Archives for category: Education Reform
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Justin Parmenter: Mega-Corporation Threatens Legal Action Against 3 North Carolina Teachers

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2019 //
26

 

Under normal circumstances, when a teacher disagreed with the state educatuon department’s decision to switch from one test to another, it would be called a difference of opinion. Under normal circumstances, when teachers called attention to the state chief’s decision to ignore the recommendations of his evaluation team and pick a different assessment, it would be treated as criticism and grounds for debate.

When NBCT teacher Justin Parmenter and two other teachers in North Carolina called out their state superintendent for disregarding the recommendation of his evaluation committee and for choosing a product they rejected, the corporation owning the winning product threatened legal action to silence the teachers. 

The superintendent in this instance is Mark Johnson, ex-TFA. His classroom experience was limited to two years. His failure to defend his state’s teachers reveals his character.

Shame on the owners of iStation.

Shame on Mark Johnson.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Leaks Reveal How Billionaires Shaped Hillary’s Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2019 //
117

Alternet published an expose of documents from Hillary’s 2016 campaign that reveal the names of the billionaires who shaped her education agenda. The documents were leaked by Wikileaks.

The education portion of the document runs 66 pages, mostly concentrated on K-12 policy, and captures specific input from billionaire donors looking to overhaul and privatize public education.

You will recognize the names: one is Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve.

One of the most connected “thought leaders” discussed is Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and the head of the Emerson Collective, a prominent education reform advocacy group. Powell Jobs who has been close with the Clintons since the late ’90s, also sat with Betsy DeVos on the board of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. She set up billionaire “roundtables” with Clinton’s campaign advisors through 2015 while donating millions to Priorities USA, Clinton’s main PAC.

Another is Bruce Reed, who had been Biden’s chief of staff but was then president of the Broad Foundation. Reed pointed to New Orleans as an amazing success story, where the public schools were replaced by charter schools, the union was crushed, and the teachers were fired and replaced mostly by TFA.

Notes taken by Clinton aide Ann O’Leary were made in interviews with Powell Jobs and Bruce Reed, President of The Broad Foundation (and former chief of staff to Joe Biden). According to the notes, the “experts” were calling for new federal controls, more for-profit companies and more technology in public schools — but first on the menu was a bold remake of the teaching “profession.”

(Ann O’Leary is now Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff in California.)

Imagine: The billionaires and policy wonks had prescriptions for remaking the teaching profession, even though none had ever been a teacher.

But they did more than talk. On June 20, 2015, O’Leary sent Podesta an email revealing the campaign adopted two of Powell Jobs’ suggestions, including “infusing best ideas from charter schools into our traditional public schools.” When Clinton announced this policy in a speech to teachers, however, it was the one line that drew boos.

“Donors want to hear where she stands” John Petry, a founder of both Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Success Academy, New York’s largest network of charter schools, told the New York Times.  Petry was explicit, declaring that he and his billionaire associates would instead put money into congressional, state and local races, behind candidates who favored a “more businesslike approach” to education, and tying teacher tenure to standardized test scores.

Clinton’s advisors warned her that wealthy donors like Petry, Whitney Tilson, or Eli Broad could walk if she didn’t support charter schools. Broad would indeed threaten to withhold funding from Clinton when she criticized charter schools for excluding difficult students. John Podesta and Ann O’Leary would publicly correct Clinton, reaffirming her commitment to charters.

This is an article you must read in full. You might even want to read the underlying document to understand how fully the Democratic Party sold out to the billionaires who oppose public schools.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Clinton, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

The New Yorker: Race Baiting Works for Trump

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
98

 

The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser says racism will be the theme of Trump’s re-election campaign. He plays it like a fiddle.

On Tuesday, President Trump convened his Cabinet in the White House. First to speak after a long, rambling, and inaccuracy-filled monologue by Trump himself was Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In a Cabinet where flowery praise of the President has become standard, Carson outdid himself. A celebrated brain surgeon whose odd asides had been one of the minor subplots of the 2016 Republican Presidential primaries, Carson has largely existed on the margins of the Trump show since joining the Administration, except for one brief scandal in which his spending of more than thirty thousand dollars on office furniture was revealed. He had an important role to play this week, however.

Carson is the lone African-American in Trump’s Cabinet, and Tuesday’s meeting took place forty-eight hours into a furor over the President’s Sunday-morning tweets attacking four left-wing Democratic members of Congress, all of them women of color. The Squad, as they are collectively known, should “go back” to the countries they came from, Trump tweeted, although three of the four are U.S.-born and all, of course, are American. The tweets were instantly condemned as racist, but the President, unrepentant, seemed to want to keep the fight going. First, Carson was sent to Fox News to provide cover for Trump. “I have an advantage of knowing the President very well, and he’s not a racist, and his comments are not racist,” Carson told viewers. At the Cabinet meeting, Carson offered more validation for the President. Here was his contribution to the national dialogue, as recorded by the White House’s own transcript:

secretary carson: Thank you, Mr. President. And just before I talk a little bit about what’s going on at hud, I just want to thank you for your incredible courage—

the president: Thank you.

secretary carson: —and stamina and resilience with unwithering criticism, unfair criticism, all the time. And I would just, sort of, sum it up by saying: Would you rather have a non-politician whose speech is unfiltered, who gets a lot of stuff done? Or somebody with a silver tongue who gets nothing done?

the president: But I thought I had a silver tongue. [Laughter.] I heard that so often. I always thought I had a silver tongue. [Laughter.] But I agree with you.

secretary carson: But, you know, as I told you before, I think God is using you.

Carson’s shameless sucking up to Trump, an act of self-abasement on live television, was hard to watch. But it wasn’t treated as news. Few accounts even remarked on it. His brief appearance as Trump’s human shield did nothing to halt the accusations that the President is an unreconstructed racist. Trump himself essentially ignored Carson’s defense, not only not retreating from his tweets about the four freshman Democratic congresswomen but going to a campaign rally in North Carolina, on Wednesday night, where he launched an extensive, pre-planned attack on them. One by one, he read their names from his teleprompter, stopping when he got to that of Representative Ilhan Omar, an immigrant from Somalia, and listening with apparent approval as thousands of red-shirted maga fans chanted, “Send her back! Send her back!”

The racism, it turns out, wasn’t a mistake, a slip of Trump’s otherwise silver tongue, as Carson would have it. It was a calculated political play, and the news of the last few days was that Trump had revealed it so clearly: this is how intends to run for reëlection, in 2020.

Say this for the racists of old, like George Wallace and Senators Eastland and Theodore Bilbo: They didn’t pretend that they were not racists.

Categories Education Reform, Racism

Rhode Island: State Commissioner Plans to Take Control of Providence Schools

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
59

 

Angelica Infante-Green, the new State Commissioner in Rhode Island, plans to take control of the Providence schools.

Providence has a mayor-appointed board. The mayor complained that the union contract made it too hard for him to fire teachers.

Infante-Green has never run a school district. She has never been a school principal. She entered education through Teach for America, then ran bilingual programs in Bloomberg’s Department of Education. She belongs to Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.

It will be instructive to see what she does to Providence.

State takeover in Rhode Island does not have a good record:

The state has never sought to reconstitute an entire school system, although it did take over Providence’s Hope High School in 2005. The school was split into three academies and showed modest improvements, but it is now back under city control and remains one of the district’s lowest-performing high schools.

The lowest performing district in the state is Central Falls, where the state stepped in and threatened to fire all the teachers.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Providence, Rhode Island

Did Betsy DeVos’s School Choice Zealotry Enable the Corruption Scandal in Puerto Rico?

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
3

 

Writer Christopher Rim asks a reasonable question in this article in Forbes: Did Betsy DeVos’ passion for school choice enable the corruption in administration of federal education funds in Puerto Rico? I was particularly pleased to read this article because Rim is a brilliant young man who does not usually write about education.

He begins:

Yesterday, the former education secretary of Puerto Rico, Julia Keleher, returned to the island to stand trial after being arrested by the FBI on July 10th on fraud charges. Specifically, she and a government official in the insurance sector have been charged with using their government positions and connections to misdirect federal funding and award bloated, fraudulent contracts to their personal connections (several of whom were also arrested on the 10th). Some see this as vindication for the Trump administration, which has cited potential misuse of funds as one of their reasons for repeatedly trying to hold back much-needed funds, most recently funding for food stamps. However, this alleged fraud actually has more to do with policies of reducing public school funding in favor of private and charter schools, a shift made popular by Education Secretary Betsy Devos. 

This scandal comes as a shock to many, but those who have been paying close attention to Keleher’s salary and budgeting, as well as the state of education in Puerto Rico during her two-year tenure, saw her arrest as a vindication of what they have been protesting throughout her time in office. Keleher assumed the responsibilities of Puerto Rico’s education secretary in early 2017. There was immediate controversy over her salary— at $250,000 annually, she was already Puerto Rico’s highest-paid public official, earning ten times more than the average Puerto Rican teacher, three times more than Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Roselló, and 25% more than Secretary DeVos. She maintained this salary even after Hurricane Maria—in fact, she attempted to use a foundation’s donation to the Puerto Rican education system to raise it to $400,000, the same salary as the US President. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, she had to spearhead the education-related relief efforts. Keleher used this tragedy as an opportunity to try her own plans to redesign Puerto Rico’s school system. She led wide-scale education reform efforts and referred to the island’s education system as a ‘laboratory’ to test the Devos model, as she pushed to adopt private school vouchers and charter schools while closing hundreds of public schools. While schools were struggling to recover from the hurricane, Kelleher worked to permanently close over 20% of them—263 public schools were shut down during her time as education secretary. Because of these closures, 5,000 teachers lost their jobs and 75,000 students were displaced. 

All of this led to protests on local, national and international scales. In March 2018, thousands of educators marched to the capitol in protest of the voucher and charter school program. On twitter, critics started the hashtag “#JuliaGoHome” in order to publicly decry her unjust policies. In April of 2019, after she had resigned, Keleher attended an education conference at Yale to speak about leadership. At the conference, a student circulated a letter about the shortcomings and negative repercussions of Keleher’s so-called “reform” efforts. After her arrest, both of the island’s teachers’ unions issued statements that theyfelt vindicated in their longstanding disagreements with and protests against Keleher and her policies. One of these unions, the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR) had filed a lawsuit in April of last year to protest Keleher’s reforms, arguing that “the new law and separate fiscal reforms will cost teachers jobs, hurt students, and dismember the island’s public education system.” By that point, 179 schools had already been closed, and 263 would soon face the same fate. 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Puerto Rico

Tim Slekar Interviews Carol Burris about Charter Scandals

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
3

 

Carol Burris is one of the best-informed observers of the charter industry. Tim Slekar interviewed her on his podcast #BustED Pencils.

New #BustEDPencils Episode 85: Charter School Scandal with @Network4pubEd and @carolburris https://bustedpencils.com/episode/episode-85-charter-school-scandal/
 

Feature Interview:

The Network for Public Education’s Executive Director Carol Burris talks about the lack of “accountability” at the Federal Department of Education regarding charter school funding.  After publishing Asleep at the Wheel the charter school industry felt dissed.  So they complained.  So Carol went back to check NPE’s facts and found out the Charter industry might even be more than just Asleep at the Wheel.

This was such an awesome interview so I asked Carol if she might be interested in doing a semi-regular interview to keep  #BustEDPencils listeners informed about the scandalous world of charter schools.!  Guess what she said?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Privatization

FBI Warns of Cyberattacks on Technology-Based Schools: The Downside of Digital Learning

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
21

 

As more and more schools adopt computer-based digital learning, the risk of cyberattacks on schools grows.

Recently a school in Avon, Connecticut, was targeted by hackers.

AVON, Conn. — Over six weeks, the vandals kept coming, knocking the school system’s network offline several times a day.

There was no breach of sensitive data files, but the attacks in which somebody deliberately overwhelmed the Avon Public Schools system in Connecticut still proved costly. Classroom lesson plans built around access to the internet had come to a halt.

“The first time I called the FBI, their first question was, ‘Well, what did it cost you?’” said Robert Vojtek, the district’s technology director. “It’s like, ‘Well, we were down for three-quarters of a day, we have 4,000 students, we have almost 500 adults, and teaching and learning stopped for an entire day.’ So how do you put a price tag on that?”

The kind of attacks more commonly reserved for banks and other institutions holding sensitive data are increasingly targeting school systems around the country. The widespread adoption of education technology, which generates data that officials say can make schools more of a target for hackers, also worsens an attack’s effects when instructional tools are rendered useless by internet outages.

Schools are attractive targets because they hold sensitive data and provide critical public services, according to the FBI, which said in a written statement that perpetrators include criminals motivated by profit, juvenile pranksters and possibly foreign governments. Attacks against schools have become common, the FBI said, but it is impossible to know how frequently they occur because many go unreported to law enforcement when data is not compromised.

Attacks often have forced districts to pull the plug on smart boards, student laptops and other internet-powered tools.

Schools in the Florida Keys took themselves offline for several days last September after a district employee discovered a malware attack. Monroe County schools Superintendent Mark Porter said teachers had to do things differently but adapted quickly…

The 2,000-student Coventry Local School District in Ohio had to close schools in May as staff worked to fight a virus of that had infected the network. The FBI helped to guide the district through the recovery and offered assistance on best practices…

In North Dakota, where a third of schools statewide were hit with a malware attack last year, it was traced to North Korea, although it’s unclear if that country was the origin of the attack or just the location of a device that was used as a stepping stone, according to Sean Wiese, the state’s chief information security officer.

Categories Education Reform, Technology, Computers

FBI Raids Home of Charter School Leader and Seizes Records of Failed School

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
8

The FBI and other federal agencies raided the home of the former director of a Los Angeles charter school that was recently closed by the district due to fiscal mismanagement. The Los Angeles school board voted to close Community Preparatory Academy last April due to ongoing mismanagement.

Federal law enforcement agents have seized records from the home of the former director of Community Preparatory Academy, a Los Angeles charter school that recently closed amid allegations of fiscal mismanagement.

The raid was carried out Tuesday morning by several agencies working in conjunction, including the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Service and the U.S. Secret Service with assistance from the FBI. Also taking part was the Los Angeles Unified School District through its inspector general….

The district repeatedly sent warning notices over issues such as minimally qualified teachers, inadequate teacher training, misassignment of teachers outside their subject area and a high ratio of substitutes, the report stated.

Some of the financial difficulties stemmed from a slow start. In the first year of its five-year run, school leaders recruited fewer than 80 students, throwing CPA into deficit spending from the get-go.

The school enrolled 338 students. The district accused it of padding its enrollment and other abuses. Questions were also raised about conflicts of interest and payments to the director’s husband. The director had previously run another charter that closed. (Culture and Language Academy of Sucess).

The closed school had received $575,00 from the federal Charter Schools Program, $433,000 from the state to pay rent, $338,000 from the state facilities fund for co-location fees, and $250,000 from the state Charter School Revolving Loan Fund. A grand total of $1.6 million wasted.

Despite the school’s multiple inadequacies and repeated warnings of violations, state law prevented closing it down until the charter came up for renewal.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization

New Bedford, Mass: A Bad Deal that Puts a Charter School First

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2019 //
16

 

 

Chris Hendricks, State Representative for the 11th Bristol District in Massachusetts, explains why he opposed a deal to open a second campus for a charter school in New Bedford. 

He writes:

THE PROPOSED charter school expansion plan crafted by New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, Alma del Mar charter school, and state education Commissioner Jeff Riley earlier this year was simply too risky for New Bedford. After reading the memorandum of understanding (MOU), which became public in March of 2019, I saw this as a bad deal.

This plan was a perceived as a compromise, which would have allowed Alma, which already operates a charter school in New Bedford, to open a second school with 450 seats, instead of its sought-after 1,188 seats. New Bedford, in turn, would have to provide Alma with a school building, free of charge. This new charter school, Alma II, would enroll children from the adjacent neighborhood only, as opposed to enrolling through the citywide lottery, which state law currently requires. If this proposal fell apart, the state education commissioner would grant Alma 594 seats through the traditional enrollment system and New Bedford would not be required to give a school building to Alma.

This is one of the strangest deals ever.

Under this agreement, a student living in the proposed neighborhood zone would, by default, be assigned to the charter school. That fact, alone, is jaw-dropping. But it gets worse. According to the MOU, no student would be guaranteed the option of going to a public school. Instead, all requests to attend a public school would require “the approval of the [New Bedford Public Schools] Superintendent.” In what world is it acceptable to tell a child they have to go to a privately-run charter school?

The MOU also mandates that the superintendent consider “Alma’s target enrollment and growth plan” when pondering a student’s request to attend a public school. Call me crazy, but I would prefer that the superintendent consider the interests of the child, not the interests of a privately-run charter school. Sadly, the MOU says nothing about what’s best for the child when considering requests to attend a public school. The superintendent can only consider what’s best for Alma II. Can you imagine the superintendent telling a child they have to go to a charter school because Alma II’s “plan” depends on it? Is this how we want New Bedford managing the education of our public school students?

No “waiting list” at Alma II. Just a promise that it takes the place of the public school.

Charter school giveaway alert!

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

Politico: Trump’s Schedule for Today

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2019 //
35

Politico posts Trump’s daily schedule. He usually leaves the morning free for watching TV and tweeting (executive time). He usually has a lunch appointment with Pence, Pompeo, or another of his trusted aides. He occasionally attends a ceremony where he gives an award.

Today he has no plans other than to fly to a rally in the late afternoon.

TRUMP’S WEDNESDAY — The president will leave the White House at 4:45 p.m. en route to Greenville, N.C. He will arrive at the Williams Arena at 6:20 p.m. and deliver remarks at a political rally at 7 p.m.Trump will leave the arena at 8:15 p.m. to return to Washington

With so much time on his hands and nothing to do, he has a lot to brood about. He probably wishes he was golfing. It’s so boring being president. At least with a few tweets, he can get everyone stirred up and talking about his favorite subject: himself. Me! Me! Me! He wants to be a worm in your brain and make sure you think of nothing and no one but him.

 

Categories Education Reform
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