Archives for category: Failure

 

Florida is controlled by Swamp creatures who want to divert money from public schools and send it to charter schools and religious schools. Jeb Bush is the puppet master who has demanded strict accountability for public schools, minimal oversight of charter schools, and no accountability at all for religious schools.

In this article, Carol Burris—the executive director of the Network for Public Education—examines the charter school mess. Florida has about three million students. About 300,000 attend charter schools. Some members of the Legislature have direct conflicts of interest but nonetheless vote to shower favors and money on the state’s charters.

Burris reports that nearly half of the state’s charters operate for profit. Entrepreneurs have flocked to Florida to get the easy money.

Burris begins:

Schoolsforsale.com claims to be “the largest school brokers in the United States that you will need to call.” Its owner, Realtor David Mope, is a broker for private schools, online schools and preschools. He will also help you start your own virtual school by providing certified teachers, marketing expertise, and assistance in securing accreditation.

Mope is not a newcomer to the for-profit school world. He was the owner and CEO of Acclaim Academy, a military-style charter chain. Acclaim’s “cadets,” who were predominantly minority students from low-income homes, wore army fatigues and engaged in drills. The schools’ education director, Bill Orris, had previously led a charter school that was shut down after its management company abandoned it.

Warning signs of failure were there from the beginning. The chain aggressively attempted to open new schools in multiple districts before establishing a track record in its two existing schools. Most districts saw red flags, but two did not. In the fall of 2013, two more Acclaim schools were approved, bringing the total schools in the chain to four.

As school grades came in, unsurprisingly, the Acclaim Academy charter schools were rated “F.” In 2015, three closed their doors, leaving families in the lurch in a manner that parents described as chaos. Although Florida’s State Board of Education had allowed the schools to stay open to finish the school year, Mope filed for bankruptcy, sending students out on the street scrambling to enroll in another school with only a few weeks left in the school year. Vendors would never be paid. Parents helped teachers pack up. Nevertheless, Mope pretended the schools were solvent and continued to broker a deal to purchase hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment.

How could Acclaim Academy ever open in the first place? Who would give this risky charter chain the seed money to get started? The American taxpayers did. A U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program (CSP) grant for $744,198 helped get the Acclaim Academies off the ground.

Acclaim Academy charter schools were among 502 Florida charter schools that received grants from the Department of Education between 2006 and 2014. All but two came from federal money given to the state for distribution. According to the CSP database, these Florida charter schools were awarded a total of nearly $92 million in federal funds between 2006 and 2014.

At least 184 (36.6 percent) of those schools are now closed, or never opened at all. These defunct charter schools received $34,781,736 in federal “seed” money alone.

Jan Resseger writes here about the charter schools in Ohio that received federal funding but never opened or closed soon after opening.

In Ohio, nearly $36 million was wasted, and that was only between 2006 and 2014. Throughout the 25-year life of the federal Charter Schools Program, the loss was far greater but has not yet been documented.

She writes:

I suppose the idea is that if you scatter hundreds of seeds across a state, they’ll grow and enrich the educational environment.  But as I examine Ohio’s list of failed or never-opened, CSP-funded charter schools, I can see that the seeds were scattered so widely that they weren’t particularly noticeable even when they came up. Unless there was a splashy scandal or a school was widely advertised on the side of city buses, nobody would have had any idea of the existence or failure of most of the seeds that did come up. And anyway a lot of them never sprouted at all.  Because the Charter Schools Program has lacked oversight from the U.S. Department of Education and because Ohio’s charter schools are poorly regulated by a large number of nonprofit agencies that serve as sponsors, the Ohio press has—until NPE’s Asleep at the Wheel report—not to my knowledge reported that the U.S. Department of Education is funding a lot of failed or never-opened schools. Until now, the failure of this program has been virtually invisible.

In the the list of failed or never-opened Ohio charter schools released last Friday by the Network for Public Education, NPE reports: “Two hundred ninety-three Ohio charter schools were awarded grants through the U.S. Department of Education’s (U.S. DOE) Charter Schools Program (CSP) from money that the U.S. Department of Education gave to the states between 2006-2014.  At this time, at least 117 (40%) of those (Ohio) charter schools were closed or never opened at all.” NPE explains that 20 of the Ohio charter schools on the list never opened; ninety-seven of the Ohio charter schools receiving CSP grants opened but subsequently shut down.

I suspect that like me, hardly anybody in Ohio has heard of most of the 20 schools that received CSP funding but never opened. Here are their names: Academy for Urban Solutions; Buckeye Academy; Central Ohio Early College Academy; Cleveland Arts and Literature Academy; Cleveland Lighthouse Charter Community School West; Columbus Entrepreneurial Academy; Cuyahoga Valley Academy; Medina City Schools Technology School; New Albany School for Performing Arts Middle School 6-8; Phoenix Village Academy Secondary 2; Rising Star Elementary School; School of Tomorrow; Summit Academy Community Schools in Alliance, Marion, Massillon, Columbus, and Cincinnati; Technology and Arts Academy of Cleveland; Vision into Action Academy-South Columbus; and WinWin Academy.  It is difficult to tell from the names of most of these schools even where it was intended that they would be located.

Ninety-seven CSP-funded schools in Ohio have shut down, but from the list, it is not possible to discern whether they were shut down by their sponsors for conflicts of interest or fraud, or whether their sponsors determined they were failing their students academically, or whether they just went broke. Most of the CSP grants awarded to closed or never-opened schools were in the six figure range—$150,000 or more.  Two of the schools that failed or were never opened had been awarded CSP grants over $700,000; three had been granted between $600,000 and $700,000; two had received between $500,000 and $600,000; and 25 had been awarded between $400,000 and $500,000.

The federal Charter Schools Program is neoliberal by design.  It awards public funding to private operators—individuals and companies—to run schools in competition with the traditional public schools. One primary problem with the CSP along with other schemes to privatize the public schools is that oversight is lacking to protect the rights of the students and to protect the stewardship of tax dollars.

 

 

 

It has become a national pattern. Republicans are on record opposing local control of public schools.

In Tennessee, the State Senate voted to create a state charter school commission, appointed by the Governor, with the power to override decisions by local school boards.

This is surely not because charter schools are more successful than public schools. They are not. The state’s so-called Achievement School District spent $100 million dollars while taking over the lowest performing schools, giving them to charters, and failed.

Why fund more failure?

 

Peter Greene puts his finger on the reason that Secretary DeVos is unmoved by charter failures. In her ideal free-market model, failure is a feature, not a bug.

in the free market, businesses open and close all the time. Where is Eastern Airlines, Braniff, TWA? Gone.

Stability, in her view, is not desirable. Disruption and churn show that the market is working well.

Thats why she is not at all disturbed to learn that one-third of the charters funded by the U.S. Department of Education either never opened or closed soon after opening. That’s music to her ears. The market is working!

He writes:

“This is one of the area where choicers have a fundamental disagreement with public education advocates. For public schools, stability is a basic foundational value. The school is a community institution, and like all institutions, part of its values comes from its continuity, its connections to tradition, the past. It means something to people to see their children and neighbors all passing through the same halls, having the same teachers, being part of a community collective that stretches across the years. For free market Reformsters, anything that gets in the way of their idea of free market mechanics is bad; there should be winners and losers and the market should judge their worth, ruthlessly culling the weak and undeserving.

“Reformsters know they have a hard sell. That’s why they don’t try to use this as a selling point (“Don’t forget– the school your child chooses could close at any time due to market consitions! Isn’t that awesome!”) That’s why they are adamant about calling charters “public” schools– because it lulls the customers into believing that charters share some of the fundamental characteristics of public schools, like stability and longevity. They (e.g. Governor DeSantis of Florida) also want to hold onto “public” because the change to privately owned and operated market based schools is the end of public education as we know it; it truly is privatization, and almost nobody pushing these policies has the guts to publicly say, “I propose that we end public education and replace it with privately owned and operated businesses, some of which will reserve the right to refuse service to some of you, and all of which may not last long enough to see your child from K through 12.”

“The person who almost has the guts to almost say this is, ironically, Betsy DeVos– the person charged with taking care of the public system that she would like to kill. What a wacky world we live in. So don’t expect her to be moved by all the waste of tax dollars paying for failed or fraudulent charter schools; every time a charter school closes, a free market reformster gets their wings, and Betsy is a-fixin’ to fly.”

 

Bill Phillis of Ohio urges the repeal of the state takeover law, HB 70:

 

It appears that the HB 70 CEO in the Lorain City School District is at odds with the Board of Education, school personnel, the Police Department and the Mayor. The CEO and the Police Department are in a tiff over a School Resource Officer matter.
The Board of Education’s Vice President says it is time for the CEO to go.
HB 70 of the 131st General Assembly was pushed through the legislature with no public discussion in a 24-hour period. It was cobbled together in secret by a former state superintendent and a half-dozen non-elected residents of the Mahoning Valley at the behest of a former governor. The premise of the bill is that a poverty-stricken school district will demonstrate significantly improved test scores and educational opportunities by removing control of the district from the elected board of education. In other words, it assumes that replacing democratic control with autocratic control of the district will solve the issue of low test scores and inadequate educational opportunities. Then if that doesn’t work, the district will be turned over to a charter operation.
The perpetrators of HB 70 presumed that when a school district registers low test scores democratic control of the district is the problem. Essentially their presumption is that, in some communities, the citizens are incapable of self-government; hence, a dictator to run the school is warranted.
The 131st General Assembly made a huge mistake in enacting HB 70 and the 133rd General Assembly must eliminate this horrific wart.
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| www.ohiocoalition.org

 

The editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a powerful editorial in opposition to the expansion of charters into the suburbs. They are currently limited to Missouri’s two biggest cities, St. Louis and Kansas City. The editorial warns that the introduction of charters would threaten the quality and viability of some of the state’s best public school districts. The Republican-sponsored bill to add charters does not include any new funding and allows for renewal of low-performing charter schools.

Besides, charters in the two urban districts have produced meager results. Why have more of what doesn’t work?

The editorial recounts the dismal charter record:

“Some high-profile disasters have resulted from lack of oversight and accountability for charter schools. In 2012, Missouri shut down six Imagine charter schools in St. Louis. Students consistently performed worse on state tests than those attending St. Louis Public Schools while Virginia-based Imagine reaped huge profits from a real estate business.

“About half of the 30-plus charter schools that have opened in St. Louis since 2000 have been shut down for academic or financial failure. That’s hardly a success model worth emulating.

”Nationally, the picture looks even worse. The federal government has wasted up to $1 billion on charter schools that never opened or opened and then closed because of mismanagement or other reasons, according to the Network for Public Education advocacy group.”

Why wreak havoc on successful schools by injecting charters, whose track record in Missouri is poor?

 

In every state that has authorized virtual charter schools, these  schools are marked by two characteristics:

1. They are very profitable.

2. The “education” they provide is abysmal.

Typically, they have high attrition, low graduation rates, and low scores on state tests. The state fails to monitor them for quality. Students and taxpayers are fleeced.

The latest example is the Indiana Virtual School. The Republicans who control the legislature ignore failure so long as students are making choices. They happily waste taxpayer dollars so long as an entrepreneur is making money.

A former employee told the state Education Department two years ago that the Indiana Virtual Dchoolwas collecting millions of dollars for students who never enrolled or who enrolled but withdrew. The whistle blower was ignored. Of course. The employee was fired.

”Enrollment quickly swelled at the schools, thanks to the state’s favorable laws and lack of regulation about how fast they could grow. School leaders also had an incentive: Indiana’s funding system that gives schools more money for each student they bring in. Today, Indiana Virtual School and its sister school, Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, enroll more than 6,000 students and could get more than $40 million from the state this year.

“But staffing didn’t appear to keep pace with that expansion. The schools have already received scrutiny for their tiny teaching staffs — with Indiana Virtual School at one time having more than 200 students for every teacher. And the schools have posted dismal academic results, with graduation rates in the single digits in recent years and a fraction of students passing state exams. Indiana Virtual School received its third F grade in a row from the state last year…

”The high student-to-teacher ratios, lack of student engagement, and high student mobility are often blamed for the schools’ academic shortcomings. Students at most virtual schools, in Indiana and other states, perform far below average on metrics like state tests and graduation rate. Last year, Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy graduated just 2 percent of its 1,009 seniors, and 5.7 percent of 10th-graders passed both state English and math exams.

“At Indiana Virtual School, about 24 percent of seniors graduated in 2018, the same year the school received its third F grade from the state. About 19 percent of elementary and middle school students passed both tests, and 4 percent of high-schoolers did.”

The School insists its students have high needs, blaming them for the dismal rates of completion and achievement.

But it still has not explained why it collected millions of dollars for phantom students.

Betsy DeVos strongly endorses Virtual Charter schools because they offer “choice.” Results and quality don’t matter.

 

 

 

 

Caitlin Reilly of “Inside Philanthropy” writes that philanthropies no longer see charter schools as the means to transform American education. Although a few have doggedly doubled down on their commitment to charters, there seems to be a broad shift underway. Reilly calls it an “inflection point,” a point where change is undeniable.

She writes:

“Though charter schools have acquired a powerful ally on the national level in the form of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, local backlash and scaling challenges have led to questions about the future of the publicly funded, privately run schools.

“Philanthropic enthusiasm for the charter movement is at a similar inflection point. For now, support for charters seems to be holding. However, the schools have had trouble reaching scale and have yet to catalyze the system-wide transformation many backers hoped for.

“Some of the field’s champions take that as a sign of the work left to do. Those foundations are doubling down on their support for the schools.

“Other funders, including former stalwart backers of charters, see the failure of this model to scale and spread as a reason to pause and consider their future investments. Those foundations tend to see charter schools as an important part of the education landscape, but not as a means to transform the system.

“Meanwhile, major new donors arriving on the education scene from the business world haven’t gravitated to charters in the same way that many such philanthropists did a decade ago. While these schools remain a growing sector within K-12, drawing political support and philanthropic dollars, the momentum around charters among funders has palpably slowed in recent years.”

The bottom line is that charters have become politically toxic, and its hard to paint them as “progressive” when Betsy DeVos is their most potent champion and striking teachers demand a moratorium on them. What’s “progressive” about schools that are highly segregated, overwhelmingly non-union, and have a record of excluding the neediest children?

It’s no accident that the foundation most deeply invested in creating new charters is the archconservative, anti-union Walton Family Foundation, which claims credit for opening 2,000 charters, more than one of every four in the nation. Why is this family, whose net worth exceeds $150 billion, devoted to charters? Charters kill unions. That works for Walmart.

We learn here that Eli Broad seems to losing his once-passionate commitment to charters. Eli  Broad!

“There does seem to be a faction of the charter movement that is stepping back to consider what comes next, and are open to charters playing a smaller role in future efforts.

“One of those people is Andy Stern, a board member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and board chair of the Broad Center.

Stern started out as an unlikely ally of the charter movement. He is the president emeritus of the Service Employees International Union, which grew by 1.2 million workers under his leadership. Given the antagonism many felt charter schools held toward unions, some were surprised by Stern’s decision to get involved with Eli Broad, an early and ardent supporter of the charter movement.

“Stern didn’t see charter schools as antithetical to his work on behalf of workers and unions, though.

“I got involved in charters because of the members’ of my union’s kids,” he said. “To me, giving janitors’ kids a chance to get the best education possible was everything they wanted from coming to this country. In Los Angeles, where we started, that was not their experience.”

“Now, Stern’s enthusiasm for the schools is waning, and it sounds like Broad’s may be, as well.

“So I would say Eli [Broad], absent any of the recent strikes and activities, has been rethinking what he wants to do in education, as he has been thinking about what he wants to do in the arts and science, as well,” Stern said. “As he thinks about his age and what he wants to see happen in a transition, I’d say there is a natural rethinking and reprioritizing going on.”

Reilly did not speak to any critics of charter schools, other than Randi Weingarten, whose union operates a charter school in New York City. She did not speak to Carol Burris or me or Jeff Bryant or Peter Greene or Anthony Cody or Leonie Haimson or Julian Vasquez Heilig or Mercedes Schneider or Tom Ultican or any of the many others who have warned about the rise of charters and the danger they present to public education.

Nor did she examine the many scandals that have brought down the repute of charters, like UNO in Chicago or ECOT in Ohio.

The good news is that many philanthropists are disenchanted with school choice.

 

 

 

Lisa Haver, Parent Activist in Philadelphia, writes here about how it takes years and millions of dollars to close failing charter schools. The public must pay the cost of challenging the charter and pay the cost of defending the charter. The charter operator gets a free ride for failing. Only the taxpayers and students lose.

Why is it easy to close a public school but hard to close a charter school? One guess: charter lobbyists wrote the state law.

Lisa Haver writes:

“This is an unbelievable story about what it takes to shut down a failing charter in Pennsylvania.
“Aspira charter operates 5 schools in Philadelphia, 2 of which are Renaissance charters–Olney High School and Stetson Middle school.  The Renaissance program is the one where the district hands over management of struggling district schools to people who are not educators in the belief that they can bring up test scores–which Aspira has not done. The Renaissance program has been a very expensive failure in Philadelphia.
“This Aspira renewal process is now in its 5th year–since 2014.  There have been numerous stories, including many in the Philadelphia Daily News–about misuse of taxpayer funds and other evidence of mismanagement.
“The District finally voted in 2017 not to renew these charters.
“For some reason, it took almost 18 months to begin the hearings.
“The District has to pay its own lawyer and hearing examiner AND for the charter schools’ lawyers.
“APPS members including me have attended the hearings every day for the first two weeks, and it is obvious that the charters’ lawyers are running up their own legal fees by asking the same questions over and over to a succession of witnesses.
“This is going to cost the District well over $150,000.  That is a lowball figure.
“When the district closed 24 schools in 2013, there were NO legal hearings at all.  The state requires a long legal process for revoking a charter that may have been around for 5 or 10 years, but none for neighborhood schools that have been around for decades–like Germantown high, which was closed one year before its 100th anniversary.
“A disgrace.”
From the article:

“One of the city’s charter-school operators has moved money from one account to another without explanation: no loan agreements, no signatures — “a shell game,” in the words of a Philadelphia School District auditor.

“Now the School District is shelling out money to try to pull two charters from Aspira — whose school bills are paid by the district — in a legal fight that could end up costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

“It’s really the district paying for both sides, which is kind of insane,” said Temple University law professor Susan DeJarnatt.

“Welcome to Pennsylvania charter school law,” said Auditor General Eugene DePasquale. “It’s unbelievable.”

Parent advocates have called on school officials for years to investigate these failing charters but were ignored. 

 

 

 

A lot was riding on the State Board of Education’s decision about whether to renew the Thrive Charter Schools of San Diego. The schools have a terrible record, which the district documented. The charter lobby was pushing hard for renewal, showing how little it cares about results or accountability or children’s welfare. It was Linda Darling-Hammond’s first meeting as chair of the State Board.

The Board voted to deny renewal. Facts still matter.

The Board voted 7-1 to renew a Gulen Magnolia Charter. A former member of the charter’s board, now on the State Board, declines to revise herself.

Thrive certainly did not lack funding; it received $575,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to open in 2014 and has received millions of dollars in “New Market Tax Credits” from the federal government since then.

To learn more about Thrive, here are some readings.

Thrive’s scores have dropped every year since it opened.

Christopher Rice-Wilson, a charter parent at another charter in San Diego, called for the closure of Thrive and laid out the facts of its poor performance. 

He wrote:

“I did not feel safe… and I learned absolutely nothing.” That was the testimony heard from one former Thrive Public Schools student who is now doing well in fourth grade at a different school. A group of former students and parents have come forward to describe their experiences during their time at Thrive charter schools. Without a doubt, there are many more like them — the school has a 27 percent to 39 percent attrition rate — roughly one-third of the students leave the school each year. And with good reason, especially for San Diego’s most vulnerable students. Simply put, Thrive is failing low-income, black and Latino students.

Looking at the numbers, Thrive failed to demonstrate it meets the academic requirements to renew its charter, especially when compared to the 13 schools Thrive identified with similar grade and demographic data. For low-income students, Thrive had the worst academic outcomes in both English Language Arts and Math. For low-income students, more than 75 percent of Thrive students weren’t able to meet the state’s standards in math. At the middle school level, the situation is even worse: 80 percent of all of Thrive’s middle school students failed to meet the state achievement standards in math, and 90 percent of low-income students failed the same standard.

Similarly, for black students and Latino students, Thrive’s outcomes were worse than almost all other schools in ELA and math. Fewer than 10 percent of Thrive’s Latino students were meeting state standards in math. All of the comparison schools have a much higher low-income population than Thrive, and a higher percentage of English learners, yet still demonstrated better academic outcomes than Thrive. Thrive argues that it excels at serving students with disabilities. However, Thrive’s academic outcomes for these students are far lower than SDUSD’s outcomes, as well as the outcomes for these students countywide.

Our entire school system needs to do better by black students, and San Diego Unified is 42 points away from having all black students at grade-level proficiency on the California Schools Dashboard in English Language Arts. For these students, Thrive is a disaster. Thrive is more than double that number, at 106.5 points below grade-level proficiency for black students. Outcomes in math are similar. Thrive also has a larger achievement gap in math and ELA between black and white students than the district overall. Why renew the charter for a school that expands the achievement gap?

Thrive argues that parents are choosing Thrive because they were struggling in the schools they were attending. But there are over 130 charter schools in San Diego County, and 46 in SDUSD alone. Wouldn’t we see these same poor outcomes at all of those schools? Thrive argues that they are too new for us to look at state standards. Two other charters in the district opened at the same time as Thrive. They were renewed because they demonstrated improved academic performance. There should be one standard for these schools and Thrive should be held accountable.

Thrive has been given every advantage to show their school can succeed. They have benefited from the investment of millions of dollars from wealthy supporters and received $13 million in new market tax credits from Civic San Diego and another Los Angeles entity. All that and still couldn’t prove their ability to deliver achievement for students.

Schools like Thrive are a symptom of a system in much need of reform. Recent research has found that the dramatic growth of charter schools has cost San Diego Unified about $66 million annually. This cost is born by the students who remain in district managed schools — the overwhelming majority of students in our public school system. Given what’s at stake, we can’t continue to support schools that cost more to our system but do not deliver for our most vulnerable students. We need to ensure our scarce resources are invested in educational strategies that create student success, not expand student failure.