Archives for category: Failure
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Ex-Governor Rick Snyder Will Not Teach at Harvard, as Backlash Grows Against Him

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
47

 

Michigan Ex-Governor Rick Snyder will not teach at Harvard,The outcry over Snyder’s role in the Flint water crisis made his position at Harvard untenable.

Former Gov. Rick Snyder has pulled out of a prestigious fellowship at Harvard University after the Ivy League school faced immense criticism for the governor’s track record in the Flint water crisis.

Snyder announced midday Wednesday his decision to withdraw from a senior research fellow position at Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government.

“It would have been exciting to share my experiences, both positive and negative,” Snyder wrote on Twitter. “Our current political environment and its lack of civility makes this too disruptive.”

Harvard’s appointment of the former two-term Republican governor and businessman sparked backlash on social media and reportedly caused friction this week on the university’s Cambridge, Mass., campus.

Snyder has shouldered public blame for the Flint water crisis after his emergency managers switched the city’s water source in April 2014 to Flint River water without corrosion control chemicals to prevent toxic lead from leaching into the city’s drinking water supply.

The Snyder administration’s Department of Environmental Quality oversaw Flint’s switch from Detroit’s Lake Huron water to the Flint River water using a water treatment plant in Flint that hadn’t been used full-time since the 1960s.

Douglas Elmendorf, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, said students would have learned from questioning Snyder over Flint and other issues, but “we and he now believe that having him on campus would not enhance education here in the ways we intended.”

Snyder’s appointment began June 1 and was to include teaching, studying and writing about issues affecting state and local government in the country.

In a statement issued last Friday, the head of the Taubman Center said the university welcomed Snyder’s “significant expertise in management, public policy and promoting civility.”

He could have lectured on his decision to poison the people of Flint to save money. Or he might have taught about the failure of his “Educational Achievement Authority.” Or he might have reviewed how the expansion of charters contributed to the collapse of Michigan’s standing on NAEP.

But to do any of that requires reflection and critical thinking, qualities Snyder never exhibited.

The ethical standards at the Taubman Center may be flexible, however. It was established with funding by businessman A. Alfred Taubman, who was convicted in a criminal price-fixing scheme that involved two prominent auction houses. He served several months in prison. Taubman, like Snyder, was born in Michigan.

Categories Education Reform, Failure

Jan Resseger: Florida’s Education Disaster

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2019 //
10

 

In this post, Jan Resseger surveys the war against public schools in Florida.

Sue Legg summarized the abject failure of Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan here.

The drive to privatize public schools was masterminded by Jeb Bush, with the help of Betsy DeVos, a compliant Republican Legislature (including some who own or operate charter schools), and a zest to give public money to entrepreneurs and grifters.

Asshe points out, recent legislation requires school districts to share their tax levies with charter schools over which they have no control.

Privatization and school choice are rooted in the desire for profit and segregation.

Despite Jeb Bush’s propaganda campaign, his A+ Plan deserves an F-.

Bush, that educational genius, invented the idea of labeling schools with a single letter.

Floridians now treat school grades as normal, but only 15 states require them, mostly low-performing. states. 

I have said it before and I was say it again: School grades are stupid. They are idiotic. Under Bloomberg as mayor, NYC had school grades for a few years. They were meaningless. The public school in my Brooklyn neighborhood was rated A one year; the Mayor and Joel Klein made a ceremonial visit to the school to congratulate the principal and staff. The next year it got a grade of F. Nothing had changed. Same principal, same staff.

If your child came home with a report card that had only one letter, you would be incensed. Why then should anyone accept a single letter grade for an institution with hundreds of staff and students and multiple programs?

School grades deserve an F. A truly dumb idea. No state should use them.

Education in Florida is a mess that is designed to benefit privateers and harm public schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization

Peter Greene: Why Does Anyone Listen to Jeb Bush’s Failed Ideas?

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2019 //
18

 

Peter Greene read an unusually annoying article in the Detroit News that showed just out of touch the authors are.

Michigan is a state that went overboard for school choice, thanks to former Governor John Engler and the billionaire DeVos family.

Michigan has dropped down to the bottom of NAEP, as scores have collapsed for every group.

Jeb Bush arrives to tell Michigan what they need to do is double down on their failed strategies. More choice. More testing. More accountability. More threats. More punishments.

Bush claimed that these strategies worked in Florida but they didn’t.As Greene notes, fourth grade score went up only because the state holds back third graders who don’t pass the third grade reading test. By eighth grade, students in Florida are at the national average.

Who aspires to be average?

Things are so bad in Michigan that average looks good. It is not.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, Fraud, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice, Testing

Utah Picks a Trouble-Plagued Testing Company to Operate State Tests for $44 Million

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2019 //
39

Utah state education officials knew that Questar had a problem-filled record, but they picked it anyway and gave it a contract for $44 million.

From the Salt Lake City Tribune:

In other states, the year-end tests were marked by glitches and cyberattacks and hourlong delays. One school district threw out its results because the software was so unreliable. In another, all of the students had to start over when the programming shut down and didn’t save their responses.

Sensitive student data was stolen in New York and Mississippi. More than 1,400 students took the wrong test in Tennessee.

But even after those issues arose — and despite clearly knowing about them — Utah signed a $44 million contract with that same testing company last spring to develop the state’s standardized exams, now called RISE. And the rollout hasn’t gone well.

As students here have tried to submit their tests, their computer screens have frozen and some haven’t been able to recover their work.

“This is clearly problematic,” said Darin Nielsen, the state’s assistant superintendent of student learning. “It hasn’t performed like we had hoped or expected. There are frustrations for many people across the state.”

The outages in Utah have delayed more than 18,000 public school students in completing their assessments this April and May. For one day, no one was able to take a science exam. On at least four others, testing was stopped entirely for some school districts.

The state has had to expand the testing window into June. Now, it’s questioning whether the scores it gets back will even be valid enough to use.

Will students be denied their high school diploma based on this invalid test? Will schools be closed or teachers fired?

Stupid is as stupid does.

Why doesn’t Utah trust its teachers to write their own tests? They know what they taught, they know their students. Let them decide.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, Testing, Utah

Closing! Delaware Charter that Won $10 Million XQ Award

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
46

 

Kevin Ohlandt has the story: The Design Thinking Academy, a charter school that won Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ competition to “reinvent” the high school, is closing.  

Ohlandt has documents demonstrating that the school was done in by adult mismanagement and greed.

The school received a five-year grant of $10 million in 2016. It was supposed to be a “school of the future,” but it experienced high teacher turnover, administrative churn, and consequently.  declining enrollments. 

One parent said she started “having doubts about the school earlier in the year, when she noticed mass teacher turnover.

“When you start seeing a lot of people leaving all at once, you know what’s happening,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s a business.”

As Ohlandt shows, the problems of the school were even more serious than portrayed.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Innovation, Privatization

Jack Schneider: Why Are Americans Turning Against Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
22

 

Jack Schneider, a historian of education who often collaborates with Jennifer Berkshire, analyzes the fading allure of charter schools. After years of claims that they would “save” public schools and poor children, the public has given up on them. Why? They have not delivered, and the public gets it.

For most of the past thirty years, charters seemed unstoppable, especially because their expansion was backed by billions from people like the Waltons, Gates, and Broad, as well as the federal government. But they have not kept their promises.

Today, however, the grand promises of the charter movement remain unfulfilled, and so the costs of charters are being evaluated in a new light.

After three decades, charters enroll six percent of students. Despite bold predictions by their advocates that this number will grow fivefold, charters are increasingly in disrepute.

First, the promise of innovation was not met. Iron discipline is not exactly innovative.

Second, the promise that charters would be significantly better than public schools did not happen. In large part, that is because the introduction of charters simply creates an opportunity for choice; it does not ensure the quality of schools. Rigorous research, from groups like Mathematica Policy Research and Stanford University, has found that average charter performance is roughly equivalent to that of traditional public schools. A recent study in Ohio, for instance, concluded that some of the state’s charters perform worse than the state’s public schools, some perform better, and roughly half do not significantly differ.

Finally, charters have not produced the systemic improvement promised by their boosters.

Competition did not lift all boats. In fact, competition has weakened the public schools that enroll most students at the same time that charters do not necessarily provide a better alternative.

Schneider does not mention one other important reason for the diminishing reputation of charters: scandals, frauds, embezzlement, and other scams that appear daily in local and state media. A significant number of charters are launched and operated by non-educators and by entrepreneurs, which amplifies the reasons for charter instability and failure.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Competition, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Innovation, Privatization, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Shawgi Tell: The Untold History of Charter School Failure

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2019 //
16

 

Shawgi Tell, a Professor in upstate New York, thinks the public needs that charter school failure is widespread, commonplace, and underreported. Even now, mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal treat charter schools reverentially, as if they know how to perform education miracles.

Professor Tell assembles research showing the frequent failure of charters. 

Open the link to see a great cartoon.

He writes:

It is worth noting that both public schools and privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are victims of expensive, curriculum-narrowing, time-consuming, high-stakes standardized tests produced by large for-profit corporations that have no idea what a human-centered education looks like. Such corporations are retrogressive and harmful in many ways; they are not concerned with the growth and well-being of children, or the future of society.

The research on how damaging and unsound these expensive corporate tests are is robust, unassailable, and constantly-growing.

High-stakes standardized testing has nothing to do with learning, growth, joy, or serving a modern society and economy. Unsound assessments do not prepare young people for life. High-stakes standardized testing does not even rest on a scientific conception of measurement; it is discredited psychometric pseudo-science through and through.

Still, with these important caveats in mind, thousands of charter schools, even when they cherry-pick students with impunity, dodge tests and ratings, and massage or misreport test scores, perform worse on these flawed, top-down, widely-rejected corporate tests than public schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Testing

Jeff Bryant: The Waste of Millions of Federal Dollars on Charters in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2019 //
3

Jeff Bryant reports here on the waste of millions of federal dollars poured into charter schools in Louisiana. 

Usually, when the media writes about New Orleans, they tell you about success stories, but they don’t mention the many failures.

Between 2006 and 2014, on the watch of both Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan, millions of dollars were awarded to open or expand charter schools in New Orleans.

Nearly half of those charters closed their doors or never opened. Nearly $24 million was wasted.

The large numbers are bad enough. The individual stories are even worse.

While the numbers alone are startling and a cause for concern, individual examples of charters in Louisiana that received CSP money and then closed throw into further doubt the prudence of using federal seed money to spread schools that open and close, repeatedly, and fund charter organizations that churn through districts and neighborhoods without any obvious regard for what parents and local officials want.

One of the examples I singled out from Burris’ research is Benjamin Mays Prep School in New Orleans, which received a $600,000 CSP grant. Mays Prep had long-standing academic issues and persistent budget shortfalls. The school had to move to a different building in 2012 and then lost that location in 2014 when its charter wasn’t renewed and a different charter moving into the space refused to enroll the Mays students. The school closed officially in 2014.

Another New Orleans charter, Miller McCoy, received a $600,000 CSP grant but eventually closed in 2014 after “a long downward spiral,” according to a local news source. The charter school’s two founders left in 2012 under alleged ethics allegations, and the school had a series of unsuccessful leaders after that. An “F” academic rating from the state seemed to have been the final straw.

The school had promised to be equivalent to a prestigious all-male private prep school in New Orleans, only free. Its closure left the teachers and remaining students and families with “a sense of loss, sadness, a grieving for what could have been,” reported a different local news outlet.

Another New Orleans charter, Gentilly Terrace, received a $600,000 CSP grant. The school was operated by a charter management group, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, that was cited for being out of compliance with several federal laws, including misdirection of federal funds for Title I schools—­money earmarked for high-poverty students. New Beginnings also had chronic problems with employee turnoverin its schools and non-transparent practice by its board of directors.

Gentilly Terrace closed in 2014 with a “D” rating from the state’s academics report card. Recently, the CEO of New Beginnings resigned amid allegations of falsifying public records and allowing one of its three remaining schools to engage in grade-fixing.

Really, you have to wonder whether anyone at the U.S. Department of Education ever read the applications, ever followed up to see how the money was used. Or do they just hand out millions and forget about it?

This year, Betsy DeVos has $440 million to toss to her favorites. KIPP got $89 million, and no one could ever say that KIPP was needy. The IDEA corporate charter chain won $116 from their friend Secretary DeVos, adding to the many millions she give them in previous years.

The federal Charter School Fund is truly a slush fund for the corporate charter industry.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization

Sue M. Legg: The Failure of Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan in Florida

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2019 //
66

Sue M. Legg is a scholar at the University of Florida, a leader in Florida’s League of Women Voters, and a new board member of the Network for Public Education. She has written an incisive and devastating critique of Jeb Bush’s education program in Florida, which began twenty years ago. Bush called it his A+ Plan, but by her careful analysis, it rates an F. Advocates of school choice tout Florida’s fourth-grade scores on NAEP, which are artificially inflated by holding back third graders who dontpass the state test. By eighth grade, Florida’s students rank no better than the national average. Note to “Reformers”: a state that ranks “average” is NOT a national model.

Twenty Years Later, Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. 

Sue Legg explodes the myth of the Florida miracle in her well documented report:  Twenty Years Later: Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. She has compiled the research over twenty years showing the negative impact of privatization in Florida.  The highly touted achievement gains of retained third graders are lost by eighth grade.  Top ranked fourth grade NAEP scores fall to the national average by eighth grade. One half of twelfth graders read below grade level.  The graduation rate is above only 14 states.

The A+ Plan was a great slogan, but its defects resulted in a twenty-year cycle of trial and error to fix the problems.   School grades are unreliable.  A school receiving a ‘B’ grade one year has about a thirty percent chance of retaining the grade the following year. Invalid grades occur so frequently that State Impact reports that Florida made sixteen changes to the school grade formula since 2010.  It was thrown out but the new version is no more stable.  What it means to be a failing school, moreover, is consistently redefined to make more opportunity for charter school takeovers.  

Florida touts improving academic achievement in the private sector that is not supported by research.  The CREDO Study reams Florida’s for-profit charter industry.  According to a Brookings Institution study, low quality private schools are on the rise, and the LeRoy Collins Institute’s 2017 study, Tough Choices, explains that there are twice as many severely segregated Florida schools (90% non-white students) than there were in 1994-5.  The legislature ignores the problem in part because key legislators have personal interest in charter and private schools.  “Florida suits him” said Roger Stone, recently indicted in the Mueller investigation.  The New York Times article: Stone Cold Loser: quoted Stone’s admiration for Florida when he said “…it was a sunny place for shady people”.  A Miami Herald series “Cashing in on Kids” reported a list of questionable land deals and conflicts of interest by for-profit charter school management. The federal government began an investigation in 2014.  Last year a  charter management firm faced criminal charges, and Florida charters have the nation’s highest closure rate.

WalletHub reports that Florida is 47th of 50 states in working conditions for teachers.  As a result, the Florida Education Association projects 10,000 vacancies next fall. Teacher shortages are not only related to money, they are due to a deliberate attack on the profession in order to break teacher unions and impose a political ideology.  As Steve Denning in a Forbes magazine article explains: “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and schools alike”. The thinking, he says, is embedded in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top policies.   The A+ Plan is an extension of these policies that includes increased testing and rewards and punishments related to results.

Florida’s teachers are not allowed to strike.  Parents may have to.  The legislature recently approved small raises for teachers but expanded the unconstitutional voucher program.  The governor is not concerned; he appointed three new judges to the Florida Supreme Court.  In the May 3rd 2019 Senate session, Senator Tom Lee chastised his fellow Republicans.  He has supported charter schools for years, but said ‘the industry has not been honest with us...first they wanted PECO facility funds, then local millage; now they want a portion of local discretionary referendum funds’.  He called the current supporters ‘ideologues who have drunk the kool-aid‘.

The full report is published on the NPE-Action website.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: The Utter Failure of Louisiana’s Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2019 //
8

 

Mercedes Schneider summarizes here the story of vouchers in Louisiana, which are now widely recognized as a train wreck.

New Orleans’ public radio station WWNO broadcast a detailed account of this policy failure, which steers students to D and F rated schools. State Superintendent John White, one of the voucher program’s most ardent advocates, refused to be interviewed for the program.

”Multiple local news outlets were involved in the investigation:

‘The Cost of Choice’ is the result of a reporting collaboration between NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, WVUE Fox 8 News, WWNO and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.”

When the program was launched in 2012, Then-Governor Bobby Jindal “beamed with pride” and voucher proponent Betsy DeVos lauded the new vouchers, and the cheerleaders said they

“would free countless lower-income children from the worst public schools by allowing them to use state tax dollars in the form of vouchers to pay tuition at private schools, where they would ostensibly receive a better education. …

“Seven years later, however, the $40-million-a-year Louisiana Scholarship Program has failed to live up to its billing. The nearly 6,900 students who’ve left public schools have instead been placed into a system with numerous failing private schools that receive little oversight, a months-long examination by a coalition of local and national media organizations has found. …

“Two-thirds of all students in the voucher system attended schools where they performed at a “D” or “F” level last school year….

“Bobby Jindal did not set up the Louisiana Scholarship Program for success. He set it up for low-performing schools to get subsidized and to stay open,” said Andre Perry, a fellow at The Brookings Institution….

“Not a single school in the voucher program received an A or B. Three received a C. Of the remaining schools, 19 got a D and 15 got an F, based on the Louisiana Department of Education rating system.”

Thousands of children were sent to low-performing schools on the false promise of a better education. Some of the voucher schools needed the voucher money to survive.

Now, Schneider notes, DeVos is distancing herself from the Louisiana failure.

The remaining ideologues insist that voucher schools should not be judged by their abysmal test scores, the same stick used to beat up public schools.

DeVos is now peddling the same failed model to the nation.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana
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