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Jan Resseger: Cory Booker Wants to Privilege the Few, to the Detriment of the Many

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2019 //
9

In this post, Jan Resseger challenges Cory Booker’s newly rediscovered support for privately managed charter schools. She says “that school choice privileges the few at the expense of the many.” That’s not quite right. If the charter school is staffed with inexperienced, under qualified teachers, if the charter is operated by grifters intent on profit, if the charter exercises harsh disciplines and has high suspension and dropout rates, if the charter lacks the financial stability to keep its doors open, then the children who enroll in them are by no means “privileged.” Instead they are marks, dupes, collateral damage.

She writes:

The essential point to remember about school choice—whether it is a system of private school tuition vouchers or privately operated but publicly funded charter schools—is that school choice privileges the few at the expense of the many.

The scale of the provision of K-12 education across our nation can best be achieved by the systemic, public provision of education. Rewarding social entrepreneurship in the startup of one charter school at a time cannot possibly serve the needs of the mass of our children and adolescents. In a new, September 2019 enrollment summary, the National Center for Education Statistics reports: “Between around 2000 and 2016, traditional public school… enrollment increased to 47.3 million (1 percent increase), charter school enrollment grew to 3.0 million students (from 0.4 million), and the number of homeschooled students nearly doubled to 1.7 million. Private school enrollment fell 4 percent, to 5.8 million students.”

Booker argues for well-regulated and high-performing charter schools. The problem he fails to acknowledge is that charter schools were established beginning in the mid-1990s by state legislatures smitten with the idea of innovation and experimentation. None of these legislatures, to my knowledge, provided adequate oversight of the academic quality of the schools, and none imposed protections to guarantee the stewardship of public tax dollars.  Malfeasance, corruption, and poor performance plague charter schools across the states. Charter schools have now been established by state law across 45 states where stories of outrageous fiscal and academic scandals fill local newspapers. The Network for Public Education tracks the myriad examples of outrageous fraud and mismanagement by charter schools. Because advocates for school privatization and the entrepreneurs in the for-profit charter management companies regularly donate generously to the political coffers of state legislators—the very people responsible for passing laws to regulate this out-of-control sector—adequate oversight has proven impossible.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Cruelty, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Michigan: State Takeover of Detroit Schools was a “Costly Mistake”

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2019 //
7

Koby Levin of Chalkbeat reports that a study of the state takeover of Detroit’s public schools–which lasted for 15 years–was “a costly mistake.”

The state was supposed to solve intractable problems that elected school officials in Detroit could not.

It made things worse, according to a newly released report on the 15 years during which the Detroit school district was largely controlled by state-appointed officials.

The study, which was commissioned by the current school board, found a pattern of “startling mismanagement” in academic and financial matters whose consequences continue to weigh on the district’s future.

While some had hoped that the report would eventually lead to a lawsuit against the state, that seems unlikely. Instead, it provides a 172-page confirmation of what many Detroiters have argued for years: that installing state officials in place of the elected school board wasn’t enough to make the district’s problems disappear.

“The legacy of emergency management coupled with the continuing effect of inequitable school funding, will inevitably cause the District to hit a ceiling and impede its current progress toward a complete turnaround of traditional public education in Detroit,” the seven board members wrote in a statement in response to the report.

As state officials closed dozens of schools, they failed to adequately maintain the properties — “a costly mistake,” the report found, “as many of the vacant buildings have been stripped and/or vandalized.”

Tom Watkins, who was state superintendent from 2001 to 2005, said there was little hope of improving the district’s financial situation simply through effective management — not without solving underlying issues with declining enrollmentand Michigan’s school funding structure.

“It’s like trying to bail out a sinking yacht with a thimble,” he said.

The state threw everything it could think of at the struggling district–emergency management, charters galore–but not the funding needed.

 

Categories Detroit, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Michigan

Eric Blanc: Why Little Rock Teachers Went on Strike

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
3

If you want to understand what is happening in the Little Rock school District today, read Eric Blanc’s article. 

Eric Blanc has covered every one of the teachers’ strikes since the West Virginia strike in the spring of 2018. Now he is in Little Rock, where he interviewed teachers who went on strike yesterday to protest the State Board of Education’s heavy-handed control of the district and its decision to strip school employees of collective bargaining rights.

Teachers are outraged that the State Board of Education, which took control of the district in 2015, utterly failed to improve student outcomes, yet refuses to relinquish control to a democratically elected board. Teachers believe that the state wants to resegregate the district.

Blanc writes:

Little Rock teachers today are not demanding raises for themselves, but an end to the state’s push to resegregate schools, its takeover of their district, its decertification of their union, and its disrespect for school support staff. As second grade teacher Jenni White explains, “this is literally about standing up for our kids and not dividing our community…

The immediate roots of this week’s action go back to January 2015 when the Arkansas State Board of Education announced that it was taking over Little Rock’s schools due to low standardized test scores. By all accounts, the ensuing state takeover failed to accomplish its nominal goal of improving stability and educational opportunities for the town’s low-performing schools. Yet rather than return Little Rock School District to local control in 2020 as promised, the state board instead proposed in September of this year that it would continue to oversee so-called “F”-rated schools, those with the lowest test scores.

Since all but one of the “F” schools were in black and brown neighborhoods south of I-630, teachers and parents saw this an attempt to create a two-tier school system. “The plan was blatantly racist, it separated the haves and the have notes,” Jenni White told me.

In a dramatic protest on the evening of October 9, thousands of teachers, support staff, students, and community members congregated on the steps of Central High, where the Little Rock Nine had famously confronted the National Guard decades earlier. Teresa Knapp Gordon, president of the Little Rock Education Association (LREA), closed the rally with the following declaration: “Either we accept segregation, or we stand and fight.”

This public outpouring forced the state board to change tactics. At the next evening’s contentious Arkansas Board of Education meeting, it dropped the proposal to split Little Rock’s school district. But surprisingly, the board then immediately proceeded to cease recognition of the LREA as the educators’ representative, thereby scrapping the last remaining collective bargaining agreement for school workers in Arkansas. The decision was blatant retaliation against not only teachers but also Little Rock’s school support staff, who were in the midst of negotiating a pay raise.

Next, the board issued a draft “Memorandum of Understanding” explaining that instead of returning full local control to the school board set to be elected in November 2020, the state would appoint a parallel “advisory board” that could veto local decisions. The Memorandum also insists on closing up to eleven neighborhood schools — which would thereby accelerate privatization, since state law gives charters first access to any vacant school. Stacey McAdoo, a teacher at Central High, told Labor Notes, “they are trying to charterize the [district] like what happened in New Orleans and disenfranchise people and make a separate school system out of the areas that are primarily Black and Latino.”

As in so many other states across the country, this offensive against the labor movement, public education, and working-class communities of color is being directly funded by billionaires. And it’s not just any billionaires: Little Rock teachers and students are up against the Arkansas-based Waltons, founders of Walmart and the richest familyin America.

The Walton family: the Death Star of Public Education. The ingrates who graduated from Arkansas public schools but now want to destroy them and public schools everywhere. Rich and shameless.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Little Rock, Resistance, Segregation, Teachers, Unions

Steven Singer: Pennsylvania Legislature Should Reject the Vulture Voucher Bill!

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2019 //
5

Steven Singer writes about what is wrong with Speaker of the House Mike Turzai’s bill to authorize vouchers for the underfunded public schools of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: In a word, everything!

He writes:

The best way to help a struggling public school is to cannibalize it.

 

 

At least that’s what Betsy DeVos thinks – and so does her Pennsylvania puppet Mike Turzai.

 

 

The Republican Speaker of the state House is expected to propose a school voucher bill Monday that will treat Harrisburg Schools as nothing more than carrion fit for plunder by school privatization vultures.

Sure the district is in state receivership after decades of neglect and bad decisions by the elected school board.

But instead of helping the school and its students get back on their feet, Turzai proposes siphoning away as much as $8.5 million in state funding set aside for the school’s aide. Alternatively, that money would go to help offset some of the cost of sending Harrisburg students to private or parochial schools if they so desire.

However in lieu of any safeguards to make sure these children fleeing from the public system receive the same quality of services required by state law, Turzai’s bill goes out of its way to protect the vultures!

Under House Bill 1800, private or parochial schools won’t be held as accountable for how they spend the money they plunder from Harrisburg nor will it force them to enroll all comers like authentic public schools are required to do.

Specifically, non-public schools would be allowed to take public tax dollars but refuse any students they wished – based on gender, race, religion, even special educational needs.

 It’s bad policy and bad politics.

Essentially Turzai is proposing we swoop in and tear the district to pieces – for its own good.

The bill would force state taxpayers to pay for half the cost of the voucher program – essentially making us shell out our hard earned money for two parallel education systems.

It’s unclear where the other half of the money would even come from that the state is supposed to match.

Thinking people know this is nonsense on so many levels. If the public schools have problems, there’s no reason to believe school vouchers hold the answer. After all, the best way to save yourself from drowning is to patch up the boat you’re already on. You shouldn’t jump to a lifeboat willy-nilly with no assurance that your escape craft is more seaworthy than the one you’re already sailing on.

And in fact, there is no evidence that voucher schools are better than authentic public schools.

Singer proceeds to review the evidence against vouchers. It is overwhelming. Vouchers do not help students or schools. They harm them. 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Failure, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Vouchers

Laura Chapman: The Disrupters Refuse to Slink Away Despite Massive Failure

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
9

Last night there was a grand event at the Kennedy Center where veterans of the Bush and Obama education world joined together to wring their hands about the crisis at hand. The crisis is not the mess they made of American education for the past 20 years. The crisis is that the tests are not hard enough, the punishments are not tough enough, and the nation needs to buckle down and keep on testing and firing and demanding more from everyone. Except them. Of course.

Our reader Laura Chapman explains what was behind the big party:

“I wanted to look past the PR for this one event. The event is a launch for a new campaign capitalizing on “stagnating” NAEP scores and persistent gaps among students “who have been underserved.”

“The reformists are calling for “evidence based” methods of teaching using only “high quality, standards-aligned, content-rich curriculum.” Suddenly these reformists think “deficits in content-knowledge” matter. But these reformists are really fans of the Common Core and have a lonh history of ignoring much else worthy of study, content in the arts and humanities for example.

“In addition to being sponsored by the Collaborative for Student Success, this “new literacy campaign” is sponsored by Achieve, The Alliance for Excellent Education, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Learning Heroes, Literacy Now, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Council on Teacher Quality, National Urban Alliance, National Urban League, Military Child Coalition, and The Education Trust. These have been supporters of the Common Core, and many love high-stakes tests.

“The Collaborative for Student Success is a multi-faced project of the New Venture Fund. It is supported by: Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. The website markets three of the Collaborative’s favorite math programs, but it also features “campaigns” of the Collaborative. Each campaign has a separate website. All campaigns are based on the premise that states are not living up to the requirements of ESSA. Truly, the sponsors of the Literacy Initiative are die-hard defenders of the Common Core and ESSA. Here are the camaigns in progress.

“A web-based “Assessment HQ” offers test scores and demographic breakouts for test scores “for more than half of states in grades 3-8.” This campaign is designed to claim that state assessments are not tough enough or fully reported to parents. The Collaborative scoops up state assessment results in math and ELA and puts these together in an interactive map. The Assessment HQ is actually sluggish and out of date. It is presenting data from the 2014-15 school year and it was designed to push PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests.

“The “Check State Plans” campaign offers ratings of the state plans for ESSA based on their strict conformity to ESSA. The Collaborative asked 45 reviewers to judge state plans, back in 2017, at about the same time that Bellwether Education Partners also put together a panel to review state ESSA plans. The Collaborative wanted to see “the following principles” honored in state plans. “Set the bar high for what students need to know and understand; Focus on closing the achievement gap in math and English; Ensure that parents and communities have access to meaningful data; Have a real plan for helping those schools that have been historically failing.”

“The “Educators for High Standards” campaign has offered about 12 fellowships to teachers willing to voice enthusiasm for ESSA, along with “partners” from the following groups, all known to push for high-stakes tests and the Common Core: The National Network of State Teachers of the Year, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, PARCC, Teach Plus, Student Achievement Partners (Achieve the Core), National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Hope Street Group, The New Teacher Project (TNTP), Teach for America, Center for Teacher Quality, and Educators4Excellece.
The” Military Families for High Standards” campaign features the work of advocates for schools serving military families. Among the resources is an article from the Center for American Progress titled “How the Common Core Improves Education for Military-Connected Children.”

“The Honesty Gap” campaign asserts that states must take NAEP’s definition of “proficiency” as the standard for judging the “honesty” in state tests. State tests that claim students are “proficient “are dishonest unless the state standard is the same as for NAEP tests. The “honesty gaps” for each state are shown on an interactive map. The explicit message is that schools are often lying to parents about student achievement. The website should be called Arne Duncan’s BS. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=246201831
The “Understanding ESSA” campaign provides news about USDE activities (up-to-date) and links to state actions that comply with ESSA.

The whole website is devoted to belligerent judgments of states, districts, and schools while bolstering advocacy groups who will insist on “strict fidelity” to ESSA in state plans.

These birds of a feather intent on repeating the misery of two decades of top down reform.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

William Mathis: What to Do with a Dead Horse? Beat It Even Harder.

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2019 //
21

William Mathis, a member of the Vermont Board of Education and managing director of the National Education Policy Center, reviews reactions to the dismal scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

The people who inflicted high-stakes testing insist that more and more and more testing is needed. More of the same policies that have already failed will surely work if we keep doing the same things for another generation or two.

The main perpetrator of the claim that we must “stay the (failing) course” is Arne Duncan, of course.

Mathis writes:

The latest round of flagellation of dead horse flesh has been provoked by the release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores. After 20 years of overall progress, many of the scores went down. While all groups improved over the long haul, the gaps between white and other racial groups varied over time but generally remained in place.[i] Education critics lament and proclaim, “It’s time to get tough! Let’s do some more of what didn’t work!” Meanwhile officials whisper measured words through steepled fingers saying they are “concerned,” that we must do more to ensure our students are well prepared to compete with China and “we have more work to do.” Still others claim that this exercise in numerology is helpful.

Put plainly, standardized tests have no meaningful relationship with economic development and they are poor definers of learning needs. Nevertheless, the NAEP is a valuable outside way of examining trends.

The scores dropped across the nation — which tells us one important thing. The causes are not found in local or state initiatives. Something bigger is at play. Since the scores themselves do not tell us why they are low, we have to look at broad contemporary events and circumstances. This means looking at the research and related social and historical events.

Such is the case with NAEP. The strongest predictor of standardized test scores is poverty.[ii] In this latest release, the biggest drops were among disadvantaged students. Sean Riordan at Stanford has compiled a data base of all school districts in the nation and found that test scores are most affected by this single construct.[iii]

He goes on to note that schools are highly segregated by class and by race. In fact, society is showing signs of resegregating.[iv] Resolving these gaps is our first threshold issue.  High needs children are concentrated in high poverty schools which are, on average, less effective than schools with lower poverty. In a vicious cycle, poor schools are provided lesser resources. Compounding the problem, the Census Bureau tells us the wealth gap has sharply increased across the nation. Many schools across the nation have not recovered from the 2008 fiscal crisis and the federal government has never provided the promised support for needy children.

Regardless, the schools were mandated to solve the test score problem. The trouble was that the policymakers got it backwards. Poverty prevents learning. It is the threshold issue. Without resorting to what we knew, the dead horse was beaten once more with the No Child Left Behind Act. We adopted the Common Core curriculum, punished schools, and fired principals and teachers whose misfortune was being assigned to a school with high concentrations of needy children. It was literally expected that a child from a broken home, hungry and with ADHD would be ready to sit down and learn quadratic equations.  Nevertheless, the test-based school accountability approach emerged and still remains the dominant school philosophy. While it is claimed that successful applications exist, the research has not been found that says poverty can be overcome by beating the dead horse. The irony is that the tests themselves show that a test based system is not a successful reform strategy.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Failure, NAEP, Testing

Nancy Bailey: If Only Students Could Sue Betsy DeVos and the Corporate Reformers for the Damage They Have Done

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2019 //
17

Nancy Bailey writes here about the long-term damage that corporate reformers (the Disruption movement) have inflicted on two generations of students.

If only students could sue them for ruining their schools! If only teachers could sue them for ruining their profession! If only the public could sue them to disruption their schools and communities!

She begins:

Frustrated by public schools? Look no further than the corporate education reformers and what they have done to public education.

Education Secretary DeVos and her corporate billionaire friends have been chipping away at the fabric of democratic public schools for over thirty years!

The problems we see in public schools today are largely a result of what they did to schools, the high-stakes testing and school closures, intentional defunding, ugly treatment of teachers, lack of support staff, segregated charter schools, vouchers that benefit the wealthy, Common Core State Standards, intrusive online data collection, and diminishing special education services.

Big business waged a battle on teachers and their schools years ago. The drive was to create a business model to profit from tax dollars. Now they want to blame teachers for their corporate-misguided blunders! It’s part of their plan to make schools so unpleasant, parents will have no choice but to leave.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Cruelty, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: The Reformers’ Desperate Effort to Find Hope in the NAEP Scores

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2019 //
11

Gary Rubinstein, math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, is a skilled myth buster. He frequently unmasks “miracle” stories.

In this post, he demolishes the claim that Louisiana has improved faster in 8th grade math than other states.

This is the last gasp of the Disruption movement, which has controlled federal and state policy for 20 years but has little to show for it.

As Rubinstein shows, Arne Duncan and John White are leading the effort to find the “bright side” of the latest NAEP results, which were stagnant In 2019 and have been stagnant for a decade.

Duncan says the nation should look to Louisiana for inspiration. Louisiana ranked among the bottom  states on NAEP, 44th to 49th, depending on the grade and the subject. But how creative to point to one of the lowest performing states as a national model! Do what Louisiana did and your state too can rank among the bottom five states in the nation!

Gary points out that Louisiana has indeed improved, but its 2019 scores on 8th grade math were actually a point lower than its scores were in 2007! In other words, Louisiana hasn’t gained at all for the past dozen years!.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the leaders of the Disruption movement admitted that their 20-year-long policy of test-and-punish is both stale and failed?

Wouldn’t it be great if they said, “Whoa! We’re on the wrong track. We’ve inflicted nonstop testing on the nation’s children since 2002. We have spent billions on testing and test-prep. Scores went up for a few years but leveled off in 2007. Enough! Our answers are wrong. Time for fresh thinking.”

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Louisiana, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Jan Resseger: On the Failure of Eli Broad and His “Academy”

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2019 //
14

 

Jan Resseger reviews Jeff Bryant’s article about the failure of the unaccredited Broad Academy and the meteoric rise of its graduates, whose primary qualification is their network. Being connected is more valuable, it turns out, than achieving results.

The most important thing to know about the Broad Academy is that its “graduates” are central to the Disruption Movement, that they specialize in closing schools, that they promote privatization, and that their big ventures (e.g., the Education Achievement Authority in Michigan) have collapsed in failure.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Michigan

Washington State: Another Charter School Closes Due to Dwindling Enrollment

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2019 //
6

 

Do you remember the prolonged battle over charter schools in Washington State? There were four referenda in the state, starting in the late 1990s, and the pro-charter forces lost the first three. On the fourth try, in 2012, Bill Gates and his friends bundled millions of dollars to buy the election. They outspent civil rights groups, PTAs, and teacher associations by a margin of 16 to 1. Sixteen to one!

And Gates and friends won the election by about 1% of the vote. Then the losing side appealed to the state courts to block charter funding, which would divert money from the state’s underfunded public schools. The State Supreme Court ruled that charter schools are not “common schools,” as defined in the state constitution, because their boards are not elected. Thus, charters are not eligible to take money from the public school, fund.

Gates and friends then waged a campaign to defeat the Supreme Court judges who ruled against them, but they were re-elected despite the money thrown into the coffers of the candidates who opposed them.

Gates then put pressure on the Legislature to fund his charters. After much lobbying, the Legislature gave lottery money to sustain the billionaire’s charters (surely, you don’t expect Bill Gates to fund them himself!)

Governor Jay Inslee decided bravely not to take a stand. He neither signed nor vetoed the law diverting lottery money to support charter schools, and the law was enacted.

Gates spent millions more encouraging charters to open.

(This story, with all the details, the data, and the footnotes, is included in my new book, SLAYING GOLIATH, which will be published on January 21, 2020.)

However, it turns out that there is not a lot of demand for charters. Three closed this year due to low enrollments, which made them financially unsound.

Just this week, another charter announced that it was closing, due to dwindling enrollments and staff flight.

The Charter was approved in 2018, opened in August 2019, and is now closing.

Ashé Preparatory Academy welcomed its inaugural class of 140 students in kindergarten, first, second and sixth grades when it opened in August. Within four years, the school hoped to grow to more than 400 studentsacross grades K-8.

But within a month of opening, several staff quit or stopped showing up to work. And by Oct. 4, the day the school’s oversight board voted unanimously to close the school, enrollment had been sliced in half. Ashé’s last day of classes was Friday…

But this fall, the school’s ambitious mission was quickly overshadowed by practical problems in the classrooms. Ashé (pronounced ah-SHAY) relied on an “inclusive” classroom model, which means that students with special needs and those with advanced abilities worked alongside their peers. Teaching all levels of students can be tough for any teacher, Sullivan said, but this was particularly true for staff new to the profession.

About six of the school’s nine teachers and paraprofessionals were new, she said. In hindsight, she added, she should have hired a full-time instructional coach to aid junior staff members. The school’s principal and several staff could not be reached for comment.

On Sept. 24, the school’s oversight board held an emergency meeting after three staff resigned or stopped coming to work, meeting minutes suggest. One option the board discussed: Stop serving sixth graders.

The board convened again three days later; at that meeting, staff pleaded for more help. A first-grade teacher asked for more professional coaching, and a sixth-grade paraeducator remarked that similar calls by sixth-grade staff had gone unanswered.

Then more staff resigned and students left, too. By Oct. 1, just 90 students were enrolled, according to board-meeting minutes. And by Oct. 4, enrollment sank to 70 students.

Charter schools in Washington are publicly funded, but privately run. Sullivan said Ashé raised close to $1 million in grants and was also eligible for state funding based on the number of students enrolled. Because so many students left, the school was expected to run a $700,000 deficit this year.

The fledgling charter-school movement in Washington has grown in fits and starts. Nine are still operating, and several have plans to open over the next few years. This month, a state charter-schools nonprofit won nearly $20 million from the federal government to help new charters get off the ground. But three charters have closed this year — and with the closure of Ashé, charter-school advocates and officials say they intend to take a hard look at what went wrong.

Good old Betsy DeVos to the rescue, giving $20 million in federal funds to open new charters in a state where there is little demand for charters.

One other interesting side note: CREDO analyzed charter performance in Washington State based on three years of data and determined that there was no difference overall between charter schools and public schools.

The findings of this study show that on average, charter students in Washington State experience annual growth in reading and math that is on par with the educational gains of their matched peers who enroll in the traditional public schools (TPS) the charter school students would otherwise have attended.

Question: If both sectors get about the same results, why did Bill Gates spend millions of dollars to open a privately managed sector? Was it sheer vanity?

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Washington State
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