Archives for category: Education Industry
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New Orleans: Orleans Parish School Board Hiring an Auditor to Check Finances of Charter School

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
3

The Orleans Parish School Board has hired an auditor for Harney charter school upon suspicions of financial shenanigans or worse.

The Orleans Parish School Board confirmed Tuesday that a charter school improperly withheld employees’ retirement contributions, which The Lens has reported could have reduced their investment gains and may violate federal guidelines.

The school district is looking to hire a forensic auditing firm to help investigate Edgar P. Harney Spirit of Excellence Academy and other schools with financial issues. The audit could help quantify employees’ losses.

By The Lens’ count, Harney has received six warnings since last fall related to finances, enrollment, special education, public records and improper restraint of a student. Two more warnings are on the way.

Meanwhile, its chief financial officer is under an ethics investigation for being paid on the side to do school accounting.

Orleans Parish schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. said the embattled Central City school might not reapply for its charter, which is up for renewal this fall….

In a similar case in Baltimore, delayed retirement payments resulted in a federal conviction and a two-year prison sentence.

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

Voucher Advocate: Test Scores Don’t Matter

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
19

For years, for decades, we have been told that the answer to low-scoring public schools was School Choice.

That was until we learned that most charters don’t get higher scores than public schools, and voucher schools actually lead to lower scores.

So school choice advocates now claim that test scores don’t matter, at least not for non-public schools. They are still absolutely essential for public schools, and can be used to stigmatize them and close them down.

But for schools of choice, they just are not all that important. They don’t matter. They only matter for public schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: The New Research on New Orleans is a Hoax

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
20

Last week, the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a report declaring that the market-driven reforms in the New Orleans schools were a success. The formula for success: Get a big hurricane to wipe out a large swath of your city, close down the public schools, fire all the teachers, eliminate the union, get the federal government and foundations to pour in huge sums of money, and voila! A miracle! The miracle of the market!

When watching an illusionist at work, keep your eye on the action. Watch his hands. Or watch what else is happening (I saw an illusionist last year in Las Vegas and still haven’t figured out the tricks he pulled off while everyone watched his hands).

Watch the master illusionists at the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University. They said that the New Orleans corporate takeover was a roaring success. They said it in 2015. They said it again in 2018. Guess what? On the same day that they published their latest study, Betsy DeVos gave them a $10 Million grant to become the National Research Center on School Choice! What a happy coincidence!

Unfortunately for the ERA, Mercedes Schneider figured out the Big Trick.

You see, after the hurricane in 2005, the state created the Recovery School District (RSD) and took control of most of the NOLA schools, turning them over to charter operators. The best schools, however, remained under the control of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB).

The RSD is all-charter. Forty percent of the charters are failing schools. The white kids go to the top-rated charters. The failing schools are almost all-Black.

The best schools in New Orleans are the OPSB schools, some of which are selective-admission charter schools. Not surprisingly, the selective-admission schools have the highest test scores.

The ERA pulled a fast one. In its report, it combined the results of the less-than-stellar RSD with those of the high-performing OPSB.

Schneider titled her post: “How to Make New Orleans Market Ed Reform a Success: Hide RSD Failure Inside an OPSB-RSD Data Blend.”

She writes:

“The problem here is that OPSB schools were never taken over by the state, which means that the New Orleans “failing school” narrative does not include these schools, and that whether they be direct-run or converted to charter schools, OPSB schools have test-score advantages over the “failing” RSD schools taken over by the state. Moreover, a number of OPSB schools are selective-admission charter schools (see also here and here), which gives even more advantage over state-run RSD schools (and which puts a snag in the “open school choice for families” narrative).

“It is the OPSB advantage that allows researches to combine post-Katrina, OPSB and RSD data and actually hide the lack of progress that state-run, all-charter RSD has made, all the while selling a generalized version of New Orleans market-ed-reform success to the public. I have seen this ploy in the past from the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) in its efforts to conceal low ACT composite scores of RSD schools that it was supposed to take over and reform right into higher test scores, and I am seeing it here in the Harris-Larsen study.

”OPSB schools are not only chiefly responsible for the results in the Harris-Larsen study; OPSB schools are concealing the mediocrity (at best) that was the RSD, state-takeover-charter-conversion experiment…”

As it happens, David Leonhardt of the New York Times today published the second part of his two-part encomium about the apotheosis of the New Orleans schools, due entirely to the miracle of the market. Ironically, his article is titled, “A Plea for a Fact-Based Debate About Charter Schools.” Ironic, because he swallows the charter propaganda whole. He apparently doesn’t know that the “miracle” was the result of merging the RSD scores with the OPSB scores. He never acknowledges that 40% of the RSD schools are failing and segregated. He is right, however, that it is time for a fact-based debate about what happened in New Orleans, and his two articles did not contribute to that debate.

Watch the illusionists. Great tricks. Don’t be fooled.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, New Orleans, Privatization, Testing

Mercedes Schneider Teaches David Leonhardt the Reality of the Charter Takeover in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2018 //
14

Mercedes Schneider, high school teacher in Louisiana with a doctorate in statistics and research methodology, has some lessons for New York Times’ columnist David Leonhardt about the sham of charter schools in New Orleans.

One way to look at the takeover: The charter schools with a white majority are rated A or B. The charter schools that are almost completely black are rated D or F.

Another way to describe this: Separate and unequal.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New Orleans, Privatization

Gary Rubinstein: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Reform Movement and Its Critics, But Didn’t Ask

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2018 //
4

This is a hilarious, must-see video, narrated by Gary Rubinstein, about his life in Teach for America, his disillusionment with Reform, and his collision with Reformers as they set about to remake American education.

I play a minor role in his story, because I too was an apostate, and my turnaround helped him make his own turnaround.

You will see all the stars of Reform, as Gary gives each of them their few seconds of glory and dispatches some of their heroes.

You will also see how he had his own moment of reckoning and developed a passion for calling out lies and propaganda.

It really is delightful and informative.

The moral of the story, he says, is that Tufts University (where he was a student) beats Harvard University (where most of the Reformers were students).

There are lots more morals to the story, and you will see how he skillfully weaves the history of the past 25 or so years together into a slide show.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Lies, Michelle Rhee, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Teach for America

Dora Taylor: The “New Gentrification”: Charter Schools and Teacher “Villages” for TFA

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2018 //
14

Dora Taylor, a parent activist in Seattle, noticed an interesting new development.

A developer plans to build a project that includes retail, low income housing and at one time, a charter school, the Green Dot charter school chain, in Southeast Seattle.

Based on further research, I found this is not an anomaly but a national trend.

Bankers, developers and real estate brokers are working together with Teach for America (TFA) and charter school enterprises to offer low income housing mainly for Teach for America recruits and other teachers who do not have adequate pay for clean and safe housing along with free space for charter schools through city and state support. These are our tax dollars paying for highly lucrative business ventures where all the profit goes back to the bankers, developers and brokers.

These people are not developing these projects out of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it for, of course, the money.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Teach for America

Philadelphia: Charter School Accepts Student, Then Withdraws Acceptance After Seeing Her IEP

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2018 //
20

Franklin Towne Charter High School in Philadelphia has been accused of discrimination against a student with disabilities, reports Greg Windle in The Notebook.

Pamela James was thrilled when her granddaughter was accepted at Franklin Towne Charter High School. Her granddaughter raced off to tell friends the good news, and James gave the school a copy of her granddaughter’s Individual Education Plan (IEP), which included the need for emotional support — a common but relatively expensive requirement among students in Philly schools.

Hours later they were both shaken when James got a call from the Northeast Philadelphia school, informing her that her granddaughter could not attend as a result of her emotional disturbance diagnosis, that the class she needed was “full” and that the school would not accommodate her.

“After I took her IEP to the school, that’s when they shot me down,” James said. “That was really ugly discrimination.”

James was furious. No one at the school would return her calls, though she eventually received a brief letter restating that her daughter could not attend.

“I don’t understand how they’re able to do this,” James said. “They decided to change their mind because she needed emotional support.”

At that point, James did not know it is illegal to deny a student attendance at a public school based on their special education status. But she would soon find out. The Education Law Center of Philadelphia has since taken up her cause, sending an open complaint letter to the schools’ lawyer.

The article includes a graph created by the Education Law Center that shows the stark disparity between Philadelphia’s public schools and its charter schools in enrolling students with disabilities.

The only type of disability where charters accept the same proportion of students as public schools is “speech or language impairment.”

On every other type of disability, the contrast is dramatic. The public schools enroll more than 90% of students who are blind and nearly 90% of those who are deaf. The proportions accepted by charter schools are tiny. Eighty percent of students with autism are in public schools, 20% in charters.

Let us all be grateful to organizations like the Education Law Center. Without them, many students would have rights that are not enforced.

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

Mercedes Schneider: Charter School Growth Is Declining

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2018 //
4

Well, here is some good news.

Mercedes Schneider reports that the net rate of charter school growth is declining. The number of charter school closings is rising, and the number of new schools is slowing.

“Market-driven ed reform is a story of races to close gaps. However, there is one ed-reform gap that appears to be closing, with the gap closure no doubt undesired:

“The national rate of charter school closures is notably gaining on the rate of charter school openings.

“In spring 2018, the ed-reform publication, Education Next, published an article about the decline in charter school annual net growth (number of new charter schools minus number of charter school closures per year) since the 2013-14 school year. The graph below ends with the 2016-17 school year. Note that EdNext reports that the data from this graph comes from another ed reform org, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS).

“As of this writing, NAPCS has two reports available focused on charter school enrollment, one from 2016-17 and one, from 2017-18. In 2016-17, NAPCS reported that across the nation, 329 new charter schools opened in fall 2016 as 211 had closed by spring 2016, for a net gain of 118 additional charter schools in 2016-17. The total number of charter schools open nationally in 2016-17 was 6,939, which yielded a gain of 1.7 percent (118 / 6,939), somewhat shy of the 2.3 percent EdNext listed in its spring 2018 graph, and on the lean end of the rounded “2 percent” presented in NAPCS’s 2016-17 report.

“But let us give the benefit of the still-embarrassing doubt to EdNext, who may have received more precise data from NAPCS, with both pro-charter orgs understandably motivated to present this loss in the best possible light. A dim light at a best of 2.3 percent, but worth a couple more lumens than the 1.7 percent based on the data in NAPCS’s 2016-17 report.

“Going beyond the data in the EdNext report: In 2017-18, NAPCS loses more lumens: 309 new charters opened across the nation in fall 2017 even as 238 had closed by spring of 2017, yielding a net gain nationally of 71 additional charter schools in 2017-18. Given that NAPCS reported 7,038 charter schools in operation in 2017-18, the net gain was 1 percent (71 / 7,038), which NAPCS reported spot-on as 1 percent.”

Mercedes observes that the tortoise seems to be gaining on the hare.

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

Mike Petrilli: In the Face of So Many Setbacks, Where Does Reform Go From Here?

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2018 //
28

Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, one of the leading advocacy groups in the Corporate Reform Movement, offers advice and consolation to fellow Reformers.

“After two decades of mostly-forward movement and many big wins, the last few years have been a tough patch for education reform. The populist right has attacked standards, testing, and accountability, with particular emphasis on the Common Core, as well as testing itself. The election of Donald Trump and appointment of Betsy DeVos, meanwhile, have made school choice and charter schools toxic on much of the progressive left. And the 2017 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate a “lost decade” of academic achievement. All of these trends have left policymakers and philanthropists feeling glum about reform, given the growing narrative that, like so many efforts before it, the modern wave hasn’t worked or delivered the goods, yet has produced much friction, fractiousness, and furor.”

Take heart, he says. The children of America need us to privatize their schools, bust teachers’ unions, and Judge their teachers by student test scores. Remember when they all laughed at NCLB, but now “we” know that it was a great success?

It’s true that NAEP scores have been flat for a decade. It’s true that charters close almost as often as they open. It’s true that the charter industry is riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse.

But stick with proven leaders like the hedge fund managers, Bill Gates, and DeVos.

Sorry to be snarky, Mike, but I couldn’t resist.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Testing, Trump, VAM, Vouchers

North Carolina: An Insider on the Hoax of School Choice

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2018 //
5

A few days ago, I posted teacher Stuart Egan’s description of the attack on public schools in North Carolina, which identified the malefactors who are luring kids to charter schools, religious schools, cyber charters, and home schools, driving down public school enrollment to 81%.

Egan received a response from a staff member of the North Carolina Department of Instruction, which is led by Mark Johnson, former TFA who marches to the tune of the Tea Party and has no conscience of his own, no vision for the 81%, no concern about the quality of education in the state’s charter or religious schools. How does TFA find the people who advocate and act so strongly against public schools that enroll the majority of students? Will TFA ever be held accountable for them?

Here is the comment:

“This is so spot on. Everyone should translate ‘choice’ into ‘undermining of public schools’, because that is exactly what it is. The most sickening part is how low-income families and those of children with disabilities have been targeted, cajoled, hoodwinked and bamboozled into believing that choice automatically equates to quality. (Anyone who considers themselves conservative should be outraged at this profound misuse of their tax dollars.)

“Unfortunately, I get to witness this erosion and implosion every day at DPI. I just met another of my colleagues whose job was eliminated by the General Assembly’s draconian cuts and our puppet superintendent’s ‘just following orders’ approach. It was so sad to see this person, who was providing passionate, competent and knowledgeable support to eastern NC schools trying mightily to serve their markedly low-income populations, tossed aside in this ponzi scheme to dangle ‘school choice’ in front of needy families. It’s like eliminating the road crew that is fixing potholes and cracks on I-95 and using the public’s money to build a flimsy expensive two-lane highway right next to it that has no markings, guardrails, speed limits or enforcement (with full kickbacks going to the private paving company). ‘Hey mom and dad — let your kids ride on this shiny new road because you’ll have a choice, and we all know choice is better!’

“EdNC put out an excellent article a few days ago: https://www.ednc.org/2018/07/11/steep-cuts-to-north-carolinas-education-agency-hurt-low-performing-schools-the-most/. It perfectly spells out the absurdity in our agency and our feckless leadership. We’re told ‘shh, be quiet; this is a sensitive time’ for all our colleagues who were laid off, when in reality there should be a loud leader fighting for his folks every step of the way, even if the jobs could not be saved. You see, that’s how the damage really occurs here in our agency — not by vocal or visible action of those who ultimately have to answer to their supervisor every day, month and year, but by the SILENCE and joint inaction of the only ones in the agency who AREN’T supervised. The superintendent has no official boss and writes no annual work plan like the rest of us; instead, he gets a four-year ride and won’t have a whiff of accountability for another two and half years, long after the damage has been done. Meanwhile, scores of good people continue to walk out the door, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and the Public Schools of North Carolina will continue to suffer for it.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Fraud, North Carolina, Privatization, Shame, Teach for America, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers
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