Archives for category: Education Industry
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Tom Ultican: The Devastation Caused by School Choice in Milwaukee

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2018 //
18

Tom Ultican reviews here how school choice has devastated (DeVos-tated?) the public schools of Milwaukee.

Milwaukee is the city with public schools, charter schools, and voucher schools. It is also one of the lowest performing urban districts tested by NAEP.

He begins:

This past school year, Wisconsin taxpayers sent $250,000,000 to religious schools. Catholics received the largest slice, but protestants, evangelicals and Jews got their cuts. Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) reveals that private Islamic schools took in $6,350,000. Of the 212 schools collecting voucher money, 197 were religious schools.

The Wisconsin voucher program was expanded before the 2014-2015 school year. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, “Seventy-five percent of eligible students who applied for taxpayer-funded subsidies to attend private and religious schools this fall in the statewide voucher program already attend private schools, ….”

Money taken from the public schools attended by the vast majority of Milwaukee’s students is sent to private religious schools. Public schools must adjust for stranded costs while paying to serve a higher percentage of special education students because private schools won’t take them. Forcing public schools to increase class sizes, reduce offerings such as music and lay off staff.

The public schools have a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, because the charter schools and voucher schools don’t want them.

Ultican recounts the history of charters and vouchers in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. He reminds us that charter schools are NOT public schools. They are privately managed organizations draining money from public schools.

And he concludes:

In the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that vouchers to religious school did not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. This decision re-wrote more than a century worth of precedence and further eroded the separation of church and state. No matter how this case was decided, it is patently un-American to force citizens to send money to religious organizations that they do not support.

Privatizing public education is a horrible idea. Public-schools are the bedrock upon which America’s democracy is built. Now strange conservatives and their fellow traveler in the Democratic party, the neoliberals, are claiming that democratically elected school boards are an anachronism. Know this; if someone is opposing democratic governance, they are proposing totalitarian rule by the wealthy.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Milwaukee, Privatization, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Los Angeles: Celerity Charter School Closes in Response to Under-Enrollment and Financial Woes, Stranding Students

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2018 //
11

The Celerity charter chain in Los Angeles was raided by the FBI because of the financial shenanigans of its founder and CEO, who resigned. The chain did an overhaul, worked to change the management, but one of its schools just closed due to under-enrollment. Where was that waiting list with tens of thousands of students that we always hear about?

Celerity Rojas was unable to attract enough students to balance its budget. Its doors will close, and its students are on their own. The deadline has passed for most charter schools, so–sob!–it is fortunate that public schools accept every student who walks in the door.

The closure is the first public sign that Celerity is under considerable financial strain.

In the aftermath of the January 2017 raid and news that the FBI was investigating the nonprofit and questioning its employees, Celerity was thrown into turmoil. The State Board of Education refused to renew two of its charter schools, and although both schools were able to reopen under different names, the network said some its families never came back.

At Celerity Rolas, an elementary and middle school split between two sites — one in Eagle Rock and one in Highland Park — the school needed 435 students to break even, according to the organization’s correspondence with the state. But only 309 students enrolled last year.

The loss of students meant less funding from the state. Meanwhile, the organization’s legal fees were rising.

Facing investigations by federal agencies and L.A. Unified’s Office of Inspector General, the group hired the law firm Gibson Dunn to aid it during the inquiries and help it separate from its founder, Vielka McFarlane, a target of the investigations. Celerity has also continued to pay a separate firm that specializes in charter school law.

The group’s most recent financial projections show that while its individual schools are bringing in more money than they are spending, the organization that manages them is on less firm ground.

An L.A. Unified analysis described the fiscal condition of the group as weak. Within a year, the nonprofit’s expenses are expected to exceed its revenue by $826,000. Out of its total budget of $5.3 million for the coming school year, the group expects to spend more than $500,000 on legal fees alone.

The former CEO of the chain, Vielka McFarlane, got into trouble for her profligate use of the schools’ credit card for her luxurious lifestyle. Chauffeur-driven cars, expensive dinners, designer suits, etc. It was good while it lasted. She became the poster person for the lack of oversight and regulation of charter schools in California, at least for a few days.

Don’t expect the California Charter School Association to care about the closure of another charter school. They are busy hatching more.

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

Gary Rubinstein: How TFA and Other Reformers Reacted to the Janus Decision–and Why TFA Recruits Should Join the Union

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2018 //
7

Having been part of TFA, Gary Rubinstein understands that Teach for America is conflicted about unions. They are both for and against them.

He tried to get TFA to take a position on the Janus decision, but that was fruitless.

So he reviews the responses of leading Reformers and finds that they are either happy, silent, or conflicted.

Nonetheless, he thinks that new members of TFA should join the union, and he explains why.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Teach for America, Unions

Steven Singer: Voucher Schools Don’t Increase Test Scores, But They Make Racism Acceptable

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2018 //
11

Steven Singer read the article explaining that voucher schools do not increase test scores, a fact now confirmed by multiple studies and evaluation, but they do make racism acceptable.

He writes:

For decades, school voucher advocates claimed that sending poor kids to private schools with public tax dollars was acceptable because doing so would raise students’ test scores.

However, in the few cases where voucher students are even required to take the same standardized tests as public school students, the results have been dismal.

In short, poor kids at private schools don’t get better test scores.

So why are we spending billions of public tax dollars to send kids to privately run schools?

A 2018 Department of Education evaluation of the Washington, D.C., voucher program found that public school students permitted to attend a private or parochial school at public expense ended up getting worse scores than they had at public school.

Their scores went down 10 points in math and stayed about the same in reading.

These are not the pie in the sky results we were promised when we poured our tax money into private hands.

However, corporate education propaganda site, The 74, published a defense of these results that – frankly – makes some pretty jaw dropping claims.

The article is “More Regulation of D.C. School Vouchers Won’t Help Students. It Will Just Give Families Fewer Choices for Their Kids” by far right Cato Institute think tanker Corey DeAngelis.

In his piece, not only does he call for less accountability for voucher schools, he downplays the importance of standardized test scores.

And he has a point. Test scores aren’t a valid reflection of student learning – but that’s something public school advocates have been saying for decades in response to charter and voucher school cheerleaders like DeAngelis.

Supply side lobbyists have been claiming we need school privatization BECAUSE it will increase test scores. Now that we find this claim is completely bogus, the privatizers are changing their tune.

The new song is, “why shouldn’t parents be able to choose a school that has a ‘culture’ more to their liking?”

Singer hears a racist dog whistle in that reference to “culture.”

So parents don’t like the CULTURE of public schools. And they’re afraid public schools aren’t as SAFE.

Hmm. I wonder what culture these parents are objecting to. I wonder why they would think public schools wouldn’t be as safe.

Could it perhaps be fear of black students!?

Give DeAnglis credit for his honesty. No more happy talk about higher scores. It’s all about picking a school where the children look like you. Why are we surprised?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, Racism, Segregation, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: David Leonhardt Doesn’t Know What He Is Writing About

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2018 //
12

What David Leonhardt Ignores, Denies and Gets Wrong about the 2005 Seizure of New Orleans Schools

Jan Resseger deconstructs David Leonhardt’s columns celebrating the privatization of New Orleans schools, which she says is riddled with ignorance. If charter schools were as great as he says, the best urban districts in the nation would be Detroit, D.C., and Milwaukee. They are not. They cluster at the bottom. Explain that, David.

Why am I posting so much about New Orleans?Because it is the foundational lie of Corporate Reform.

For her many links, open her post.

Jan writes:

What David Leonhardt Ignores, Denies and Gets Wrong about the 2005 Seizure of New Orleans Schools

What David Leonhardt Ignores, Denies and Gets Wrong about the 2005 Seizure of New Orleans Schools

The NY Times columnist David Leonhardt reflects anew on the school transformation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After a recent visit to New Orleans, Leonhardt extols a New Orleans miracle. Many knowledgeable people have disagreed. Perhaps Leonhardt’s new column is a case of confirmation bias or maybe just rose colored glasses.

Leonhardt concludes: “(T)he academic progress has been remarkable. Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged… People here point to two main forces driving the progress: Autonomy and accountability. In other school districts, teachers and principals are subject to a thicket of rules, imposed by a central bureaucracy. In New Orleans, schools have far more control. They decide which extracurriculars to offer and what food to serve. Principals choose their teachers—and can let go of weak ones. Teachers, working together, often choose their curriculum.” “The charters here educate almost all public-school students, so they can’t cherry pick.”

Leonhardt is flat-out wrong on that last point. What is different about New Orleans’ charter schools is the Louisiana law passed right after Hurricane Katrina, a law allowing charter schools explicitly to select their students. Charter schools in New Orleans can use admission tests and other admissions screens that cannot be used by the charter schools in any other state. I remember being shocked by the formation of selective charter schools when I visited New Orleans myself in the summer of 2006. The Rev. Torin Sanders, a member of the Orleans Parish School Board, told me: “Pre-Katrina, New Orleans already had a dual system for privileged and poor children. We used to call the selective schools our magnet program. Then we used the term ‘city-wide access.’ These schools were created for children of promise. After the hurricane, legislators said Act 35 created the charters to demonstrate innovative ideas for at-risk students, but the highest performing schools… went charter first. The law was used to make these privileged schools unencumbered and autonomous.”

For example, after the hurricane, New Orleans added a selective charter high school by seizing the storied Uptown Neighborhood’s comprehensive, public Alcee Fortier High School and turning it into a charter high school with priority admission for the children of faculty at Tulane and other local universities. Tulane granted $1.5 million to clean and transform the old neighborhood high school into its model charter. Although Fortier’s former neighborhood students were allowed to apply to the new charter Lusher High School through an admissions test, the test was waived for children of professional staff at Tulane, Loyola, Xavier and Dillard Universities.

A decade after the New Orleans’ schools takeover, Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education explored the implications of the Louisiana law that permits selective charter schools in New Orleans: “Louisiana’s charter law explicitly allows some schools to engage in selective enrollment practices that resemble those of private schools—for example, requiring minimum grade point averages and standardized test scores, as well as other criteria, for admission.”

The Stanford report continues: “It is clear that the organization of schools in New Orleans is highly stratified: The school tiers sort students by race, income, and special education status, with the most advantaged students at the top and the least advantaged at the bottom. Only the top two sub-tiers of schools within Tier 1 have any appreciable number of white and Asian students and any noticeable number of students who are non-poor… Because schools at the top of the hierarchy largely choose their student body, few students actually have the option to attend these schools, while those schools at the bottom are assigned students who are not chosen elsewhere or who are pushed out of schools further up the hierarchy… This stratification occurs as a function of both admissions patterns and transfer/exclusion patterns. The top schools not only have selective enrollment criteria, they are also permitted to ask students who do not maintain a certain grade point average to leave. Similarly, they are allowed to determine which and how many special needs students they admit, often turning parents away because they do not, for example, serve students with cognitive or physical disabilities that require significant accommodations. The students identified as ‘special education’ in the highest performing schools are generally designated as ‘gifted’ or ‘talented,’ and rarely include the kinds of disabilities found in lower tier schools. When schools at the top of the hierarchy, disenroll students whose GPAs have slipped, or turn away children with special needs, these children end up attending schools further down on the hierarchy.”

Not only is Leonhardt’s column based on a factual error when he highlights what he imagines to be “open admissions” in New Orleans’ charter schools, but there is also so much that he chooses to ignore. In a column last year for the Brookings Institution, Andre Perry describes the ideologically driven seizure of the city’s schools and details some of the collateral damage: “Sure, rebuilding school buildings and improving systems are worthy goals after any disaster. But Hurricane Katrina blew a window of opportunity wide open for New Orleans reformers to ram through a mostly predetermined agenda of disempowering the New Orleans Public School Board. In the weeks after the storm, the Louisiana legislature changed its previous definition of an academically failing school to be able to take control of the vast majority of schools in the city.”

Then the Recovery School District fired the entire staff of the public school district, ignoring tenure laws and eliminating the teachers union. Perry continues: “Of the more than 7,000 employees who were terminated from New Orleans schools in the months after Katrina… approximately 4,300 were teachers, 71 percent of whom were black, and 78 percent of whom were women. Not only did this negatively impact the black middle class of the entire city, it emasculated the black community as a whole, which still feels the sting of that decision today.” In 2015, Teach for America bragged about its “growing footprint” in New Orleans: “Today, TFA corps members and alumni comprise a full 20 percent of the New Orleans teaching force, and over 50 alumni serve as leaders at the school or school systems level.”

Andre Perry’s hindsight demonstrates his own personal learning from the charter experiment: Perry served for several years as the CEO of the New Beginnings charter schools in New Orleans. Writing for the Hechinger Report, Katy Reckdahl quotes Perry describing the way he had to exaggerate expectations as he proposed the formation of a new charter school: “Perry, then CEO of the New Beginnings Schools Foundation submitted an application for Gentilly Terrace Elementary predicting that 100 percent of the school’s fourth and eighth graders would reach proficiency or close to it… ‘If I had submitted more realistic numbers, the state would have never accepted it… There is a general belief that you have to shoot for the stars or you’ll be shortchanging a possibility of miraculous growth.’”

In this week’s NY Times piece, David Leonhardt alleges that, “(A)cademic progress has been remarkable. Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged.”

That conclusion certainly contradicts reports last November about a collapse of state standardized test scores. For The Lens, Marta Jewson reported: “State rankings for most New Orleans schools are on a three-year slide, with 65 percent of the schools dropping from 2014 to 2017. The drop in school performance scores from 2016 to 2017 caused hand-wringing among the city’s education leaders, but The Lens’ analysis of state data shows it’s just part of a worrisome trend… Charter networks Kipp New Orleans Schools, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, ReNEW Schools and Algiers Charters operate a combined 23 schools. Only one of them improved its school performance score from 2016 to 2017… The three-year drop appears to confirm education leaders’ fears about what would happen when tests aligned with tougher standards were introduced in 2015… Some school leaders say those tougher standards have caught up with the city’s schools….”

Yes, scores tend to drop when new tests and new standards are introduced. But the fact remains that Leonhardt’s boast about remarkable progress seems to contradict a three year slide in scores.

In the fall of 2006, writing for the Center for Community Change, Leigh Dingerson described the seizure of New Orleans’s public schools: “Over the past twelve months, buoyed by the support of the federal government, a network of conservative anti-government activists have moved with singular intensity to patch together a new vision for K-12 education that they hope will become a national model. It is a vision that disdains the public sector and those who work within it. It is a vision based on competition and economic markets. It is a vision of private hands spending public funds. Most disturbing, it is a vision that casts families and students as ‘customers,’ who shop for schools in isolation from—and even in competition with—their neighbors. It is a vision that, like the game of musical chairs, requires someone to be left without a seat.”

Several years after the hurricane and the New Orleans school takeover, in perhaps the most stunning moment I have ever experienced at a public meeting, a well-known keynoter echoed then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—calling Hurricane Katrina a remarkable opportunity for New Orleans to redesign its schools. A woman in the audience leapt to her feet and loudly contradicted his conclusion by telling the truth of her own experience as a parent: “They stole our public schools and they stole our democracy, all while we were out of town.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, New Orleans, Privatization, Propaganda

Gary Rubinstein: A Short and Powerful History of the Rise and Fall of the Corporate Reform Movement

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2018 //
5

Gary Rubinstein gave a delightful talk about education reform and its distortions at his alma mater, Tufts University, in April.

It is very enjoyable. Please watch.

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

Is Anti-Testing Movement Over or Just Resting?

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2018 //
14

Alyson Klein reports in Education Week that the anti-testing movement has slowed to a crawl. With testing requirements locked into federal law (the so-called “Every Student Succeeds Act”), activists are discouraged or waiting for another chance to attack the testing regime that has obsessed federal policymakers since the passage of No Child Left Behind, and even earlier, going back to Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000, which encouraged every state to develop their own standards and tests with an infusion of federal dollars. You can trace the testing movement even earlier, but it was not until Goals 2000 that there was real federal money offered to states to get the testing going.

She writes:

Just a few short years ago, there were real questions about whether Congress would ditch annual, standardized assessments as part of a makeover of the nation’s main K-12 education law. At the same time, parents were increasingly choosing to opt their children out of standardized tests.

But the Every Student Succeeds Act ultimately kept the tests in place. And since then, at least some of the steam has gone out of the opt-out movement in states such as New Jersey and New York, considered hotbeds of anti-testing fervor.

Some of the biggest skeptics of annual, standardized testing have taken a break from what was a big push to reduce the number of federally required tests. And they don’t expect there will be another opportunity to roll back federal testing mandates for quite awhile.

“Nobody is fighting on it now,” said Monty Neill, the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest, who has spent decades engaged in the national fight to pare back assessments and has recently announced his retirement. “It’s too early for the next round. On the consequences of the tests, the lengths of the tests, the nature of the tests, [the debate’s] continuing. It’s not on any state table now because there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Neill is grateful that some states took opportunities in ESSA to broaden accountability beyond test scores and shift teacher evaluation away from test results, although most state ESSA plans don’t go as far as he’d like.

On the other side of the coin, organizations that see annual standardized testing as a key equity principle are also taking note of a break in the anti-test action.

“I think it is much quieter, whether that’s because ESSA plans [are mostly approved] and [the] federal law is not going to be opened up for awhile,” said Patricia Levesque, the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a think tank started by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But, she said, she doesn’t expect that the debate is dead forever. “A lot of things are cyclical. That’s just the way that policy is.”

ESSA, like its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act, requires states to test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. But the new law says states must use other factors—such as chronic absenteeism—in identifying schools for extra support. And it gives states wide latitude to figure out how to intervene in struggling schools and evaluate teachers.

NCLB required states to test all their students. Schools that assessed fewer than 95 percent of their students were considered automatic failures.

Under ESSA, states must somehow account for low test participation, but just how to do that is up to them. And states can continue to have laws affirming parents’ right to opt their students out of tests, as Oregon does. ESSA also requires states to mark non-test-takers as not proficient.

There are a few things to say about the testing movement.

First, there were some gains initially on NAEP as a result of the introduction of test prep, the biggest gains occurring in the late 1990s.

Second, NCLB has been a major disappointment, with billions spent on testing and meager gains since 2003, when the high-stakes testing began. Even some of its biggest supporters acknowledgement that the gains since 2007 have been meager to non-existent. Apparently, the low-hanging fruit has been picked with test prep. For most states, NAEP scores have been flat since 2007, yet the testing continues.

Third, the U.S. stands alone in its demand for annual testing. Among the high-performing nations of the world, not one of them tests every student every year. Most have a single test at transition points, from elementary school to middle school, from middle school to high school. Finland has no standardized tests at all until the end of secondary school.

Fourth, the NAACP broke ranks with other civil rights groups recently and released an issue brief opposing high-stakes standardized testing.

Last, standardized tests are NOT a way of advancing civil rights; they are normed on a bell curve, and the neediest kids always end up in the bottom half of the bell curve. Being told year after year that you have failed does not encourage students to try harder.

Testing corporations are in D.C. and important state capitols, lobbying to keep the testing regime in place. The Gates Foundation funded numerous organizations to demand the continuation of high-stakes annual testing, a practice unknown in private schools like the one where the Gates children are students.

The billions spent on testing should have been spent to reduce class sizes, raise teachers’ salaries, and affect real change.

Annual standardized testing is a hustle and a fraud.

It is the Golden Calf of education. Our policymakers and members of Congress worship the Golden Calf. The gold, however, is available only to the test corporations, not students.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Testing

Delaware: Parents at Charter School Question Why School Needs Three Co-Administrators

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2018 //
10

A charter school in Delaware recently hired a second co-administrator, then hired the chair of the board.

“Odyssey Charter School parents and teachers have been packing board meetings this summer to question the hiring of a new co-administrator, the convening of committee meetings with little public notice and the resignation of a board president rumored to be in line for a full-time job.

“In June, they demanded to know why the board hired a second administrator at $150,000, plus a $7,500 signing bonus to cover health expenses. He will share control of the school with Denise Parks, who will also make $150,000.

“The jobs were not advertised and stakeholders didn’t know about the change in leadership, they said.

“This week, they focused on the resignation of former board president Dimitrios Dandolos and rumors he might be hired for a third administrative job, also making six figures. If he was, they said, Dandolos would be doing many of the things he did for free as board chair.

“Teachers and parents, who have donated thousands of dollars to the school, questioned the need for two, if not three, well-paid administrators.”

In the unregulated world of charter schools, anything is possible. No accountability, no transparency.

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

Leonie Haimson Takes David Leonhardt to the Woodshed and Pleads for Fact-Based Journalism

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2018 //
18

Leonie Haimson, parent activist in New York City, critiques David Leonhardt’s highly admiring and uncritical review of the latest study of charter schools in New Orleans.

Leonhardt says he wants a “fact-based debate,” but Leonie says, he didn’t provide “fact-based journalism.”

She opened the links he provided and found that most have nothing to do with his claims. He introduces no new facts or evidence.

She begins:

David Leonhardt’s latest NY Times column touting charter schools is full of bogus claims and sloppy journalism. He inveighs against progressive critics, writes that he wants a fact-based debate over education reform “in a more nuanced, less absolutist way than often happens” but then adds: “Initially, charters’ overall results were no better than average. But they are now.” The link is to a CREDO website that doesn’t show this.

The most recent CREDO national study of charters from 2013 examined charters in 26 states plus NYC and found significant (if tiny) learning gains in reading on average but none in math. CREDO is generally considered a pro-charter organization, funded by the Walton Foundation and many independent scholars have critiqued its methodology.

Moreover, the main finding of the 2013 study was that the vast majority of charter schools do no better than public schools, as Wendy Lecker has pointed out. In 2009, CREDO found, 83 percent of charters had the same or worse results in terms of test scores than public schools, and in 2013, about 71-75 percent had the same or worse results.

Finally, to the extent that in some urban districts, there are studies showing that charters outperform public schools on test scores, there are many possible ways to explain these results, including an overemphasis on test prep, differential student populations, peer effects, higher student attrition rates and under-funding of most urban public schools.

Leonhardt also writes that “The harshest critics of reform, meanwhile, do their own fact-twisting. They wave away reams of rigorous research on the academic gains in New Orleans, Boston, Washington, New York, Chicago and other cities, in favor of one or two cherry-picked discouraging statistics. It’s classic whataboutism. ”

Yet three out of these four links have nothing to do with charter schools, nor are they peer-reviewed studies. The NYC study by Roland Fryer instead focuses on which attributes of NYC charter schools seemed to be correlated with higher test scores compared to other NYC charter schools.

The Chicago link goes to a NY Times column Leonhardt himself wrote on overall increases in test scores and graduation rates in Chicago public schools that doesn’t even mention charter schools. The DC link also is far from “rigorous research,” but sends you to a DCPS press release about the increase in 2017 PARCC scores, with again no mention of charter schools, or even “reform” more broadly.

If there is indeed “reams of rigorous research” supporting charter schools, one might expect that Leonhardt would link to at least one actual, rigorous study showing this.

Open her post to see her masterful analysis of Leonhardt’s vapid claims.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Orleans, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation

Breaking News! Los Angeles: Ref Rodriguez Pleads Guilty of Conspiracy, Resigns Seat on Board, Avoids Jail Time

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
4

Charter school founder Ref Rodriguez pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in Los Angeles and agreed to resign from his seat on the local school board, which he clung to until a new charter-friendly superintendent was selected. He will be on probation for three years and do community service. The plea deal allows him to avoid jail time, which could have been several years.

The board must decide how to fill his seat. At present, it is deadlocked 3-3. It could remain deadlocked, or one of the weak dissidents could join the former majority.

Superintendent Beutner, billionaire and former hedge fund manager, will now have to figure out how to work with a board that does not have a working majority until this issue is resolved.

Expect the billionaires–Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Richard Riordan, William Bloomfield, Michael Bloomberg, etc–to come in to salvage their prize.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization
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