Archives for category: Education Industry
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Breaking News: Pearson Foundation Fined Millions for Violating Laws

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
45

New York state’s attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman won an agreement from the Pearson Foundation to pay $7.7 million in fines for using its charitable activities to advance its corporation’s profit-making arm.

According to the story by Javier Hernandez in the New York Times,

“An inquiry by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, found that the foundation had helped develop products for its corporate parent, including course materials and software. The investigation also showed that the foundation had helped woo clients to Pearson’s business side by paying their way to education conferences that were attended by its employees.

“Under the terms of the agreement to be announced on Friday, the money, aside from $200,000 in legal expenses, will be directed to 100Kin10, a national effort led by a foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, to train more teachers in high-demand areas, including science, technology, engineering and math.

“The fact is that Pearson is a for-profit corporation, and they are prohibited by law from using charitable funds to promote and develop for-profit products,” Mr. Schneiderman said in a statement. “I’m pleased that this settlement will direct millions of dollars back to where they belong.”

“Officials at Pearson and the foundation defended their work.

“We have always acted with the best intentions and complied with the law,” they said, in a joint statement. “However, we recognize there were times when the governance of the foundation and its relationship with Pearson could have been clearer and more transparent.”

“The case shed a light on the competitive world of educational testing and technology, which Pearson has come to dominate. As federal and state leaders work to overhaul struggling schools by raising academic standards, educational companies are rushing to secure lucrative contracts in testing, textbooks and software.

“The inquiry by the attorney general focused on Pearson’s attempts to develop a suite of products around the Common Core, a new and more rigorous set of academic standards that has been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

“Around 2010, Pearson began financing an effort through its foundation to develop courses based on the Common Core. The attorney general’s report said Pearson had hoped to use its charity to win endorsements and donations from a “prominent foundation.” That group appears to be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Pearson Inc. executives believed that branding their courses by association with the prominent foundation would enhance Pearson’s reputation with policy makers and the education community,” a release accompanying the attorney general’s report said.

“Indeed, in April 2011, the Pearson Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced they would work together to create 24 new online reading and math courses aligned with the Common Core.

“Pearson executives believed the courses could later be sold commercially, the report said, and predicted potential profits of tens of millions of dollars. After Mr. Schneiderman’s office began its investigation, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to Pearson for $15.1 million.

“The attorney general’s office also examined a series of education conferences sponsored by the Pearson Foundation, which paid for school officials to meet their foreign counterparts in places like Helsinki and Singapore…..”

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Pearson

EduShyster: No More Conflict of Interest Rules!

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
10

EduShyster retains the capacity for astonishment and surprise.

In this post, she identifies some seemingly blatant conflicts of interest on the part of big players in the education reform world.

Yet no one cares. Ethics? What’s that?

She calls it “carerruption.”

I don’t feel like getting a lawyer’s letter today threatening to sue me for defamation, so I will ask you to read EduShyster yourself.

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles

Charter Founder in Ohio Makes Large Political Contributions, Gets Rich

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
14

The blogger Plunderbund here documents the conditions in which certain major charter operators in Ohio become financially very successful.

In this instance, he tells the story of William Lager, founder of ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow), who has generously donated $1.3 million to the Ohio Republican Party in the last decade.

His generosity has been amply repaid with generous state funding for his businesses.

Plunderbund writes:

“This weekend we posted about Ohio’s largest charter school, ECOT, being recommended to receive a “bonus” check of $2.9 million that would be quickly rerouted into ECOT owner William Lager’s other private businesses. This is not the first raise that ECOT has received this year. Through the Kasich budget passed this summer, ECOT received the largest increase in state funding for any charter school in Ohio at $4.8 million. This far surpassed the second largest increase of $1.35 million given to Ohio Virtual Academy.

“It’s good to buy friends in high places…

“Since 2004, Lager, the ECOT CEO, has been donating to Ohio political campaigns with staggering regularity and in staggering numbers for someone whose main livelihood is providing a “public” education to Ohio children…”

He supplies the facts and figures.

Let’s put it this way: Mr. Lager’s generosity has been repaid many times over by his benefactors, using tax dollars that were supposed to go to educate Ohio’s students.

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

Wall Street’s Plans for the Future of K-12 Education

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
13

When Frank Bruni wrote a column saying that American students are too “coddled,” he added a gratuitous swipe at “leftwing paranoiacs” who “imagine some conspiracy to ultimately privatize education and create a new frontier of profits for money-mad plutocrats.”

Well, here is another point of view, called “Wall Street is Designing the Future of Public Education.” It appears on Salon.com.

I think Bruni has not heard about the investors’ conferences where hedge funders and entrepreneurs gather to learn about the opportunities to make a profit in public education. Stephanie Simon, then at Reuters (now at politico.com), wrote an article about this called “Private Firms Eyeing Profits from U.S. Public Schools.”

Why are so many hedge fund managers so interested in funding charter chains?

Why is the tech industry so devoted to Common Core and charters like Rocketship?

Why are billionaires and other wealthy individuals sending money to local school board races in districts where they do not live?

Anna Simonton, who wrote this post for Alternet, has done a herculean task trying to disentangle the web of connections among advocacy groups and entrepreneurs:

She writes:

The Education Reform Industrial Complex is a dizzying house of mirrors, with money ricocheting back and forth between many more players. To outline all of the connections would be a Herculean task.

Suffice it to say, their investments are paying off. National charter school enrollment has increased from 340,000 students in 1999 to 1.8 million in 2011. As of 2009, President Obama’s Race to the Top fund rewards states for tying teacher compensation to test scores. Teach for America boasts over 19,000 corps members and alumni teachers in 36 states and the District of Columbia, and has nearly doubled the number of alumni in school system leadership in the past two years. As a result, business is booming for education companies like K12 Inc., the country’s largest operator of full-time virtual schools, whose CEO received a compensation package of $6 million in 2011.

Most of this change has taken place as the result of campaigning and lobbying at the state and federal levels. But as the Atlanta school board election shows, no race is too small for the millionaires behind the education “reform” movement.

Last year these same millionaires bought school boards in New Orleans, Indianapolis, Memphis, and a little town in New Jersey called Perth Amboy. (The money in that purchase came from a man who made his fortune selling Bank of America shares to the government for twice what he paid, while stroking a pair of brass testicles he keeps on his desk for good luck.) This year Denver and Los Angeles were also sites of the onslaught, with reformer candidates collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

As regular readers of this blog know, there is a silver lining: An informed public.

Simonton writes:

In Seattle, Wash. and Bridgeport, Conn., the same script concluded with very different results. Last year, Bridgeport voters rejected a measure that would have ended school board elections for good by authorizing the mayor to choose board members. The referendum was backed by Michelle Rhee and Michael Bloomberg, but real grassroots organizing efforts shot it down.

This year, in Seattle, blogger and activist Sue Peters ran for school board on a platform critical of corporate education reform. She was outspent 4 to 1 by her billionaire-backed opponent, but squeaked by with 52% of the vote.

These cases offer hope that when voters are made aware of the money trail, they turn out and vote in their community’s interest.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Eva’s Success in Getting Whatever She Wanted from Bloomberg Administration

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
10

Eva Moskowitz is a tough taskmaster. Lucky for her, the New York City Department of Education was willing to do whatever she demanded, no matter the cost.

As this article reports, what Eva wants, Eva gets. That may explain why Eva closed her schools this fall and led a protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge to demonstrate her opposition to Bill de Blasio’s demand that her charter chain pay rent for using public space. Unlucky for her, de Blasio won the election and will be the Mayor on January 1, 2014.

James Fanelli writes:

“NEW YORK CITY — When Eva Moskowitz starts a new charter school, top officials at the city’s Department of Education move heaven and earth to meet her demands.

“During the past two years, the DOE gave Moskowitz’s controversial chain, Success Academy, rent-free space in city school buildings to open 14 new co-location sites. In each handover, Moskowitz demanded the DOE deliver the space clear of furniture and broom-swept by 5 p.m. on the last day of the school year, according to sources and emails obtained by DNAinfo New York.

“But since students used the space until the second-to-last day of the school year, the DOE was left with less than 36 hours to clear the area — costing the department tens of thousands of dollars in overtime from contracted workers scrambling to meet the onerous deadline.

“The cost was astronomical,” a DOE insider told DNAinfo New York. “We don’t have to do it the very last day of school. There’s absolutely no need for this.”

The high-octane moves, insiders say, show the preferential treatment that DOE officials — including deputy schools chancellor Kathleen Grimm — give Success Academy, whose 22 schools serve just 6,700 of the city’s 1.1 million students.

Emails obtained by DNAinfo highlight the special relationship the high-profile school leader has with the DOE.”

As Mercedes Schneider reported recently, after reviewing Success Academy’s tax returns, the chain has millions in assets and can afford to pay rent. Moskowitz’s salary for overseeing 6,700 students is nearly $500,000, about double that of the NYC schools’ chancellor, who is responsible for overseeing 1.1 million pupils.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, New York City

The Most Important Post of the Day: The Rightwing Assault on the Public Sector

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
21

Jan Resseger here links to a startling expose that appeared in the Guardian, a U.K. newspaper.

The Guardian gained access to secret documents showing the ties that bind a far-right network of public policy groups called the State Policy Network.

There is a public policy institute in almost every state, all sharing the same far-right ideology.

This group, which operates in tandem with the ALEC agenda, seeks to deregulate and privatize public services, privativepublic schools with charters and vouchers, reduce the corporate tax burden, reduce or eliminate regulation of greenhouse gases, and eliminate any public restriction on private greed.

Resseger writes:

The Guardian describes the State Policy Network as a sister organization to the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC. “SPN’s president, Tracie Sharp, told theGuardian that ‘as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society.'”

Despite that the majority of the state affiliates of the State Policy Network are 501 (C) (3) organizations, according to The Guardian, the State Policy Network makes grants to its member think-tanks for projects “aimed at changing state laws and policies, or (that) refer to ‘advancing model legislation’ and ‘candidate briefings’, in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.”

See if your own state is represented on the list here.

The proposals submitted by specific state think-tanks for funding from the State Policy Network’s war chest include attacks on public employee pensions, campaigns to eliminate or reduce taxes, promotion of school vouchers, attacks on worker and union rights, and opposition to Medicaid.

Another post by Resseger reported the source of funding for this far-right assault on the public sector. Stinktanks.org reveals that the State Policy Network (SPN) has $83 million in funding from such sources as the Koch Brothers:

Stinktanks writes:

SPN has become an $83 million right-wing empire. SPN and its affiliates are not required to disclose their donors, and almost none of the groups publish a list of funders. Tax documents and other available records reveal that SPN is funded by large corporations, right-wing foundations, and wealthy conservative ideologues. Some of the most notable corporate funders of SPN and its web of “think tanks” include Big Tobacco companies (like Reynolds), Big Oil corporations (like the Koch family fortune), AT&T, Kraft Foods, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Facebook, and Microsoft. SPN and its “think tanks” are also largely funded by right-wing special interest groups and individuals, including the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Coors family (of Coors Brewing Company), the Walton Family Foundation (of Walmart), Richard Mellon Scaife, Art Pope, the Roe Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation.

Stinktanks was written and posted by the Center for Media and Democracy, which also posts about “ALEC Exposed.”

If you want to know who is funding and lobbying for the attacks on public education and on teachers, this is a good place to start.

For more on the “Guardian” exposé, read NPR’s interview of “Guardian” correspondent Edward Pilkington by Terry Gross.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Sweden: Market-Based Reforms in Big Trouble

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2013 //
60

Privatizers like to point to Sweden as their model (conveniently ignoring Chile, where the military dictator Pinochet’s advisors embraced Milton Friedman’s free-market policies). Since a conservative government came to power, Sweden has vouchers, publicly financed private schools, and for-profit schools. It is everything that ALEC, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Tom Corbett, and Rick Snyder could dream of.

But Swedish education just ran into a huge problem. Private equity firms are booming, as social and economic equity is growing.

And, oops, one of the biggest private firms went bankrupt earlier this year, causing many legislators to wonder if the nation is on the wrong path.

Reuters reports:

“STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – When one of the biggest private education firms in Sweden went bankrupt earlier this year, it left 11,000 students in the lurch and made Stockholm rethink its pioneering market reform of the state schools system.

School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.

“I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality,” said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament’s education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party.

In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.

Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden’s secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.

Nearly half of those study at schools fully or partly owned by private equity firms.

Ahead of elections next year, politicians of all stripes are questioning the role of such firms, accused of putting profits first with practices like letting students decide when they have learned enough and keeping no record of their grades…..”

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, International, Privatization

Why Shaun Johnson Should Renew His AERA Membership

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2013 //
18

Shaun Johnson eloquently explains here why he is letting his AERA membership lapse.

In brief, he is disappointed that AERA has not taken a leadership role in defending public education against the corporate-funded assault on its very existence.

But, Shaun, don’t give up.

AERA invited me to give the John Dewey lecture at AERA in Philadelphia on April 3, 2014. When I last spoke at AERA in 2011 in New Orleans (my topic was “Who Kidnapped Superman?“), the room held only about 400 people, and there were more people outside the room than inside it, because the room was too small.

This time, I have been promised a room that holds at least 1,000 people.

Come to Philadelphia. You will not be disappointed.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Research

Momma Bears: How to Get Stinking Rich Off Education

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2013 //
9

Some very smart public school parents in Tennessee who calls themselves Momma Bears have figured out the game plan of the education industry.

Here is their plain and simple 10-step plan about how to cash in on the public school marketplace and get stinking rich.

These are the first three steps (read the post to learn about the other seven steps that will make you a millionaire):

Times are tough, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a buck in education right now. No qualifications or experience? No problem! In fact, it is actually works better if you have zero classroom experience (so you won’t have any compassion for the hardworking teachers and innocent students you’ll be profiting from).

You could pay $1,395 to attend a workshop (like this one) to learn how to get rich in the education industry, but Momma Bears already did the homework and figured it all out. And Momma Bears is all about sharing knowledge with other concerned folks. So, save your money and read about the easy 10-step program to getting rich with other people’s money through America’s public school system…

10 steps to hitting the jackpot in education:

Picture

Step #1: Start a consulting business or organization. It doesn’t really matter if it is profit or non-profit. Non-profit organizations will seem more trustworthy and innocent to the public (but don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you won’t get a nice paycheck.)Step #2: Create a catchy name for your organization. Acronyms work especially well. Don’t forget a logo. You cannot go wrong with an apple logo, they are very much in style right now.

Step #3: Make a website with pretty pie charts and lots of catchy buzz-words like these:

  • achievement gap
  • data driven benchmarks
  • human capital
  • Common Core aligned
  • education strategies
  • global citizen
  • rigorous, relevant, and robust

Keep reading, and you too will hit the jackpot.

Categories Education Industry, Tennessee

Deasy and Hess: Do Not Fear Technology!

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2013 //
44

Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy and Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute wrote an article in which they seek to reassure teachers not to be afraid of technology. They patiently explain why the critics of Deasy’s decision to spend $1 billion for iPads and Pearson content are wrong, and why technology is good for students and teachers.

This is a classic example of what is known as “begging the question.”

No one is opposed to technology.

Teachers are not opposed to technology.

Parents are not opposed to technology.

Students are not opposed to technology.

What critics have asked is how Los Angeles can afford to spend $1 billion on iPads using money from a voter-approved school construction bond fund. When the money is used to buy iPads instead of repair buildings, where will the money be found to fix the buildings? Will voters be willing to support future bond issues if their wishes (to repair the schools) are blithely ignored? Deasy and Hess do not answer those questions.

What critics have asked is whether it is wise to spend $1 billion on iPads loaded with Pearson content when the iPads will be obsolete in 3-4 years and the lease on the Pearson content will expire in three years? Will the district spend $1 billion every 3-4 years to replace the obsolete tablets and to renew the lease on the Pearson content? Where will that money come from?

Why is Superintendent Deasy overriding the district’s Bond Oversight Committee, which is concerned about the cost and curricular content of the iPad purchase? Deasy and Hess don’t answer that question either.

In fact, none of the questions raised in Yasha Levine’s article about the iPad purchase (“The Unanswered Questions Behind L.A.’s iPad Fiasco”) were answered.

Here are some of those unanswered questions:

There were a lot of unanswered questions about the deal, but at least one thing was crystal clear: outfitting nearly a million people with top-of-the-line tablets was going to be insanely expensive. And that’s why just about everyone that wasn’t directly cashing in on LA’s “tablets was all” scheme was baffled and outraged by it. Parents and teachers couldn’t understand how LAUSD’s top brass could blow so much money on an expensive toy at a time when the district was laying off teachers and cutting physical education, art and music programs. Pointy headed academics scratched their chins at the news because there is no scientific evidence that shows tablets help kids learn or boost academic performance in any way. And others wondered why LAUSD planned to pay for iPads using bond money that was approved by voters solely for use in upgrading physical school infrastructure, especially when schools routinely lack the funds to make critical repairs.

Even the Los Angeles Times, which is normally very sympathetic to Deasy’s technocratic reform schemes, criticized the iPad deal. The paper noted with concern that Deasy not only owned Apple stock, but he had also appeared in an Apple promotional video boosting iPads as the best educational tools around.

Deasy and Hess should have answered at least a few of those questions, not just expressed praise for the joys of technology.

Categories Education Industry
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