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Tom Ultican: How Betsy DeVos’s Ideology Damaged the Schools of Michigan and Destroyed the Schools of Detroit

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2018 //
43

Tom Ultican posted this research about the damage wrought by the Destroy Public Education movement on Michigan and Detroit last March. I missed it. It is still painfully current.

What is the DeVos agenda? It is an aggressive version of Christian evangelism that opposes public schools.

He writes:

The destroy public education (DPE) movement’s most egregious outcome may be in Detroit and it is being driven by a virulent Christian ideology.

In 2001, Dick and Betsy DeVos answered questions for the Gathering. Dick DeVos opined that church has retreated from its central role in communities and has been replaced by the public school. He said it is our hope “churches will get more and more active and engaged in education.” Betsy noted “half of our giving is towards education.”

Jay Michaelson writing for the Daily Beast described the Gathering:

“The Gathering is a hub of Christian Right organizing, and the people in attendance have led the campaigns to privatize public schools, redefine “religious liberty” (as in the Hobby Lobby case), fight same-sex marriage, fight evolution, and, well, you know the rest.”

“The Gathering is an annual event at which many of the wealthiest conservative to hard-right evangelical philanthropists in America—representatives of the families DeVos, Coors, Prince, Green, Maclellan, Ahmanson, Friess, plus top leaders of the National Christian Foundation—meet with evangelical innovators with fresh ideas on how to evangelize the globe. The Gathering promotes “family values” agenda: opposition to gay rights and reproductive rights, for example, and also a global vision that involves the eventual eradication of all competing belief systems that might compete with The Gathering’s hard-right version of Christianity.”

In the Gathering interview, Betsy talks about how she and Dick both come from business oriented families. From their experience, they understand how competition and choice are key drivers to improve any enterprise. She says public education needs choice and competition instead of forcing people into government run schools.

She was also asked how she felt about home schooling? She replied, “we like home schools a lot,” and humorously shared, “not sure our daughters do, they were homeschooled for three years.” Then Dick added how impressed he was with Bill Bennet’s new project, K-12. He said it wasn’t a Christian oriented on-line curriculum but it was a complete education program that could help homeschoolers.

By the 1990’s Dick and Betsy DeVos were successfully influencing Michigan education policies and using private giving to drive their agenda. Christina Rizga wrote about the DeVos’s philanthropy for Mother Jones.

“… [T]here’s the DeVoses’ long support of vouchers for private, religious schools; conservative Christian groups like the Foundation for Traditional Values, which has pushed to soften the separation of church and state; and organizations like Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which has championed the privatization of the education system.”

As the new century opened, the DeVos agenda was being ever more adopted in Lancing. If improving the education of children in Michigan was the goal, then the DeVos education agenda has proved to be a clear failure. On the other hand, if destroying public education to accommodate privatized Christian schools was the goal, they are still on track.

Betsy and Dick DeVos got a referendum on the ballot in Michigan in 2000, aiming to revise the state constitution to allow for vouchers, so students could use public funds to attend religious schools. Their constitutional amendment was overwhelmingly rejected by the voters. So, the DeVoses turned to charter schools as their means to promote choice.

From 2000 to 2015, Michigan’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress fell from 14th in the nation to 43rd.

Ultican describes what happened to Detroit. First, the state wiped out the elected board and established mayoral control. Then the state restored an elected board. Meanwhile the district’s debt kept rising as its enrollment was plummeting. Detroit was flooded with charter schools, most of which operated for profit. The district was left with “stranded costs” as students transferred from public to charter schools.

He writes: The extra-costs associated with privatizing DPS were all born by the public schools.

As charters continued to open and enrollment continued to fall, the state stepped in again:

Not acknowledging their own role in creating the financial crisis in Detroit, the state government again pushed the elected school board aside in 2009. Education policy was theoretically left under the purview of the school board but financial management would be the responsibility of a governor appointed emergency manager. This time it was a Democratic Governor, Jenifer Granholm who selected a graduate of the unaccredited Broad superintendents’ academy class of 2005, Robert Bobb, to be the manager.

Not only did Granholm select a Broad academy graduate, but Eli Broad paid part of his $280,000 salary. Sharon Higgins, who studies the Broad academy, reports that a civil rights group and a coalition of teachers who oppose charter schools questioned “whether Bobb was in conflict of interest for accepting $89,000 of his salary from a foundation that supports private and charter schools.”

Bobb made significant cuts to DPS. He closed many schools and eliminated 25% of the districts employees. He also sold several school buildings. The Detroit News reported in March 2010, “Instead of a $17 million surplus Bobb projected for this fiscal year, spending has increased so much Bobb is projecting a $98 million deficit for the budget year that ends June 30.”

Bobb blamed unforeseeable costs related to declining enrollment. Curt Guyette at the Metro-Times relates that many people blamed spending on high priced consultants and contracts. Guyette provided this example:

“Of particular note was Barbara Byrd-Bennett, hired by Bobb on a nine-month contract to be the district’s chief academic and accountability auditor. She received a salary of nearly $18,000 a month plus an armed personal driver. In addition, Byrd, a former chief executive officer of Cleveland’s public schools system, ‘brought with her at least six consultants who are collectively being paid more than $700,000 for about nine months of work,’ according to a 2009 Detroit Free Press article.”

In 2011, Republican Governor Rich Snyder ushered through two laws that had a negative effect on DPS. The first law, Public Act 4, gave the emergency manager total control and removed all powers from the elected school board. The second law, Public Act 436, created a state school district called the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) which took effect in 2013.

The EAA’s first task was to take over 15 of Detroit’s lowest performing schools. This immediately removed another 11,000 students from DPS and further stressed its finances.

Counting Robert Bobb there were five emergency managers at DPS between 2009 and 2016. Mercedes Schneider reports that “The most recent Detroit Public Schools emergency manager, Darnell Earley, is chiefly responsible for water contamination in Flint, Michigan.”

By 2016, the schools of DPS were in such a disgraceful condition that the New York Times called them “crumbling” and “destitute.” The Times’ article included this quote: ‘“We have rodents out in the middle of the day,’ said Ms. Aaron, a teacher of 18 years. ‘Like they’re coming to class.”’

July 1, 2017 the EAA returned the fifteen schools to DPS and the Michigan legislature finally acted to mitigate the debt crisis created in Holland and Lancing not Detroit. Also on July 1, 2017 Nikolai Vitti the new superintendent of DPS took on the challenge or rehabilitating the public schools of Detroit.

Robert Bobb was handsomely paid. So was John Covington. So was Barbara Byrd-Bennett (who is now in prison, after being found guilty of taking kickbacks while CEO of the Chicago public schools). The leaders made lots of money.

The charters were a disaster. The Educational Achievement Authority was an even bigger disaster, consuming high administrative costs and producing nothing for the children of Detroit.

Ultican identifies one of the villains in this chain of events that harmed the children and the public schools of Detroit: the Skillman Foundation of Detroit. With “the best of intentions,” this local foundation has supported every raid on the city, its children, and its public schools. It continues to support the Destroy Public Education Movement despite its repeated disasters and its failed experiments on children.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Michigan, Privatization

Los Angeles: Austin Beutner’s Plan to Disrupt the Schools and Impose the Portfolio Model

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2018 //
30

The Los Angeles Times exposed school superintendent Austin Beurner’s no-longer secret plan to reorganize the district by downsizing the central office and decentralizing authority to 32 “networks.” You May recall that the Gates Foundation set aside money to support “networks,” so this may be an effort to get Gates money or simply jumping on the latest fad. It is not as if this is a new idea. Joel Klein created networks about 10 years, as one of four different reorganizations during his time as chancellor of the NYC schools. Beutner seems to think that decentralization to networks will raise test scores. Uh-huh. What part of reorganization raises test scores?

Capitol & Main explains the logic (or illogic) behind the plan.

Times education writers Howard Blume and Anna Phillips say highlights [of the plan] include a purge of “discretionary” staff at the district’s Beaudry Avenue headquarters. Budgeting, hiring and curriculum authority would be transferred to LAUSD’s 988 district-managed schools, which will be organized into 32 geographic “networks” under the oversight of regional offices. The theory is that cost savings and “charter-like” autonomy will improve student outcomes. Beutner is expected to unveil details next month.

Reimagining’s actual reimagineers are outside consultants who carried out a similar reorganization of Newark, New Jersey schools using a highly controversial approach borrowed from Wall Street. Called the “portfolio model,” it means each of the 32 L.A. networks would be overseen like a stock portfolio. A portfolio manager would keep the “good” schools and dump the “bad” by turning them over to a charter or shutting them down much like a bum stock. Why that should fare any better than a short-lived LAUSD reform in the 1990s that also divided the district into small, semi-autonomous clusters but failed to budge academic performance remains unclear. The changes in Newark included neighborhood school closures, mass firings of teachers and principals, a spike in new charters and a revolt by parents that drove out former Newark supe — and current L.A. consultant — Cami Anderson.

One wrinkle in LAUSD going portfolio is the March 5 special election to fill the District 5 seat left vacant by the August resignation of disgraced board member Ref Rodriguez. District 5 veteran Jackie Goldberg’s October 26 announcement that she is running for a third term in her old board seat could effectively make the contest a local referendum on the Beutner plan. The progressive, twice-elected L.A. City Councilmember and two-term California Assemblymember has never lost a race in her political career. The pro-charter forces on the current one-vote board majority might consider having a kinder, gentler-to-public school families Plan B waiting in the wings.

If Beutner seems clueless, it is understandable. He has no experience in education, and he doesn’t know anything about the past. His ideas are based on his experience in corporate America. The people he brings in are reformers who believe in disruption.

The race to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of charter founder Ref Rodriguez after his conviction on various felony charges may well determine the future of Austin Beutner’s plan and Austin Beutner.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles

California: Tony Thurmond’s Lead over Marshall Tuck Just Grew to 160,000

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
18

The vote totals have been growing.

The last report, published by the Secretary of State at 4:59 pm PST, shows a big increase for Tony Thurmond. His total is now nearly 160,000 more than Tuck’s.

https://vote.sos.ca.gov/returns/superintendent-of-public-instruction

This is nearly a two-point lead.

The charter billionaires spent twice as much on Tuck’s campaign as Thurmond received, mostly from teachers and unions.

Passion beats money. Not always. But maybe in this race.

Wow!!

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

“Dear Mr. Zuckerberg.” Students Take Their Grievances about Summit Platform to Mark Z.

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
33

Students at the Secondary School for Journalism walked out to protest the Chan-Zuckerberg Summit depersonalized learning program, but thought Mark Zuckerberg might not have noticed. So they wrote him a letter to explain why they don’t like interacting for hours a day with a computer. They wrote and told him that they were learning little or nothing, and they complained about the collection of their personally identifiable data. They asked why Summit (and CZI) was collecting all this data without their knowledge or consent. Great points!

The article appears in EdSurge, a tech journal that is partially underwritten by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. I bet Mark and Priscilla see it.

They had tried before to address their concerns with the program, says Kelly Hernandez, one of the organizers of the protest. But no matter how many times they talked to their principal, or how many calls their parents made to the school to complain, nothing changed.

“We wanted to fight back with a walkout,” Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior, tells EdSurge, “because when we tried to voice our concerns, they just disregarded us.”

The Secondary School for Journalism is one of about 380 schools nationwide using Summit Learning, a personalized learning program that involves the use of an online instructional software, called the Summit Platform. This program grew out of Summit Public Schools, a network of 11 charter schools based in California and Washington, and soon caught the eye of Facebook, which lent engineers to help build the software. The platform was later supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Earlier this year, Summit Public Schools announced it would be spinning the program out as an independent nonprofit in the 2019-2020 school year.

This is not the first time that the Summit software has attracted questions and protests. Around this time last year, a Connecticut school suspended its use of the software just months after implementing it.

For Hernandez and her classmates, the breaking point came the week of Halloween, when students got their report cards, she says. Some weren’t showing any credit for the courses they’d taken and passed—courses that were necessary to graduate. Others had significant scheduling errors. “It was just so disorganized,” Hernandez recalls.

So she and her friend, senior Akila Robinson, began asking around to see who might participate in a walkout. A few days later, on Nov. 5, nearly 100 students left the school to protest Summit.

“We didn’t necessarily want attention,” Hernandez says, even though they got plenty from the media. “We wanted the changes we felt we needed.”

Some changes have come. The school dropped the learning program for 11th and 12th grade students, because teachers of those grades didn’t receive any professional development for Summit. It is still using it with 9th and 10th graders, which Hernandez wants to change.

She believes a lot of the problems with Summit fall on her teachers and administrators, who were not properly trained in using it. Summit Learning officials, in an email to Education Week, also attributed the problems described by the students to poor implementation and a lack of professional development for teachers.

But fundamental issues with the learning system, as well as concerns over the data Summit collects and shares about its students, must be addressed with the people behind Summit, Hernandez feels. That’s why she and Robinson drafted and sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Thursday.

Below is the full text of the email the students sent to Facebook’s chief executive. Diane Tavenner, CEO of Summit Public Schools, is also copied on the note.

[Please open the link to read the students’ letter.]

Disclosure: EdSurge has received grant support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Categories Accountability, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privacy, Students, Technology

New Bedford, Massachusetts, Doesn’t Need or Want More Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
12

The public schools of New Bedford, Massachusetts, have gone through a remarkable turnaround in recent years. They are getting better and better. In 2016, nearly 60% of the voters of New Bedford opposed any increase in the number of charters in the state. But now the state—in the hands of charter zealots—wants to expand the number of charter seats in New Bedford. These two citizens of New Bedford explain why this is a terrible idea that will do irreparable damage to the public schools.

The authors of this article are Joshua Amaral, a member of the New Bedford School Committee and the chair of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees Division IX (urban districts), and Bruce Rose, president of the New Bedford NAACP. “Ignore the Charter School Think Tank Crowd,” they say, and they are right. Why sink the ship for the benefit of a leaky rowboat?

They begin like this:


YOU ARE AN EDUCATION RESEARCHER sent to discover best practices in urban schools so that you can replicate them to create results for more kids—kids who you believe are trapped in mediocre schools. You look at three exemplar schools to scale up:

School A has 336 students and rates in the state’s 85th accountability percentile, a measure now used to aggregate a school’s performance on MCAS relative to other schools in the state. This school made 95 percent improvement toward its own goals, such as increasing the percentage of students who score advanced or proficient on statewide exams, or improving attendance rates. Remarkably, 46 percent of this school’s students have a first language other than English, and 75 percent are considered economically disadvantaged. The school has been named a School of Recognition by the state, among only 50 others.

School B has 730 students and rates in the state’s 59th accountability percentile and made 83 percent improvement toward its targets. The school is home to specialized classrooms designed to serve students with severe behavioral and developmental delays, and 27 percent of the school’s students have disabilities, 44 percent are economically disadvantaged, and 21 percent have a first language other than English.

School C has 413 students and rates in the state’s 38th accountability percentile and made 47 percent improvement toward its targets. At the school, 23 percent of the students have a first language other than English, and 58 percent come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

If you had to make the call on which school to expand by 300 percent – to double- or triple-down on – I suspect you would favor schools A and B, New Bedford district public schools Congdon and Pulaski, respectively, over School C, Alma del Mar Charter School, the school actually proposing such an extraordinary expansion.

The New Bedford district public schools have a plethora of higher performing schools. Not just Pulaski and Congdon, but 10 of New Bedford’s elementary schools finished higher in accountability ranking than Alma del Mar, more than half of the city’s primary schools. On improvement toward targets, 18 of the district’s 23 schools exceed Alma’s 47 percent improvement rate. And among those performing worse than Alma? The city’s other two charters: Global Learning and City on a Hill. The district educates a higher percentage of English language learners, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students and has schools soaring past Alma nonetheless.

Why siphon from the most successful of New Bedford’s schools, which outperform charters with a more challenging student population, just to increase charter seats? With a concerted and well-funded public relations strategy unmatched by cash-strapped district schools, it seems the only advantage charters have over traditional public schools is in the marketing department. It’s a credit to the public relations efforts of charters that the success of the New Bedford district public schools relative to its charters comes as a surprise.

The New Bedford district public schools have undergone a marked turnaround over the last six years, stemming the tide of mediocrity and ineffectiveness that branded the district poorly across the state. The wave of accountability that rolled in post-ed reform hit New Bedford hard. Systems were put in place, issues were corrected, difficult decisions were made. The road to improvement has not always been smooth, but focused leadership and putting students first has left the district primed for takeoff, not takeover.

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

Restore Reason: What Happens When Government Services Are Privatized

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
21

Thanks to Guy Brandenburg for directing me to this fascinating post about what happens when private corporations take over government services, in this case, reporting the weather.

Restore Reason writes about the commercialization of weather reporting and draws a parallel with charter schools and vouchers. Please open the link and read the entire post.

I just listened to “The Coming Storm”, by Michael Lewis. I didn’t carefully read the description before diving in, and thought it would inform me about the increasing violence of weather. Rather, I learned about the privatization of weather, or at least the reporting of it, and the Department of Commerce.

Turns out, the Department of Commerce has little to do with commerce and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. Rather, it runs the U.S. Census, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Over half of its $9B budget though, is spent by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to figure out the weather. And figuring out the weather, is largely about collecting data. “Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.” One senior policy adviser from the George W. Bush administration, said the Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Science and Technology. When he mentioned this to Wilbur Ross, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department, Ross said, “Yeah, I don’t think I want to be focusing on that.” Unfortunately for all of us, Ross also wasn’t interested in finding someone who would do it for him.

In October 2017, Barry Myers, a lawyer who founded and ran AccuWeather, was nominated to serve as the head of the NOAA. This is a guy who in the 1990s, argued the NWS should be forbidden (except in cases where human life and property was at stake) from delivering any weather-related knowledge to Americans who might be a consumer of AccuWeather products. “The National Weather Service” Myers said, “does not need to have the final say on warnings…the government should get out of the forecasting business.”

Then in 2005, Senator Rick Santorum (a recipient of Myers family contributions) introduced a bill to basically eliminate the National Weather Service’s ability to communicate with the public. Lewis asks his readers to “consider the audacity of that manuever. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.”

It was at this point in my listening that I began to think how this privatization story was paralleling that of education’s. In both cases, those in the public sector are in it for the mission, not the money. In both cases, the private sector only “wins” if the public sector “loses”. In both cases, it is in the interest of the private sector to facilitate the failure of the public sector or make it look like it is failing.

Just as private and charter schools profit when district schools are perceived to be of lower quality, Barry Myers has worked hard to make government provided weather services look inferior to that which the private sector can provide. As Lewis points out, “The more spectacular and expensive the disasters, the more people will pay for warning of them. The more people stand to lose, the more money they will be inclined to pay. The more they pay, the more the weather industry can afford to donate to elected officials, and the more influence it will gain over the political process.”

This is the beginning of a thoughtful post. Please read it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Jan Resseger on the Debate About Who Governs Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
10

Jan Resseger always comments thoughtfully about important issues. In this post, she weighs in on the debate about whether it matters who controls public schools by reviewing a much-discussed article by David Labaree, historian of education at Stanford. Open her posts to see the links.

She begins:


There has recently been a debate among guest writers in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” column in the Washington Post. The Network for Public Education’s Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch published a defense of public governance of public schools, a column which critiqued a new report from the Learning Policy Institute. The Learning Policy Institute’s Linda Darling-Hammond responded with a defense of the Learning Policy Institute’s report, which defends school choice including privately governed and operated charter schools. Finally Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris responded to Darling-Hammond’s response. This blog weighed in here last week.

As it happens, Stanford University emeritus professor of education, David Labaree enhances this conversation with a new column on the public purpose of public education at Phi Delta Kappan: “We Americans tend to talk about public schooling as though we know what that term means. But in the complex educational landscape of the 21st century… it’s becoming less and less obvious….”

A spoiler: There is no equivocation in Labaree’s analysis. He is a strong supporter of public education, and he worries that by prizing the personal and individualistic benefit of education, our society may have lost sight of our schools’ public purpose: “A public good is one that benefits all members of the community, whether or not they contribute to its upkeep or make use of it personally. In contrast, private goods benefit individuals, serving only those people who take advantage of them. Thus, schooling is a public good to the extent that it helps everyone (including people who don’t have children in school). And schooling is a private good to the extent that it provides individuals with knowledge, skills, and credentials they can use to distinguish themselves from other people and get ahead in life.”

Labaree traces the history of public education through the 19th and early 20th centuries, but he believes more recently: “Over the subsequent decades… growing numbers of Americans came to view schooling mainly as a private good, producing credentials that allow individuals to get ahead, or stay ahead, in the competition for money and social status. All but gone is the assumption that the purpose of schooling is to benefit the community at large. Less and less often do Americans conceive of education as a cooperative effort in nation-building or collective investment in workforce development.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

California: Tony Thurmond Vs. Marshall Tuck: More Than $50 Million Spent

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2018 //
22

I have been watching the website of the California Secretary of State to follow the close contest between Tony Thurmond and Marshall Tuck. The polls and pundits predicted that Tuck would win.

When the polls first closed, Tuck had an early lead, but millions of votes had not been counted. In California, mail-in ballots postmarked on the day of the election must be counted, and they are still being counted.

After election day, Thurmond went into the lead, then Tuck came back, then Thurmond opened up a lead of 65,000-85,000 votes. That lead has held steady over the past couple of days as the vote total grows.

The vote is not final, and the numbers obviously could change in the days ahead.

Thurmond is winning heavily in Los Angeles (the city that should be Marshall Tuck’s base, where the most charters are located) and in San Francisco, which is Thurmond’s base.

On October 28, EdSource in California reported that at least $50 million had been raised for the race, and that Tuck had outraised Thurmond by 2-1.

When all the reports are in, the total amount of spending will surely be even more.

Thurmond was backed by the California Teachers Association and labor unions, meaning that his campaign was paid for by the dues of working people.

Here is a partial list of Tuck donors, a veritable Who’s Who of the school choice movement:

Bill Bloomfield: $6.761 million

Bloomfield is a billionaire Republican mega-donor who has become a charter school advocate.

The Walton Family: $5.138 million

Walmart billionaires

Eli Broad: $3.2 million

The Los Angeles billionaire who believes in closing public schools and privatizing them into charters.

Arthur Rock: $3.2 million

A California venture capitalist and billionaire who gives millions to Teach for America

Doris Fisher: $3.1 million

A billionaire, thanks to The Gap and Old Navy; the family gives heavily to KIPP

Richard Riordan: $2 million

The former Mayor of Los Angeles

These were the totals as of October 28. We will have to wait a few weeks for a complete accounting.

Undoubtedly these donors could have given twice or three times as much, but must have decided that it might embarrass Tuck to have three times as much money as Thurmond. Twice as much should have been enough.

One thing is certain. This is the most expensive contest in history for the job of State Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that pays $175,000 and has limited authority.

The symbolic importance of this race, however, cannot be overstated. If the charter lobby prevails in a deep blue state, it can prevail in every state. It already owns Governor Cuomo in New York (but lost control of the State Legislature, when progressive candidates ousted fake Democrats in the State Senate). It tried and failed to lift the charter cap in Massachusetts in 2016, routed in a public referendum, even though the Governor and the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is in the hands of the charter industry.

So, we will continue to keep a close watch on California, where the teachers and the charter billionaires are in a face-off.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Florida: Charter Operator Gets 20-Year Jail Sentence for Fraud

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2018 //
34

Marcus May, charter operator, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and a fine of $5 million for fraud.

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — The founder of a company that operated charter schools in several Florida counties has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Pensacola News Journal reports Marcus May also was sentenced Tuesday to pay a $5 million fine for using those schools to steer millions of dollars into his personal accounts. He was convicted last month of two counts of racketeering and one count of organized fraud.

May’s company, Newpoint Education Partners, operated charter schools in Escambia, Bay, Broward, Duval, Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties.

Prosecutors say May misappropriated millions in public money to buy furniture, computers and other materials at inflated prices from fraudulent companies headed by his close associates.

A co-defendant, Steven Kunkemoeller, has been sentenced to 4 1/2 years for racketeering and organized fraud.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Florida, Fraud, Privatization

Laurene Powell Jobs Wants YOU to Run for School Board and Implement Her XQ Program

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2018 //
11

It isn’t enough that billionaires are pouring big money into school board races.

Now Laurene Powell Jobs is urging her allies to run for the local school board and become advocates for her ideas about the importance of reinventing high schools along the lines that she and Arne Duncan have chosen.

She has even provided a handy kit about how to do it.

Good move on her part. She doesn’t have to spend millions to elect her candidates. She just asks for volunteers for the XQ army.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization
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