally own their buildings, taking advantage of public bonds that aren’t available to charter schools.

When the school failed to amass the more than $8 million it needed to buy the building, it paid a steep price. The rent went up sharply, increasing by 57 percent between 2017 and 2018, per the lease.

The school’s inability to keep up with its lease payments set off alarm bells within the Michigan Treasury Department, which flagged it as a “potential fiscal distress school” and required it to submit regular reports.

The rent, which grew to $769,910 annually this year, was higher than what other schools in the neighborhood pay. The payments suck up 19 percent of what the school brings in from the state to educate children.

Agassi and Turner made a handsome profit.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization
By dianeravitch | Link
May 9, 2019 //
13

 

Peter Greene has a rapier sharp wit, which he wields so deftly that the object of his attention has been beheaded without knowing what happened. If you want to see him at his best, read this mystery: Who is murdering Charter Schools? 

Teachers?

Unions?

Lobbyists?

If you live in the real world, the people fighting privatization are heroic defenders of the commonweal, protecting the public interest against the Waltons, the Koch brothers, DeVos, and other private interests.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Scandals, South Carolina, Teachers, Unions, West Virginia

Mercedes Schneider: The Utter Failure of Louisiana’s Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
8

 

Mercedes Schneider summarizes here the story of vouchers in Louisiana, which are now widely recognized as a train wreck.

New Orleans’ public radio station WWNO broadcast a detailed account of this policy failure, which steers students to D and F rated schools. State Superintendent John White, one of the voucher program’s most ardent advocates, refused to be interviewed for the program.

”Multiple local news outlets were involved in the investigation:

‘The Cost of Choice’ is the result of a reporting collaboration between NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, WVUE Fox 8 News, WWNO and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.”

When the program was launched in 2012, Then-Governor Bobby Jindal “beamed with pride” and voucher proponent Betsy DeVos lauded the new vouchers, and the cheerleaders said they

“would free countless lower-income children from the worst public schools by allowing them to use state tax dollars in the form of vouchers to pay tuition at private schools, where they would ostensibly receive a better education. …

“Seven years later, however, the $40-million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program has failed to live up to its billing. The nearly 6,900 students who’ve left public schools have instead been placed into a system with numerous failing private schools that receive little oversight, a months-long examination by a coalition of local and national media organizations has found. …

“Two-thirds of all students in the voucher system attended schools where they performed at a “D” or “F” level last school year….

“Bobby Jindal did not set up the Louisiana Scholarship Program for success. He set it up for low-performing schools to get subsidized and to stay open,” said Andre Perry, a fellow at The Brookings Institution….

“Not a single school in the voucher program received an A or B. Three received a C. Of the remaining schools, 19 got a D and 15 got an F, based on the Louisiana Department of Education rating system.”

Thousands of children were sent to low-performing schools on the false promise of a better education. Some of the voucher schools needed the voucher money to survive.

Now, Schneider notes, DeVos is distancing herself from the Louisiana failure.

The remaining ideologues insist that voucher schools should not be judged by their abysmal test scores, the same stick used to beat up public schools.

DeVos is now peddling the same failed model to the nation.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana

Valerie Strauss: The Tide Is Turning Against Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2019 //
6

 

Valerie Strauss reviews the education budget of the House Appropriations Committee and notes that budget proposal increases the programs that Trump and DeVos while endorsing an unprecedented cut for the Charter Schools Program. As she notes in  the title of the article, the committee concluded that the Education Department was not “a responsible steward” of the charter fund.

Surely, they must have noticed the daily scandals associated with this unaccountable sector.

“Many public school systems are complaining about losing significant funding to charters. Teacher strikes that began in 2018 and have continued this year throughout the country — including in Republican-led states — have helped change the debate about public education funding.”

Strauss writes:

A 2018 report by the Education Department’s inspector general slammed the agency’s oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program and made recommendations for improvement that the House legislation says DeVos’s team has ignored. The agency was accused of the same thing in a2016 inspector general report.

“The committee is deeply concerned that the department does not intend to be a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars when it comes to [Charter Schools Program] funding,” the legislation says.

The committee has included language that would direct the Education Department to implement the recommendations from the 2018 inspector general’s report within six months of the bill’s enactment and brief legislators on its plan within a month.

The legislation also says lawmakers are “concerned” about a recent report issued by the advocacy group the Network for Public Education, which says that as much as $1 billion in federal money was wasted on charter schools that never opened or that closed because of mismanagement and other issues from 2009 to 2016.

Jeanne Allen, leader of the pro-school choice, anti-public school group Center for Education Reform, asks “Who is killing Charter Schools?” and the answer is clear: the Department of Education’s Inspector General, Congressional appropriators, the daily scandals caused by unaccountable charters, the dedicated work of scores of state and local parent organizations, and the Network for Public Education, which is devoted to fighting privatization and profiteering.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »