Archives for category: Education Industry
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The Reformy-to-English Dictionary You Have Been Waiting For

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2013 //
22

Valerie Strauss published a terrific column by a Chicago public school parent, Karen McKeegan Fraid.

Fraid has written a wonderful translation of some of the reformers’ favorite phrases, which they repeat ad infinitum.

It begins thus:

“Assessment (noun): A test made by a corporation and protected from peer review and public scrutiny by intellectual property laws and strict confidentiality agreements.

Data-Driven Assessment (noun): A test made by a corporation and protected from peer review by intellectual property laws and strict confidentiality agreements whose purpose is to provide numbers too complicated and nuanced for the general public to understand, but vague enough that they can be molded into a variety of purposes as the need for “data” to support reforms arises.

Failing School (noun): A school for poor children of color whose intended funding subsidizes corporations.

For the Children (phrase): This actually doesn’t mean anything. The Reformy equivalent to chanting “USA! USA!”

You can see the possibilities of exposing the rhetoric that masks failed and harmful policies.

What is promising is that people are beginning to see behind the rhetoric and the mask. That is a danger to the corporate reformers, who use words to deceive and mislead.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry

Duncan Taps Charter Executive as His Chief of Staff

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2013 //
35

Arne Duncan has never disguised his preference for privately-managed charter schools over public schools. He especially favors “no excuses” schools.

So it is not surprising that–according to Joy Resmovits at the Huffington Post, he has invited Emma Vadehra, the chief of staff of Uncommon Schools, which is known for its rigid discipline and high suspension rates, to be his chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education.

As Resmovits notes:

“For Vadehra, the move would be a return to the Education Department, where she worked as deputy assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development until leaving for Uncommon in 2011. In that job, she developed a reputation for being a policy whiz kid. Before that, she worked as the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) chief education adviser on the Senate’s Education Committee. She has a law degree from Yale Law School and graduated from Brown in 2002.”

Before she joined the U.S. Department of Education in 2009, she also worked for Uncommon Schools.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

South Carolina Will Adopt Privatization Strategy

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2013 //
2

Public education in South Carolina, already suffering because of underfunding and intensely segregated schools in some districts, will sustain another blow. The privatization movement claims another victory. Now parents will be able to get a tax-credit when they send their children to little religious academies where the teachers are uncertified and the curriculum is Bible-based.

South Carolina poised to become 23rd state with private school choice

Adopted state budget includes tax-credit scholarships for students with special needs

COLUMBIA, SC (June 19, 2013)—South Carolina is on the verge of becoming the 23rd state to enact private school choice, pending Gov. Nikki Haley’s signature. Today the House and Senate approved the conference committee’s state budget report, which includes a tax-credit scholarship program for students with special needs.

Under the proposal, taxpayers can receive a credit worth no more than 60 percent of their state tax liability when donating to nonprofits that distribute private school scholarships to children with special needs. Scholarships cannot exceed $10,000 per pupil. The statewide limit on tax credits distributed is $8 million. According to 2011-12 data, more than 12 percent of South Carolina students are identified as having a disability that would qualify them for the program.

“This is an important step toward giving South Carolina parents access to the schools that work best for their children,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. “Although it’s available only to a small percentage of students, we applaud state leaders for taking this historic action.”

Currently there are 15 tax-credit scholarship programs operating in 12 states. Just this year, Alabama created its first such program, while Georgia and Iowa increased their caps on available tax credits. Including vouchers, education savings accounts, and individual tax credits and deductions, there are 42 private school choice programs in 22 states and Washington, D.C.

“South Carolina is part of an ongoing trend in which private school choice is growing and reaching new states,” said Enlow. “And, encouragingly, states that have small school choice programs are expanding them to assist more families.”

States that specifically make students with special needs eligible for school choice are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Virginia. For more details on those programs, and others, visit www.edchoice.org/ABCs.

About the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice

The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, solely dedicated to advancing Milton and Rose D. Friedman’s vision of school choice for all children. The Foundation promotes school choice as the most effective and equitable way to improve the quality of K-12 education in America.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Republicans in NC Step Up Their War Against Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2013 //
29

Far-right Governor Pat McCrory has brought in an aggressive leader for his strategy to privatize public education and dismantle the teaching profession. That is Eric Guckian, the governor’s tip advisor on demolishing–re, transforming –North Carolina’s education system.

Guckian is a TFA alum with long experience in the corporate reform movement. He wants “an aggressive K-12charter school environment in the state.”

At a meeting of the governor’s task force on education (which has no teachers on it), “Guckian presented five pathways for education in North Carolina that included a call to dismantle walls and textbooks for “digital online solutions;” having the business community play a larger role in developing educational pathways; job-embedded professional training for teachers; and basing teachers’ salaries on their “outputs in the field.” You can see where this is heading: profits for corporations, a welcome mat for for-profit virtual providers, and no professional preparation for teachers.

A proposal–Senate Bill 337–is already in the works in the ALEC-dominated Legislature to set up a charter commission that takes supervision and authorization of charters away from the State Board of Education and gives it to a new charter-friendly board. This charter board will be able to authorize charters over the opposition of local school boards. Senate Bill 337 is extreme in its commitment to deregulation. Charters would be able to take any unused public space for only $1. They would not be subject to conflict of interest laws. Their employees would not be required to pass criminal background checks. Their teachers would not require certification of any kind. High school teachers need not be college graduates. They would be relieved of diversity requirements.

See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2013/06/19/mccrory-education-advisor-eric-guckian-calls-for-aggressive-charter-school-environment-in-north-carolina/#sthash.QuvJ7V2e.dpuf

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, North Carolina, On-Line Education

What Is the Role of Profit in School Reform?

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2013 //
10

Ken Previti, a retired teacher, has been watching the evolution of school “reform,” and he wonders when the public will catch on to the schemes and fear-mongering. What is it all about? Sell-sell-sell.

Just doing what business does. Monetizing the children.

Categories ALEC, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Privatization

Reader: How to Describe Corporate Reform in Plain English

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
31

A reader commented on an earlier discussion with these thoughts:
***************************************************************************

“”Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch

While I applaud the sentiment and aspirations of this letter I am saddened with the weak tea rhetoric and carefully qualified points in academic insider language. This is how academics exchange views at conferences. Arne Duncan is not an academic and he has yet to show any respect for or interest in anything academics have to say.

Offering a long list of research citations is great if your are publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise they indicate a false belief in the authority of the research, which the reform movement has largely ignored and dismissed all along. This high flown rhetoric doesn’t stand up well to Duncan’s canned talking points outside of academia.

A non-academic reading this might well ask: So what exactly are they saying? What exactly are they asking for? Where’s the beef?

Can we get a plain-spoken English translation, something like: You are destroying public schools and the teaching profession. Standardized testing is out of control, cruel, and useless in determining success of students and teachers. Your “Race to the Top” creates losers as well as winners. These programs have been tried over and over and always fail — why are you still promoting them?

If the purpose was to convince other academics then it serves that purpose well, a preaching to the choir moment. If the purpose is to impact and change wrong-headed policies then the audience should be much broader and the language much less academic and their tone much more forceful. That’s how the game is played today.

“Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch

“Yes.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Vouchers

Imposing Standardization on Other People’s Children

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2013 //
20

Robert D. Shepherd, one of our many brilliant readers, offered the following explanation of the impulse to standardize the education of children across the nation:

“It’s no secret that income inequality has skyrocketed in the United States in recent decades, that economic and social mobility have plummeted, that wealth has been increasingly concentrated at the top, and that increasingly, the affluent in this country are isolated in their own circles–living in their own separate neighborhoods; sending their kids to their own separate schools from preschool through college; keeping their money offshore; spending much of their time in homes outside the country; and so on.

“Isolation from ordinary people breeds contempt and prejudice. Lack of intimate, long-term interaction with ordinary people makes it easier for the wealthy to generalize about “those people,” whoever they might be–workers, teachers, the poor, etc., and to buy into across-the-board, one-size-fits-all prescriptions regarding those Others. It becomes easy to think that it makes sense that we have a top-down, mandated, invariant curriculum for the masses based upon the vise of invariant standards on the one side and invariant tests on the other if one thinks of teachers, students, workers, the poor–of any group of people outside the privileged class–as homogenous. “If only we held those people accountable via a standardized test!” begins to sound sensible, even though giving the same test to every third grader is equivalent to giving the same certification exam to plumbers, doctors, airplane mechanics, and NBA players. And when the privileged, with all their accomplishments and clout, make such generalizations, others buy in out of fear and self interest and, of course, respect. How could a man as clearly brilliant and skilled as, say, Bill Gates, be so terribly wrong? Our politicians left and right have almost entirely bought into the absurd generalizations underpinning the accountability movement. And our educational “leaders” have lacked all leadership; they haven’t had the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes.

“There are two main issues here: First, we can have liberty, or we can have standardized objectives (and, inevitably, the standardized curricula that follow from them) mandated by a small, centralized, unaccountable, totalitarian authority. Second, we can recognize students’ uniqueness and diversity and foster their individual propensities and talents, or we can give them a homogenous, one-size-fits-all education.

“It’s astonishing to me that there is even any debate about which we should do. And it’s horrifying that our “leaders”–professional education people–have come down so often on the side of taking away educators’ autonomy, their ability to make their own decisions about what to teach, when, and to whom.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform

Sarah Darer Littman: How to Create a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2013 //
10

Sarah Darer Littman watches in wonder as the Gates Foundation uses its billions to reorganize public education in Connecticut.

Their goal: more Achievement First charters, regardless of their high suspension rates for children in kindergarten and their poor record relating to students with disabilities.

Gates wants close collaboration with AF and other “high performing” charters. It wants them to be treated equitably, as if the generous support of Connecticut’s equity investors was not enough of a cushion.

What do they want? A dual school system of regulated public schools and unregulated charters, free to exclude, expel, or suspend any child?

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Special Education

Newark: The End of Neighborhood Schools

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2013 //
11

Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson has proposed the end of neighborhood schools.

All district schools and charter schools will be part of a pool. Or something.

Reformers don’t like neighborhood schools. They like a free market where everyone chooses and no one has any loyalties.

Michigan has abolished district lines and schools advertise for students. They waste money on radio and TV ads, trying to poach students from each other.

This is the business approach. Typically, what happens is that students apply, but schools choose.

Karran Harper Royal, a parent in New Orleans, said this about the Newark plan:

“No assigned neighborhood school can be restated as no guaranteed right to the school closest to your home if that is indeed your choice. Parents should push back on this plan to ensure that they retain the right of first refusal to the school nearest their home. This is not a positive innovative practice, it is a way to segregate children by ability, income and parental motivation. Despite the claims in the article, this is not successfully implemented in New Orleans. The children with the highest needs now face chronic instability in their school placement.”

About 40,000 children attend public schools in Newark. About 12,000 are in charters. Charters are clearly favored. Parents get that. “Reform” means get rid of public education.

An interesting comment at the end of the article:

“Anderson also said she hopes the district and charter schools can pool their resources and work together to renovate aging district-owned facilities with financing only charter schools can currently access.”

Wait a minute: “financing only charter schools can obtain.” Why are charters co-located in public schools if they have easy access to facilities financing? Why are district-owned facilities “aging”? Couldn’t some of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million fixed up the schools?

And by the way, how will it improve education if neighborhood schools are wiped out?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Jersey

Hey, Kids! $100 If You Enroll in This Charter School

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2013 //
6

David Safier writes here about a charter school in Arizona that offers students $100 to sign up. Arizona was once known as the Wild West of charter schools, but now other states are catching up as charter operators join the Gold Rush.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry
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