Archives for category: Education Industry
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Master of Disruption Will Speak to National Charter School Conference

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
25

Clayton Christensen, the leading advocate of DISRUPTION, will address the “National Summit on Education Reform,” sponsored by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence. He will speak on Thursday November 30 in Nashville, as Jeb’s group celebrates a solid decade of efforts to privatize public education. Don’t expect to see or hear about charter school frauds or the failure of vouchers to improve student test scores or the looting of public funds by virtual charter schools.

If you are going, be sure to read the debunking of disruption by Harvard professor Jill Lepore. She demonstrates that disruption is a fraud, a hoax. Even the business disruptions that Christensen boasts about were actually failures. “Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence….”

Read Judith Shulevitz’s takedown of disruption in The New Republic, and how it has emboldened those who want to destroy public education and diminish democracy. Eli Broad’s love of disruption produced the failed leadership of Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein.

Shulevitz wrote (in 2013):

“But when Broad’s “change agents” move into the institutions they’ve been taught to shake up, as dozens have now done, we can see how disruption, well, disrupts—not just “the status quo,” but peoples’ lives. Teachers quit en masse or are fired. Nearby schools close, forcing students to travel to distant ones. School boards divide and bicker. Parents picket. Broad-affiliated superintendents all over the country—Atlanta; Philadelphia; Rochester, New York; Sumter, South Carolina—have resigned or been forced out after no-confidence votes, corruption or cheating scandals, or, in one case, the discovery of alleged irregularities with a doctorate degree.”

Bringing a disruptor into your school district is like inviting an arsonist into your home. You will have change aplenty, but you will lose your home and possibly your family.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Disruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Privatization

Join the Fight to Save Public Schools in Arkansas!

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2017 //
2

Save Our Schools Arkansas and Grassroots Arkansas are sponsoring a showing of “Backpack Full of Cash” on Thursday September 7 from 6:30-8:30 pm at Philander Smith College (M.L. Smith Auditorium) in Little Rock. The event is sponsored by the Schott Foundation for Public Education and SOS Arkansas and Grassroots Arkansas.

All who are concerned about the future of public education as a basic human right are encouraged to attend. Join the Fight to stop privatization of what belongs to all of us!

Parents, educators, students, and other concerned citizens are urged to attend.

In response to the lobbying of representatives of the Walton family, the Legislature stripped Little Rock of local control. The pretext was that 6 of its 48 schools were low-performing.

Learn about the struggle to restore our democratic rights and save our public schools.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Jersey Jazzman: What Makes a No-Excuses Charter School?

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2017 //
31

Jersey Jazzman tries to figure out the definition of a no-excuses charter school. Is it in the eye of the beholder or is there actually a definition that is widely accepted. He traces the ideology back to Dtephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s 2003 book, “No Excuses.” I suggest he also take a look at David Whitman’s 2008 book “Sweating the Small Stuff,” which highlights several exemplary no-excuses schools. Whitman’s book was sponsored by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Soon after he finished it, Whitman became Arne Duncan’s chief speechwriter. That helps explain a lot about Duncan’s love of no-excuses charters. Even earlier was Samuel Casey Carter’s “No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools (2000), which was launched by the Heritage Foundation, thrilled by the idea that schools could get high test scores without spending more money or reducing poverty.

The impulse behind the no-excuses schools, I believe, is neo-colonialism, the desire to teach poor children of color to behave like affluent white children.

I continue to impressed by the Dobbie and Fryer study of charter schools in Texas that found that they had no bearing on test scores or earnings. Dobbie and Fryer are supporters of charters.

They wrote:

“We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earn- ings. Moving to school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings. In contrast, high school graduation effects are predictive of earnings effects throughout the distribution of school quality. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of what might explain our set of facts.”

The paper concludes with this speculation:

“Charter schools, in particular No Excuses charter schools, are considered by many to be the most important education reform of the past quarter century. At the very least, however, this paper cautions that charter schools may not have the large effects on earnings many predicted. It is plausible this is due to the growing pains of an early charter sector that was “building the plane as they flew it.” This will be better known with the fullness of time. Much more troubling, it seems, is the possibility that what it takes to increase achievement among the poor in charter schools deprives them of other skills that are important for labor markets.”

Maybe conformity and obedience are not enough.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Peter Greene: The Branded Classroom of Tomorrow

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2017 //
19

Peter Greene read the article in the New York Times about the new trend to introduce brands into the classroom and imagined what the classroom of Tomorrow would look like.

He begins:

“Good morning,children, and welcome to today’s classes in the Mr. Edbrand Fifth Grade Room, brought to you by Exxon here at Apple Elementary School. I’ll remind you that all Samsung devices and Microsoft Surface tablets must be placed in the big box just outside the door. As usual we’ll be recording and webcasting today, and only properly sponsored materials can be shown on camera.

“Oh, Chris– you brought in your signed clearances from home? Excellent– you can finally move your desk out of the cupboard and join your classmates on camera.

“Today we’re going to continue working on this week’s essay, “Why Pepsi Is the Most Refreshing Drink.” Remember, we’re going to be writing them with the new Edutech Markotron 5000s that came in yesterday. No, Ronny– you’re trying to hold your Markotron like a pen or pencil– just flip your wrist so your hand is upside down and backwards– the Markotrons work fine if you just change the way you write. At recess we’ll be trying out the new game from EduGo– did everyone sign their decline-of-liability forms? And while at your work stations, remember not to slouch so that the new DataGrabber Mining Module can track every part of your facial expressions.

“I’ll also remind you that part of your class requirement is to post a picture from class on Instagram or Twitter; remember, you only get credit if you use the hashtag #MrEdbrandTeaches, because every day what…? That’s right– “Every day I’m increasing my digital footprint.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit

Mike Klonsky: How Vouchers Came to Illinois

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
36

Mike Klonsky explains that Cardinal Cupich did not have to twist any arms to get vouchers.

Governor Bruce Rauner, Spesker Mike Madigan, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel were eager to jump on Betsy DeVos’s privatization bandwagon.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Linda Lyon: The Fight to Save Public Education and Democracy in Arizona

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
10

Linda Lyon is a retired Air Force colonel and President-Elect of the Arizona School Boards Association.

She writes here about the forces massing against the parents and educators who oppose vouchers. Betsy DeVos’s organization American Federation for Children has jumped into the campaign, smearing Arizona’s Teacher of the Year. What a disgrace! DeVos vs. democracy.


During the last legislative session in Arizona, lawmakers approved a full expansion of vouchers to all 1.1 million Arizona students against very vocal opposition. In response, Save Our Schools Arizona conducted a grassroots petition drive with over 2,500 volunteers collecting over 111K signatures to get the issue on next year’s ballot.

To fight back, privatization proponents have recently ramped up their “take no prisoners” war on public education in Arizona with attacks on Arizona’s 2016 Teacher of the Year, Christine Marsh. According to The Arizona Republic, the American Federation for Children (AFC), (“dark money” group previously led by Betsy Devos), recently “unleashed robocalls” in the Phoenix area targeting Marsh. In a related effort, a Republican state legislator, Rep. David Livingston, R-Glendale, also filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Isela Blanc, D-Tempe, accusing her of disorderly conduct.

What is the egregious violation these women are accused of? According to voucher proponents, (during the drive to gain petition signatures for an anti-voucher referendum), both circulated petitions without a box at the top of the petition checked. The box, according to state law, is required to be checked prior to petitions being circulated, to reflect whether the circulator is a volunteer or paid petition gatherer. In Livingston’s complaint and in AFC’s robocall, Blanc and Marsh respectively, are accused of “falsifying petition sheets” by marking the boxes after the signatures were collected.

I understand the law is the law, but I’ve circulated many petitions and I can tell you that not one signatory has ever given a damn about whether that little box was checked. They don’t care who is circulating the petition, just that it is legitimate and for a cause they care about. The “box” in question likely matters to someone, but certainly not to the voting public.

Yet, AFC chose to reach into Arizona to demand Marsh “come clean on who altered” her petition. “I’m calling from the American Federation for Children with an alert about an election scandal in this district,” the call said. “Christine Marsh, candidate for state Senate, circulated a petition sheet which was later falsified and filed with the Arizona Secretary of State, a felony. Christine Marsh won’t say whether it was she or someone else who broke the law by tampering with the document. Christine needs to come forward with the truth. Christine, stop hiding behind the 5th amendment and come clean.”

Always one to cut right to the heart of the matter, Marsh told The Republic “she was ‘incredulous’ that an out-of-state special-interest group was spending money in her race 15 months before the election.”

I personally know Christine Marsh, am very proud to have had her representing our state, and understand why AFC and the pro-privatization lobby is threatened by her. Christine has taught English Language Arts for almost a quarter century and she still thinks she has the best job in the world. She is passionate about her students’ success and is a great example of the type of excellent teachers we have in our public district schools. She doesn’t do it for the money, but because she absolutely loves the students. She is also a vocal advocate for her students and public education and is not afraid to speak out to combat injustices. She is now running for the AZ Legislature (a job that will pay even less than she makes as a teacher), because she knows that is the only way she’ll have a chance at affecting real change.

Categories Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Democrats, Education Industry, Privatization

Ohio: Charter School Sponsor Gets Reprieve Even Though Its Charters Are Rated F

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
8

Thanks to Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy for alerting me to this shocking and disgusting story.

A charter school sponsor, the Ohio Council of Community Schools, is responsible for 50 charter schools. It was exempted from any accountability because it split from its partner, the University of Toledo.

“The council and the university have been partners for 15 years in sponsoring – creating and overseeing charter schools – after the state decided to let more organizations beyond the Ohio Department of Education sponsor schools. While the university was the official legal sponsor, it created the council as a non-profit to do all the oversight work.

“The relationship has been a controversial one, drawing accusations over the years of favoritism and nepotism. See below for more on those concerns.

“Most recently, the state rated the two as “ineffective” as a charter sponsor last fall after their 50 schools landed an academic rating of zero – the equivalent of an F – as a group. Those schools include 11 in Cleveland.

“If student test scores did not improve by the end of this school year, the partners would have been booted out of the sponsorship business.

“Not anymore.

“By splitting from the university, the Council moves on with a clean slate and the poor results will be assigned to the university.”

No results. No accountability. State money wasted. Children’s education harmed.

Who are the criminals in state government who permit this fraud to continue.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Privatization

Alan Singer: Say NO to Unqualified Teachers in New York’s Classrooms

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2017 //
11

Influential charter operators in New York have been pressing for exemption from certification requirements for their teachers. This is a truly bad idea. Why should children have unqualified teachers?

Alan Singer writes here about the fight against this effort to lower standards for charter teachers, which is not only bad on its face, but would make these “teachers” unemployable in real public schools.

He writes:

“Politically influential charter school operators in the State of New York are on the verge of pushing through an administrative ruling that eliminates the requirement that children attending their schools be taught by certified teachers. This is happening at the same time that support for charter schools across the nation is in steep decline, probably because of Donald Trump’s endorsement of charter schools and private-school vouchers. According to a recent public opinion poll the growing opposition to charter schools is bipartisan. Support among Republicans declined by 13%. Democratic support for charter schools dropped by 11%.

“The Network for Public Education and New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) are organizing parents, teachers, and the public to flood the SUNY Trustees and the SUNY Charter Schools Institute with protests against the certification waiver proposal. Their opposition to the waiver is supported by the Deans of Schools of Education at eighteen colleges in the State University of New York system.

“Comments can be submitted online or mailed to Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York, 41 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 by September 10. You can also sign the NYSUT email letter. More information is available at the United University Professionals website.

“The Charter School teacher “decertification plan” is under review by political appointees on a sub-committee of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY). The SUNY Charter Schools Institute is interpreting its authority to ensure the “Governance, structure and operations of SUNY authorized charter schools” as authorization to eliminate teacher certification requirements. It calls the proposal alternative certification, but it allows charters to declare anyone they want to be a teacher. In a series of Huffington Posts I explained why this decertification proposal is a threat to public education and the political forces and financial donors behind the charter school plan. In this post I examine whether the people hired under this waiver are qualified to teach children.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Teachers and Teaching

Here is a Good Reason to Buy Samuel Abrams’ “Education and the Commercial Mindset”

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2017 //
8

Samuel Abrams is director of the Teachers College, Columbia University, Center on the Study of Privatization of Education. He wrote a wonderful book called “Education and the Commercial Mindset.” Most of the book is focused on the haplessness and failure of the for-profit Edison Project, which became Edison Schools, which became EdisonLearning, and which lost money, a lot of money. Abrams’ book represents deep scholarship into the consistent failures of for-profit education.

I reviewed it in the <em>New York Review of Bookss, along with Mercedes Schneider’s superb “School Choice.”

Barron’s just posted a negative review of the Abrams’ book by a reviewer who has made a career of besmirching public schools, teachers, and unions. He hates them all, so of course, he hates Abrams’ elegant expose of the profit motive in education. The reviewer is a polemicist, not a scholar, so he probably didn’t understand the book.

I don’t subscribe to Barron’s so I can’t post the review. You probably don’t subscribe either. I wish I could quote it but I can’t. I know it is hostile to Abrams’ scholarly work because the title of the review is “Slurring Charter Schools: A skewed defense of our failing public schools, and a hit job on Harvard Business School.”

But I know a great deal about the reviewer, Bob Bowdon.

Bowdon wrote and produced a “documentary” called “The Cartel,” in which he compared the teachers’ union in New Jersey to the Mafia. He is a familiar figure on far-right TV shows, where he bashes teachers and public schools.

Read his Wikipedia entry, where it says:

Bowdon directed The Cartel, a 2009 documentary film about corruption in American public education that was distributed by Warner Brothers.[1] The film views the current state of public schools in the U.S. as a “national disaster for the workforce of the future.” Bowdon notes that the U.S., by many measures, “spends more on education than any country in the world,” and chooses to concentrate principally on his own state, New Jersey, which spends more per student on public education than any other state, but where average standardized-test scores in public schools are very low. In an effort to explain where all the money allocated to public education is going, Bowdon portrays a union-dominated institutional culture in which bureaucracies are overstaffed by highly paid administrators, expenditures on school-construction projects are unsupervised and out of control, corruption and patronage are rampant, incompetent teachers cannot be fired, and excellent teachers cannot be rewarded. As a solution to the problem, Bowdon proposes school choice and charter schools.[3]

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who watched The Cartel twice, has praised it as an influence on his own ideas about school reform.[4][5]

When my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” was published in 2010, I was invited to be interviewed by Judge Napolitano. I learned when I got there that I was going to debate Bob Bowdon. Judge Napolitano was on Bowdon’s side, and he said snidely, “would you allow any child of yours to attend a public school?” I vowed never again to appear on any show on FOX, as my experience left me feeling deeply outraged by their hostility to the views I had formed over 40 years of study. Bowdon knew nothing whatever about education, nothing whatever about teaching. All he knew was that privatization was good, public schools bad.

It is an ugly experience to get into the ring with someone who literally doesn’t know what he is talking about but is sure of his opinions.

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

A New Orleans Parent Warns Houstonians to Beware the Elite “Saviors”

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2017 //
19

Ashana Bigard is a native of New Orleans and a parent. This is her warning to the parents and other citizens of Houston.

She writes:

“My prayers are with you, Texas. My memories are with you too. The day after Katrina hit New Orleans, my family and I made the 17 hour car ride to Houston. The people of Texas welcomed us, opening their homes and helping us out with clothing, even financial assistance. As a native New Orleanian, I wish that I could do the same for you now. But what’s happened in my city and to its schools serves as a cautionary tale to residents of Houston. Reeling from the disaster, our communities were scattered like the four winds. I returned from Houston, many of us did, but the New Orleans we left doesn’t belong to us anymore.

“Rents have quadrupled as gentrification remakes whole neighborhoods, pushing out long-time residents. Nearly half of the children here now live in poverty, and job security is worse, salaries lower. The sense that we’re doing worse than before Katrina is borne out in the data: Black New Orleanians have 18% less wealththan we did in 2005.

“My prayers are with you, Texas. But my warnings are too.

“1. Be wary of elites with big plans. Even as Katrina’s waters were receding, a handful of local elites were making plans for taking over the city’s schools. In the years following the storm, more than $76 billion came to the city of New Orleans. Yet the native population is poorer than we were before Katrina; we have 18% less wealth than we did in 2005. It became obvious early on that the money for New Orleans wasn’t making it into the hands of native New Orleanians. Huge sums of money demand oversight, accountability, and, most importantly, a vision for how exactly investment will help the people who need it most. All parts of your community must be allowed to participate fully in the rebuilding of their own city.

“2. Trauma can’t be “disciplined” out of kids A hurricane is a deeply traumatic experience for children and trauma cannot simply be “disciplined” out of kids. New Orleans is now full of schools with “college prep” in their names, but their strict rules, harsh discipline and fixation on a culture of compliance have more in common with prison than with college. The “new” and “innovative” approach to educating kids that swept through our city after Katrina seems to start from the assumption that what children need to be successful is to be treated like adult criminals. We’ve had multiple incidents of children as young as five being handcuffed in schools, even arrested. Students who can’t afford the uniforms that are now mandatory at virtually every school in New Orleans are suspended, often for long periods of time. As an advocate for children in the schools, I’m regularly reminded that our post-Katrina schools in New Orleans intersect with the criminal justice system starting in the earliest grades, and ensnaring parents too. Louisiana, after all, that incarcerates a higher percentage of its residents than any other state. I wonder why that is?

“3. Don’t let your teachers get swept away Three months after Katrina, 7,500 school employees, including 4,000 teachers, were fired. Many of them had lost their homes to the hurricane. New Orleans lost the core of its Black middle class, and our schools lost adults who were connected to the city and its culture. What happens when all of your teachers are fired? You have a teacher shortage. New Orleans now imports its teachers: recent college grads from programs like Teach for America, who are entrusted with our kids’ development after receiving less training than what we require from workers at a nail salon.

“4. Your culture isn’t a liability to be overcome Beware of people who see your culture as a liability. The culture and soul of our city is music, arts and drama. Yet the people who came to “fix” New Orleans viewed the city and its culture as the source of our problems that they had to help us overcome. That mean schools without art, music or drama, in a city whose culture draws people from all over the world. Think about that. Without arts in the schools where will the next generation of performers come from? The arts are also an important way for kids to deal with trauma in a city that’s seen so much of it. Our kids desperately needed art, music and drama—yours will too.”

But that’s not all she writes. Read it all. Share the wisdom.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, New Orleans, Privatization
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