Archives for category: Education Reform
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At the NPE Conference, I Explain Who We Are and What We Do

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2017 //
1

The Network for Public Education just held its fourth annual conference in Oakland, California, on October 14-15.

It was a fabulous conference, with great speakers, roundtables, panels, and camaraderie.

I opened the conference on October 14. I introduced our wonderful board and staff (we have 1.5 staff members and hundreds of amazing volunteers).

I described what we are for and what we oppose.

If you agree with us, please join, donate whatever you can, and help us continue our grassroots efforts to strengthen and support public education.

In the days ahead, I will post all the keynote addresses. They were fantastic.

If you knew how inspiring these two days were, you will want to join us next year. I can’t give the location yet, but we will meet in the Midwest.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Childhood, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Testing

URGENT: Pennsylvania Legislators Rush to Enact Vouchers, Take Money from YOUR Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2017 //
28

Peter Greene writes here about a sneaky effort in the Pennsylvania legislature to push through a voucher bill without public hearings. Republicans following the DeVos script want to raid public school funds and transfer your tax dollars to unaccountable private and religious schools and for a variety of other purposes (in one state in the west, a parent used the “education savings account voucher” to pay for an abortion, another parent bought school supplies, returned them, and bought the family a big-screen television).

If you live in Pennsylvania, contact Your State Senator NOW.

Greene writes:

“Tomorrow morning, the Senate Education Committee will be once again considering a bill to promote vouchers across the state of Pennsylvania, and to pay for them by stripping money from public schools. If you’re in Pennsylvania, drop what you’re doing and call your Senator today.

“SB 2, Education Savings Accounts for Students in Underperforming Schools, sets up vouchers with no oversight and an extremely broad criterion for how the vouchers can be spent. According to the official summary, voucher money may be spent on

1) Tuition and fees at a participating private school;
2) Payment for a licensed or accredited tutor;
3) Fees for nationally norm-referenced tests and similar exams;
4) Industry certifications;
5) Curriculum and textbooks; and
6) Services to special education students such as occupational, speech, and behavioral therapies.

“So anything from private school tuition to buying books for home schooling to sending a child to massage therapist school.

“Money can be carried over from one year to the next, and if there’s still some left at graduation time, the money may be used for higher education costs.”

Districts like Philadelphia, already operating on a bare bones budget, will lose money. So will every other district.

“This bill is bad news, and would have an immediate and damaging effect on school finances across the state. It is an attack on public education. And conservatives really shouldn’t be fans, either– this bill provides zero accountability, and our tax dollars disappear down a black hole where we have no say and no knowledge of how they are spent. A family could decide that it would be educational for Junior to go to Disney World, and your tax dollars would pay for it…

“This is not the first time someone has tried to push a voucher bill, and it won’t be the last. But it is time, once again, for defenders of public education to hit the phones. Even if your senator is not among those who will act on the bill tomorrow, chances are good that he’ll be looking at it a bit later. Let him know that stripping funds from public schools in order to fund unregulated oversight-free vouchers is not okay.”

The research has been accumulating in recent years that vouchers don’t produce better education and often produce worse education. Increasingly, vouchers go to students already enrolled in private schools.

Citizens of Pennsylvania, get active. Stop vouchers! Stop DeVos! Save Your public schools!

Categories Education Reform

Virginia: A Busload of Volunteers from Manhattan Went Door to Door for Northam!

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2017 //
4

I received the following note from a Virginia public school parent:

“Pleasant surprise today when we went to canvass for the pro-public education Democratic team of Ralph Northam, Justin Fairfax, Mark Herring & Danica Roem in VA13 Prince William County….a bus load of volunteers from New York City! They knocked on 549 doors!

“#ManhattantoManassas”

This is the first statewide election since the 2016 election.

It is widely seen as a referendum on Trump, since Lt. Governor Northam’s opponent is running as a Trump devotee. His big issue is Confederate statues.

Northam is running as a champion of public education, the environment, gun safety, affordable healthcare for all, justice and equality for all Virginians.

It’s time to restore American values of fairness, justice, equality, and decency.

If you can’t go to Virginia and knock on doors, send a donation to help turn America into America again, a land of hope, not fear.

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Categories Education Reform, Supporting public schools, Virginia

The Death of the Credible Think Tank

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2017 //
51

I meant to post this article when it first appeared, but it got lost in my inbox.

It is a very important read. I worked for the Brookings Institution for two years in the mid-1990s, after working in the first Bush administration. I got to know most of the D.C. think tanks. They have a huge influence on federal policy, because they put on dog-and-pony shows with experts, and Congressional aides pay attention to their reports, studies, and conferences.

The original idea of the think tank, as Judis explains, is that it would be free of partisan influence. Ha!

How times change!

The “think tanks” of D.C. today are influenced by partisanship and by corporate money.

This was brought out into the open when the New America Foundation fired Barry Lynn and his “Open Markets” project. His criticism of the mega-tech monopolies hit too close to home, inasmuch as Eric Schmidt of Google is one of New America’s biggest funders. Apparently Lynn could not provide assurances that he would not embarrass Google, and he was dismissed. (I was on the board of the New America Foundation. I was outspoken, as is my way. I was asked to leave the board. As I have said before, I have been kicked out of some of the finest organizations in D.C. and elsewhere.)

Judis writes:

In fact, one can connect the events at New America to the transformation of American think tanks over the past century. The term “think tank” didn’t appear until the Kennedy administration, which relied heavily on Rand Corporation research, but these policy groups and research institutes date from 1916, when philanthropist Robert Brookings established the Institute for Government Research, which later became known as the Brookings Institution. Robert Brookings was one of a group of very wealthy businessmen who had become convinced that through the application of social science, government policies could be devised that would stem the rising conflict between the classes and parties and also achieve world peace. They were Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson progressives in the broadest sense of the term.

Brookings wanted a research institute that was “free from any political or pecuniary interest.” The scholars didn’t raise their own money, but were employed like university faculty. In founding the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Andrew Carnegie went farther: In 1910, he endowed the new institution with bonds that he hoped would allow it to forego fundraising entirely. Other groups that began during those first decades included the Council on Foreign Relations, the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation), the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Committee for Economic Development.

The groups attained a reputation for intellectual independence. When coal company officials complained in 1933 to Brookings’ first president, classical economist Robert Moulton, about a study recommending their nationalization, Moulton responded, “We are concerned only in finding out what will promote the general welfare.” That reputation lasted into the 1960s, when, under John F. Kennedy, think tanks were conspicuously welcomed in the policy debate. But Robert Brookings’s early model of political disinterestedness and scientific objectivity began to erode soon afterward.

Three developments contributed to this change: Beginning in the 1940s, and in earnest in the early 1970s, conservative Republicans and business groups established think tanks and policy groups that had a specific economic and/or factional purpose. Businessmen dissatisfied with the New Deal created the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1943. In 1964, it served as the policy arm of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing campaign for president, and in the ‘70s became the preferred think tank of the Fortune 500 and of center-right Republicans, even when, for appearance’s sake, AEI kept around a few liberal researchers.

The Heritage Institution was founded in 1973 as a sophisticated business lobby (its first president came from the National Association of Manufacturers) that, unlike the more scholarly AEI, actively worked on Capitol Hill to develop legislation. It became a key player in the growth of Republican conservatism. Other groups included the American Council for Capital Formation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and later “action tanks” like Citizens for a Sound Economy and its successors FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.

Together, these business and conservative Republican groups attempted to take advantage of the reputation created by the older think tanks: They demanded attention for their “experts” in the media—on op-ed pages and, later, TV news shows—but they were in fact the kind of political organization or business lobbies that Robert Brookings and Andrew Carnegie had wanted to avoid at all costs. These groups’ scholarly output, particularly from a group like Heritage, was nugatory. They debased the coinage of the older thinking. And their model of partisan intervention and policy briefs spread leftward to groups like the Center for American Progress, which is something of a Democratic version of the Heritage Foundation.

My experience at Brookings in the mid-1990s was wonderful. I loved working there. The scholars were real scholars, and there was no partisan bias. Many or most of the scholars were tasked with raising their own funding, despite the hefty endowment at Brookings. I found myself constantly in a learning mode as a Senior Fellow because I was able to attend daily seminars about every sort of domestic and foreign issue. It was like being in college without any students. I started an annual conference of education issue, and while I was a conservative (at the time), I also included people from different camps and different parties to talk about every issue.

After I returned to New York City in 1995, I continued to manage the annual conferences for another decade. Tom Loveless picked up the conferences for a while after 2005, then they disappeared as he preferred to do his own research.

Then came my infamous firing in 2012. After the 2008 election, Brookings brought in the George W. Bush education research director, Grover Whitehurst. He was an advisor to Romney in 2012. I wrote an article slamming Romney on education in 2012 and that same day received an email from Whitehurst telling me that I was terminated as of that date as a Senior Fellow (unpaid) at Brookings. The reason: I was “inactive.” That was funny, because my most recent book was a national best seller.

It is hard to think of a “think tank” in D.C. that is truly nonpartisan and independent. They depend too much on corporate funding. They are over-identified with political parties. Every one of them should bear a warning.

How often have you read that the Center for American Progress is “left” or is the Democratic equivalent of the Heritage Foundation? Judis says that in this article. Yet we know that CAP is crazy for charter schools and has a hard time distinguishing its education values from those of Betsy DeVos. Well, at least they don’t support vouchers! But they use many of the same talking points.

The closest think tank to the original Democratic party of labor, minorities, poor and working people is the Economic Policy Institute.

The rest of the party has simply blown off the base of the party and looks to Wall Street and the billionaires to fill their coffers, then wonders where the base went and why they have lost so many state elections over the past decade.

Categories Education Reform

How to Decipher and Detect Fake News

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2017 //
14

Jack Hassard wrote about the use of social media to spread fake news. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have become facilitators of fake news.

We know it is there. What can we do about it?

This is a very good analysis by a group of scholars at the Stanford History Education Group about civic reasoning, which explains how to avoid being hoaxed by fake news.

The questions that must always be present in any discussion is: How do you know? Who said so? What is the source? How reliable is the source? Can you confirm this information elsewhere? What counts as reliable evidence?

Many people use Wikipedia as a reliable source, but Wikipedia is crowdsourced and is not authoritative. I recall some years back when I gave a lecture in North Carolina that was named in honor of a distinguished senator of the state. The Wikipedia entry said he was a Communist, as were members of his staff. This was obviously the work of a troll. But it might not be obvious to a student researching a paper.

They write:

“Fake news is certainly a problem. Sadly, however, it’s not our biggest. Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and PolitiFact can help us detect canards invented by enterprising Macedonian teenagers,3 but the Internet is filled with content that defies labels like “fake” or “real.” Determining who’s behind information and whether it’s worthy of our trust is more complex than a true/false dichotomy.

“For every social issue, there are websites that blast half-true headlines, manipulate data, and advance partisan agendas. Some of these sites are transparent about who runs them and whom they represent. Others conceal their backing, portraying themselves as grassroots efforts when, in reality, they’re front groups for commercial or political interests. This doesn’t necessarily mean their information is false. But citizens trying to make decisions about, say, genetically modified foods should know whether a biotechnology company is behind the information they’re reading. Understanding where information comes from and who’s responsible for it are essential in making judgments of credibility.

“The Internet dominates young people’s lives. According to one study, teenagers spend nearly nine hours a day online.4 With optimism, trepidation, and, at times, annoyance, we’ve witnessed young people’s digital dexterity and astonishing screen stamina. Today’s students are more likely to learn about the world through social media than through traditional sources like print newspapers.5 It’s critical that students know how to evaluate the content that flashes on their screens.

“Unfortunately, our research at the Stanford History Education Group demonstrates they don’t.* Between January 2015 and June 2016, we administered 56 tasks to students across 12 states. (To see sample items, go to http://sheg.stanford.edu (link is external).) We collected and analyzed 7,804 student responses. Our sites for field-testing included middle and high schools in inner-city Los Angeles and suburban schools outside of Minneapolis. We also administered tasks to college-level students at six different universities that ranged from Stanford University, a school that rejects 94 percent of its applicants, to large state universities that admit the majority of students who apply.

“When thousands of students respond to dozens of tasks, we can expect many variations. That was certainly the case in our experience. However, at each level—middle school, high school, and college—these variations paled in comparison to a stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people’s ability to reason about information on the Internet can be summed up in two words: needs improvement.

“Our “digital natives”† may be able to flit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they’re easily duped. Our exercises were not designed to assign letter grades or make hairsplitting distinctions between “good” and “better.” Rather, at each level, we sought to establish a reasonable bar that was within reach of middle school, high school, or college students. At each level, students fell far below the bar.”

They offer specific examples of hoaxes to show how easily people are duped.

They conclude:

“The senior fact checker at a national publication told us what she tells her staff: “The greatest enemy of fact checking is hubris”—that is, having excessive trust in one’s ability to accurately pass judgment on an unfamiliar website. Even on seemingly innocuous topics, the fact checker says to herself, “This seems official; it may be or may not be. I’d better check.”

“The strategies we recommend here are ways to fend off hubris. They remind us that our eyes deceive, and that we, too, can fall prey to professional-looking graphics, strings of academic references, and the allure of “.org” domains. Our approach does not turn students into cynics. It does the opposite: it provides them with a dose of humility. It helps them understand that they are fallible.

“The web is a sophisticated place, and all of us are susceptible to being taken in. Like hikers using a compass to make their way through the wilderness, we need a few powerful and flexible strategies for getting our bearings, gaining a sense of where we’ve landed, and deciding how to move forward through treacherous online terrain. Rather than having students slog through strings of questions about easily manipulated features, we should be teaching them that the World Wide Web is, in the words of web-literacy expert Mike Caulfield, “a web, and the way to establish authority and truth on the web is to use the web-like properties of it.”13 This is what professional fact checkers do.

“It’s what we should be teaching our students to do as well.”

Categories Civics, Education Reform, History, Research

Ohio: Fordham Knocks Stephen Dyer for His Criticism of Charters; Dyer Strikes Back

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2017 //
14

Stephen Dyer is a Senior Fellow at Innovation Ohio and a former legislator. He has scrutinized state data exhaustively and reported that district schools outperform charter schools by every measure: test scores, graduation rates, achievement gaps. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute didn’t agree with his conclusions. Although it claims to be a think tank, it is in fact an advocacy group for school choice.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is technically based in Dayton (where the late Mr. Fordham lived) is actually based in D.C., is an authorizer of charter schools in Ohio. Authorizers are paid a commission on every student who enrol in charter schools so it is a lucrative role. I was a board member at TBF and an original founder. I opposed the decision to become an authorizer because I thought that it conflicted with the role of a think tank, which should be free to critique or praise anyone without fear or favor. I was outvoted.

In this post, Stephen Dyer responds to TBF criticism.

He explains that every public school in Ohio receives less money so charters can be funded.

“According to the final state payment made to school districts from June, there were 1.7 million students in Ohio set to receive $7.95 billion in total state aid. That’s works out to $4,657 (I’m rounding here) for every student in local public school districts.

“Then come charter schools.

“According to the report, $898 million left school districts last year for charters (a district-by-district breakdown I received from the Ohio Department of Education puts that tally at $935 million, so there’s that). Leaving with that funding were 113,613 students.

“So, after losing the funding and students to charter schools, the remaining 1.59 million children in Ohio school districts were set to receive $7.05 billion in state revenue, or $4,425 each.

“That means that the charter deduction costs every kid in Ohio school districts, on average, $231.51.

“This is why I compare charter school performance with school district performance. Because charter schools affect every kid in a school district. Profoundly. How profoundly? Let’s look at Columbus.

“Prior to the charter school deduction, every kid in Columbus City Schools is set to receive $4,559 in state funding. However, once the $145.65 million and 18,541 students are transferred to charter schools, the remaining 53,532 students who attend Columbus City School buildings receive $3,418 per pupil. That is a difference of $1,141.62. So charter schools cost students who are in Columbus City Schools about 1/4 of their state revenue. That’s every student in Columbus, regardless of wealth, race, or disability, Jamie.

“Every.

“Single.

“Student.

“So if this profound a change in state funding is going to happen for the 75 percent of children who remain in Columbus City Schools, or the 93 percent of children who remain in Ohio’s local public school districts, we’d better be damn sure it’s worth it. Is it worth removing $1,141.62 from kids in the best performing school in Columbus so thousands of kids can go to ECOT, for example (ECOT is the largest recipient of charter school transfer funding from Columbus)?

“I would say that’s a big, “No.”

“Now my friends at Fordham often complain that charters don’t get local revenue. And while that’s true, I fail to see how that justifies removing millions of state dollars from kids in local school districts. If the legislature believes in school choice so strongly, then set aside $260 million or so to make up for the lack of local revenue.

“Stop taking it from the 1.59 million kids who aren’t in charters.“

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Ohio, Privatization

Teacher: I Opted Out All My English Classes from Taking SBAC!

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2017 //
33

A daily reader and commenter who calls him/herself LeftCoastTeacher left the following comment:

I’m off topic, sorry, but I am excited.

Congratulate my students! I have just been able to Opt Out all my English classes from taking the SBAC Interim Assessments. I work in a district with criminals on the board and their deform appointees in administration, so the entire district is being forced to take the computer-based interim assessments made by the Smarter (dumber) (un)Balanced Assessment (not) Consortium (conspiracy), or SBAC. You know those interim tests are just a stepping stone toward Competency Based data collection taking over instruction time completely.

In California, schools and districts are required to inform parents of their right to Opt Out of state tests. So, I went to admin and asked for the form letter to parents before Back to School Night so I could ‘make sure parents are informed of their rights’. Admin said, Gulp. There was some back and forth about whether state law was in play for tests required by the district versus by the federal government. I insisted that California parents always have the right to have their children receive instruction instead of standardized testing, and always have the right to refuse having their children forced to sign in to a website that collects testing data.

I am being granted a waiver Out of the SBAC IAB’s. I get to instead design and implement my own formative assessments. We are going to read — together — some great, whole fiction and poetry (on paper), and write some essays about what we read. On paper. With pens. We will discuss the results — together — and learn from the experience. I won. My students won.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Opt Out, Standardized Testing

Lordy, Lordy! Bill Gates Has a New Idea. Run. Hide. Protect the Children and the Teachers

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2017 //
49

After two high-profile failures that he acknowledges, and one high-profile failure that he does not acknowledge, Bill Gates is ready to start reforming the schools of America again.

Valerie Strauss reports on his announcement here.

He jumped into school reform in 2000 with his plan to break up the nation’s high schools into small schools. He promised dramatic test score gains. It wasn’t a terrible idea, but it did not get the score gains he wanted, and he gathered the creme de la creme to his digs in Seattle in 2008 to announce that he was abandoning small schools. Valerie says he dumped $650 Million into that, but my own Research says it was $2 Billion.

His next obsession was evaluating teachers by the test scores of their teachers. He partnered with Arne Duncan on that; Arne made it a condition of Race to the Top funding. The ratings were criticized by the American Statistical Association, the National Academy of Education, AERA, and many individual scholars. But Duncan and Gates plowed ahead. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Post published the ratings of individual teachers. Duncan congratulated them for doing so. A teacher in Los Angeles committed suicide after his ratings were published. Gates gave out hundreds of millions to districts that adopted his evaluations. Hillsborough County, Florida, won $100 Million to apply Gates’ ideas about teaching, and the district exhausted its reserves and abandoned the plan. Gates paid up only $80 Million, and the district was left holding the bag.

Now Gates has given up on that idea, although many states are still sticking with it. Thousands of teachers and principals have been fired based on the ideas sold by Gates and Duncan, but that’s not of any interest to him.

The failure that Gates does not yet admit is the Common Core. He paid hundreds of millions for its development and promotion, and he still loves the idea of standardizing education. He refuses to accept that it’s dead man walking.

So what’s his new idea? I’m not really sure, so I will quote Valerie. My hunch is that he is still pushing Common Core, but it is not clear.

He said 85% of the money will go to public schools and the rest to charter schools. Knowing that Gates is a charter zealot, one must wonder what medicine (or poison) he is offering.

“He said most of the new money — about 60 percent — will be used to develop new curriculums and “networks of schools” that work together to identify local problems and solutions, using data to drive “continuous improvement.” He said that over the next several years, about 30 such networks would be supported, though he didn’t describe exactly what they are. The first grants will go to high-needs schools and districts in six to eight states, which went unnamed.

“Though there wasn’t a lot of detail on exactly how the money would be spent, Gates, a believer in using big data to solve problems, repeatedly said foundation grants given to schools as part of this new effort would be driven by data. “Each [school] network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching and data collection and analysis,” he said, an emphasis that is bound to worry critics already concerned about the amount of student data already collected and the way it is used for high-stakes decisions.”

What is he up to? Big data? Common Core? Data mining?

I have often said and written that if he really wanted to help children, he would open health clinics in their schools. He would provide doctors to supply good maternal care to pregnant women. He would not tell teachers how to teach or get involved in evaluating teachers or writing curriculum. He would stop pretending he knows how to reform education and do something that is actually needed.

After 17 years of failure, has he learned nothing?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Florida Squanders $1 Billion on “Schools Without Rules”

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2017 //
12

This is a story about vouchers in Florida, where the state constitution forbids the use of public funds “directly or indirectly” for religious schools. Message to school-children: Ignore the state Constitution. It is meaningless.

The Florida state Constitution forbids the use of public funds in religious schools.

Article 1, Section 3 of the state Constitution says:

“Religious Freedom

“There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety. No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.”

Jeb Bush wanted to amend that language so Florida could provide vouchers for religious schools. So, he got an amendment on the ballot in 2012 called the Religious Freedom Amendment, or Amendment 8. What clever wording! How many people would vote against “religious freedom”?

Enough to defeat Amendment 8. Fifty-five point five percent (55.5%) of voters said NO to vouchers.

But that didn’t stop Jeb and his friends from cooking up ways to bypass the State Constitution and the clear will of the people.

They proceeded to develop voucher programs masquerading as something else: tax credits, scholarships, whatever.

The Orlando Sentinel just concluded an investigation of Florida’s voucher programs and concluded it is an unregulated sector that enrolls 140,000 students and costs taxpayers $1 Billion per year. All in a state whose Constitution prohibits vouchers and whose voters opposed changing the Constitution.

The series begins like this:

“Private schools in Florida will collect nearly $1 billion in state-backed scholarships this year through a system so weakly regulated that some schools hire teachers without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls and falsify fire-safety and health records.

“The limited oversight of Florida’s scholarship programs allowed a principal under investigation for molesting a student at his Brevard County school to open another school under a new name and still receive the money, an Orlando Sentinel investigation found.

“Another Central Florida school received millions of dollars in scholarships, sometimes called school vouchers, for nearly a decade even though it repeatedly violated program rules, including hiring staff with criminal convictions.

“Despite the problems, the number of children using Florida’s scholarship programs has more than tripled in the past decade to 140,000 students this year at nearly 2,000 private schools. If students using Florida Tax Credit, McKay and Gardiner scholarships made up their own school district, they would be Florida’s sixth-largest in student population, just ahead of the Jacksonville area.

“The scholarships are good. The problem is the school,” said Edda Melendez, an Osceola County mother. “They need to start regulating the private schools.”

“Melendez complained to the state last year about a private school in Kissimmee. The school promised specialized help for her 5-year-old twin sons, who have autism, but one of their teachers was 21 years old and didn’t have a bachelor’s degree or experience with autistic children.

“I feel bad for all the parents who didn’t know what’s going on there,” she told the state.

“Last year, nearly a quarter of all state scholarship students — 30,000 — attended 390 private schools in Central Florida. The schools received $175.6 million worth of the scholarships, which are for children from low-income families and those with disabilities.

“During its investigation, the Sentinel visited more than 30 private schools in Orange, Seminole, Lake, Osceola and Brevard counties, reviewed thousands of pages of public records and interviewed dozens of parents, private school operators, state officials and policy experts.

“Unlike public schools, private schools, including those that accept the state scholarships, operate free from most state rules. Private school teachers and principals, for example, are not required to have state certification or even college degrees.

“One Orlando school, which received $500,000 from the public programs last year, has a 24-year-old principal still studying at a community college.

“Nor do private schools need to follow the state’s academic standards. One curriculum, called Accelerated Christian Education or ACE, is popular in some private schools and requires students to sit at partitioned desks and fill out worksheets on their own for most of the day, with little instruction from teachers or interaction with classmates.

“And nearly anything goes in terms of where private school classes meet. The Sentinel found scholarship students in the same office building as Whozz Next Bail Bonds on South Orange Blossom Trail, in a Colonial Drive day-care center that reeked of dirty diapers and in a school near Winter Park that was facing eviction and had wires dangling from a gap in the office ceiling and a library with no books, computers or furniture.

“However, scholarships can be appealing because some private schools offer rigorous academics on modern campuses, unique programs or small classes that allow students more one-on-one attention, among other benefits. Bad experiences at public schools also fuel interest in scholarships.

“Parents opting out of public schools often cite worries about large campuses, bullying, what they call inadequate services for special-needs children and state-required testing. Escaping high-stakes testing is such a scholarship selling point that one private school administrator refers to students as “testing refugees.”

“But the Sentinel found problems with Florida’s programs, which make up the largest school voucher and scholarship initiative in the nation:

► At least 19 schools submitted documents since 2012 that misled state officials about fire or health inspections, including some with forged inspectors’ names or altered dates. Eight of the schools still received scholarship money with the state’s blessing.

► Upset parents sometimes complain to the state, assuming it has some say over academic quality at these private schools. It does not. “They can conduct their schools in the manner they believe to be appropriate,” reads a typical response from the Florida Department of Education to a parent.

► The education department has stopped some schools from taking scholarships when they violated state rules, from the one in Fort Lauderdale led by a man convicted of stealing $20,000 to a school in Gainesville caught depositing scholarship checks for students no longer enrolled. But the department often gives schools second chances and sometimes doesn’t take action even when alerted to a problem.

► Florida’s approach is so hands-off that a state directory lists private schools that can accommodate students with special needs — such as autism — without evidence the schools’ staff is trained to handle disabilities.”

Since Betsy DeVos considers Florida to be a national model, you should read this series and learn what’s heading your way and stop it before it gets into your state.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/os-schools-without-rules-story-gallery-storygallery.html

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Education Reform, Ethics, Florida, Lies

Gary Rubinstein: The Collapse Of Tennessee’s Achievement School District

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2017 //
22

Gary Rubinstein has been tracking the progress—and the hubris—of the Tennessee Achievement School District. The ASD was created with millions drawn from Tennessee’s $500 Million Race to the Top Grant, the first in the nation. The basic idea was that the ASD would create a special district for the state’s lowest performing schools, turn them over to charter operators, and within precisely five years, these schools would be “catapulted”into the top 25% of the schools in the state.

The first cohort of six schools were in the bottom 5% of schools in the state.

“Two years into the five-year mission, the superintendent at the time, TFA alum Chris Barbic, declared in an interview that of the original six schools, two were on target to get to the top 25% in five years while one of the six schools, Brick Church Elementary, was on a trajectory to reach the goal after just four years.

“Three years into the five-year mission, the improvements that he had based these projections on did not continue and Barbic was saying that they underestimated how difficult this would be, even admitting that the ‘immigrant poverty’ he worked with as a charter school founder in Houston is very different than the ‘generational poverty’ he works with in Tennessee.

“Four years into the five-year mission, Barbic resigned from the ASD, citing among other things, his health as he had recently had a heart attack. He soon got hired by the John Arnold foundation to work on education issues for them.”

In the fifth year, the state testing system was messed up by technical glitches, so there were no scores. So the ASD got six years to work its magic.

Now the scores are out, Gary analyzed the results, and one thing is clear: the ASD was an abysmal failure.

Of the original 6 ASD schools, one is in the bottom 7%, the rest are still in the bottom 5% with two of them in the bottom 1%.

This is what is called a total and complete failure. It was not “for the kids.” It was for the ego-gratification of arrogant deformers.

Gary writes:

“There are actually other states considering starting their own ASDs, I just read that Mississippi is working on it. Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada already have them in the works. There was one in Michigan which folded and there is still the original one in New Orleans which continues to post awful test results.”

Most of the ASD schools were in Memphis. Jeannie Kaplan reported earlier today that author David Osborne was in Denver touting Memphis as a reform Success. Six out of six of the state’s lowest performing schools are still the state’s lowest performing schools. If this is success, what does failure look like?

The definition of a reformer today: Never look at evidence, never admit failure, never learn anything new, just keep pushing privatization, lower standards for teachers, and high-stakes testing. Fail, fail, fail, and do it again.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Memphis, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee
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