Several years ago, the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation decided that it was not enough to open new charter schools. No, they had to devise mechanisms to make sure that school officials put charters on an equal footing with public schools and that the public didn’t care whether schools were run by their elected school board or a private board of directors.

The Gates Foundation created something called “the Gates Compact,” paying districts to treat public and charter schools the same.

The Waltons played a different angle. To advance their agenda of embedding charters and wiping out any differences between public schools and charter schools, they pushed for the adoption of a common enrollment form. The two sectors are intermingled, and neither students nor parents know which schools are public and which have private or corporate management.

In Oakland, where a slate of pro-public school parents won the last school board election, the board voted to eliminate the OneApp system.

Jane Nylund, a parent activist in Oakland, sent the following report:

Elections matter. In a complete turnaround to the common enrollment momentum that we have seen since 2015, our newly elected school board voted by 4-3 to pass the Enrollment Stabilization Policy, which eliminates the ability of OUSD to participate in marketing and supporting charter schools with our tax dollars. The policy ends the shared enrollment system put into place in 2015 by former superintendent Antwan Wilson, who had actively steered the district towards a common enrollment system. When the board voted it down, Antwan Wilson, undeterred, supported the implementation of an electronic school finder, Schoolmint, which combined both district and charter schools on a single platform, thus placing both types of schools on the same footing, which was the intent all along. Families searching for schools using their neighborhood zip codes, would often find charter schools at the top of their search feed, rather than the neighborhood school within their boundary.

Key point of the Enrollment Stabilization Policy: “This prohibition applies (but is not limited) to OUSD’s enrollment system, school maps, family guides and other enrollment materials, any OUSD website, OUSD facilities, enrollment fairs, and teacher recruitment events. Competing schools shall not be invited to participate in or be included in OUSD- or site-run recruitment fairs or OUSD- or site-run enrollment events or to recruit students on OUSD-operated campuses.”

For the first time, district legislation is acknowledging that marketing and competition vs. “quality” are the key strategies to the growth of charter schools in Oakland. While charter proponents have argued that the district is trying to “hide” “quality schools” and that families can pick whatever type they want (district, charter, or private), that’s not the reality of what families do. According to OUSD feeder patterns, it is clear that charters are marketed aggressively as “high quality” from the elementary schools onward and that elementary charter enrollment is the key to future charter school demand at the secondary level. Charter proponents have always known this and have relied on the “all charters are high-quality” tag line to sell this school model to families.

None of this would have happened without constant vigilance and involvement from teachers, as well as support from grassroots parents’ groups such as Parents United. For too long, charter schools have had it both ways: operate like a business with all the usual trappings, but pretend to be a public entity for purposes of revenue generation. If charters want to be in the education business using marketing and competition as proxies for authentic “achievement”, then they need to play by the rules of that game and find their own customer base using their own funds (our taxpayer dollars). While much work remains to be done to defeat privatization in Oakland, the days of feeding at the OUSD trough at the expense of our own district students are finally coming to an end.

https://ousdparentsunited.com/

Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter expressed my reaction to President Joe Biden’s speech to Congress. No boasting. No narcissism. A strong assertion that government must work for the people and use its resources to improve the lives of the people.

The most abnormal thing about Biden’s speech, however, was how normal it was. After four years of Donald Trump spewing his particular brand of dyspeptic, self-absorbed oratory, it felt a bit unfamiliar, and a bit exhilarating, watching Biden calmly discuss the challenges and the opportunities facing the nation, and discuss how he proposed to confront the one and exploit the other. A sense of déjà vu does not usually mix with the emotions kindled by promise, but when they do, the experience is centering. The speech felt like the country was getting back to normal. 

The United States, in normal, pre-Trump times, believed democracy worked. Regrettably, Ronald Reagan pitted democracy against government, and set the terms of public policy for 40 years. The pandemic brought into sharp relief what had long been obvious to those of us schooled in Catholic social doctrine: Reaganism hollowed out the government’s ability to achieve its foremost objective, the common good. 

But, the will of the people continued to voice skepticism about government overreach and the most memorable line from a State of the Union speech by the first Democratic president after Reagan, Bill Clinton, had the flavor of capitulation: “The era of big government is over.”

Biden announced that government focused on the common good was back and that the democratically expressed will of the people insisted on a more activist government.

Kathleen Cashin has been a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent in New York City in high-needs districts. She is currently a member of the New York State Board of Regents, which sets policy for the state.

In this article, which appeared in the New York Daily News, she explains her hope that school district will use their new money to invest in most successful school reform that works: reduced class size. (Mayor de Blasio, by contrast, says he wants to pour $500 million of the city’s windfall into more testing and tutoring.)

Cashin writes:

In 1999, when I was superintendent of the city’s District 23 in Ocean Hill Brownsville, fourth graders had to take a multi-faceted standardized state test for the first time, which included reading, writing and listening. The first thing I did was to reduce class size as much as possible.

The results were astounding. Not only were there significant gains in test scores the following year, but I noticed a stunning development: Students were able to forge closer relationships with their teachers, and their teachers had their morale lifted because no longer did they have an overwhelming number of students with high needs to address.

Most disciplinary problems vanished overnight, even among students who were most prone to act up. Teachers were now keeping their doors open, and welcoming administrators and other teachers to visit, because their classes were running smoothly, and it was evident how much learning was going on. They were no longer fearful that someone would notice chaotic classrooms and blame it on them. They began to enthusiastically collaborate with each other, and this collaboration helped to further sharpen their skills and fostered a strong sense of professionalism.

In 2003, I was appointed Superintendent of Region Five, encompassing Districts 19 and 23 in Brooklyn and District 27 in Queens, including some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Aided by a state program that helped fund class size reduction, I lowered class sizes in as many schools as I could. Over the next three years, our elementary and middle schools achieved the greatest test score gains of any region in the city.

It was a revelation. And now for the first time, NYC has the opportunity to transform all our schools and classrooms in a similar fashion.

New York City will receive about $7 billion from the federal government over the next three years to help our schools reopen to in-person learning safely, with additional support students will need to recover from more than a year of disrupted learning and the losses that so many suffered due to the pandemic. President Biden has also proposed to more than double Title I funding, which could mean an additional $700 million annually to the city’s schools.

In addition, after many years of reneging on their promise, the state has now pledged to provide the city with full Foundation Aid, starting at $530 million and increasing over three years to about $1.3 billion in annual funding. This is the result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, in which the excessive class sizes in our schools were central to the judgment of the state’s highest court that students were deprived of an equitable opportunity to learn. In 2003, the New York Court of Appeals wrote: “[T]ens of thousands of students are placed in overcrowded classrooms…and provided with inadequate facilities and equipment. The number of children in these straits is large enough to represent a systemic failure.”

Unfortunately, class sizes have only increased since then, particularly in the early grades. More than 300,000 students were in classes of 30 or more last year, with average class sizes 15% to 30% larger than those in the rest of the state.

Research shows that while all children benefit from smaller classes, those who make the greatest gainsare students of color, those who are economically disadvantaged, English Language Learners and those with special needs. These students collectively make up the majority of students in the NYC public schools.

The City Council has now proposed that $250 millionbe spent on a targeted program to lower class size next year. This is a good beginning. I hope Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Meisha Porter will enthusiastically accept this proposal, so that class size reduction can begin to be phased citywide over the next three to four years.

We have a crisis in teaching, with high teacher attrition rates, particularly in those schools with the most disadvantaged students. This emanates in part from these teachers having class sizes too large. Educators are not being provided with the opportunity they need to succeed in their jobs.

It’s simply too difficult for one person to handle 30 young students and know all their abilities and disabilities, no less be able to address them effectively. But if you have 20 students or fewer, and in the upper grades 25 or fewer, suddenly what was impossible before becomes possible.

Poverty drains everyone it comes in contact with. But when children are provided the chance to have the close personal attention and connection with their teachers, made possible by a small class, it can change their lives. We believe they deserve that chance.

Cashin represents the borough of Brooklyn on the state Board of Regents.

During the Obama administration, Roberto Rodriguez was the White House advisor on education. He vigorously supported the Race to the Top program, the Common Core standards, and high-stakes testing. All of these initiatives failed to improve student test scores and wasted billions of dollars.

Andrew Ujifusa wrote in Education Week (April 28) about the return of Rodriguez. He joins former Obama official Carmel Martin, another zealous advocate of those failed policies. Basically, they are switching places, with Rodriguez taking the job that Martin held, and Martin moving into the slot previously occupied by Martin. There is no indication that either has modified their support for the Bush-Obama bipartisan agenda.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he plans to nominate Roberto Rodriguez, one of former President Barack Obama’s top education advisers, to lead one of the most important divisions of the U.S. Department of Education.

Biden wants Rodriguez to lead the Education Department’s office of planning, evaluation and policy development. Rodriguez, a former special assistant to Obama on education policy who also previously worked in the Senate, is currently the president and CEO of Teach Plus, a teacher-advocacy organization.

The office Rodriguez would lead, if confirmed, has played a significant part in past presidential administrations. For example, Carmel Martin, who oversaw the development of the Race to the Top competition and the expansion of School Improvement Grants in the early part of the Obama administration, led the office. Under former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the office was led by Jim Blew, who came to the department after many years of working to promote school choice.

As a deputy assistant to Obama, Rodriguez played a major role in developing and advocating for the president’s K-12 policy priorities.

Rodriguez defended Race to the Top in a 2012 Education Week article, saying that it was sparking major shifts for schools, such as the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Both Race to the Top and the standards, of course, became controversial as time went on, and attracted criticism from Democrats as well as Republicans.

It would be gratifying to hear either or both explain why they the multi-billion Race to the Top failed, why Common Core had no impact (yet cost hundreds of millions) to implement, whether they have changed their views about VAM (evaluating teachers by student test scores) and charter schools.

It appears that Rodriguez and Carmel Martin will make policy, not Secretary Cardona or Deputy Secretary-designate Cindy Martens.

Biden is looking to the future with his sweeping domestic policy plans. But in education, he is looking in the rear-view mirror to the architects of Obama’s failed programs.

The Mind Trust in Indianapolis has been the central engine of charter creation in that city and holds itself up as a model charter authorizer.

Until it was “deceived” by a would-be charter operator with a rosy vision, according to this story by Stephanie Wang in Chalkbeat Indiana.

She begins:

To launch a “transformational” middle school in an overlooked eastside neighborhood, Indianapolis charter advocates turned to a man students call Coach T.

For two decades, Tariq Al-Nasir ran his Stemnasium enrichment programs with a mission of helping Black and brown students realize their “superpowers” in science, technology, engineering, and math. With a resume boasting advanced degrees from MIT and Stanford, Al-Nasir put forward a vision of education in which hands-on lessons in coding, flying drones, and tinkering with robots could change children’s lives.

Calling him “brilliant” at working with students, the influential charter incubator The Mind Trust gave Al-Nasir a two-year, $800,000 fellowship last summer to develop Stemnasium Science Math Engineering Middle School.

But a Chalkbeat investigation found that the rosy charter pitch painted over troubling details — lawsuits, financial troubles, questionable academic credentials — that escaped notice by city charter officials and The Mind Trust.

A bankruptcy filed six months before Al-Nasir won the prestigious fellowship showed that he had accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts while running the programs that inspired his charter proposal — including a nearly $500,000 judgment in a lawsuit that alleged Al-Nasir wrote bad checks to cover outstanding Stemnasium bills.

His resume lists a bachelor’s degree from New York University, a master’s from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a doctorate from Stanford University — each earned at times when the employment section of his resume placed him at jobs in other cities. All three of those institutions told Chalkbeat they had no records of Al-Nasir’s attendance.

The lawsuits and financial scandals did not deter The Mind Trust but lying about his academic credentials did.

The Mind Trust cancelled his fellowship.

What is even more shocking than the candidate’s misrepresentations was The Mind Trust’s failure to conduct a review of his background.

Without the inquiries from Chalkbeat, it’s unclear whether Al-Nasir’s money troubles or unsubstantiated educational claims would have come to light. The Indianapolis mayor’s office, which oversees more than 40 charter schools in the city, is often named among the strongest charter authorizers in the nation. But its director acknowledged that officials don’t vet new applicants’ financial histories or even run a simple free search on a public database of court records that would reveal lawsuits.

The Mind Trust displayed neither accountability nor transparency. Its naïveté and gullibility embarrassed the candidate as well as the organization. It failed to vet him or to conduct due diligence.

Federal officials arrested Seth Andrew, founder of the Democracy Prep charter chain, accusing him of taking money from the schools’ bank account to lower his mortgage rate on a new home. Andrew launched Democracy Prep in 2005; he left in 2013 to work the Obama Department of Education but retained financial ties with the charter chain. He severed his ties with the chain in January 2017.

Federal officials say he withdrew more than $200,000 from one of the schools’ accounts in 2019.

He is accused of wire fraud, money laundering, and making false claims to a bank.

CNBC reported:

Andrew, 42, was busted in New York City, where he and his wife, CBS News anchor Lana Zak, have a residence valued at more than $2 million. 

The founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools is accused of using more than half of the allegedly stolen money from that network to maintain a bank account minimum that gave him a more favorable interest rate for a mortgage on his and Zak’s Manhattan residence. Zak was not charged in the case.

Prosecutors said Andrew in 2019 — more than two years after severing ties with Democracy Prep — looted a series of escrow accounts he had previously set up for individual schools within Democracy Prep’s network, and then used their funds to open a business account in the name of one of the schools at a bank...

Andrew’s criminal defense attorney, Michael Yaeger, told CNBC that Andrew “will be entering a plea of not guilty” in the case. He declined to comment further.

Arne Duncan, who as then-President Barack Obama’s Education secretary supervised Andrew, declined to comment on the criminal case.

Minnesota was the first state to pass a charter law in 1991. As blogger Sarah Lahm wrote in the Progressive in 2019, the new charters were exempt from most state regulations, including desegregation. A number of its charters are segregated by race and ethnicity, intentionally so, because the charter industry believes that segregation is culturally affirming. This situation led to a lawsuit to assure the rights of children of color in the state.

So now leading figures in the state charter lobby want to pass an amendment to the state constitution that would make segregated schools acceptable, while adding that school quality would be determined by standardized tests.

Blogger Rob Levine explains:

The Page Amendment is best understood if you recognize these foundations’ overall public education strategies. For 30 years the Minneapolis Foundation and its allies have been creating, funding, and persuading the legislature to loosen requirements on charter schools in the state. Over that same period, they have been pushing for data (test) driven education policies. The proposed Page Amendment would enshrine standardized test scores in the state constitution as measure of educational quality, and remove language courts have used to fight school segregation. So for the foundations the proposed amendment is a two-fer. But it’s even more than that…

One need only look at the two charter chains that get the most money from the foundations – Hiawatha Academies and KIPP Minnesota – to understand that threat. Hiawatha is a chain of five charter schools based in Minneapolis whose student population is about 88% Hispanic, in a city that is about 10% Hispanic…

It’s a similar story at the foundations’ second-most funded charter school chain, KIPP Minnesota, where the school population is 96% Black in a city that is less than 20% Black, and has been that way since it opened in 2008…

The proposed amendment both adds and removes language from the section of the Minnesota Constitution that involves public education. Currently, Article XIII, Section 1 of the Constitution provides, in part:

“…it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state” [emphasis added]

The Minnesota Supreme Court’s ruling in July, 2018, sending the Cruz-Guzman case back to the district court, said this when ruling for the plaintiff’s motion to proceed with the case, writing:

“It is self-evident that a segregated system of public schools is not ‘general,’ ‘uniform,’ ‘thorough,’ or ‘efficient.’” [emphasis added]

But the proposed Page Amendment removes the words general, thorough and efficient, and recasts “uniform” as the results of standardized tests.

So this is what corporate reform has wrought in Minnesota. A renewed belief in racial segregation and a determination to enshrine standardized testing in the state constitution.

PTC is joining with many parent groups and school boards to fight this direct assault on local control and democracy.

Pastors for Texas Children is a staunch ally of public schools and of separation of church and state. They have vigorously fought vouchers and now they are fighting an all-out attempt by the yet the aggressive charter industry to open wherever they want, without the approval of local elected officials. The lobbyists also want to slash the state board of education’s power to veto new charters.

PTC is working with parent groups and other activists to stop this direct assault on local control and democracy.

PASTORS FOR TEXAS CHILDREN

SB 28 HEARING IN HOUSE COMMITTEE TOMORROW

The public education advocacy community–which includes YOU–has had some great success despite this being a very difficult legislative session.

First of all, one piece of legislation that PTC is hoping to see made into law is the “community schools bill.” HB 81 by Eddie Rodriguez would give struggling schools the ability to partner with the community to improve educational outcomes for their students. HB 81 unanimously passed out of the House Public Education committee recently.

Second, you might have heard about the House of Representative’s budget debate this past Thursday. The House sent a clear message to us: they want to support public education. There were two big ways they did this on Thursday:

1. They voted to ensure the legislature will appropriate the $18 billion in federal relief money to public schools, and to only spend that money on public schools.
2. They overwhelmingly voted down a private schools voucher amendment.

Job well done, faithful servants! This is a huge celebration, but we still have work to do…

Tell the House Public Education Committee to reject unlimited charter school expansion.

Tomorrow, April 27, the House Public Education Committee will meet to consider SB 28. This bill makes it easier for the State Board of Education to approve new charter applications, and makes it easier for charter schools to locate anywhere they want without restriction.

SB 28 affords special privileges to charter schools. It unfairly disadvantages smaller cities from zoning restrictions to charter schools. And it prohibits school districts from providing information to the public about the impact of a new charter school.

SB 28 also changes the process for State Board of Education approval of a new charter school.Previously the SBOE was able to veto the commissioner of education’s approval of new charter school applications with a simple majority. SB 28 would require a larger majority of 3/5, or nine out of 15 members to veto. With a State Board of Education who is usually split down the middle on charter schools, this would make it significantly harder for the board to use their veto power. The SBOE has not abused this power; in fact, many public education advocates would like to see them use it more often. Since holding this privilege, the SBOE has only vetoed seven new charter school applications in eight years. 

Help us oppose this bill! Please call the members of the House Public Education committee