Archives for category: Education Industry
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Idaho Teacher: We Have a Testing Crisis

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2014 //
31

This article was sent to me by the author, Travis Manning, who teaches high school English in Idaho.

 

We have reached a testing crisis in Idaho and Common Core hasn’t helped. As a current high school English teacher, I know. We are over-testing children, including the new 8-hour Common Core test: the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).

In high school alone we give students the PSAT, SAT, IELA, PLAN, ACT, pre- and post-tests, end-of-semester exams, ASVAB, Science ISAT, AP tests, SBAC, PLATO, benchmarks, Career Information System (CIS) and sometimes the NAEP. Not all students take every test every year, but the testing process disrupts the entire school calendar, regardless. Testing burns weeks of instructional time, clogs up school computer labs, and costs millions. Special education students are given even more tests, often with accommodations to take as much time as they need, soaking up weeks more in a teacher’s curriculum calendar.

I support the Common Core standards generally, but I do not support the high-stakes test, the SBAC. Last year I wrote an op-ed in support of Common Core, but there are some ongoing concerns since then that haven’t been addressed by policymakers: fiscal strain, increased class sizes, cutting necessary programs and courses, teacher and student privacy issues, and tying teacher merit pay to SBAC.

The proposed teacher career ladder is coming down the pike, but details are sketchy. Idaho legislators want to tie as much as 50 percent of SBAC scores to teacher pay. “Our students are the most over-tested in the world,” writes education historian Dr. Diane Ravitch in a January 11, 2014 speech. “No other nation—at least no high-performing nation—judges the quality of teachers by the test scores of their students. Most researchers agree that this methodology is fundamentally flawed, that it is inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable, that the highest ratings will go to teachers with the most affluent students and the lowest ratings will go to teachers of English learners, teachers of students with disabilities, and teachers in high-poverty schools.”

We have become a nation infatuated with standardized testing and, in the process, have given private testing companies the onus for unnecessarily labeling schools, children and teachers. Groups like the Albertson Foundation and their Don’t Fail Idaho campaign continue to beat public schools about the head with statistics. Their campaign is meant to inform – but also to demoralize public schools – in order to privatize them, convert them into for-profit charters.

Ravitch notes that U.S. Department of Education website data reveals that recent U.S. test scores were “the highest they had ever been in our history for whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians; that graduation rates for all groups were the highest in our history; and that the dropout rate was the lowest ever in our history.” Unabashedly, privateers like Governor Otter and Superintendent Luna choose to ignore these facts.

New York state gave Common Core tests last spring and only 30 percent of students passed, including less than 20 percent of Hispanic students, 5 percent of students with disabilities, and 3 percent of English language learners. Could New York teachers use Common Core test results for item analysis and re-teaching? Nope. Results were reported in August. SBAC passing marks, called “cut scores,” are aligned with the federal test called NAEP, and the bar is set so high only 40 percent of students, at best, reach proficiency.

In Idaho, we are setting up 60 percent of our children to fail. My young children will not be taking the SBAC, especially in their elementary years, when their love of learning is paramount.

One answer: “opt out.” See Idahoans for Local Education website: http://bit.ly/1ac5aRZ. For the sake of Idaho’s children and teachers: “opt out.”

Travis Manning is executive director of The Common Sense Democracy Foundation of Idaho and can be reached at manning_travis@hotmail.com.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Idaho, Privatization, Testing

Researchers Reveal Funding Network for Wash. Charter Law

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2014 //
36

University of Washington scholars Wayne Au and Joseph J. Ferrare have written an excellent analysis of the big money that flooded the state of Washington to pass charter legislation in 2012. Although defeated three times before by voters, this time the proposal passed by a tiny margin. Its major funders were Bill Gates, who has no children in public school, and Walmart heiress Alice Walton,who lives in Arkansas. Substantial help was provided by other members of the Billionaire Boys Club and their claque (such as Stand for Children).

The more than $10 million they amassed was sufficient to buy what they wanted.

The moral of the story: a small number of very wealthy individuals and organizations bought a policy of their choosing. This subverts democracy. It subverts the principle of one man, one vote.

These are not reformers. They are plutocrats who use their vast wealth to buy what they want.

Here are a few choice quotes:

“Conclusions/Recommendations: This study concludes that, compared to the average voter in Washington, an elite group of wealthy individuals, either directly through individual donations or indirectly through their affiliated philanthropic organizations, wielded disproportionate influence over the outcome of the charter school initiative in the state, thereby raising serious concerns about the democratic underpinnings of an education policy that impacts all of the children in Washington State. This study also concludes that elite individuals make use of local nonprofit organizations as a mechanism to advance their education policy agenda by funding those nonprofits through the philanthropic organizations affiliated with those same wealthy elites. In light of these conclusions, the authors recommend that a mechanism for more democratic accountability be developed relative to education policy campaigns, initiatives, and legislation.

“INTRODUCTION

“To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, today’s plutocrats are not like you and I; nor do they resemble the politicians we elect. Even when they assume the authority to set public policies, they are, I fear, not sackable. (Bosworth, 2011, p. 386)

“With the backing of both major political parties, billionaire philanthropists, venture capitalists, business leaders, and a growing network of nonprofit organizations and research centers, charter school policy has evolved into a major component of the current education reform movement in the United States (Fabricant & Fine, 2012; Rawls, 2013). As of 2012, all but nine U.S. states allowed charter schools (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2013), and in one of those nine, Washington State, charter school legislation was passed by popular vote in November 2012 (Reed, 2012)…..”

And more:

In this section we present the findings of our network analysis in two phases. First, through two tables, we present data on cash and in-kind contributions to the Yes On 1240 campaign and funding relationships between campaign donors, affiliated philanthropies, and organizational campaign supporters (Tables 1 and 2). Second, we visualize these relationships through a simple directed graph that traces the flows of sponsorship (material and symbolic) among policy actors (Figure 1).

YES ON 1240 CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

Several important findings arise when we analyze the contributions to the Yes On 1240 campaign.

Table 1: Yes On I-1240 Campaign Cash and In-kind Contributions of $50k and More

Yes On 1240 Donor
Donation Amount
1.
Bill Gates Jr. – Microsoft cofounder and current chairman
$3,053,000.00
2.
Alice Walton – heiress; daughter of Walmart founder, Sam Walton
$1,700,000.00
3.
Vulcan Inc. – founded by Paul Allen, Microsoft cofounder
$1,600,000.00
4.
Nicolas Hanauer – venture capitalist
$1,000,000.00
5.
Mike Bezos – father of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
$500,000.00
6.
Jackie Bezos – mother of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
$500,000.00
7.
Connie Ballmer – wife of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
$500,000.00
8.
Anne Dinning – managing director D.E. Shaw Investments
$250,000.00
9.
Michael Wolf – Yahoo! Inc. board of directors
$250,000.00
10.
Katherine Binder – EMFCO Holdings chairwoman
$250,000.00
11.
Eli Broad – real estate mogul
$200,000.00
12.
Benjamin Slivka – formerly Microsoft; DreamBox Learning cofounder
$124,200.00
13.
Reed Hastings – Netflix cofounder and CEO
$100,000.00
14.
Microsoft Corporation
$100,000.00
15.
Gabe Newell – formerly Microsoft; Valve Corporation cofounder
$100,000.00
16.
Doris Fisher – Gap Inc. cofounder
$100,000.00
17.
Kemper Holdings LLC – local Puget Sound developer
$110,000.00
18.
CSG Channels
$60,000.00
19.
Education Reform Now
$50,000.00
20.
Bruce McCaw –McCaw Cellular founder
$50,000.00
21.
Jolene McCaw – spouse of Bruce McCaw
$50,000.00
Source: Washington State Public Disclosure Commission (2012a)

Table 1 highlights that $10.65 million in total, or almost 98% of the $10.9 million raised for the Yes On 1240 campaign, was funded by 21 individuals and organizations who each donated more than $50,000 to the campaign (Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, 2012a).

Notably, Bill Gates Jr. is the biggest contributor ($3M) to the campaign, nearly doubling the next biggest contributions coming from Walmart heiress Alice Walton ($1.7M) and Vulcan Inc. ($1.6M),2 Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s company. As a more general finding, these amounts indicate that a number of select wealthy individuals with no immediate connection to Washington State (e.g., Eli Broad and Alice Walton) demonstrated a vested interest in charter school policy in the state. Another finding that emerges from the data is that wealthy individuals who are connected to the technology sector also demonstrated a vested interest in promoting charter school policy in Washington State (12 of the top 21 contributors to Yes On 1240 are strongly connected to the technology sector). Additionally, as might be expected given the interconnectedness of any sector of industry, several of these individuals have historical and industry-related connections to Microsoft Inc. and Microsoft Inc. cofounder and chairman, Bill Gates Jr.

It is also of value to highlight the $50,000.00 donation to the Yes On 1240 campaign from Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee because it illustrates the tightly woven interconnectedness of organizations and funding structures associated with education policy reform advocacy. New York State tax records from 2006 explicitly indicate that Education Reform Now, Inc., Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee, and DFER all share officers, personnel, office space, and paymasters (Libby, 2012). Tax records from 2007 further indicate that Education Reform Now Inc. and Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee share these same resources (New York State Office of the Attorney General, 2013). Thus, it is difficult to determine where DFER, Education Reform Now Inc., and Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee begin and end individually because, in essence, they represent a financially intertwined cluster of three organizations that seem to operate as a single organization with overlapping staff and resources. Consequently, even though tax records do not allow us to fully understand the exact relationship, the $50,000.00 donation to the Yes On 1240 campaign from Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee is functionally also a donation from Education Reform Now Inc. and DFER.

YES ON 1240 CONNECTED ORGANIZATIONS

As discussed above, four organizations, LEV, DFER, Stand for Children, and Partnership for Learning, publicly claimed credit for leading and coordinating the Yes On 1240 WA Coalition for Public Charter Schools (Yes On 1240, 2012a). An analysis of the in-kind donations to the Yes On 1240 campaign (that is, donations of labor or other services that are given cash value and added to the campaign donation total) supports this claim: Those four organizations predominate the in-kind donations database and are the only organizations listing “staff time” as donated in kind to the campaign (Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, 2012c). Further, as a university-based research center, they cannot be listed as having provided in-kind donations (or any donations) directly to a political campaign in the state. Because of their active role in providing direct, nonmonetary support for the Yes On 1240 campaign vis-à-vis being highlighted prominently in a campaign video (Yes On 1240, 2012b) and authoring a research report explicitly in support of I-1240 (Lake et al., 2012), we have included the CRPE here as a “connected organization” for their symbolic contribution to the campaign through the lending of their expertise.

PHILANTHROPIC CONNECTIONS TO THE YES ON 1240 CAMPAIGN

Cross referencing information gathered from the Google search engine, philanthropy websites, and available tax records (Foundation Center, 2013) produced the following 11 foundations directly connected to major donors to the Yes On 1240 campaign (in alphabetical order): Apex Foundation (formerly the Bruce & Jolene McCaw Foundation), Bezos Family Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Corabelle Lumps Foundation (formerly the Anne Dinning and Michael Wolf Foundation), the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund (connected through the Connie and Steve Ballmer advised Biel Fund),3 Lochland Foundation (Katherine Binder, cofounder, officer, and contributor), The Walton Family Foundation, and Wissner-Slivka Foundation. Using foundation databases, foundation reports, available tax records, organizational websites, and institutional reports, we then looked for whether or not these foundations provided funding to the Yes On 1240 campaign-related organizations.

Table 2: Philanthropic Support for Yes On 1240 Connected Organizations

Organization

Amount

Foundation

Center on Reinventing Public Education
$8,578,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$701,000
The Walton Family Foundation
$512,813
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
Education Reform Now (Democrats for Education Reform)
$2,925,000
The Walton Family Foundation
$2,481,716
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
$600,000
Doris & Donald Fisher Fund
$500,000
Corabelle Lumps Foundation
$15,000
Bezos Family Foundation
League of Education Voters
$4,790,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$257,000
Lochland Foundation
$160,139
Bezos Family Foundation
$1,000
Apex Foundation
Partnership for Learning
$4,700,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Stand for Children™
$9,000,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$2,857,945
The Walton Family Foundation
$350,000
Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund
$120,304
Bezos Family Foundation
$55,000
Wissner-Slivka Foundation
$25,000
Lochland Foundation
$1,000
Apex Foundation
(Sources: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013; Foundation Center, 2013; Libby, 2012; New York State Office of the Attorney General, 2013; Stand for Children, 2013; University of Washington Bothell Office of Research, 2013; University of Washington Bothell Office of Sponsored Programs, 2013)

“As Table 2 indicates, the philanthropic foundations connected to major contributors to the Yes On 1240 campaign provided a range of support directly to three of the four campaign-coordinating organizations and the CRPE: the Apex Foundation’s $1,000.00 contributions to each LEV and Stand for Children were the smallest, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s total contribution of $9,000,000.00 to Stand for Children was the largest. Further, while DFER received no direct philanthropic support, its sister organization Education Reform Now received ample support from campaign-connected philanthropies, and, as detailed above, the overlap of resources between the cluster of Education Reform Now Inc., Education Reform Now Advocacy, and DFER, is very fluid. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the most prominent here, haven given over $27 million total to Yes On 1240 campaign-connected organizations across multiple years, grants, and contracts. The Walton Foundation is second-most prominent, having contributed $6.48 million to campaign-connected organizations, followed by the Broad Foundation at $2.99 million in support for campaign-connected organizations. There is a precipitous drop in total support after these three, potentially indicating smaller amounts of financial support originating from smaller foundations (e.g., Lochland Foundation or the Bezos Family Foundation). Regardless of the amount, foundation support of the organizations directly involved in the Yes On 1240 campaign is indicative of ideological alignment around specific education reforms (in this case, charter schools) between funders and grantees/contractors.”

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Research, Washington State

When Did Gibberish Replace Conventional English?

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2014 //
120

Colin McEnroe of NPR in Connecticut has discovered the root problem of corporate reformers: They have lost touch with common sense and the meaning of learning. To cover up their ignorance, they have invented rhetoric that sounds impressive but is no more than unintelligible verbiage.

He starts here, and gets better:

“I don’t know about you, but I remember the moment when, as a boy, I fell in love with learning. It was 1964, in the spring. My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Vick, sat down with me in the late afternoon and gently pried from my hands Hardy Boys book No. 42, “The Secret of the Mummy’s Strategically Dynamic New Paradigms.”

“Colin,” she said. “I know you’re a good boy with a bright mind. But your EAPE scores don’t point to project-based learning across the curriculum. You need to scaffold texts to other texts, and to that end I’m going to start interfacing with your developmental space.”

“Miss Vick,” I stammered, “can you disintermediate that for me in a way that unpacks the convergence in assessment-driven terms?”

We talked for hours as the sun sank toward the horizon. I believe both of us wept. My mind opened like a flower. That night, I chopped my Hardy Boys books into little pieces and fed them to the neighbor’s python. I read Emerson’s “The American Scholar” instead.

Wait. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, because in 1964, American education was not drowning in incomprehensible crap.”

Have we lost the ability to say what we mean and mean what we say?

Categories Common Core, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Humor

I Am Bummed Out: Rhee Will Speak in Minneapolis Instead of Debating Me

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2014 //
106

As readers of this blog know, Michelle Rhee promised to debate me at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania last spring.

The date was set, at her request, on February 6.

Then she demanded a second, and I agreed. (Her second was going to be Rod Paige.)

Then she demanded a third, and I agreed.

Then she said she couldn’t find a third, and she canceled.

Now I learn she is speaking to the Chamber of Commerce in Minneapolis on February 6, where she will bring the message that the way to have great schools is to fire teachers and use test scores as the absolute judge of students, teachers, principals, and schools.

She is speaking during the day so it is not likely that there will be teachers or students present.

I wish she would debate me. I would even accept a fourth or a fifth. We could each bring a team and mud-wrestle.

But no basketball. She would bring you-know-who, and I am not that tall.

Come on, Michelle. Just do it.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Testing

Bob Braun on Newark and the Pink Hula Hoop

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2014 //
8

Bob Braun has a fascinating blog where he writes about New Jersey politics and education, based on his 50 years of covering both as a reporter and columnist.

Here he tells the story of the current administration’s determination to sell off public buildings to KIPP and perhaps other charter operators.

Newark is under state control and has been since 1995. The state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson is a former Teach for America teacher who has been knee-deep or neck-deep in corporate reform, from TFA to New Leaders for New Schools to the Bloomberg administration, and now the Chris Christie administration. Her present assignment apparently is to turn public assets over to charter operators, in this case, a corporation named “the Pink Hula Hoop.”

The story begins like this:

Keeping public education public and out of the grasp of privatizers won’t be easy. The people behind it all make following the power and the money deliberately complicated. Consider the story of the Pink Hula Hoop, a convoluted tale of big money and insider contacts that could be the future of public education.

The front archway over the 18th Avenue School
The front archway over the 18th Avenue School

Pink Hula Hoop—more correctly “ Pinkhulahoop1, LLC”—is a profit-making company, one of four legal entities created to, among other things, raise money for the Team Academy Charter schools in Newark so it can buy and occupy public schools put on the auction block by the state-appointed school administration in New Jersey’s largest city. The Team Academy is considered a “region” of the better known KIPP charter schools.

The saddest part of the story is the inscription over the 18th Avenue School (photo):

“THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS THE BEST DEFENSE OF A DEMOCRATIC NATION.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, New Jersey, Privatization

Governor Haslam of Tennessee: Bad Collision with Facts

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2014 //
5

This blogger has gathered the latest wave of bad news from Tennessee, showing the emptiness of the Republican Governor Bill Haslam’s efforts to outsource everything public to whoever wants to make money.

Even though President Obama praised red-state Tennessee as a prime example of the success of Race to the Top, conveniently ignoring the other Race to the Top winners where NAEP scores stagnated, things are not going well for corporate-style reform in the Volunteer State.

Haslam and his TFA Commissioner Kevin Huffman (ex-husband of Michelle Rhee) have the support of a far-right legislature, but their plans are still in disarray.

Nearly half the superintendents bravely signed a letter protesting Huffman’s heavy-handed mandates (seems to be the custom with corporate reform superintendents, brooking no dissent from the peons). Now parents have formed a new organization to fight Haslam and Huffman’s plans to outsource as many public schools to private corporations as possible. And, of course, Chris Barbic, imported from Houston to perform a miracle, promised to gather up all the state’s lowest-performing schools and move them to the top of the state’s rankings within five years (the clock is ticking–better to make your utopian promises fuzzy, not so concrete).

Now comes Tennesseans Reclaiming Education Excellence, organized by parents across the state, and they injected an unknown quantity into educational debates in Tennessee: Facts. Facts!

….on Monday, the top-down, one-size-fits-all education policies Haslam has been pushing through the legislature met a formidable roadblock — a TREE.

As has been custom the past few years, corporate education organizations have trotted out their privatization policies at the beginning of each legislative session. Their glossy, well-funded presentations always grab headlines and typically re-affirm Republican efforts that privatize public schools, divert money from our students’ classrooms and devalue educators.

This year, however, a new group, Tennesseans Reclaiming Educational Excellence, kicked off the week with some analysis that threw cold hard facts into the discussion of reforms trumpeted by Haslam’s administration.

Several points of interest:

Elaine Weiss of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, was TREE’s featured presenter. From TNEdReport.com:

“Weiss discussed recent Tennessee education policy in the context of the drivers of educational inequality. She pointed to research suggesting that poverty is a significant contributor to student outcomes and noted other research that suggests as much as 2/3 of student outcomes are predicted by factors outside of school.”

The beauty of TREE’s press conference was two fold — one; they took some media coverage away from corporate education groups, and, two; they empowered our reporters with facts that have largely been missing from the education debate in Tennessee. Hopefully this presser will pay dividends for the weeks to come.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Resistance, Tennessee

Starr to Duncan: Stop Calling Educators Liars

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2014 //
20

Joshua Starr to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: Stop calling lifelong public educators liars.

This is one of Arne’s most inexplicable habits. He has repeatedly said that educators lie to children. They tell children they are smart, they tell them they passed, they tell them they did good work, when Arne knows better. He knows our kids are lazy and dumb. He alone tells the truth.

Thanks to Josh Starr, superintendent of Montgomery County, Maryland, for saying that’s enough. Please, Arne, just stop it.

Find the good and praise it.

Or, as W. H. Auden wrote, “In the prison of his days, Teach the free man how to praise.”

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Industry

A Hero of Public Education in Michigan: Ellen Cogen Lipton

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
13

State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton has bravely fought for public education and for the children of Michigan in a hostile environment, in a state where free-market fundamentalists control the governorship and the legislature.

She has been unable to hold back hostile legislation and anti-civic policies, but she has actively resisted those who encourage the plundering of precious taxpayer dollars for corporate benefit, to the detriment of children.

In this interview, conducted by Eclectablog, she describes how the legislature created the so-called Educational Achievement Authority and how she was stonewalled when she tried to get information about what was happening to children in the EAA. She filed a Freedom of Information Act to get the information the EAA refused, and after a long delay, it released nearly 2,000 pages. That is called a data dump, where they give you so much information that they hope you can’t figure it out.

The state boasts about the EAA, but what Rep. Lipton discovered was appalling. This is the way Eclectablog described EAA:

“What has become increasingly apparent is that the administration of the EAA is in complete disarray. They have incredible discipline issues, special education kids are being summarily removed from the program in violation of state and federal law, and they appear to be manipulating testing to both make their outcomes look better than they are and also to justify taking over schools. Instead of being a model for educating kids, classroom instruction is being handled by inadequately trained graduates from the Teach for America program which gives “teachers” five weeks of training before sending them into the classroom. Text books and other teaching methods appear to have been tossed aside in favor of software programs where the student interacts with a laptop computer rather than a teacher.”

The interviewer for Eclectablog writes:

“On the forefront of this effort to hold the EAA accountable and to make sure they are actually achieving the results they say they are before we take the system statewide is Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton (D-Huntington Woods). She has been repeatedly rebuffed by the administration of the EAA as well as the Department of Education, forcing her to pay several thousands of dollars out of her own pocket for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data that should have been provided to a three-time elected state legislator for the asking. She and Senator Hoon-Yung Hopgood (D-Taylor) have, through their FOIA requests, been given over 2,000 pages of information in what amounts to a data dump intended to overwhelm them with so much documentation that they couldn’t find the information that they are looking for. They have, however, begun the process of organizing the documents and have them on a searchable website called InsideTheEAA.com.”

Then follows a fascinating conversation, and you realize that Rep. Lipton “gets it.” She sees that what is happening in Michigan is the same as what happened in Louisiana. she sees a national pattern. She sees that Broad, Walton, and Gates don’t like democracy. It is too messy. They like organizations where one person runs everything, and what he does fits their mold.

This is part of the interview:

Q. “He [a state senator] got something like 880 documents in mid-August. How many did you get, you got more than that, right?

A. “Yeah, I got about 1,700 pages.

Q. “It’s like drinking from a fire hose. I was on your site and it’s clear what they’ve done: they want to make it so that it’s impossible to analyze it, basically.

A. “Yeah, that’s sort of the game plan. But there are certain threads that you can definitely glean from the documents. One thread that is abundantly clear is that the Broad Foundation, and specifically Eli Broad, was and still is intimately involved in the creation as well as the carrying out of the EAA.

Q. “How are they doing this?

A. “The Broad Foundation, before the EAA opened, contributed something like $25 million and I believe they’ve made a subsequent grant to the EAA. It appears that he was instrumental in, if not the hiring of John Covington, he was certainly…

Q. “Who was a Broad Fellow, correct?

A. “That’s right, a graduate of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy. There are some emails that suggest that the Broad Foundation put his name forward and there doesn’t seem to be any other names that you can find. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of extensive interview process. Some of the emails from that time are sort of, “This is the person that it’s going to be”.

Q. “What’s interesting is that, when you look at this in a broader context, in terms of what the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation, to name a few, have done in other states, there are similarities. The money that they spend, it sort of follows a very interesting trend line. They will go into states with opportunities for state take over districts or where there is mayoral control. So, you’ll see the Broad Foundation in the Louisiana Recovery District, for example.

Q. “Challenged places, in other words.

A. “Mmm hmm. In Philadelphia, places like that. Instead of — and, again, this is my opinion — instead of using their money to fund initiatives that we know work, you have them spending an enormous amount of money to create an infrastructure like an EAA — in Louisiana you have the Louisiana Recovery District — that aggregates control in a single person.

Q. “You begin to wonder, “Why is that?” and then you begin to look at the broader context of corporate reform in education, you see that that seems to be the M.O. Why have to work through all of the messiness of this thing called ‘democracy’? Oh, my heavens! School boards can be so insufferable! I mean, we actually have to work with our community!

A. “You have this sense of this sort of disdain for the democratic process. Because, think about the local school board. That defines democracy for a lot of people, right? I mean, people will say to me, “I’m not political. I couldn’t care less about politics.” And I’ll ask them, “Do you care about your schools?” and they’ll say, “Why heavens yes, my children are in school.” “Do you go to school board meetings?” “Absolutely!”

Q. “So they are involved.

A. “Absolutely. And the concept that these corporate “reformers” loathe is that very concept. So, how do you get around that? Well, first of all, you convince people that the current system is rotten. And you spend a lot of money to do that. And they can, right? These are organizations…”

Q. “That are super-wealthy.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Michigan

EduShyster Takes a Ride on a Rocketship and Finds Miraculous Visions

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
8

In this post, EduShyster surveys the progress of the Rocketship charter chain, which aspires to enroll 1 million children in its low-cost, high-tech fleet of schools.

She writes:

“The audacious exercise in audaciousness was off to an audacious start. Fueled by an explosive combo of Silicon Valley funding and free advertising from *journalists* who found the use of rocket-related terminology irresistible, the super cool new rocketships blasted off towards the stratosphere. Before long, ground control envisioned a whole fleet—no wait—a whole galaxy of rocketships, each populated by rocketeers excelling like never before. Why not eight schools serving up to 4,000 children in Milwaukee. Why not schools in Tennessee, Louisiana, Indiana and Washington D.C.? Why not 2,000 schools in 50 cities, serving 1 million rocketeers?

“But space colonization turned out to be rather more challenging than expected. For one thing, sending all of those rocketships into orbit was an expensive business, meaning that new rocketships had to be launched continuously in order to pay for the ones that were already soaring. The mothership was a hungry beast too, and required each school to fork over a 20% facility fee and a 15% management fee. In an old school school that $$ would have gone to pay for outmoded freight like teachers and their salaries. But once again the mothership had thought of everything. The space-age solution: Boost student to teacher ratios from 40:1 to 50:1 and *supplement* their numbers with plenty of minimum-wage-ish computer lab aids on hand to oversee the *individualized* instruction.”

But that’s not all. Big plans ahead to expand the empire and reach 2 billion customers, er, students, with programming delivered to cell phones. Really.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Technology, Computers

Michigan: Governor Snyder Is Succeeding…..in Destroying Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
24

One of our readers brought this sad article to my attention.

Under Governor Rick Snyder, more school districts have collapsed into emergency status than during the time of any of his predecessors. Failing districts get taken over by the state and put into its Emergency Achievement District, an oxymoron. Once in the EAA, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy arranges to dissolve democratic control and turn the schools over to for-profit charter chaplains.

Snyder encourages charters and loves for-profit charters.

80% of Michigan’s charters operate for-profit.

What a racket!

How much longer will Michigan voters tolerate the plundering and sacking of public education?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »