Archives for category: Education Reform
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Nancy Bailey: 8 Ways to Save Public Schools from Draconian Budget Cuts

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2020 //
6

Veteran educator Nancy Bailey knows that public schools will be confronted with the threat of deep Bridget cuts in the wake of the pandemic.

She here presents eight excellent ideas to stave off the pain of budget cuts and save public schools. Betsy DeVos offered her ideas, which are the same-old same-old stale voucher schemes. Privatization only hurts public schools, which enroll the vast majority of American children. Let’s put our money where the kids are.

Bailey explains her eight ideas.

She begins:

1. End charter schools. We can’t afford to fund two different school systems.

2. End vouchers. We already know they are unsuccessful.

3. End high-stakes testing. They waste money and produce no benefits for students.

4. End the Common Core. Ten years after this radical standardization was introduced, its proven to be ineffective.

That’s four of her eight big ideas. Open the link to read about the others.

So sensible.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Watch Tennessee Voucher Trial Live— Now

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2020 //
0

Tennessee vouchers are on trial right now.

The court proceedings are being live-streamed.

Major civil liberties organizations are opposing the voucher legislation, which applies only to two cities—Nashville and Memphis—whose representatives voted against vouchers. The law passed by one vote—after a reluctant legislator changed his vote when promised that his district would not get vouchers.

The ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Education Law Center are leading the case against vouchers.

Categories Civil Rights, Education Reform, Tennessee, Vouchers

Christine Langhoff: The Great Boston School Heist

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2020 //
11

Christine Langhoff is a retired teachers in Massachusetts who is an activist on behalf of public schools. She warns here about the unfolding plot to impose a state takeover of Boston public schools. Having been decisively rebuffed at the polls by the state’s voters in 2016, the Walton allies on the state board have found another way to disrupt and control the Boston public schools and install Broadies and other willing allies to advance their privatization agenda.

Christine writes:

Massachusetts’ state board of education has been moving inexorably toward a takeover of the Boston’s schools. On March 13, the same day as schools shut down, DESE announced a MOU with Boston’s superintendent. In response, Alain Jehlen, Board Member of Citizens for Public Schools, is taking a deep dive into how and why the state rates city schools so poorly on the Schoolyard News website.

Here’s Part 1:

“Boston has 34 schools (out of about 125) that rank in the bottom 10 percent in the state. BPS as a whole is 14th from the bottom out of 289 districts. Why is it rated so low?

“One major reason is that the rating system was designed in a way that almost automatically puts Boston and other urban centers with large numbers of low-income students and recent immigrants at the bottom.

“Here’s how it works: The state rates schools and districts mostly according to test scores. But there are two ways they could use the scores. State officials picked the one that makes urban areas look worse.”

https://schoolyardnews.com/one-reason-boston-gets-low-ratings-from-the-state-the-system-is-designed-to-give-bad-marks-to-f6c9ee3418d

The current board of education is loaded up with Walton connected folks. No doubt that has some impact on decision making.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Massachusetts, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Corruption Watch: DeVos Awarded $72 Million to IDEA Charter Chain Despite Negative Staff Reviews!

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2020 //
5

Three whistleblowers in the U.S. Department of Education filed complaints that Betsy DeVos overruled internal reviews to award $72 million to the IDEA charter chain.

This is not the way federal grants are supposed to work. Funds are supposed to be awarded based on peer reviews and staff reviews, not awarded as plums by political appointees. This is political interference at the highest level. This award should be revoked.

I have often referred to the $440 million federal Charter Schools Program as DeVos’s private slush fund, and this grant proves that my hunch was right.

Valerie Strauss writes in the Washington Post:

A U.S. congressman is demanding answers from the U.S. Education Department, alleging department employees complained to his office about political interference in the awarding of a multimillion-dollar federal grant to the controversial IDEA charter school network.


Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) sent a letter to the department Monday asking for details and records related to the awarding of the grant.

In an interview, Pocan said “three whistleblowers” told his office that professional staff evaluating applications for 2020 grants from the federal Charter School Program had rejected IDEA for new funding, deeming the network “high risk” because of how IDEA leaders previously spent federal funds.


But according to these whistleblowers, Pocan said, professional staff was overruled by political appointees who ordered the funding be awarded to IDEA. The identities of the whistleblowers were not revealed to The Post, nor were the names of the political appointees.


The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.


IDEA, a Texas-based charter school network with nearly 100 campuses in Texas and Louisiana serving nearly 53,000 students, said in a statement:
”Peer reviewers from education and other fields evaluate grant applications independently from Department of Education staff. In three of the last four Charter Schools Program competitions, spanning two administrations and including the most recent round of grants, the independent reviewers who evaluated applications gave IDEA Public Schools the highest scores of any applicant in the country. (In 2017, IDEA received the second-highest score.) All of the outside reviewers’ scores and comments are public on the Department’s website, and we encourage anyone doubting the strength of IDEA’s applications and our 20-year track record with students to read those reviews.”


Earlier this month, the Education Department announced it was awarding millions of dollars in new grants to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated. IDEA was the top recipient, receiving $72 million over five years.

IDEA had previously received more than $200 million in funding over the past decade through the program.



But the network has been dogged by controversy. This month, IDEA chief executive Tom Torkelson resigned after publicly apologizing for “really dumb and unhelpful” plans that included leasing a private jet for millions of dollars and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on San Antonio Spurs tickets.

The Texas Monitor reported last month that Torkelson had flown on a private jet to Tampa to meet with DeVos to discuss “education philanthropy,” records show. The Monitor reported he was the only passenger on a jet that can hold nine people.


Last November, the Education Department’s inspector general criticized IDEA in an audit of data IDEA included in annual performance reviews it submitted to the federal government, required as part of the grants received from the federal Charter Schools Program.
The inspector general concluded that IDEA Public Schools “did not provide complete and accurate information” for all performance measures on annual performance reports over three years and did not report any information for 84 percent of the performance measures on which it was required to report over two years.

Still, IDEA had certified its annual performance reports were “true, complete and accurate.”
The audit also found IDEA “did not always spend grant funds in accordance with federal cost principles and its approved grant applications.”
IDEA acknowledged some of the findings, took issue with others, and agreed with all the recommendations from the inspector general to improve internal procedures.


That inspector general report, together with the suggestion that political appointees pushed through more grant money, should spark an even deeper inspection of IDEA, Pocan said in an interview.
“There needs to be an investigation,” Pocan said. “This would be completely improper to take a program that has to have inspector general reports and a lot of media attention about bad decisions they’ve made, and then to get a grant that wasn’t approved by the professional staff and instead given for political reasons.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Scandal, Texas, U.S. Department of Education

Bald Piano Guy Serenades Betsy DeVos!

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2020 //
5

The Bald Piano Guy is a very clever public school teacher in Great Neck, New York, who posts musical videos on YouTube expressing his views about education and politics, always with a smile. I erred in thinking he was a NYC teacher.

In this video, he has advice for Betsy DeVos:

“Go back to selling Amway/
Teaching really isn’t your thing.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Humor, New York City, Teaching

This is What National Leadership Looks Like: Angela Merkel

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2020 //
32

Angela Merkel’s political star appeared to be on the decline until the pandemic erupted across the world.

Suddenly Germany had exactly the leader it needed. An experienced public figure with a scientific background and a calm demeanor.

The Atlantic has the story here.

BERLIN—Today, we face the global outbreak of a disease that has the potential to catalyze what the historian Eva Schlotheuber terms a “pandemic of the mind.” As misinformation proliferates and lines between fact and fiction are routinely and nonchalantly crossed, world leaders must, now more than ever, illuminate a thoughtful path forward, one reliant on science and evidence-based reasoning. Indeed, many have. One leader goes further still. Trusted by her people to navigate this outbreak’s murky waters, without inciting or succumbing to a pandemic of the mind, one politician is less a commander in chief and more a scientist in chief: Angela Merkel.

For weeks now, Germany’s leader has deployed her characteristic rationality, coupled with an uncharacteristic sentimentality, to guide the country through what has thus far been a relatively successful battle against COVID-19. The pandemic is proving to be the crowning challenge for a politician whose leadership style has consistently been described as analytical, unemotional, and cautious. In her quest for social and economic stability during this outbreak, Merkel enjoys several advantages: a well-respected, coordinated system of scientific and medical expertise distributed across Germany; the hard-earned trust of the public; and the undeniable fact that steady and sensible leadership is suddenly back in style. With 30 years of political experience, and facing an enormous challenge that begs calm, reasoned thinking, Merkel is at peak performance modeling the humble credibility of a scientist at work. And it seems to be paying off, both politically and scientifically…

On March 18, after the country had closed its schools, its economy, its way of life, she gave a rare televised speech that solidified her leadership.

Facing the camera from behind a desk, with both the German and European Union flags to her side, she began on an emotional note, by conceding that “our idea of normality, of public life, social togetherness—all of this is being put to the test as never before.” She emphasized the importance of democracy and of making transparent political decisions and she insisted that any information she shared about the pandemic was based on thorough research. Then, in an astonishing statement for a German leader, one she “must have considered endlessly,” Kornelius told me, she made reference to her country’s darkest hour. “Since the Second World War,” Merkel said, “there has not been a challenge for our country in which action in a spirit of solidarity on our part was so important.”

What stood out from the address was not so much Merkel’s medical advice, but her unusually direct appeal to the notion of social togetherness and to her own limitations as an individual and as a leader (“I firmly believe that we will pass this test if all citizens genuinely see this as their task”). Her rational assurances and her emotional appeal were crucial at a time of rising panic. While the mood isn’t quite so dark here anymore—thanks to a variety of factors, Germany appears to have dealt with the outbreak better than many other countries—Germans largely continue to heed the chancellor’s detailed directives. The number of people infected by the coronavirus has increased, as it has throughout the world. But unlike in Italy, where more than 22,000 have lost their life to COVID-19, or in the United States, where the death toll has surpassed that figure and continues to rise rapidly, total deaths in Germany have been inching up from 4,000. To put this in perspective, more than twice as many New Yorkers have lost their life to the coronavirus as have individuals in all of Germany to date.

While country-level comparative data may be somewhat unreliable, and the numbers can certainly take a turn for the worse in Germany as anywhere else, experts cite a number of possible factors for the country’s relatively low number of deaths: The average age of coronavirus patients has been lower here than elsewhere, which limits the risk; the number of people tested for the virus is higher than in other countries, and cases are for the most part carefully tracked; and the public health-care system has been efficient enough to ramp up the number of available intensive-care units to meet potential demand.

Imagine that: a leader who is rational and calm. A leader who believes in science and evidence. A leader who appeals to social solidarity in the face of a national crisis. A nation prepared to act on behalf of the public interest. No grandstanding. No vainglorious or egotistical rants.

Categories Education Reform

Gary Rubinstein: Some TFA Leaders Can’t Stop Bashing Teachers

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2020 //
2

Gary Rubinstein started his teaching career in Teach for America, and he knows many of its successful alums.

Unlike many of them, he became a career teacher in New York City, and he began to see the world differently. About a decade ago, he became a critic of TFA, though always a civil critic.

In this post, he calls out certain TFA leaders because of their contempt for public school teachers.

Some TFA folk can’t get over the idea that they are superior to people who have chosen a career in teaching. Maybe it’s because TFA has $300 million in the bank and pays six-figure salaries that are far more than public school teachers will ever earn.

Categories Education Reform, Teach for America, Teachers

You Read It Here First: Betsy Uses Relief Funds to Push Vouchers and Online Ed

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2020 //
7

I posted yesterday that Betsy DeVos set aside more than $300 million of the billions in coronavirus aid to advance her personal agenda of undermining public schools. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who is chair of the House subcommittee that oversees education appropriations, criticized her misuse of the funds.

Chalkbeat has the story.

Betsy thinks the days of learning in physical buildings are obsolete.

I have often posted the research on virtual charter schools. The 2015 CREDO study showed the abject failure of online charter schools. Their results are abysmal. The most EPIC charter scandals are associated with virtual charters like ECOT in Ohio, now bankrupt, and the A1 chain in California, where 11 people were indicted for the disappearance of more than $50 million in state funds.

Betsy’s ideas are a proven failure.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Failure, Online Learning, Scandal, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Eleven Warning Signs that Privatizers Are Invading Your School District During the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2020 //
14

“In The Public Interest,” a nonpartisan organization that supports a healthy public sector, has identified eleven warning signs that privatizers are targeting your school district.

Read them and be prepared to defend your public schools from privatizers and profiteers!

Here are the first six. Open the link and learn about the other five:

As students, parents, educators, and school districts struggle to adjust to the Covid-19 pandemic, others see the crisis as an opportunity to escalate their efforts to further privatize public education. For years, “education reformers,” private companies that want to profit from public education dollars, and others have worked to undermine public education by privatizing all aspects of it—from charter schools, to contracted out bus services and cafeterias, to private testing companies, to software and hardware providers touting the benefits of virtual/online education.

With the current need for districts to rapidly switch to distance learning, many of these same privatization advocates and corporations are using the crisis and the resulting confusion as an opportunity to greatly expand their privatization agenda by offering to help solve some of the problems that the crisis is creating.

The pandemic is creating a fiscal crisis for state, local, and school district budgets and these same forces are also offering up privatization as the solution to these longer-term economic problems. Consequently, we are seeing a major push now by online (virtual) charter schools to greatly increase their number of enrolled students. We are also seeing a major push by “EdTech” companies (education software providers, online pre-packaged classes and tests, computer hardware, cloud computing companies, and others) to peddle their goods and services. These companies seek to offer their services as a way to radically reshape education and education budgets for the long term by dramatically cutting back on qualified classroom teachers and overhead expenses of brick-and-mortar schools.

What to watch for:

Public education advocates need to be vigilant to ensure that during this crisis no long-term commitments are made that increase the privatization of public education.

Below are eleven warning signs and some follow-up questions to help advocates determine whether and how privateers may be trying to make inroads in your school district.

1. Emergency powers have been requested, given, or exercised by superintendents that circumvent normal oversight rules.

• Have emergency powers been granted to district or state superintendents of education? What, if any, are the limits to those powers? When will the emergency powers end?
• How are school boards informed of decisions being made, contracts being entered into, etc., under those powers? Does the board have the authority to review or overturn those decisions?
• Are other emergency orders being put in place? What do they waive or change?
• Are there efforts to suspend open meetings and public records laws?

2. Procurement rules and processes are being suspended, overruled, or ignored.

• In response to the crisis, has your district, locality, or state suspended normal procurement rules?
• Are procurements being made outside the normal process?
• Are there guarantees ensuring that the district isn’t entering into long-term contracts?
• What, if any, transparency is there in the procurement and contracting process?
• Who is responsible for the contracting process and what monitoring and oversight is
there?

3. Virtual/online charter companies are expanding their outreach and recruitment of students.

• Have online charters increased their advertising and recruitment activity in your area?

4. Charter schools and their advocates are pushing to change or ignore authorization and oversight rules.

• Are charter schools attempting to change or relax authorization, oversight, and renewal guidelines?
• Are charter schools requesting or being granted increased funding or extensions on funding or renewal periods?
• Are existing charter schools seeking to expand enrollment caps?
• Are districts providing additional services or technology to charter schools?
• Are there efforts to suspend or disregard open meetings and public records laws for
charter schools?
• Are there efforts to create long-term distance learning contracts with charters?
• Who is monitoring charter schools for compliance with all legal requirements? Are all
the services being delivered?
• Are charter schools ignoring requests for information?

5. Existing charter schools and new charter schools are pushing for immediate charter expansion.

• Are charter school chains or management organizations seeking expansive contracts to provide larger scale education services or replace schools struggling before the crisis?
• Are charter schools advocating for new or additional facilities, or changes in rules regarding facilities?
• Are homeschool charters aggressively marketing payments to families to be used to pay for educational and enrichment programs or services?

6. Education technology companies (hardware and software companies, online testing and lesson planning companies, etc.) are aggressively soliciting the district offering immediate solutions.

• Are education technology companies approaching the district to provide services during the crisis? Which companies? What services? Will those services be needed after the crisis has passed?
• Are companies that already have contracts with the district being allowed to expand those contracts?
• Are companies offering free introductory contracts that are tied to long term obligations?
inthepublicinterest.org
• Are educational technology companies offering free hardware that requires the district to purchase or lease software or other services?
• All students do not have equal access to the Internet. What—if anything—is being done to ensure equal access?
• Who evaluates education technology software for cost and effectiveness? Are new contracts for education technology being executed? What are the durations and terms, and who is providing oversight?
• Is there a protocol for ensuring that student and educator data is secure? What is the policy for responding in the event of a data breach?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Online Education, Privatization, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Tennessee: Court Hearing April 29 on Vouchers

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2020 //
4

Three major civil rights legal teams are challenging vouchers in Tennessee: the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Education Law Center.


MEDIA ADVISORY

April 27, 2020

Ashley Levett, SPLC, ashley.levett@splcenter.org / 334-296-0084

Sharon Krengel, ELC, skrengel@edlawcenter.org / 973-624-1815, x24

Lindsay Kee, ACLU-TN, communications@aclu-tn.org / 615-320-7142

Christopher Wood, Robbins Geller, cwood@rgrdlaw.com / 615- 244-2203

Court Hearing to Block Implementation of Tennessee School Voucher Law Set for April 29

Nashville, Tenn. – On Wednesday, April 29, Chancellor Anne C. Martin of the Chancery Court for Davidson County will hear oral arguments in two cases challenging the constitutionality of Tennessee’s Education Savings Account (ESA) Pilot Program, the private school voucher law passed in 2019.

The voucher program diverts scarce public education funding to private schools and applies only to Nashville and Memphis students, in violation of several provisions of the Tennessee Constitution as well as state statutes. At the request of Governor Bill Lee, the program will begin issuing vouchers this fall, a year earlier than the law requires.

The plaintiffs in McEwen v. Lee, who are public school parents and community members from Nashville and Memphis, are seeking a temporary injunction to stop the state from implementing the voucher program until the court rules on the constitutionality of the voucher law. Oral arguments on their motion will be heard on Wednesday at 10 a.m. CT.

Also during Wednesday’s hearing, the Court will hear oral argument for summary judgement in a separate lawsuit challenging the voucher law brought by Davidson and Shelby Counties and the Metro Nashville Board of Public Education.

The hearing will be conducted by video conference and live stream. Members of the public can watch online, though a link will likely not be available until shortly before the hearing starts. A member of our communications team will send the link to reporters as soon as it becomes available.

Please email Ashley Levett at ashley.levett@splcenter.org to ensure you are on the press list to receive this link or to schedule an interview.

Categories Education Reform, Tennessee, Vouchers
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