Archives for category: Education Industry
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Newark Plans to Close School Praised by Michelle Obama as “Phenomenal”

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2013 //
25

Jersey Jazzman reports that Newark officials, who love to close public schools, will close a school that First Lady Michelle Obama highly praised. When she visited Maple Avenue Elementary School in 2010, she praised the staff and called the school “phenomenal.”

The Obama administration loves closing public schools and firing everyone who works in them. This is called a “turnaround.” It is one of the administration’s worst initiatives. Call it the Donald Trump approach to school reform: “You’re fired!”

Categories Closing schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey

Tony Bennett and the Privatization Money Trail

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
19

You remember Tony Bennett? Not the famous singer but the guy who was State Commissioner of education in Florida. The guy who led the effort to privatize public education in Indiana and led the charge for charter schools, vouchers, for-profit charters, virtual charters, high-stakes testing, the A-F grading system, and the elimination of collective bargaining rights for teachers. Remember that he was honored by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute as the leading “reformer” (translated, privatizers) of all state chiefs. He was also chair of Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change,” composed of state superintendents who share Jeb’s antipathy to public education.

Now, you may recall, that Bennett ran for re-election and was trounced by Democrat Glenda Ritz. Despite Bennett’s more than 5-1 funding advantage over Ritz, she won more votes than the new Republican governor, Mike Pence.

Here is a recap: After his stunning defeat, Bennett was promptly hired as state superintendent in Florida, where Jeb Bush created the template for the privatization movement. Meanwhile, back in Indiana, newly elected Governor Pence has done whatever he could to strip power and authority away from Glenda Ritz’s office and turn it over to a parallel agency that he created or to the Legislature, controlled by his allies.

As for Bennett, he didn’t last long in Florida. In August 2013, he resigned after a journalist for AP revealed that Bennett and his team had changed the A-F grading system to avoid giving a C grade to a charter school founded by a major contributor. Bennett contested the journalist’s interpretation, but his resignation suggested tat he wasn’t prepared to fight to refute the allegations.

The Bennett story was one of the biggest of the year.

There is only one other important detail that has not been explored, at least not on this blog: Who put up nearly $2 million to re-elect Tony Bennett in Indiana? Was it supplied by grateful parents in Indiana? No.

Mostly, it was big out-of-state donors who fund the privatization movement across the nation, in state and even local races.

His single biggest contributor was Alice Walton of the Walmart family of Arkansas. She gave $200,000, nearly 11% of Bennett’s total. Alice Walton has generously funded privatization campaigns in Georgia, Washington state, and elsewhere.

His second largest contribution of $175,000 came from Dean V. White, an Indiana corporate leader who is a major on or to Indiana Republicans.

Christel Dehaan gave Bennett $90,000. It was her charter school that was at the center of the grade–fixing scandal. Dehaan gave a total of $283,000 to the Indiana Republican Party this year.

Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst contributed $64,000.

There were also contributions to Tony Bennett by Eli Broad of Los Angeles, who pretends to be a liberal Democrat; the voucher-loving, far-right American Federation of Children, led by the DeVos family; Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, who prefers to project an image as a liberal independent; Roger Hertog, equity investor in New York and former chair of NYC’s conservative Manhattan Institute; Dan Loeb, hedge fund manager in New York City.

Florida blogger Bob Sikes reported: “Rhee’s contribution to Bennett’s Indiana campaign places her among his top contributors. Among his contributors from Florida were three members of Florida’s board of education, Jeb Bush, Patricia Levesque and charter school giants Charter Schools USA and Academica.” Patricia Levesque is Jeb Bush’s top policy advisor.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, Indiana, Vouchers

Robert Freeman: How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
49

We know the formula by now for destroying public education and handing it off to entrepreneurs who can cut costs, package it, extract a profit (or remain nonprofit while paying exorbitant executive salaries):

Cry “crisis.” Set impossible targets (100% success on tests normed on a bell curve). Demoralize teachers. Fire the most experienced teachers. Hire low-wage temporary teachers who will leave within three years, thus eliminating future pension obligations. Close schools and disrupt communities. Turn schools over to entrepreneurs, to amateurs, to non-educators, to sports stars, to charter chains. Watch as public schools are dissolved and disappear. Watch as people become consumers, not citizens.

But now others get it, even if most of our major editorial boards do not.

Robert Freeman writes here about the public theft that is underway.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Reader: Exxon Mobil and the Devaluing of AP Courses

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2013 //
54

Reader Christine Langhoff writes in response to a post wondering about Exxon Mobil’s fervent advocacy for the Common Core standards:

“Exxon Mobile came into the Boston Public Schools in about 2003, trying to destroy our contract by inserting merit pay through a project called the Massachusetts Math and Science Initiative (MMSI), a branch of the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). And surprise! David Coleman is also a member of this board.

“Despite its official-sounding name, this was a private project begun by Tom Luce who served in Bush’s cabinet as an under secretrary of education. Failing to win the governor’s race in Texas in 1990, he was inspired to form “two nonprofit ventures that led public schools across the United States to measure performance based on standardized tests.” One of the first iterations was called “Just for Kids”. An early innovator (read NCLB) – all good ideas come from Texas! Currently, he is now a “reformer”on the board of the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), Jeb!’s spawn.

“The Mass Math and Science Initiative set up shop in my school (89% of our students were minorities). We already had an outstanding track record of well-prepared kids diligently working their way toward scores of 4 and 5 in a host of AP classes. But the goal was not to have kids do well, the goal was simply to get more kids to take AP classes. Why? Follow the money.

“Although teachers had long taught AP courses successfully, no outsider consultants were involved. Suddenly, we were inundated with “verticle alignment” workshops, AP workbooks, CD’s, mandatory extra time for teacher AP training (including Saturdays) and cash payments to students taking the tests, as well as “merit pay” to AP teachers for high scores. In other words, what had been an in-house effort to take our most talented students a step forward toward distinguishing their academic records was co-opted to make bank for test fees, materials and consultants.

“In the same time period, the College Board began to require that AP teachers write up and submit an AP curriculum to them for approval (un-reimbursed, of course), and AP training courses began to be required of teachers so that they would be “qualified” to teach those “endorsed” classes. More “ka-ching” at the cash register.

“Remember that our faculty and students had a long track record of success in this arena. Under pressure from the school department, our numbers of students taking AP classes expanded exponentially, until nearly every student was enrolled in some AP class or another. So we met the goal of more kids, but of course our percentage of high scores fell off precipitously.

“It so happened that my own kids were applying for college during this time period. I noticed that though AP had been on the lips of admissions officers of “elite” schools four years earlier for my older child, now there was little interest. Every admissions person I asked about this at competitive liberal arts colleges had the same answer – that credential has been devalued.

“See:
http://www.nms.org/
http://www.nms.org/AboutNMSI/BoardofDirectors.aspx
http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/robert-miller/20130402-odonnell-foundation-hires-tom-luce-dallas-attorney-and-education-advocate.ece
http://www.susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=18”

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Leonie Haimson: The Woman Who Stopped Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and the Ed Profiteers

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2013 //
19

Below is a letter from Leonie Haimson, who was previously added to the honor roll of this blog for fighting for students, parents, and public education.

Leonie almost singlehandedly stopped the effort to mine student data, whose sponsors wanted confidential and identifiable information about every child “for the children’s sake.” Leonie saw through that ruse and raised a national ruckus to fight for student privacy. Privacy of student records is supposedly protected by federal law (FERPA), but Arne Duncan weakened the regulations so that parents could not opt out of the data mining.

It is not over. The Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation put up $100 million to start inBloom, and Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation got the contract to develop the software, and amazon.com plans to put it on a “cloud.” They will be back. We count on Haimson and the many parents she has inspired to remain vigilant on behalf of our children. As a grandparent of a child in second grade in a Brooklyn public school, I have a personal interest in keeping his information private.

Here is Leonie’s letter, written 12/20/13:

Dear folks,

I have good news to report! Yesterday, Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the NYS Assembly, along with Education Chair Cathy Nolan and fifty Democratic Assemblymembers sent a letter to Commissioner King, urging him to put a halt to inBloom.

“It is our job to protect New York’s children. In this case, that means protecting their personally identifiable information from falling into the wrong hands,” said Silver. “Until we are confident that this information can remain protected, the plan to share student data with InBloom must be put on hold.”

Why is this important? Because Speaker Silver and the Democrats in the Assembly appoint the Board of Regents, as the Daily News noted. The Regents control education policy in New York, and appoint the commissioner.

We have begun to make real headway in the past year against inBloom, but we need your support so we can continue the fight for student privacy and smaller classes in the public schools.

We count on donations from individuals like you as our main source of funding. If you appreciate our work and want it to continue and grow stronger, please give a tax-deductible contribution right now by clicking here: http://www.nycharities.org/donate/c_donate.asp?CharityCode=1757 or sending a check to the address below.

I am proud to have been called “the nation’s foremost parent expert on inBloom and the current threat to student data privacy.” We were the first advocacy group in the nation to sound the alarm about inBloom’s plan to create a multi-state database to be stored on a vulnerable data cloud run by Amazon.com with an operating system built by Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify. The explicit goal of inBloom was to package this information in an easily digestible form and offer it up to data-mining vendors without parental consent.

In February, inBloom formally launched as a separate corporation, and nine states were listed as “partners.” We worked hard to get the word out through blogging, personal outreach to parent activists and the mainstream media. After protests erupted in states throughout the country, inBloom’s “partners” pulled out. Now, eight out of these states have severed all ties with inBloom or put their data sharing plans on indefinite hold.

Sadly, as of yesterday, New York education officials were still intent on sharing with inBloom a complete statewide set of personal data for all public school students– including names, addresses, phone numbers, test scores and grades, disabilities, health conditions, disciplinary records and more. To stop this, we helped to organize a lawsuit on behalf of NYC parents which will be heard in state court on January 10 in Albany (note the new date), asking for an immediate injunction to block the state’s plan. (The state has delayed the hearing in order to gain more time to respond to our legal briefs.)

In addition, we will continue our work on the critical issue of class size. As a result of our reports, testimonies and public outreach, we have been able to shine a bright light on what many consider to be the most shameful aspect of Mayor Bloomberg’s education legacy: the fact that class sizes in NYC have increased sharply over the last six years and are now the largest in the early grades since 1998. More on this issue is in my Indypendent article just published, called Grading the Education Mayor

Class sizes have increased every year, despite the fact that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case was supposedly “settled” by a state law in 2007 that required NYC to reduce class sizes in all grades. As a result, 86% of NYC principals say they are unable to provide a quality education because classes are too large. Parents say that smaller classes are their top priority according to the Department of Education’s own surveys. There is no more critical need than smaller classes if the city’s children are to have an equitable chance to learn.

But class size is not just a critical issue in NYC public schools. Because of budget cuts, class sizes have risen sharply throughout the state and the nation as a whole. In more than half of all states, per-pupil funding is lower than in 2008 and school districts have cut 324,000 jobs.

At the same time, more and more money is being spent by billionaires and venture philanthropists on bogus “studies” to try to convince states and districts that class size doesn’t matter and public funds should be spent instead on outsourcing education into private hands – despite much rigorous research showing the opposite to be true.

With vendors trying to grab your child’s data in the name of providing “personalized” instruction – a euphemism that really means instruction delivered via computers and data-mining software in place of real-life teachers giving meaningful feedback in a class small enough to make this possible — our efforts are more crucial than ever before.

Please make a donation so that our work can continue and be even more effective in 2014.

Thanks for your support and Happy New Year,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320

Categories Arts Education, Class Size Matters Org, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Lee Fang: Obama Picks Prominent Privatizer for Key Role in Department of Education

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2013 //
65

Lee Fang is one of our most extraordinary investigative journalists. He is one of the few who has looked behind the rhetoric of the privatization movement that calls itself a “reform” movement. Unfortunately, the goal of “reform” is to dismantle the public sector and turn it over to entrepreneurs. In 2011, Fang wrote a blockbuster exposé about the online industry and its ties to politicians.

In this article, Lee Fang describes Ted Mitchell, who has been nominated to serve as Undersecretary of Education, the second most powerful spot in the U.S. Department of Education.

Mitchell is chief executive officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which promotes and funds charter schools and for-profit ventures.

Fang writes:

“As head of the NewSchools Venture Fund, Mitchell oversees investments in education technology start-ups. In July, Zynga, the creators of FarmVille, provided $1 million to Mitchell’s group to boost education gaming companies. Mitchell’s NewSchool Venture Fund also reportedly partners with Pearson, the education mega-corporation that owns a number of testing and test-book companies, along with one prominent for-profit virtual charter school, Connections Academy.

“Jeff Bryant, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future, says it seems likely that Mitichell will “advocate for more federal promotion of online learning, ‘blended’ models of instruction, ‘adaptive learning’ systems, and public-private partnerships involving education technology.”

“Mitchell did not respond to TheNation.com’s request for comment.

“His ethics disclosure form shows that he was paid $735,300 for his role at NewSchools, which is organized as a non-profit. In recent years, he has served or is currently serving as a director to New Leaders, Khan Academy, California Education Partners, Teach Channel, ConnectED, Hameetman Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Silicon Schools, Children Now, Bellwether Partners, Pivot Learning Partners, EnCorps Teacher Training Program, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Green DOT Public Schools.

“In addition, Mitchell serves as an adviser to Salmon River Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in education companies. Mitchell sits on the board of Parchment, an academic transcript start-up that is among Salmon River Capital’s portfolio.

“Salmon River Capital helped create one of the biggest names in for-profit secondary education, Capella University. “As a foundational investor and director, [Salmon River Capital’s] Josh Lewis made invaluable contributions to Capella’s success. From leading our landmark financing in 2000, when Capella was a $10 million business operating in a difficult environment, through a successful 2006 IPO and beyond, he proved a great partner who kept every commitment he made,” reads a statement from Steve Shank, founder of Capella.”

In sum, the fox has been put in charge of the henhouse.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Obama

Wendy Lecker: CT Governor Dannell Malloy Can Tell It to the Judge

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2013 //
7

Wendy Lecker, a civil rights attorney in Connecticut, remembers when Connecticut Governor Dannell Malloy was a champion for equitable funding.

But no longer.

He recently spoke at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and boasted about the success of his “reform” program.

According to Lecker:

At his AEI speech, Malloy shockingly dismissed the need to provide all children with educational opportunities as “old rhetoric.” His focus is not on educational opportunity, he claimed, but rather “educational success.” Malloy trumpeted his 2012 education “reform” legislation as providing the path to educational success.

Contrary to Malloy’s contention, educational opportunity is not just “old rhetoric.” The concept of educational opportunity has a specific constitutional meaning in Connecticut. Under our constitution, Connecticut must provide all children with “suitable educational opportunities.” Connecticut’s highest court has defined those opportunities as schools with sufficient resources to provide an education that prepares Connecticut’s children to participate in democratic institutions, attain productive employment and otherwise to contribute to the state’s economy, or to progress on to higher education.

As mayor of Stamford, Malloy understood the constitutional significance of educational opportunity. He was a founding member of theCCJEF coalition and one of the original plaintiffs in the suit demanding the state fulfill its legal obligation to provide fair and adequate funding to all Connecticut public schools.

Two days after Malloy spoke to AEI, a judge in Connecticut denied Malloy’s motion to dismiss the court case that he had helped initiate on behalf of fairness.

Malloy has abandoned his commitment to equality of education opportunity and now relies on high-stakes testing, evaluation of teachers by test scores, and ample funding to charter schools as the reforms that can take the place of equitable funding.

He even appointed a co-founder of the state’s leading charter chain as his state commissioner of education.

In his re-election campaign, Governor Malloy can count on the financial support of some of the wealthiest equity investors in the nation, who live in sheltered enclaves in places like Greenwich and Darien and support charter advocacy organization like ConnCAN.

Lecker writes:

In his motion to dismiss the CCJEF case, Malloy claimed there was no need to continue with this case because his 2012 education reforms cured all the constitutional deficiencies in Connecticut’s educational system. The judge disabused the governor of the fantasy that his reforms have actually improved Connecticut’s schools. He ruled that Malloy and the state presented no evidence to prove that his 2012 reforms were enacted to correct the constitutional inadequacies of Connecticut’s educational system or state school funding.

Malloy’s 2012 education legislation was not designed to provide Connecticut’s children with equal educational opportunity. As he admitted in his AEI speech, educational opportunity is no longer the governor’s focus. He would rather push unproven “reforms” that bear no relationship to what our highest court and our constitution recognize that our children need.

Another incredible claim made by Malloy at the AEI appearance was that his 2012 education legislation, for the first time in Connecticut history, directed copious amounts of money to Connecticut’s neediest districts.

A few hard numbers may help bring Malloy back to this planet. According to CCJEF’s expert’s analysis, updated to 2012 dollars, East Hartford’s school district is owed $6,131 per child in state funding. Malloy’s 2012 legislation gave them an increase of $214 per pupil. Bridgeport’s school district is owed $7,505 per child, but only received an increase of $209 per pupil in the 2012 legislation. The state owes New Britain’s children $10,185 per student. The 2012 legislation provided them with a whopping $245 per pupil increase. The list goes on and on. Moreover, as a condition for each tiny increase in ECS funding, these districts were saddled with costly mandates.

By contrast, charter schools, which educate 1 percent of Connecticut’s public school children and 90 percent of which serve a less needy population than their host districts, received an increase of $2,600 per pupil over three years in the 2012 legislation. Diverting state funding to 1 percent of public school children, who are often not the neediest, is likely to increase educational resource inequity in the state, especially when our neediest schools are getting so little.

 

Categories Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty

A Reader: Our Plight and the Fight Ahead

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2013 //
72

Reader Sharon Sanders posted this comment:

 

The intentional destruction of our economy and educational system has been perpetrated by libertarians, right-wing and religious extremists, as well as corporatists, who want every last penny for themselves and their doctrines through private prisons, charter schools, private armies, a biased corporate media– everything, while they ship our factories and jobs overseas. There can be no economy and no way out of poverty until America rises up and realizes what’s being done to them. There can be no economy without jobs. Now there are few jobs except low-paying ones where people must work two or three to make ends meet, forcing children to grow up without adult supervision and time to care for, help them, and love them. It’s all intentional.

These multinational corporations are determined that only the elite few shall be well-educated–after all, no one else can afford good college educations today. They want to profit from phony standards for schools, unaccountable charter schools, while they dismantle collective bargaining rights and pensions, not only from teachers, but from every workerr in this country and overseas. We will have no country ever again worth two cents until and unless these greedy corporatists are forced to keep their hands out of our schools, until we give each and every child the right to the best education possible with excellent thinking skills, challenges, necessary facts, real history, civics, building a base of knowledge and critical thinking for the future. I’m afraid these extremists have so overtaken our country, that there may be no turning back–but we must keep fighting. I taught at a time when creativity and thinking and knowledge were highly regarded and excellent public schools were respected.

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

EduShyster: What Happened to Free-Market Schooling in Sweden

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
3

EduShyster has written a hilarious and accurate description of Sweden’s love affair with privatization.

School choice advocates swooned over the Swedish model.

But something very bad happened on the Road to Utopia.

Read her post and learn from it.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, International, Privatization, Vouchers

Paul Horton Writes a Letter to the Chicago Tribune

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
10

Paul Horton, a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School, wrote this letter to the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune:

Dear Tribune Editorial Board,

You will have us all (teachers) drinking Hemlock very soon with the absurd editorials on Education that you publish.

You should interview Nobel Laureate Gary Becker. He spoke for our students yesterday, and he fully supports all of your editorial positions. He is really smart because everything comes out perfectly in his mathematical models. Nothing can exist outside the market. Forget “externalities”!

Will you publish teacher VAM scores?

Everything on your editorial page is right out of George Saunders fiction: we will have robocops who shoot innocents here instead of in Yemen, we will have roboteachers and robograding, robofiremen, and we will have no public sector. Most importantly, we will have no public sector unions. Everyone except the Ivy educated (plus Chicago and Stanford) will make $12 an hour because we (union members) are all too lazy, good for nothing, and shiftless: definitely inferior genetic material.

Your readers on the North Shore are eating your stuff up: teachers are the new PWT (I can say it because this is who I am–Lincoln was too, read Honor’s Voice).

We need Common Core scripted lessons so that the inferior genetic material we are can not mess up learning. This is all eugenics in a different form: science is truth, statistics are truth, the Illinois Policy Institute, the Broad Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation are truth. Truth is privatization, if it is not digital, it has no worth, and rational choice for the one percent is freedom. Nothing else we get comes close.

How did your pages report Mandela and the ANC in 1962? MLK in 56? The big picture pattern that you present has an impact over time. The Rauner-Rahm jingo eats it up almost as much as your future owners who are making you beg for crumbs (Broad or Murdoch?).

You need a good Swiftian kick in the ass every day!

“Serendipity”?

Happy Holidays!

Paul Horton
Chicago History teacher, AFT Local 2063

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Testing, Unions, US Education
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