Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy forwarded links to Dennis Kucinich’s town hall meetings, where he blasted charter school fraud. Watch and enjoy!
Is he running for governor? Let’s hope so.
Archives for category: Education Industry
Do you remember back in the old days when the privatization movement began that choice was going to “save poor children from failing schools”?
Well, that slogan is now obsolete. Now the advocates say that the purpose of choice is choice, regardless of results.
That subtle shift has happened because of the many recent studies and evaluations showing that charters and vouchers do not necessarily get better results, and that they may even have a negative effect, as we learned from recent evaluations of voucher programs in D.C., Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos sounded the bugle call for retreat after learning of the poor results of the latest evaluation of the D.C. voucher program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
In the past, she had said that choice would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Now, however, she says, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.” Parents are satisfied, and that is good enough for her, even if the children’s test scores are falling. If you parse this sentence, what she is saying is that when everyone chooses, none of the schools will be better than any others. They will all get the same results, even if they are dismal. The purpose of choice is choice.
Results don’t matter. Only parent satisfaction matters. If poor kids are moved from a “failing public school” to a “failing charter school” or “failing religious school,” that’s fine. An opinion piece in a D.C. paper suggested that we should not pay attention to those studies, because critics of school choice twist their findings anyway, especially if their findings are negative.
Karen Wolfe is a parent activist in Los Angeles who fights for public schools against the behemoth that is the California Charter Schools Association and even against the Los Angeles Unified School District.
She recently discovered that the school district was considering spending $24 million to install a Unified Enrollment system. She became curious and began digging. After all, Los Angeles was the district that (almost) committed to spend $1 billion on obsolete iPads loaded with Pearson content.
The decision will be made on Tuesday at a board meeting.
Karen smelled a scam in the making. She was right.
The first thing she learned was that a common enrollment system is being pushed hard by the charter lobby, because it puts public schools and charter schools on an equal footing. The cheerleading for unified enrollment, where students have “one-stop shopping,” was funded by the Walton Family Foundation in New Orleans and Denver, which tells you almost everything you need to know.
The next thing she learned was that in a unified enrollment system, the school makes the choice, not the student. This also works out well for the charters.
Third, the OneApp system (as it is called in New Orleans) increases inequity and segregation.
Karen did research and wrote three posts. You should read all of them. The third post in the series has links to the other two.
Perhaps most alarming, Karen learned that the unified enrollment proposal was being pushed by insiders who were connected to the Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation.
She writes:
In this post, as promised, we’ll introduce the privatizers who have infiltrated the school district to advance the interests of the charter lobby.
Conspiracy theory? Hardly. This just looks like the new business model. Since the iPad scandal, privatizers have had to find new ways to move their agenda. The scandal made direct corporate lobbying behind the scenes too risky. But there’s no need, if you have managed to plant your sales force inside the school system itself.
The District personnel pitching the Unified Enrollment scheme are not just any LAUSD employees. They are Broad and Walton acolytes, trained and placed in the school system to move the corporate reform agenda forward from the inside.
Peter Greene wrote about these “cyber shenanigans” here.
Just goes to show that you can neither slumber nor sleep when the charter industry is seeking a new angle to legitimize privatization and money.
Great job, Karen!
Tennessee created the so-called “Achievement School District” in 2012, to take over schools in the lowest 5% of the state, based on test scores, and hand them over to charter operators. The head of the ASD at the time, Chris Barbic, who had run the YES Prep charter chain in Houston, promised that these low-performing schools would be in the top 20% within five years. The five-year mark is approaching, and none of the schools is in the top 25%. It is not clear that any of them have moved out of the bottom 5-10% (moving to the bottom 10% would be progress, though not much). Gary Rubinstein called ASD the “Underachievement District.” See here for his 2016 post. Barbic left before the five-year marker, and the ASD carries on. Unfortunately, despite the meager (or nil) results of the ASD, several states have created their own versions of the ASD. If it failed in Tennessee, why notcopy it in Georgia and Nevada?
The latest news from the ASD is that it is laying off 29 employees. This is not a sign of good health.
The state-run Achievement School District is losing 29 employees including 13 who are involved in the direct running of the first schools in Frayser taken over by the district in 2012.
The changes, which include another 16 positions in the central office, are the most significant change to the district for the bottom 5 percent of public schools in the state in terms of academic achievement.
All but two of the 33 schools in the ASD, including two alternative schools, are in Memphis.
As expected, management says that this move will strengthen the organization for future success. They are “right-sizing” and “streamlining” the organization for the future.
Although the ASD consists of charter schools, parents did not choose them. Their local public schools were taken over without their consent, and that takeover is certainly not school choice. Consequently the ASD has faced considerable parent and community hostility.
Earlier I posted Larry Lee’s post about the overwhelming defeat of a charter bill in Alabama.
I asked him for more details on charters in the state because I knew that Alabama already passed a charter law. Why was this bill defeated?
This was the response I received:
“What did the bill propose?
“The bill proposed several changes to the original law passed in 2015 – a law that was touted as one of the best charter school laws in the nation.
“It greatly diminished local school board control. In Alabama’s existing charter law, while the State Charter School Commission can overturn a local board’s decision, they do have to give deference to the board’s position. The amended language would have allowed the commission to reweigh the application with no deference to the school board’s original decision and would have given the Commission a very broad definition to use when overruling a local school board.
“The bill also made some timeline changes in the application process and created a staff for the State Charter School Commission.
“Why was it voted down?
“It was voted down because most legislators believe that their community school boards know what their community schools need and believe that decision should be a local board decision, not a state commission decision. They understood that a state commission could never understand the nuances, needs, and priorities of individual communities better than the communities themselves.
“How many charters does Alabama have now?
“Alabama does not have any charter schools currently open in the state. However, a charter school is set to open for the 2017-18 school year in Mobile, Alabama. This charter school was fully vetted by local community stakeholders and was eventually approved by the Mobile County Board of Education with the cooperation of the Mobile County Education Association, a local affiliate of the Alabama Education Association.
“Two charter school companies applied to open charter schools in Birmingham, both applications were unanimously denied by the Birmingham Board of Education. The charter companies appealed the decision to the State Charter School Commission and on Tuesday the Commission overturned one of the denials. Birmingham is now set to have a charter school open in the 2018-19 school year. That will give Alabama two charter schools by 2018.
“What did Collins want to change?
Rep. Collins said she brought the bill to clarify language, tweak the timeline, and create a much-needed staff for the Commission. She denied that it diminished the control of local school boards. An independent group, the Alabama Law Institute, was contacted by a republican legislator for an interpretation of the language that was in question. The bill further diminished local control by adding yet another layer for the State Charter School Commission to overturn local board decisions.”
Alabama has a solid Republican majority in its legislature.
Yet, Larry Lee reports, an effort to expand the number of charters in the state was overwhelmingly defeated.
Alabama has a lot of small towns and rural districts, represented by Republicans. They know the public school is part of the fabric of their community. They don’t want charters, though they are fine with opening them in Birmingham. Not all Republicans are free market zealots. Some are old-fashioned conservatives who want to conserve their community, not disrupt it.
This is an interesting article by Jonathan A. Knee of the Columbia Business School about the perils of making a profit in the education sector. I note that he has a book coming out, fleshing out his case studies and arguments about for-profit investing in education.
Knee describes the many visionaries who saw the possibilities of transforming education into a for-profit bonanza but lost their shirts.
Earlier this year, LeapFrog Enterprises, the educational-entertainment business, sold itself for $1 a share. The deal came several months after LeapFrog received a warning from the New York Stock Exchange that it would be delisted if the value of its stock did not improve, a disappointing end to the public life of a company that had the best-performing IPO of 2002.
LeapFrog was one of the very last remaining of the dozens of investments made by Michael Milken through his ambitiously named Knowledge Universe. Founded in 1996 by Milken and his brother, Lowell, with the software giant Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, as a silent partner, Knowledge Universe aspired to transform education. Its founders intended it to become, in Milken’s phrase, “the pre-eminent for-profit education and training company,” serving the world’s needs “from cradle to grave.”
Knowledge Universe businesses included early-childhood learning centers, for-profit K–12 schools, online M.B.A. programs, IT-training services for working professionals, and more. Milken’s penchant for secrecy makes a comprehensive assessment impossible—most of the businesses were privately held and some were sold to private buyers for undisclosed sums. But of the companies about which there is public information, most, like LeapFrog, ended badly. Education remains untransformed.
Milken was far from alone in the belief that education could be revolutionized through radical new business models. In 2012, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein established the Amplify division within News Corp. At the time of his initial investment, Murdoch described K–12 education as “a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” Their idea was to overturn the way children were taught in public schools by integrating technology into the classroom. Although inspirational, the idea entailed competing with a series of multibillion-dollar global leaders in educational hardware, software, and curriculum development. After several years and more than $1 billion, with no serious prospect of ever turning a profit, Murdoch and Klein sold their venture for scrap value to Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, last year.
Professor Knee does see a role for for-profit businesses, but it is on the margins, not as school operators.
Frankly, the scariest for-profit ventures are the tech companies that hope to replace teachers and schools with their “scalable” models.
If the subject interests you, as it should, you should be sure to read Samuel Abrams’ Education and the Commercial Mindset, which documents the Edison Project disaster.
Jennifer Berkshire posted this interview with economist Harvey Kantor in response to a column in the New York Times by David Leonhardt suggesting that schools were the best way to address poverty.
Leonhardt wrote that education “is the most powerful force for accelerating economic growth, reducing poverty and lifting middle-class living standards.” He then goes on to argue that vouchers don’t work, but charters do. This runs contrary to Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie’s study of charters in Texas, where they found that attendance in charter schools had no effect on future earnings.
What Kantor has to say is crucial in this discussion.
Kantor says what I have come to believe is bedrock truth. Poverty should be addressed by reducing poverty. No matter how high the standards, no matter how many tests, no matter how swell the curriculum is, those are not cures for homelessness, joblessness, and lack of access to decent medical care. This realization explains why I changed my mind about the best way to reform schools. It is not by turning schools over to the free market but by seeing them as part of a web of social supports for families and children.
Here is part of a fascinating discussion:
One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that we’ve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead we’re asking education to do things it can’t possibly do. The result has been increasing support for the kinds of market-oriented policies that make inequality worse.
If we really want to address issues of inequality and economic insecurity, there are a lot of other policies that we have to pursue besides or at least in addition to education policies, and that part of the debate has been totally lost. Raising the minimum wage, or providing a guaranteed income, which the last time we talked seriously about that was in the late 1960’s, increasing workers’ bargaining power, making tax policies more progressive—things like that are going to be much more effective at addressing inequality and economic security than education policies. That argument is often taken to mean, *schools can’t do anything unless we address poverty first.* But that’s not what we were trying to say.
Berkshire: But isn’t part of the attraction of today’s education reform movement, that it holds out the tantalizing possibility that we can correct the effects of poverty without having to do anything about, well, poverty?
Kantor: That’s right. What’s interesting about our our contemporary period is that we’re now saying schools can respond to problems of achievement and we don’t need to address any of these larger structural issues. When you think about these larger questions—what causes economic inequality? What causes economic insecurity? How are resources distributed? Who has access to what?—they’ve been put off to the side. We’re not doing anything to address these questions at all.
Please read the entire discussion. It is very important in understanding the attack on schools and the fruitlessness of corporate reform, which ignores the causes of poor student achievement.
It will help you understand why billionaires and right-wingers love corporate reform. It enables policymakers to forget about the necessity of social policy that affects the conditions in which many families live.
I don’t begin to understand the complexities of Pennsylvania’s formula for allocating dollars to public schools and charter schools, but this article explains how the formula cripples public schools.
Chester Upland School District keeps raising taxes to overcome its deficit but it can’t keep up.
Chester Upland spends about $16,000 a year on average for each special ed student in its traditional district schools. But the state’s formula has forced it to pay more than $40,000 per student to charters, regardless of the child’s level of disability.
Those payments crippled Chester Upland so badly that Gov. Tom Wolf and the courts stepped in.
But this is far from just an issue in Chester Upland. Newly analyzed state data show that a combination of quirks in the charter law have caused a statewide problem, because charters across Pennsylvania are enrolling a greater share of the least needy, least costly special ed students.
The special ed funding formula’s intricacies are infamous. But the problem in a nutshell is this: when the neediest students concentrate in district schools, that drives up the per-pupil payments that districts must pay charters.
It’s a paradox that can drain the budgets of traditional school districts while infusing charters with cash. And it creates incentives for districts like Chester Upland to do what they can to keep special ed students from migrating to charters and cyber-charters.
David Kristofferson tutors students for AP exams in California. He sees a scam that benefits mainly the College Board, which sells the exams for $100 per students and rakes in millions.
He wrote this article to share what he has learned.
The first thing that parents and others need to do is that the passing scores on these exams are very low.
Parents don’t realize that the passing scores for at least some of these exams are set very low. When their son or daughter passes with a 3, 4, or 5, parents are elated without understanding what this really means.
For example, the minimum passing score to get a 3 for AP Physics 1 for 2015 was only 41%. Despite that low bar, 63.1% of all students who took the exam were not able to pass it!
41% was the minimum score for a 4, and 71% for a 5.
Unconfirmed reports state that the AP Physics 1 passing grade in 2016 may have been 36%, but the College Board does not readily release such information to the public.
Meanwhile their test fees are pushing close to $100 per exam!
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has been a strong advocate for the AP exams. He believes that students benefit even if they don’t pass them.
Kristofferson disagrees. He writes:
From my direct experience with students, the AP curriculum covers a large amount of material very quickly. Because the exams are in early May, the curriculum must be completed before then, wasting the final month of school, and making the pace of “learning” even more hectic.
The exams are also filled with very tricky, challenging questions to fulfill the College Board’s quest to, in old school, sexist language, “separate the men from the boys.”
The consequence of this fast-paced, trick-filled curriculum is not quality learning for a very significant number of students, but instead, frantic memorization of test methods and past exam question tricks, most of which disappears right after the student completes the course.
Even worse, this curriculum leads to significant amounts of cheating on local classroom tests!
Read Kristofferson’s article. What do you think?
