Archives for category: Education Industry
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Why Cynthia Nixon Has a Chance to Beat Andrew Cuomo

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
44

 

This is a good article in the New York Daily News by Alyssa Katz, of the Daily News about Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary in New York.

She says that Cynthia Nixon should not be written off.

Cuomo has raised $30 million, almost all of it from fat cats and Wall Street.

Nixon, unlike Cuomo, is a genuine progressive.

Cuomo has helped Republicans retain control of the State Senate, even though Democrats have a numerical majority. Cuomo has allied himself with a breakaway group of rightwing Democrats (the Independent Democratic Caucus), who side with the Republicans and keep the Republicans in power. At Cuomo’s last election, he persuaded the Working Families Party to endorse him by promising to help Democrats win back the Senate. The day after he won the WFP endorsement, he broke his promise. That is why the leader of the State Senate is a rightwing Republican, John Flanagan, who defeats every progressive measure.

Nixon promises to change Albany’s culture of corruption. One of Cuomo’s closest aides was recently convicted of taking bribes.

She is way ahead of Cuomo on education issues. She went to public school, and she sends her own children to public schools. She understands that the state has failed to fund the public schools in response to court orders. She knows that Cuomo does the bidding of the charter industry, who have given generously to Cuomo. She knows that Cuomo supports vouchers, in a blatant appeal to religious groups. She remembers that Cuomo promised to “break up the public education monopoly” by funding billionaire-backed charters.

Cynthia is intelligent, quick on her feet, and unafraid of Cuomo, who likes to bully people.

At Cuomo’s last Democratic primary four years ago, Zephyr Teachout won 34% of the vote, with no money or media exposure or  name recognition. She swept upstate New York. Now she is treasurer of Cynthia Nixon’s campaign.

If Nixon can win Teachout’s 34% by building on her New York City appeal, and add to it with the free media and name recognition that Teachout never had, Cuomo should worry.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Industry, New York, Privatization, Vouchers

Arizona SOS Defeats Koch Brothers in Court!

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
6

 

Arizona SOS beat the Koch brothers and DeVos money in court!

Arizona SOS gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on the expansion of vouchers in the state, and the Koch brothers underwrote a legal effort to knock the referendum off the ballot. Democracy frightens them.

Today, the Arizona Supreme Court Rules that the referendum can go forward.

The vote would not kill the voucher program but block the Legislature’s efforts to expand it, thus siphoning more money from the public schools that enroll most students.

 

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

San Antonio: Carpe Diem Charter School Will Close in June

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
7

 

The Carpe Diem charter school in San Antonio announced that it was closing its doors in June. The charter chain relies heavily on “personalized learning” and “blended learning,” which means a lot of instruction takes place on computer screens. It failed to meet academic standards two years in a row and was not likely to improve in its third year.

Carpe Diem was part of the initial cohort of schools recruited by Choose to Succeed, a school choice campaign that sought to attract high-performing charter districts to San Antonio. While the other Choose to Succeed districts — KIPP San Antonio, BASIS, Great Hearts Academies, IDEA Public Schools and Rocketship Education — built campuses across the city, Carpe Diem floundered. Its enrollment hovered between 200 and 250 students at its single campus on the West Side.

Former Mayor Julian Castro embraced charter schools and promised to have a large proportion of the students in the city enrolled in them. He created the campaign that welcomed the big corporate charter chains to San Antonio. The new Mayor, Ron Nuremberg, is not hostile to charters but has emphasized that charters should be complements to high quality public schools, not replacements.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Choice Advocates: Test Scores Don’t Really Matter All That Much

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
31

 

Ever since the School Choice Movement got momentum in the early 1990s, its proponents have claimed that charters and vouchers would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Their metric, of course, was scores on standardized test scores, and they welcomed No Child Left Behind and its successor Race to the Top. They were certain that choice schools—free to select their students, free to kick out students, free from bureaucracy, free from unions, free to pay differential pay to teachers—would prove their value by generating sky-high test scores.

There are some charter schools that get high scores, but most don’t. Most studies find that some charters get high scores, some get the same scores as nearby schools, and some are far worse than the so-called “failing schools.”

Recent voucher studies have converged on the finding that students who use vouchers actually lose ground as compared to their peers who won a voucher but didn’t use it. The more optimistic say that the voucher students make up the lost ground in 3-4 years, but they don’t take into account the attrition of the weakest students from the voucher schools.

A new paper by three school choice advocates concludes that test scores are not the best measure of success (whoa! Who knew?). Other long-term impacts, they say, matter more, like graduation rates. Why are they moving the goal posts? Voucher programs show no academic gains, but they do show higher graduation rates, so that’s what really matters. There is a trick here, however. Every voucher program has a high rate of attrition, which pro-choice researchers ignore or downplay. The “higher graduation rates” in evaluations of voucher programs in Milwaukee and D.C. do not acknowledge the high number of kids who started ninth grade and didn’t make it to the end of twelfth grade.

Patrick Wolf of the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas (funded primarily by the Walton Family Foundation) conducted the official evaluations of both Milwaukee and the District of Columbia. In his initial report about Milwaukee, he wrote that the attrition rate was 75%, but decided that was an error and revised the attrition rate to 56%. Either number is huge. Huge and huger. 

The survivors had a higher graduation rate than the students in the Milwaukee Public Schools, which included the kids who dropped out of the voucher schools.

Wolf’s D.C. evaluation does not break out the attrition rate, but it is likely to be significant. William Mathis of the National Education Policy Center reviewed Wolf’s Congressionally mandated evaluation of the D.C. voucher program but could not determine with certainty how many students had dropped out before graduating, but it appears to be nearly three-quarters.

All of this is background to Secretary Betsy DeVos’ nonchalant response to the latest [2017] negative evaluation of the D.C voucher program.  She never expected vouchers to raise test scores, she says. And it doesn’t matter.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, High School Graduation, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Nancy Flanagan: Do Not Trust “Education Trust”

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2018 //
12

Earlier today, I posted an article criticizing Michigan’s floundering and unaccountable charter schools, based on a report by Education Trust Midwest. I have long known EdTrust as a DC-based organization heavily funded by the Gates Foundation as a cheerleader for high-stakes Testing as the remedy for low test scores of black and brown children. Last night, I saw a tweet that referenced the PIE Network, a collection of 70 corporate education reform groups spread across the nation, all committed to the testing and privatization network. There in Michigan was Education Trust Midwest. Check it and seee which groups in your state are part of this insidious network.

In a comment posted earlier on the blog, Nancy Flanagan, a veteran teacher and blogger, offers reasons not to trust EdTrust on the topic of charter schools.

She writes:

“I once was on the dias with Amber Arellano for a panel discussion on improving MI schools. The setting was an event for Oakland County school boards. Oakland County is Michigan’s richest county, and most of its public school districts are well-regarded, among the top-scoring districts in the state. The audience was elected school board members for these PUBLIC school districts, people who were presumably focused on improving the educational offerings and succcesses in the districts they represented.

“And what did Amber Arellano, Education Trust Midwest’s glamorous and charismatic CEO want to talk about? Charter schools and increasing choice. She framed her remarks by noting the number of failed charters in nearby Detroit. Left unsaid, but hanging in the air: Charters in Oakland County wouldn’t fail, because, well… let’s just say that the student populations would be different. Oakland County kids would benefit from an array of boutique charters for students’ individual passions and interests. Oakland County charters would be managed by innovative educators.

“That was her message. I was stunned. Wasn’t this audience dedicated to preserving public education?? Evidently not, as she was surrounded, after the program, by would-be innovators and entrepreneurs, wanting her advice on how to capitalize on MI’s charter laws.

“Her chief talking point is reflected in the report: You, too, can start a charter, but to sustain it, you must generate “good data.”

“This is the next logical step in Michigan’s utterly failed charter movement (driven by terrible legislation): First, we attract families to charters in areas (like Detroit) where public schools are in intense poverty and have been mismanaged by the state. The low-hanging fruit. Then, we go after the school districts that aren’t in trouble, while pointing fingers at the charters (and charter operators) who are taking on the most troubled kids. We can do better, we tell them.

“The purpose of this report is to spread the charter movement into solidly performing public districts who have thus far resisted the lure of the boutique charter, by once again contrasting (mostly white) children of privilege with children in struggling, underfunded schools in our poorest cities and rural areas.”

 

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

Tom Ultican: Leader of “Destroy Public Education” Group in Indianapolis Will Go National

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2018 //
5

 

Tom Ultican shows how The Mind Trust has dutifully implemented the rightwing agenda in Indianapolis. Fattened with big contributions from far-right foundations, the Mind Trust has done  a thorough job of undermining public education in that city. Now its leader, David Harris, has decided to create yet another national corporate reform organization, having established his bona fides with the Walton Family Foundation and the Arnold Foundation. Walton loves charters and hates unions. Ex-Enron John Arnold loves charters and hates public sector pensions.

Republicans in the State Capitol must love David Harris. He cleverly uses his Democratic credentials to pursue the Trump-DeVos-Pence agenda of privatization.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Indiana, Indianapolis, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Puerto Rico: Legislators Moving to Adopt Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2018 //
36

Another victory for the Trump-DeVos agenda of school choice, this one in Puerto Rico, which is still struggling to recover from massive hurricane damage.

Politico Morning Education reports:

SCHOOL CHOICE PROPOSAL MOVES AHEAD IN PUERTO RICO: One of the island’s legislative chambers approved this week an education reform plan that would usher in charter schools to the territory and roll out a program of school vouchers in 2019. The plan was pitched by Gov. Ricardo Rossello as the island’s education system grappled with a tough recovery and mass migration to the states following Hurricane Maria. It has been criticized by teachers unions, which fear that turning over education to private entities will disrupt public schools there.

– The legislation allows for the creation of charter schools, or for the conversion of existing public schools into charters. Schools must be run by non-profit operators, and must be non-sectarian. Students from across the island would be able to participate in enrollment lotteries, though schools have to give preference to students in neighboring communities. Teachers who chose to work for charter schools in Puerto Rico would be given a leave of absence from the Education Department, which would hold their jobs for up to two years.

– Responding to concerns that Puerto Rico’s system would emulate post-Katrina New Orleans, where nearly all students attend charter schools, lawmakers instituted a cap on the number of charter schools equal to 10 percent of all public schools there.

– As for school vouchers, lawmakers are proposing a rollout in the 2019-2020 school year that would allow 3 percent of students to attend schools of their choosing – including private schools. That number would rise to 5 percent the following year. It’s unclear how much money would be granted to each student, but the legislation calls for no more than 70 percent of what is already allocated per public school student.

The lesson: If you can’t fund your schools adequately, offer school choice instead. It will intensify social and economic segregation and it won’t improve education, but it will give the illusion of reform.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

California: Why the State Board of Education Will Never Say No to KIPP

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2018 //
14

 

Expanding charter schools is the passion of Betsy DeVos.

Lest we forget, it was also the passion of the Obama administration, which spent eight years promoting the wonders of charter schools.

In the last months of the Obama Administration, with John King as Secretary of Education, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $100 million to California and to KIPP to open more charter schools. 

“KIPP Public Charter Schools and the California Department of Education have received federal grants together worth nearly $100 million to expand and start more public charter schools.

“The California Department of Education won $49.9 million to run a grant competition for charter school operators, to support nearly 500 new and expanded public charter schools.

“A consortium of the KIPP Foundation and the KIPP California Region won nearly $48.8 million over three years.

“Among schools benefiting from the award are four growing KIPP Bay Area schools: KIPP Heritage Academy and KIPP Prize Preparatory Academy in San Jose, KIPP Excelencia Community Prep in Redwood City and KIPP Bridge Academy in Oakland. Each of the schools may receive up to $500,000 over the three-year grant period for expansion.”

All that money to expand a charter chain that was first introduced to a national audience in performance at the Republican convention of 2000, when George W. Bush was nominated for the Presidency. 

Betsy DeVos will enjoy the results, but hold Secretaries Arne Duncan and John King and President Obama accountable. John King is now president of Education Trust, which supports high-stakes testing as the path to equity (which it never has been and never will be since all standardized tests mirror family income). Arne Duncan works for Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, U.S. Department of Education

Roxana Marachi: KIPP Refuses to Abide by Conflict of Interest Law, But Gets Approved Anyway

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2018 //
8

Roxana Marachi, professor at San Jose State University, writes here that KIPP refuses to abide by the state’s conflict of interest law (that’s for the little people in public schools) but won approval of new charters by the state board anyway to open two new charters, despite public opposition.

Her post contains a wealth of documents showing the failure of KIPP to enroll the same proportions of ELLs and students with disabilities as nearby public schools, as well as documents about the damage that charters are doing to public schools in California.

This is great news for Betsy DeVos!

But bad news for public schools in California, where the state board rubber-stamps every charter proposal that comes before them, regardless of the views of elected local boards.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, California, Education Industry, Funding, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Why California Should Ban For-Profit Charters and Hold All Charters Accountable

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2018 //
6

 

Julian Vasquez Heilig testified to a State Senate Committee on Education about why charters should be held accountable and be transparent. As chair of the California NAACP Committee on Education, he cites the findings of the national NAACP, which recommended banning for-profit charters and requiring that all charters be authorized ONLY by the local school district, to be sure that they meet local needs instead of replacing  public schools.

Yesterday, the State Board of Education approved two KIPP charters for districts that had rejected them. In California, a charter school can be rejected by the local board, rejected by the county board, and appeal to the state board, which was packed with charter supporters by charter-friendly Governor Jerry Brown.

At the charter hearing, Angela Der Ramos, the CTA State Board liaison for the Dr. Oscar F. Loya Elementary School, said:

KIPP is trying to muscle their way into the SF School District, despite the fact that the District and the County denied the charter.

There is no location, so they would force one of the public schools to share their space.

Over and over, the current state board approves charters that are not wanted by the community. The failure rate of these charters is alarming. 39% fail. And there are clear reasons why. Lack of oversight, lack of transparency, budget shenanigans…

The teachers tend to be uncredentialed, inexperienced, and unsupported, as evidenced by the high turnover rate of faculty.

NAACP is in the house speaking against this charter, as is SF School Board candidate Alison Collins, CTA, and reps from the district and county. They already said no twice. Will this board go against the wishes of the community and approve a charter at the expense of public schools?”

The state board gave its answer: Yes, we will go against the wishes of the community and approve KIPP charters at the expense of public schools. We don’t care what the local community wants.

WHY can’t KIPP find communities where they are welcome?

Categories Accountability, California, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization
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