Archives for category: Education Industry

As Gary Rubinstein writes, Louisiana is one of the most “reformed” states in the nation. It’s superintendent John White is a TFA alum and a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. It has an all-charter city. It has vouchers. It received a Race to the Top grant. What could possibly go wrong?

Rubinstein writes here about a seeming paradox: Every year, Louisiana State Superintendent John zwhite boasts about an astounding increase in the proportion of students passing AP exams. Yet, Louisiana has pretty awful performance on the AP exams.

Paradox solved!

Louisiana moved from fourth worst to third worst in the nation on AP performance. It was recently overtaken by North Dakota.

Read his post and ask yourself why anyone would boast about such low performance. Is that what they teach at the Broad Academy?

Gay Adelmann, co-founder of Save Our Schools Kentucky, reports that the Koch Brothers have landed. They are not welcome.

Gay wrote this article that was published in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Families in Jefferson County (Louisville) want the state legislature to stop messing with their public schools. Many of the meddling legislators are associated with ALEC, the far-right group that doesn’t believe in local control or democracy. Please read her article.

In addition, she sent out this letter warning about the unwanted arrival of the field operation of the Koch Brothers. She hopes they leave town soon, and empty-handed.

She writes:

“Hello friends,

“I hope you had a wonderful holiday. I wanted to give you the latest news from Kentucky.

“The expression goes, “If you want to hide something, the best place is plain sight.” Well, the Koch operatives have gotten so comfortable hiding in plain sight in Kentucky, they’re starting to get a little sloppy. In fact, they sent a rookie in to start up a new “independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization” and he’s been playing a little too fast and loose with the “research.”

“From making an outrageous claim earlier this year about gang violence being behind the increase in murders in Louisville (in order to push some agenda, I’m sure),

http://wfpl.org/gangs-are-behind-louisvilles-growing-homicides-study-says/

“to this unbelievable piece blaming universities for the opioid crisis and babies out of wedlock (more Koch agendas at play).

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2017/09/19/universities-opioid-crisis-jordan-harris/677901001/

“Wait, what? And the media gives this guy a platform? Yeah, sadly.

“This admitted “millennial-is-just-a-marketing-ploy” executive director of Pegasus Institute was featured on a painful podcast encounter with one of his critics following his gang violence piece. This led to this insightful follow-up assessment from said critic via a blog on Medium.

View at Medium.com

“But he escaped my radar until this past week, when he made the mistake of going after the local school board for the largest district in the state. He claimed a state takeover was the “last best hope” for the urban district that serves 101,000 of some of the state’s highest poverty (and therefore lowest performing) students. Who is this guy? How did he become such an expert on Louisville, or pedagogy for that matter? Is he even aware that in just the past year or so, our community put pro-public education board members in place, and just 6 months ago, that board removed an ineffective superintendent? Our work is just getting started! And since these same greedy carpetbaggers are also currently going after our teachers’ pensions, local control over our student assignment plans – and ramming a shiny new charter school law down our throats – some of us weren’t having it!

“Connecting the Koch dots is easy when you’ve got Koch Institute in your bio and Art Laffer on your advisory board, as this guy does! To help expose these Koch fiends to the rest of our community, I wrote the following opinion piece, which appeared in today’s Sunday paper.

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2017/11/25/dear-jcps-school-takeover-opinion/889979001/

“I am reminded of another expression my uncle shared with me at the start of my career in financial services 25 years ago. He said, “Remember: Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.” Folks, the hogs have arrived, and they’re running amok. It’s time we sharpen some knives, turn up the heat on the grill, and send them the message they are not welcome in Kentucky.

“Thanks,

“Gay

This is one of the best pieces I have read about the pernicious effects of “education reform” on the the Democratic Party. I have consistently argued that the Democrats triangulated so far during the Clinton administration that they blurred the distinct lines between the parties, then ended up supporting the Republican policies of testing, accountability, and choice, which previously they abhorred.

Jennifer Berkshire here fills in the details with her sharp eye and wit. So thoroughly have Democrats joined with Republicans in demonizing teachers and unions, that there is hardly a dime’s worth of difference between them on education issues. Things have gotten so bad that one Democrat espousing privatization recently co,pare the teachers unions to Alabama governor George Wallace, blocking children as they try to escape public schools to enter charter nirvana.

She writes:

“To begin to chronicle the origin of the Democrats’ war on their own—the public school teachers and their unions that provide the troops and the dough in each new campaign cycle to elect the Democrats—is to enter murky territory. The Clintons were early adopters; tough talk against Arkansas’s teachers, then among the poorest paid in the country, was a centerpiece of Bill’s second stint as Governor of Arkansas. As Hillary biographer Carl Bernstein recounts, the Arkansas State Teachers Association became the villain that cemented the couple’s hold on the Governor’s mansion—the center of their Dick Morris-inspired “permanent campaign.” The civil rights language in which the Democratic anti-union brigade cloaks itself today was then nowhere to be heard, however. And little wonder: Civil rights groups fiercely opposed the most controversial feature of the Clintons’ reform agenda—competency tests for teachers—on the grounds that Black teachers, many of whom had attended financially starved Black colleges, would disproportionately bear their brunt.

“Hillary made the cause her personal crusade in 1983, trotting out anecdote after anecdote about teachers she’d heard about who couldn’t add or read. The reform package passed, cementing Bill’s reputation as a new breed of Democratic governor, one who wasn’t afraid to take on entrenched interests in order to tackle tough problems. “Anytime you’re going to turn an institution upside down, there’s going to be a good guy and a bad guy,” recalls Clinton campaign manager Richard Herget. “The Clintons painted themselves as the good guys. The bad guys were the schoolteachers.”

“By the early 1980s, there was already a word for turning public institutions upside down: neoliberalism. Before it degenerated into a flabby insult, neoliberal referred to a self-identified brand of Democrat, ready to break with the tired of dogmas of the past. “The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,” wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed, whom he called simply The Neoliberals. His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore (for the record, Gore eschewed the neoliberal label in favor of something he liked to call “neopopulism”). In Rothenberg’s telling, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party that had begun during the economic crises of the 1970s. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over. It was time for fresh neo-ideas.

“Redistribution and government intervention were out; investment and public-private partnerships were the way to go. Neoliberal man (there are no women included in Rothenberg’s account) was also convinced that he had found the answer to the nation’s economic malaise: education, or as he was apt to put it, investment in human capital. “Education equals growth is a neoliberal equation,” writes Rothenberg.

“But this new cult of education wasn’t grounded in John Dewey’s vision of education-as-democracy, or in the recent civil-rights battles to extend the promise of public education to excluded African-American communities. No, these bold, results-oriented thinkers understood that in order to fuel economic growth, schools had to be retooled and aligned in concert with the needs of employers. The workers of the future would be prepared to compete nimbly in the knowledge-based post-industrial society of the present, For the stragglers still trapped in older, industrial-age models of enterprise and labor, re-training—another staple of the neoliberal vision—would set them on the path to greater prosperity….

“Today’s Democratic school reformers—a team heavy on billionaires, pols on the move, and paid advocates for whatever stripe of fix is being sold—depict their distaste for regulation, their zeal for free market solutions as au courant thinking. They rarely acknowledge their neoliberal antecedents. The self-described radical pragmatists at the Progressive Policy Institute, for instance, got their start as Bill Clinton’s policy shop, branded as the intellectual home for New Democrats. Before its current push for charter schools, PPI flogged welfare reform. In fact, David Osborne, the man so fond of likening teacher unions to arch segregationists in the south, served as Al Gore’s point person for “reinventing government.” Today the model for Osborne’s vision for reinventing public education is post-Katrina New Orleans—where 7,500 mostly Black school employees were fired en route to creating the nation’s first nearly all-charter-school-system, wiping out a pillar of the city’s Black middle class in the process.”

Read the article.

It brilliantly describes how Democrats attacked their own base, embraced Republican ideas, and merged their thinking with that of Republicans. A sure-fire recipe for disaster, since Republicans are so much better at being Republicans than Democrats are. You can’t win by destroying your base.

Charter advocates like to say that a charter school is a public school.

Peter Greene lays out the conditions that charter schools must meet to be considered public Schools.

Here are three of those conditions. There are more.

“If it is owned and operated by the local community and their duly elected representatives. If you can call the people who run your school to talk about your school, and it’s not a long distance call, that might be a public school. If your school is run by a board of directors who must all stand for election by the taxpayers who foot the bill for your school, you are probably a public school.

“If it is operated with financial transparency. If any taxpayer can walk into the main district office and request a copy of the budget and receive a copy, that’s a public school system. If you have the opportunity to call or meet with those local elected board members t argue about how your tax dollars are being spent, it’s probably a public school.

“If it cannot turn down a single student from your community. Your school system may sort students into specialized schools, or it may pay the cost of sending Very Special Need students to Highly Specialized schools, but it cannot ever deny unilaterally responsibility for students just because they cost a lot of money or require specialized programs or just fail to behave compliantly. If your school system can’t wave a student off and say, “She’s not our problem,” your system is probably a public school system….

“You can say that a pig is a cow. You can dress it up in a cow suit and just keep insisting over and over that it’s a cow, correcting everyone who says differently. But at the end of the day, when you butcher it, you still get pork.”

Bill Gates has a big new idea. He has gotten together with a few other big-time philanthropists and created a pool of $500 Million, with which they plan to solve the really big problems in health, education, and economic opportunity. They call their collaboration “Co-Impact.” One of the collaborators is Jeff Skoll, who was one of the producers of the public school-bashing hitjob “Waiting for Superman.”

Emily Talmage is not happy about what’s coming from this group. She sees it as yet another attempt by the super-elites to impose their will on the rest of us, who lack their money and power.

Let us stipulate: no one elected a Bill Gates and his friends to remake social policy. Sure, Trump is busy dismantling and shredding social policy, but who put Bill in charge? One thing we can say about the richest man in America: Every one of his interventions into American education has failed. There is no reason to believe he has learned anything from the slow collapse of VAM and the catastrophe of Common Core. To the contrary, he is still propping CCSS up with new millions, although it’s very name is mud.

Emily writes:

“Gates is one giant, gnarly tree in an dark, overgrown forest of private “givers” who are dead-set on remaking our nation into something reminiscent of a feudalistic society.

“I say it’s time to investigate the whole rotten system that’s allowing this to happen.

“Seriously, folks. This just can’t be okay.”

Carol Burris and Darcie Cimarusti of the Network for Public Education argue here that the candidates who forcefully stand up for public schools and speak out against privatization will win in November 2018.

Their evidence is the Elections of 2017.

Start with the remarkable results in Virginia.

“The most important race of 2017 was the hotly contested race for the governor of Virginia, in which a strong public education advocate, Democrat Ralph Northam, faced off against Republican Ed Gillespie. Gillespie fully embraced the entire DeVos agenda — charter expansion, online virtual schools, home schools, and vouchers in the form of tax credits and education savings accounts. There was not an inch of policy daylight between Gillespie and DeVos.

“This should come as no surprise. Gillespie received over $100,000 in campaign contributions from the DeVos family, including a donation from the Secretary’s husband, Dick DeVos. Americans for Prosperity, which is controlled by the Koch brothers, launched a digital video in which a charter school leader criticized Northam for being the vote that stopped the neo-voucher “educational savings accounts.”

“Northam, who was supported by the teachers union, has been a strong and consistent supporter of public education. As stated on his website, “Ralph took tie-breaking votes to protect Virginia’s public education from being raided with unconstitutional private school vouchers and to keep decisions about public charter schools in the hands of local school boards.”

“The election of Gillespie would have been a game changer for public education in the Commonwealth. Virginia is one of a handful of states that allow charter schools to only be authorized by local school boards. In Virginia, charters are subject to the same transparency guidelines as public schools in the state. There are only eight charter schools in Virginia, much to the chagrin of charter advocates.”

Northam, who calls himself a “friend of public schools,” will keep privatization out of the state and instead work to strengthen and improve Virginia’s public schools.”

Friends of public schools will win. Democrats who abandon public schools will not be able to take advantage of “The DeVos Effect.”

Some readers have asked for a copy of the speech that was so beautifully illustrated by the graphic posted earlier today.

I didn’t have a speech. I made notes and used them as talking points, on which I elaborated. When some in the audience (composed of progressives) insisted that charter schools were saving lives, I should have pointed out that the single biggest funder of charters is the anti-Union Walton Family Foundation, which is known for low wages and resistance to workers’ rights. About 95% of charters are non-union. The best kind of social justice that could be done by the Waltons is to pay their one million employees $15 an hour and allow them to unionize, in the stores and the charters they fund.

Here are my talking points.

“War on public sector.

“Take any public sector activity and google it with the word “privatization.”
Police, firefighters, prisons,hospitals, libraries, parks, schools—and what we once thought of as public is either privatized or under threat of privatization.

“Powerful movement—some driven by profit, some by libertarian ideology—seeks to shrink the public sector and monetize it.

“My area of specialization is education.

“There is today a full court press to privatize public education.

“How many in this room went to public schools?

“The fundamental purpose of public schools is to develop citizens, to sustain our democracy. To prepare young people to assume the duties of citizenship, to vote wisely, to understand issues, and to sit on juries.

“Our current obsession with standardized testing has corrupted the purpose of schooling. Clinton, Bush, Obama. We are now locked into a marketization approach to education: Testing, Accountability, competition, Choice. This is market-driven education, with winners and losers.

“The Bush program: NCLB. The same children were left behind.
THE Obama program: Race to the Top. Same as NCLB. Where is the top? Education is not a race.

“Test scores are fundamentally a reflection of family income and education. They are now cynically used by rightwing politicians to declare schools to be failures and set them up for privatization.

“Public education is one of the foundation elements of our democracy.
The movement to privatize public schools is a threat to democracy.

“Education Policy today is decided not by deliberation and debate but by big money.

“The Queen of Dark Money in education is now Secretary of Education.

“Betsy DeVos sees education as a Consumer good, not a civic responsibility
She has Compared choosing a school to choosing an Uber or choosing which food truck to buy lunch from. These are trivial choices, consumer choices. They are not public goods.
She really doesn’t understand the role of the public school in a community, as part of our democracy

“Dark Money, major philanthropies, and Wall Street billionaires have collaborated in attacking democratic control of schools. They have encouraged State takeovers, Charters, Vouchers. Private management. Mayoral control.

“Goals:

“School Choice, which promotes segregation by race and social class
Get rid of unions
Attacks on teaching profession.

“Venture philanthropies back Privatization: Gates, Broad, Walton, Arnold Foundation, Fisher Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Bloomberg Foundation, Dell Foundation, Jonathan Sackler, many more

“Dark Money funneled to state and local elections— by such groups as: Education Reform Now, Stand for Children, Families for Excellent Schools, Democrats for Education Reform, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Walton family. All have the same goal: Privatization.

“Half the states now have vouchers for private schools, enacted by the legislature, despite the fact that vouchers have always been defeated in state referenda.

“Betsy DeVos paid for a voucher referendum in Michigan in 2000. It was defeated overwhelmingly. So Michigan went for unbridled Choice with charter schools, no district lines. 80% of the charters in Michigan operate for profit, more than any other state. Michigan’s standing on national tests dropped from the middle of the pack, to the bottom, between 2003 and 2013. Detroit is overrun with charters yet it continues to be the lowest scoring district in the nation.

“Milwaukee has public schools, charters, and vouchers, and all three sectors are low performing.

“Demand for vouchers is actually very low: Indiana, only 3% use them, less in Louisiana. Only 6% in charters. Yet every dollar for vouchers and charters is taken away from the schools that educate the great majority of children.

“Katherine Stewart in the current American Prospect: “Proselytizers and Profiteers.” Religious extremists in the voucher movement made “useful idiots of the charter movement.” Community public schools replaced by Corporate charter chains. Some of the biggest charter chains are owned and run by evangelicals and fundamentalists.

“The real Dark Money wants vouchers, religious schools, homeschooling, charters, anything but public schools.

“DeVos, American Federation for Children
Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity (Libre Initiative) (AZ referendum)
ALEC— model legislation for charters, vouchers, ending certification, breaking unions.

“Public schools struggle where there is high poverty.

“Income inequality is the scourge of our society.

“Privatizing public schools won’t solve poverty.

“Hopeful signs:

*Virginia election: pro-public schools, many of the winning candidates are teachers

*Douglas County, CO, rebuff to vouchers

*upcoming referendum in AZ on vouchers, which Koch brothers want to knock off the ballot

*In 20 State referenda, vouchers have lost every single time.

*support for charters dropped from 51% to 39% in the past year, among both Democrats and Republicans, largely in response to scandals, prosecutions, and also NAACP criticism of charters.

“The origin of school choice was in segregated states fighting the Brown decision.

“Betsy DeVos is such a polarizing figure that she reminds us of the importance of public schools.”

The first law authorizing charter schools was authorized by Minnesota in 1991, and the first charter school opened in St. Paul in 1992. The original idea of charters was that they would enroll students with high-needs, would try new approaches, and would share what they learned with the public schools. They were not intended to be competitors with public schools, but to be akin to research and development centers, abetting the work of the public schools.

Now, 25 years later, the charter sector has burgeoned into nearly 7,000 schools enrolling some three million students. Some charters are corporate chains. Some are religious in character. Some operate for profit. Some are owned and run by non-educators.

Instead of collaborating with public schools, most compete for students and resources. Instead of serving the neediest students, many choose the students who are likeliest to succeed.

It is time for a thorough inquiry into the status and condition of charter schools today, and that is what Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has done in this report.

An experienced high school principal, Burris has traveled the country, visiting charter schools and talking to parents, teachers, students, and administrators.

Not only has she examined many charters, she reviews the marketing of charters and their fiscal impact on traditional public schools. Policy makers have not expanded the funding at the state or local level to pay for new charters. Instead, they have cut funding for the public schools that typically enroll 85-90% of students. Thus, most students will have larger classes and fewer curriculum choices because of the funding taken away for charter schools. Burris also analyzes the report on charters by the NAACP and the response to it by charter advocates.

This is neither fair nor just nor wise.

This is the only post you will see today, except for a graphic that will pop up in an hour or so.

Take the time to read the entire report.

Let me know what you think.

A charter founder in the suburbs of Illinois is under investigation for theft of $2.7 Million from school lunch Funds, to subsidize her lavish lifestyle.

“Pamela Strain said she’d once dreamed of following in the footsteps of Clarence Darrow, the legendary Chicago attorney known for championing the underdog.

“Strain instead went into education, rising to become an elementary school principal in an impoverished neighborhood in Chicago before founding her own charter school in the south suburbs serving underprivileged kids.

“But federal investigators say instead of championing the less fortunate, Strain has been stealing from the very programs intended to help them.

“Court records made public this week show that Strain is suspected of using the small, nonprofit school she founded in 2005 to loot as much as $2.7 million in funds over a seven-year period, including money from federal school lunch subsidies and other grants designed to provide nutritious food to low-income children.

“Strain, 60, allegedly used the funds to pay for a lavish lifestyle, including her home and other properties, luxury cars, spas, salons and shopping sprees at stores such as Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s, according to an FBI search warrant affidavit unsealed in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

“The 54-page filing also contained startling details about the conditions at Strain’s Beacon Hill Preparatory Academy, which operated in various locations in the south suburbs before reopening in Lansing last year under a new name, Lighthouse Christian Academy.”

Big news!

Today state control of the schools officially ends.

A concerted effort by parents and citizens of Philadelphia ended the city’s long and disastrous trial of state control. Paul Vallas, the Edison Project, charters, a steady stream of efforts to privatize the schools and hand control over to someone else. Meanwhile, the public schools were stripped bare, to the bone.

The state-controlled School Reform Commission voted to disband itself after 16 years of running the public schools into the ground. The city now reverts to mayoral control, and the parent groups won’t rest until the city has an elected board.

Congratulations, Philadelphia!

Time to return democracy to the cradle of our democracy.

From the Alliance on November 2:

“Members of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools celebrate the impending dissolution of the School Reform Commission. We thank Mayor Kenney and Council President Clarke for their leadership in bringing this state-imposed body to an end. State control of our schools has brought devastation to this city: precious funds have been diverted to non-public schools and over 30 neighborhood have seen their schools closed permanently.

“Since 2012, APPS members have attended every session of the SRC, including special meetings and Policy Committee meetings. We have spent those five years fighting and organizing against the reckless spending, lack of transparency and disregard for the public exhibited by the many iterations of the SRC. In 2014, APPS sued then-Chair Bill Green and the SRC in federal court for violating the public’s First Amendment rights when Green ordered the police to confiscate signs from members of the public—and won. The following year, we filed suit in Commonwealth Court to stop the SRC’s continual violations of the PA Sunshine Act. Our settlement resulted in significant changes in SRC policy, including posting the resolutions to be voted on two weeks before the meeting instead of only 72 hours, and allowing the public to speak on resolutions posted just before or during the meeting.

“We now have a unique opportunity to end the disenfranchisement of the people of Philadelphia. The stakeholders in our public school system—that is, every person who benefits from a thriving public school system—should have the same rights as those in every other district in the commonwealth to elect the officials who will be entrusted to represent them in matters of school governance.

“The dissolution of the SRC is not contingent on changing the City Charter. The Charter now provides for mayoral control, as it did before SRC. The Mayor can select an interim school board for a year, during which time the city should hold community forums, as it is presently doing for the Rebuild initiative, to hear from the people whose voices were shut out during the reign of the SRC about how best to create a truly representative body for the critical task of educating our children.

“Trading in one unelected, unaccountable board for another is not a progressive solution to the problems facing the district.”