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Julian Vasquez Heilig: How Does KIPP Really Treat Parents?

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2020 //
7

Julian Vasquez Heilig writes one of the most interesting blogs around, called “Cloaking Inequity.” He is a scrupulous researcher and specializes in exposing frauds. He recently was appointed dean of the school of education at the University of Kentucky. Before he came to Kentucky, he was a faculty member at Sacramento State and chair of the California branch of the NAACP. He is also a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.

In this post, Heilig examines the relationship between KIPP and one of its parents.

How does KIPP charter really treat parents?

A KIPP parent sent me a disturbing story today! I am more and more convinced that we need a national website like Yelp for charter schools, I was thinking we could call it Chelp.com. It would be a website where parents can do to get help when they run into the charter school buzz saws that I have blogged about often here on Cloaking Inequity. This is not my first tangle with or blog about KIPP Houston (See more posts here). I actually started Cloaking Inequity because of KIPP’s deceptive response to a peer reviewed research study about charter attrition that we published in the Berkeley Review of Education.

Here is her story:

Mary Courtney has been trying to get basic Special Education services for her son at KIPP for three years. When her son did not receive the Special Education services he should have received by law, she advocated for her son. When KIPP would not provide the support her son needed, she found therapeutic support for her son on her own outside of school. And she continued to advocate for her son and other students with disabilities, filing complaints whenever KIPP regularly broke state and federal laws.

Originally a strong charter school advocate, even speaking at the State Capital seeking more charter funding, she became increasingly discouraged by the KIPP charter school chain. In 2017, When she found out that parents like her were charged hundreds of dollars per parent in school fees, she complained to the state of Texas which later required KIPP to stop charging these unallowable fees.

OKIPP retaliated against her son, filing over thirty discipline referrals against him, hoping that the family would remove him from KIPP and their problem family would disappear. But her son liked the school and given his disabilities- cognitive delays, autism, ADHD and epilepsy- his mother was committed to providing as much stability as possible. So she kept her son at KIPP.

Two weeks ago on February 27, 2020, KIPP expelled her son from school for trumped up charges, in the process violating a long list of federal Special Education laws. This expulsion came after KIPP had filed two lawsuits against the family. Only one month before the expulsion, KIPP’s attorneys offered Mrs. Courtney $10,000 to leave the school.

Using unprincipled techniques ranging from lawsuits to bribery to expulsion, KIPP was more committed to getting rid of a Special Needs kid than serving his needs.

Mary Courtney and her family moved to Houston from Louisiana in 2013. While her family is low income, she has always been determined that her son will receive the education they need to be successful in life.

When Mary brought her son to KIPP in 2015, she had high hopes. At the time, she did not know that KIPP disproportionately suspended African American students. Even though its schools were only 33% African American, the out-of-school suspension rate was 60%, nearly twice that. In 2015, she also did not know that KIPP and charters like KIPP tended to “counsel” parents of children with special needs to return to their home school.

Her son was identified as a Special Education student in February 2017. The school started with the usual speech. The Special Education Director of KIPP Texas, Andrea Sampy, stated, “I’ve seen this before. Based on my experience, I’m looking at a child that is emotionally disturbed.” KIPP gave her son an “emotionally disturbed” label with no formal evaluation whatsoever.

Mrs. Courtney disagreed emphatically and asked for a formal outside evaluation of her son. Her son was identified with autism and expressive and receptive language delay. The child’s doctor also diagnosed him as having ADHD and epilepsy.

KIPP did not like this diagnosis that contradicted their informal assessment and they refused to pay. Mrs. Courtney won a due process lawsuit against the school because they delayed her son’s evaluation. Thus, KIPP was required to pay for the original evaluation.

However, the agreement reached in early 2018 allowed the school to re-evaluate her son. The school determined that her son qualified for services under the emotionally disturbed (ED) label, other health impairment (ADHD and epilepsy) and learning disability in written expression and math calculation. The autism, ADHD and epilepsy labels were determined by a medical doctor and Mrs. Courtney supported the diagnosis. She continued to disagree with the school’s emotionally disturbed label because it was not based on any formal diagnosis of outside evaluators, just the opinions of three staff members.

The only disability services her son consistently received the three years at KIPP was bus transportation to school. Her son has not consistently received many of the other services stipulated in his individual educational plan (IEP). During a 2019 investigation, “TEA found that social skills development have not been provided in accordance with the IEP (for her son).” This academic year, her son has not received counseling services 30 minutes per week nor has he received psychological services once per month as stipulated by his IEP. And he has not had consistent paraprofessional support for specialized instruction in mathematics and reading since the previous school year. A charter school like KIPP receives public funds and, as such, is required by law to provide Special Education services.

But it gets worse. Mrs. Courtney stated, “The more I advocated about his lack of services and how the ED label was incorrect; the more they began to give office referrals for discipline. Then they started suing me and trying to get me to leave the school.”

In April and Fall 2019, KIPP filed due process lawsuits against Mrs. Courtney to defend the appropriateness of their evaluation, specifically the emotionally disturbed label that Mrs. Courtney disputed. KIPP eventually withdrew both lawsuits, likely because they did not have a reasonable claim. Instead of providing services for her son, KIPP used discipline referrals and unnecessary protracted litigation over issues that should have been, as a matter of public policy, solved through mediation. Pure and simple, they filed lawsuits against the Courtney family to bully them into leaving KIPP.

Her son, is a helpful son, very soft-spoken and caring. While he got in some fights in elementary and middle school, it was a result of his autism and communication deficits rather than his disposition. Since KIPP did not provide any services at all for her son, Mrs. Courtney found an organization that provided free applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy two years ago. Since then, her son has learned strategies to manage his autism and has not gotten in any more fights. He is truly a gentle giant but, unfortunately, because he is tall and large for his age and Black, some of his teachers judge him as intimidating.

On Valentine’s Day this past month, her son, an autistic student, and his new girlfriend got off the bus and went into the cafeteria. His previous ‘girlfriend’ with whom he had never kissed or even held hands was unhappyp and insulted him. He moved to another part of the cafeteria using a strategy his ABA (applied behavior analysis) therapist had told him to manage his autism and responses. Later, after breakfast, his former ‘girlfriend’ yelled at him and he yelled back. Both cursed at each other. Then he started walking to class. The two students were sent to the main office, she tried to hit him and a teacher stopped her. She then punched a wall and the students waited in the office for the administrator.

The former “girlfriend’s” mother arrived and the school leader asked her son to come to the office and sit down. Her son said he was not comfortable going in the office without his mom. Mrs. Courtney arrived at the school and took her son home having been told by phone that her son was suspended for three days. When he returned to school, he was placed in in-school suspension and then he was expelled on February 27, 2020.

Federal law requires that the school must take into account a student’s disabilities when making a discipline referral. Students with autism have social and communication deficits, so his outburst is highly likely to be a manifestation of his disability. The school is required to hold a hearing called an manifestation determination and review (MDR) before a student can be expelled or have more than 10 days of suspension in a school year.

Her son is a child with autism, cognitive disabilities, ADHD and epilepsy. He never received services as required by law. His expulsion is a violation of the law and is retaliatory.

Charter schools like KIPP think they can violate parent’s due process rights like they did to Mary Courtney with impunity. It is time to hold charter schools accountable. They get public funds and should be publicly accountable for how they are used. They must be held accountable for what they are doing to her son.

Sincerely, Mary Courtney March 1, 2020

Please pass this story along and Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.

For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charters click here.

https://cloakinginequity.com/category/charter-schools/

Check out and follow my YouTube channel here.

Twitter: @ProfessorJVH

Categories Education Reform

Rhode Island Will Close One of Its Oldest Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2020 //
5

Charter advocates like to caricature public schools negatively while presenting charter schools as invariably successful.

We know neither portrait is accurate.

Rhode Island’s new state commissioner has decided to close one of the state’s oldest charter schools, which has been failing for years.

The Academy for Career Exploration, which was one of Rhode Island’s first charter schools when it opened in 1997 as the Textron Chamber of Commerce Academy, informed the state Department of Education last month that it would close rather than craft a reform plan that might have kept it open.

The high school serves more than 200 students, but Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green had reservations about extending its charter because of low performance, including a zero percent proficiency rate in math. Nearly 38 percent of students were considered chronically absent last school year.

Anyone who claims that private management of schools is a panacea, especially for poor children, is either misguided or misleading.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Providence, Rhode Island

Valerie Strauss: Betsy DeVos’s Pathetic Lies

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2020 //
21

Valerie Strauss wrote a stunning dissection of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s lies to Congress in her recent testimony.

Was she lying because of ignorance or a desire to mislead the public? She lied about charter wait lists, about progress over time on NAEP scores, and about the failure of the federal Charter Schools Program, which spends $440 million to launch new charters, entirely at DeVos’ discretion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/03/07/betsy-devoss-problem-with-numbers/

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has a problem with numbers. As in, she sometimes cites numbers that just aren’t accurate.

DeVos, of course, is hardly the only government official to cite inaccurate numbers to make a point, but that’s no reason not to point it out when she does — and she did during two appearances in the last week before congressional committees when defending the Trump administration’s proposed 2021 budget.

Let’s look at a few examples from her testimony.

One misleading figure that gets repeated, and not just by DeVos, is this: There are 1 million students on waiting lists at charter schools throughout the country. DeVos uses the statistic to show there is enormous demand for charters — which are publicly funded but privately operated — but not enough schools to accept all children who want to go. That, the argument goes, is why charter expansion should be encouraged.

To be sure, some charter schools are indeed in high demand and do have long waiting lists. But on some of the lists, there are duplicates, children who are already in other schools and other issues.

The 1 million figure was first cited in 2013 when the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools first made the claim. That alliance is led by Nina Rees, who worked for former vice president Richard B. Cheney. The alliance quickly revised the number it cited — to a minimum of 520,000 when it acknowledged that students were on duplicate lists.

In 2014, Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University, and Kevin Welner, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and founder of the National Education Policy Center, wrote a policy brief titled “Wait, Wait, Don’t Mislead Me,” which gave nine evidence-based reasons the waiting list numbers from the charter alliance should not be believed. These include no external verification, the same students on multiple lists and students who were never removed from waiting lists after lengthy periods.

In 2016, WGBH in Boston came to the same conclusion when it investigated charter waiting list numbers used to justify lifting the cap on charters. There were students on waiting lists who were happily enrolled in another school, with no desire to leave. Citizens for Public Schools found the waiting list for Boston Public Schools and Boston charter schools to be comparable. Ultimately, voters rejected a statewide referendum to lift the cap on charter.

And yet DeVos used that debunked number when defending her budget before Congress.

DeVos also talked about scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP. It’s often referred to as “the nation’s report card” or the “gold standard” in student assessment because it is seen as the most consistent, nationally representative measure of U.S. student achievement since the 1990s and because it is supposed to be able to assess what students “know and can do….”

NAEP scores are eagerly anticipated as evidence that schools are — or are not — making progress, and DeVos says, on this score, they aren’t.

According to DeVos, there has been no growth on NAEP scores in the last 20 years. She said the federal government has spent “over a trillion dollars at the federal level to close the achievement gap in the last 40 years” but “that achievement gap has not closed one bit.”

Not exactly.

According to Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, the achievement gaps between white and black students and white and Hispanic students have been narrowing for decades — although unsteadily….

The gaps are still large, to be sure, but to say they haven’t budged is just not accurate.

The source of DeVos’s statement that $1 trillion has been spent over 40 years to close the achievement gap is unclear. The Education Department did not respond to a query about it.

During testimony last week before a House appropriations subcommittee, DeVos had an exchange with Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) about charter schools in which, again, she tossed out questionable numbers.

As I reported here (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/02/28/four-especially-testy-moments-when-betsy-devos-testified-capitol-hill/ ), Pocan raised the issue of fraud in the federal Charter Schools Program, which has approved $3.3 billion for the expansion of charter schools since 1994. Forty percent of operating charter schools were created with money from the program.

Pocan referred to two reports about problems with that program released last year by a nonprofit advocacy group, the Network for Public Education, which was co-founded by education historian and public schools advocate Diane Ravitch.

One report said the program had wasted up to $1 billion on charter schools that never opened, or opened and then closed because of poor management or other reasons. The other report focused on hundreds of millions of dollars spent on charter schools that got federal funding but never opened. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/25/report-us-government-wasted-up-billion-charter-schools-still-fails-adequately-monitor-grants/)

When Pocan referred to the 2019 reports, DeVos said they had been “debunked,” which Pocan noted was not true.

She also essentially denied there were problems with the program, saying the percentage of charter schools that received federal funding and closed was tiny. She instead attributed the assertions to “propaganda from an individual who has it in for charter schools.” (It is unclear to whom she was referring. But if she meant Ravitch, whom she has criticized before, she may not have known that who does indeed oppose charter schools — did not write the reports, which you can read about here and here.)

As it turns out, some of the facts she disputed from the reports came from her own letter to Congress, an audit report of the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General, Texas newspapers and other reports from her department.

Pocan told DeVos the Texas-based IDEA charter school chain had received more than $200 million from the federal Charter Schools Program. He then noted that IDEA had planned to spend millions of dollars to lease a private jet before backing off following bad publicity, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for luxury box seats at San Antonio Spurs games. He also mentioned that IDEA board members were selling and brokering property to the charter chain they governed. (Tom Torkelson, chief executive of IDEA, publicly apologized for “really dumb and unhelpful” financial decisions.)

Pocan asked DeVos if she thought charter schools that receive federal funding should be allowed to use that money to purchase private jets, and she responded by saying it was a “hypothetical question” and that “there is no funding going to charter schools that would even address something like that.”

Actually, it was not hypothetical. The excesses of the IDEA charter chain described by Pocan were reported in the Houston Chronicle, the Texas Monitor and other news organizations and occurred during the years the chain was receiving grants from the federal Charter Schools Program.

In 2017, DeVos’s Education Department gave IDEA a grant of $67.2 million — even though it had not completed two other five-year grants. The next year, the department gave IDEA another grant for nearly $117 million.

Pocan continued, saying “the same group” — IDEA — had given incomplete and inaccurate information to the department during a three-year period. DeVos responded by saying, “Everything you are citing is debunked, ridiculous.” Pocan was citing an audit report by DeVos’s own Office of Inspector General.

At one point, DeVos circled back to the Network for Public Education reports and added that “the report that you referenced has been totally debunked as propaganda, fewer than 2 percent of schools didn’t open.” Later in the conversation with Pocan, she dropped that percentage to 1.5 percent.

That percentage was wildly different from the one included in a letter she wrote to Congress on June 28, 2019. That letter, signed by DeVos, states: “Since 2001, of the 5,265 charter schools that have received funding through a State entity or directly from the Department, 634 did not open and are unlikely to open in the future.”

If you do the math, you will come up with 12 percent. The two Network for Public Education reports came up with a similar percentage — a little over 11 percent.

Throughout the discussion, DeVos denied that 40 percent of the charter schools funded by the Charter Schools Program either opened and then closed or never opened at all. She said the 40 percent figure “was nothing but propaganda.”

As noted above, in her letter to Congress, DeVos said 5,265 schools had received funding through Charter School Program grants.

According to the 2019 Charter School Program Overview (see slide 8), 3,138 charter schools funded by the Charter Schools Program during the same time period were open in 2016-2017. That means 2,127 schools never opened or closed — which represents 40.4 percent of all charters funded from active grants during those years.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Lies, Network for Public Education, Privatization

Please Send a Contribution to This Brilliant Woman: Joyce Elliott of Little Rock, Arkansas

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2020 //
0

Joyce Elliott is an articulate, brilliant woman who is a State Senator in Arkansas.

She is running for Congress against a Trump-aligned wealthy Republican. I support her, I have made donations to her campaign, and I urge you to send whatever you can—$5, $10, $25, $50, $100, or more.

Joyce is a native of Arkansas. She was a high school teacher. As a leader in the Legislature, she has been a strong opponent of charters and vouchers. She knows and appreciates the power of well-funded public schools.

Joyce recently won the endorsement of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Please do whatever you can to help her win.

Her opponent has raised six times as much money as Joyce, mostly from big corporations and financial institutions like Goldman Sachs. She needs and deserves our help.

This is a column she wrote recently that shows who she is and what she believes.

Categories Education Reform

Jennifer Berkshire: Trump’s Voucher Plan is Backfiring in Texas

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2020 //
9

Investigative journalist Jennifer Berkshire visited Texas to find out how the Trump-DeVos agenda of vouchers is being received. Not well, she found. In rural and suburban areas, parents are not eager to abandon their public schools.

She writes:

Keller, Texas—On the same night that President Trump invoked the specter of “failing government schools” in his State of the Union address, Texas Republican Giovanni Capriglione was working hard to establish his public school bona fides. Elected to the Texas House as part of the 2012 Tea Party wave, Capriglione reminded voters here in Keller, an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, that he was a product of public schools, his wife is too, and that his children attend them now. Grade by grade, he named his favorite teachers.

While Trump used his pulpit to make clear his administration’s contempt for public schools, Capriglione wooed the voters he hopes will send him back to the state legislature with calls for more generous school funding, less standardized testing, and more rigorous oversight of charter schools.

Why such disparate messaging?

In a word: elections. In 2018 Texas Democrats flipped 12 formerly Republican legislative seats, half in the fast-growing region around Dallas and Fort Worth known as the Metroplex. While the Texas version of the blue wave was fueled in part by enthusiasm for the Senate candidacy of Beto O’Rourke, Democrats also ran hard against what they characterized as the GOP’s antipathy toward public education. Voters ejected several school voucher advocates, while candidates who ran as supporters of public schools were rewarded. And while Trump is beloved among rural Texans, they are not fans of his signature education issue, “education freedom,” aka sending taxpayer funds to private and religious schools.

“Our rural communities are knit together by their public schools,” says Pastor Charles Johnson, head of the public education advocacy group Pastors for Texas Children. “It’s why they tend to oppose privatization, no matter who is pushing it.”

A similar dynamic is playing out in other key 2020 states. Even as Trump tries to lure back disaffected suburban moderates and hold on to his loyal rural supporters, his administration is peddling an education agenda that is increasingly under fire in states that are essential to his reelection bid. The deep divide between what such voters want for their schools and what Trump and state-level Republicans are offering presents an opportunity for Democrats to build on their 2018 gains, and perhaps even deny Trump a second term

Trouble may also be brewing in Ohio, she writes, where overzealous Republican legislators extended vouchers into suburban districts and are feeling a strong pushback.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Texas, Trump, Vouchers

Tom Ultican Loved This Book, and He Thinks You Will Too

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2020 //
36

Tom Ultican loved Katherine Stewart’s new book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and he thinks you will too. I have the book but, due to my travels, have not had a chance to read it yet. So I’m grateful for his review.

He begins:

Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism. It shines a light on significant threats to American pluralism and representative democracy. The religious rights amazing successes now influence every aspect of American life, from the White House to local governments, from schools to hospitals. Stewart documents the origins of “the Russia thing” and the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump. She clarifies that the Christian right is not fighting a culture war; it is a political war waged against the institutions of American democracy and freedom of conscience.

Trump is a Gift from God

Ralph Drollinger: “I started sending him my Bible studies when he was running his campaign and Trump has been writing notes back to me ever since, in a positive sense. He likes loyalty.”

Paula White about Trump: “It is God that raises up a king.”

Franklin Graham on Trump’s election: “God’s had intervened.”

David Barton called Trump: “God’s guy.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed God: “wanted Trump to become president.”

Ralph Reed stated: “There has never been anyone who has defended us and fought for us who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump.”

Rick Ridings said when he asked God how the nation will learn to change: “The Lord said, ‘It must play, the Trump card.’”

Ed Martin stated: “The Donald Trump administration has been a blessing on America like we’ve never seen.”

These sentiments are expressed by leaders of Christian Nationalism throughout this book. If you don’t recognize some of the names, it is important to understand that they are having a large influence on education, social justice and foreign policy in America and beyond. Stewart brings them out of the shadows and illuminates their roles.

Public Education, Environmentalism and Social Welfare are Evil

Pastor D. James Kennedy asserted that children in Public Schools were being “brainwashed in Godless secularism.” In 2003, the DeVos family’s Christian Reformed Church warned that “not only does there exist a climate of hostility to the Christian Faith, the legitimate and laudable educational goal of multi-culturalism is often used as a cover to introduce pagan and New Age spiritualities such as deification of mother earth (Gaia) and to promote social causes such as environmentalism.” The report also claimed that “government schools” had “become aggressively and increasingly secular in the last forty years.”

In his sermon called “A Godly Education,” Kennedy exclaimed, “The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools, has indeed become such that if it had been done by and enemy, it would be considered an act of war.” After denouncing Horace Mann as “a Unitarian,” Kennedy declared, “The modern, public education system was begun in an effort to deliver children from the Christian religion.”

Environmentalism is termed a “false religion.” Stewart quotes the young pastor who took her to a Christian political event in North Carolina, “It’s ten degrees hotter than normal, and these people don’t believe in climate science.” The conservative Christian Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation declares, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.” The Christian Nationalist political organization Culture Impact Center has claimed that environmentalism is a “litany of the Green Dragon” and “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.”

Many of the roots of Christian Nationalism can be traced to the antebellum period and theological theories supporting slavery. Calvinist philosopher R. J. Rushdoony was an admirer of these preachers and claimed that “some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.” Although some of his writing was uncomfortable for leaders in the nationalist movement, his ideas form a significant amount of the ideology embraced by today’s right wing Christian thinking. He was the first to claim the First Amendment aimed to establish freedom “not from religion, but for religion.”

Categories Education Reform, Religion, Trump

Teresa Hanafin on Trump’s Mercenary Bent

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2020 //
37

Teresa Hanafin writes Fast Forward for the Boston Globe.

She writes:

Trump has canceled his planned trip to the CDC today, and I figured it was because the researchers there didn’t want him spreading his misinformation and pseudo-facts about the coronavirus while standing in a place that’s supposed to be all about science.

Turns out somebody there fell ill. White House aides worried it could be the virus, and Trump thought wearing a face mask might smudge his spray-on. Fortunately, the employee tested negative, and Trump says he’ll go another time.

He’s heading to Nashville to tour the tornado destruction, then on to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, his umpteeth visit to one of his own resorts at an astounding cost to taxpayers.

Trump, who continues to own his properties, has built quite the profitable pipeline from taxpayers’ wallets to his bank account, which is probably why he has spent 30 percent of his presidency at a joint he owns.

His son Eric lies every time he says that the Trump Organization doesn’t charge the Secret Service to stay at the resorts while they are protecting his father: “They stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” he told Yahoo Finance last year. “We charge them, like, 50 bucks.”

Try anywhere from 400 bucks to 650 bucks or more per night. That’s one hell of a cleaning job.

Trump also charges the Secret Service a whopping $17,000 a month to rent a three-bedroom cottage at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, where he goes in the summer when Palm Beach gets too hot. He charges the service even when he’s not there. BTW, that’s about twice the going rate for a summer cottage in the area.

Trump, of course, has been desperately trying to hide all of this from the public that’s paying for his ample leisure activities. But the watchdog group Public Citizen and The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold and colleagues have been doggedly filing Freedom of Information Act requests for three years, and the truth is getting out. Here’s more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/newly-obtained-documents-show-157000-in-additional-payments-by-the-secret-service-to-trump-properties/2020/03/05/7da2a610-5cbd-11ea-b014-4fafa866bb81_story.html

Now that Joe Biden has become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, the Post reports that “President Trump and his Republican allies are rapidly shifting their focus to former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, reviving attacks that led to Trump’s impeachment, in an effort to broadly define as corrupt the potential Democratic presidential nominee.”

Categories Education Reform

Michigan: Ethical Problems at Cornerstone Charter School

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2020 //
1

Clark Durant, a former member of Congress, started a network of private religious schools called Cornerstone in 1991. In 2009, he changed them to charter schools so they could get government funding. His chain of five schools needed more money because philanthropic donations had dried up.

What was not brought up at that moment: Durant’s relationship to property he was detailing, the one he was promising to get donations to modify.

Since 2012, when Madison-Carver first opened as a publicly-funded charter school, it has been paying 11% of its per pupil funding in rent. It’s landlord? The New Common School Foundation. A non-profit Durant created in 1996 to raise money for the Cornerstone schools. He currently serves as the president.

A 7 Action News review of a 2019 audit for the school found that Madison-Carver Academy spent over half a million dollars in rent to the New Common School foundation last year. These funds are in addition to the public dollars the school spends on maintenance, insurance and taxes, since the rental agreement is a triple-net lease, which places all up-keep expenses on the tenant. In 2019, according to the audit, these expenditures added up to over a quarter of a million dollars.

This set-up is found at all five Cornerstone charter schools. In the 2017-2018 school year, for example, the five charter schools spent over $2 million in public dollars on rent going to Durant-associated entities, a 7 Action News review of the schools’ check-registers found.

Durant declined an on-camera interview with Channel 7. Tina Kozak, a spokesperson for the schools and the New Common School Foundation sent a statement saying that “all rents are used for the purposes consistent with the Foundation’s mission.”

Adding that: “Besides its educational function, the Foundation also helps to raise funds and develop a real estate strategy to enhance the Cornerstone mission.”

The budget numbers and statement, however, highlight a somewhat confusing conundrum: While Durant is pounding the pavement asking for donations to improve the education outcomes of the students — fundraising for expenses like the construction of a private work-nook at Madison Carver Academy — he is simultaneously siphoning money away from the network of schools via rental agreements.

“It certainly raises ethical questions,” said Bruce Baker, a Rutgers University professor and expert on education financing, who points out that on top of the rental agreements, each Cornerstone school has a contract with its management company: Cornerstone Education Group. Durant currently serves as CEO.

While each contract is different, the management fees for Cornerstone Education Group range from 10% to 13.5% of each school’s per pupil funding. In other words, nearly a quarter of each school’s budget is going towards rent and management off the bat.

“A really big, disconcerting piece of this puzzle is that these are a number of entities drawing on the public dollars and then sending that money back and forth between themselves,” Baker continued, noting that all of these budget decisions, in turn, divert money from the classroom.

A 7 Action News analysis of state-funding data, found that while schools across the state spend, on average, 60% of their school funding on instruction, Cornerstone schools, on average, spend only 40% of their funding on instruction.

“Those relationships and the ability to see all the financial transactions between them or not, that’s a concern,” Baker continued, noting that while the current Cornerstone set-up may raise moral questions, it is also completely legal.

“All of this stuff sort of operates at the edge of legal concerns. It’s kind of within the boundaries of lacking sufficient legal regulation to call it out as absolutely against the law or in violation of some particular law or policy. There is just not enough regulation or policy to close those loopholes as of yet.”

Cornerstone-Model
Questions around Cornerstone were raised in December when Jared Davis, the principal of Cornerstone Health and Technology High School, was terminated.

Davis, who had been at the school for four and half years, filed a whistle-blower suit that month alleging that he was fired because of questions he raised around questionable contracts and ethics within the district.

At the center of the suit? The school’s management company: Cornerstone Education Group. Its landlord: New Common School Foundation. And the man behind both entities: Durant.

“It seems to be that the rich play by a different set of rules,” Davis’s attorney, Anthony Adams said, flicking at the incestuous nature of the various entities.

“If this situation occurred in Detroit Public Schools, where the head of Detroit Public Schools was leasing schools to DPS, and was also drawing a profit and a salary from those schools, that would be very problematic,” he continued. “We’d like to understand why that is, in the context of charters that we have different sets of rules it seems to be.”

No accountability. No transparency. Sweet deal.

Categories Education Reform

EdWeek Surveys Private School Choice Programs and Finds Little Oversight

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2020 //
13

Education Week examined the extent of state oversight of publicly funded religious schools and found that it was minimal. Betsy DeVos’s goal of public funding for religious school tuition is gaining traction.

However, there is one glaring error in the article: it cites positive poll data from Education Next, which strongly supports vouchers, yet fails to mention that voters have repeatedly rejected such programs, most recently in Arizona in 2018, where voucher expansion lost a state referendum by a margin of 65-35% despite ample funding from the Koch and DeVos families and the support of Governor Doug Ducey, a Koch mentee.

The story begins:

Montana, like many other states, helps some students pay for tuition at private schools. But the rules for the schools that participate in its tax-credit scholarship program are scant: They do not have to hire teachers with college degrees or conduct criminal background checks on all their employees. Schools do not have to publicly report graduation rates or demonstrate that they are on sound financial footing. And no entity-be it the state, the organization that awards the scholarships, or the private schools-is required to track and report basic demographic data on the students who use the program.

Montana is hardly an outlier.

Nearly 30 states that have private school choice programs that either directly pay students’ tuition at private schools or provide generous tax-credits to incentivize businesses and individuals to do so.

But few require private schools to follow standard policies used to ensure transparency and accountability in the nation’s public schools, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey of states on how private school voucher and other closely related programs are regulated.

* Just six states require that all participating private schools admit students regardless of their religion, while only three require participating private schools to admit students regardless of their sexual orientation.

* Only 11 require that all teachers in participating private schools have a bachelor’s degree.

* Fourteen mandate that schools conduct criminal background checks on all staff before accepting tuition paid with the help of state aid.

* And only six states require schools to publicly report their graduation rates.

Those and other findings demonstrate the relatively thin state oversight these programs operate under, especially when compared to the tight regulation and governance of public schools.

While proponents say that giving families the choice to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools-and the freedom to walk away from any school that isn’t living up to their expectations-is the ultimate form of oversight, opponents argue that vouchers and their kin are funneling taxpayer money into largely unaccountable private schools.

It’s not a new debate, but it is one that has added urgency as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case challenging the legality of Montana’s program. The outcome of that case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (Case No. 18-1195), could remove the constitutional hurdles to establishing voucher programs in many other states.

“For school choice families, transparency is necessary if the policy goals articulated in the voucher laws are to be achieved-does the school provide sufficient information for families to make informed choices?” said Kevin Welner, a University of Colorado education professor who studies law and public policy. He is also the director of the National Education Policy Center, a group that is generally critical of vouchers. “I think more importantly, when the school accepts taxpayer dollars, it has to be transparent … around the responsible use of those dollars.”

Growing Popularity

The popularity of private school choice programs continues to grow.

More than half of Americans now support the idea of allowing government to help families pay for tuition at private schools, according to a 2019 survey on the public’s attitudes toward education by the journal Education Next.

Taken together, the number of private school choice programs, which include traditional vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts, and families using them have expanded substantially over the past decade, fueled by influential advocacy groups and strong parental demand.

While Montana’s program is at the center of the potentially pivotal Supreme Court case, it’s miniscule-around 40 students a year receive an average annual scholarship of $500-compared to private school choice programs in Arizona Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, which serve tens of thousands of students in their respective states with average scholarship amounts in the thousands.

To better understand the governance and accountability of this small, but growing sector of the K-12 system, the EdWeek Research Center reviewed statutes in 29 states that have at least one of the three types of private school choice programs on the books. The Research Center then sent the results of its analysis to state education departments to verify, correct, or update the findings.

The analysis’ findings include:

* Five states require that all teachers in participating private schools be licensed;

* Eight states require all participating private schools to publicly report the results of state and national tests;

* Four states require public reporting of demographic data on participating students;

* Five states explicitly require all participating private schools to admit students with disabilities;

* Fourteen states mandate that participating private schools prove that they are fiscally sound through audits or other measures.

Finally, half of the states with private school choice programs-14-do not even require that the agencies or organizations overseeing them publicly list all the private schools participating.

The same is true for the third-party organizations that oversee tax-credit scholarship programs. Just 12 states require a publicly available list of scholarship-granting organizations-the groups that are approved by the state to take in tax-credit-eligible donations and award scholarships.

Oklahoma is among the states that do not require that a list of scholarship-granting organizations be publicly reported. It took Education Week dozens of emails, multiple records requests, and six months to simply obtain the names of the scholarship-granting organizations from the state.

This is only part of the article. In the remainder, there are extensive quotes from voucher zealot Robert Enslow of EdChoice, formerly known as the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation, whose only purpose is to promote publicly-funded vouchers.

It would be interesting to see an article in Education Week about the long list of states that have voted against vouchers (including Florida and Arizona) but got them anyway, shoved down the throats of the public by voucher fanatics with large wallets to buy legislators’ votes. Such an article–or a different one–would review the studies of vouchers that show they have a negative effect on students’ test scores. How about an article about the “education scholarships” in D.C., which has never found any gains for voucher students, and most recently showed that voucher students lost ground? Or a review of the Thomas B. Fordham study of Ohio vouchers that showed that students lost grounds in voucher schools? Or similar results in Indiana and Louisiana?

We are hurtling back to the early 19th century, not preparing students to live in the present and the future.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Research, Vouchers

Philadelphia: City’s Second Largest Charter School is in Turmoil

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2020 //
6

The charter industry has lots of problems with stability. The charters open and suddenly close. Scandals and corruption are commonplace so much so that Carol Burris says there is a “crisis of corruption in the charter industry.”

Theft and fraud are predictable when non-educators, entrepreneurs and grifters get public money and can open or close their school without any accountability or oversight.

So in Philadelphia, the second-largest charter in the City is in trouble.

Philadelphia’s second-largest charter school has a large budget deficit, a CEO on leave, and some sort of problem related to the identification of special education students.

It’s the kind of financial and administrative turmoil that would draw major headlines at a large, traditional school district. But the K-12 school at the center of the tumult refuses to say much of anything — and only recently published a six-sentence letter on its website explaining that it had made a personnel change.

Despite repeated requests for comment, First Philadelphia Preparatory Charter School in Bridesburg has declined to explain why or how it found itself in, what one official called, a “difficult time of transition.”

Here’s what we know.

Longtime CEO Joseph Gillespie is on a leave of absence and has been replaced, on an interim basis, by Carleene Slowik. The 1,850-student school sent a brief note to parents Wednesday explaining the change — only after WHYY contacted the school and asked for clarification about the leadership situation.
Before that note, the school would not divulge whether Gillespie was still working at First Philadelphia — or even who was in charge of the school, which is affiliated with a charter management company called American Paradigm Schools.

A lawyer representing First Philadelphia said the school had no comment on the situation. Nor would he say who was currently running the campus. Several attempts to reach Gillespie were unsuccessful.

No oversight. No accountability. No transparency.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Philadelphia, Privatization
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