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City Fund: Another Billionaire-Funded Phony Scheme to Steal Public Schools from the Public

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2018 //
26

You first read about “City Fund” when Tom Ultican wrote about it on August 18. Then four days later, Chalkbeat got the “leaked memo” and told the story that Tom had already broken.

Two billionaires, unhappy with the slow and slowing pace of privatization, have created another organization to spread the gospel of school choice, following in the venerable tradition established by racist Southern governors and senators following the Brown Decision of 1954. In the late 1950s (as Mercedes Schneider wrote in detail in her fine book School Choice), white southerners were mad for choice. They saw choice as the best way to stop racial integration.

Now, under the unesteemed leadership of rightwing zealot Betsy DeVos, the mask of benevolence has been stripped away from the choice movement.

But that doesn’t stop billionaires Reed Hastings (Netflix) and John Arnold (Enron). Education is their game, their hobby, and they are not ready to abandon their dream of privatizing every school in America.

They have hired a “dream team” of failed Reformers, who bring together in one place a long history of stealing democracy and public schools from poor African Americans.

The Reformers tell us that up until now, nothing in reform has worked. But they seem convinced that charter schools work (think Detroit, think Milwaukee). If NOLA is the model, start by closing all the public schools, firing all the teachers, then replacing them with charters and TFA. Crucial to the plan is to add hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending (they forgot that part of the formula).

Peter Greene takes a crack at explaining the grand plan for transforming public schools into a business–and failing as Kevin Huffman and Chris Barbic did in Tennessee’s Achievement School District, where they blew $100 million trying to turn “failing schools” into high-performing schools by handing them over to private operators. Say this for Huffman and Barbic: It was failure on a grand scale!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Tennessee

Arizona: CEO of Failing Online Charter School Gets a Bonus of $8.8 Million

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2018 //
19

Arizona is an amazing state. Taxpayers don’t care how their money is spent. You could collect it and burn it and they wouldn’t care.

That’s the impression you would get if you read this story about Primavera Charter School.

The online high school is a failure but the CEO is getting a bonus of $8.8 million.

“By most academic measures, Primavera online charter school is a failure.”

“Its student-to-teacher ratio is 215-to-1 — 12 times the state average — allowing little or no individualized attention.

“On recently released state standardized tests, less than a quarter of its students passed math and about a third passed English, both below the state average.

“And 49 percent of Primavera students end up dropping out, 10 times the state average.

“But by another measure, Primavera is an unmitigated success: making money.

“Beginning in 2012, the school began shifting large shares of its annual $30-plus million allotment of state funding away from instruction and into stocks, bonds, mortgage-backed securities and real estate.

“That year, 70 percent, or $22.4 million, of its state funding went into its growing investment portfolio — instead of efforts to raise test scores, reduce class sizes, or address an exploding dropout rate that is now the state’s third-highest.”

That’s in line with the usual formula for online charter schools. They fail but they are profitable. State legislatures authorize them despite their consistent record of failure. Usually they do so because a key politician or two received a campaign contribution of a few thousand dollars. Think ECOT in Ohio, which paid off important pols to the tune of a million a year, assuring a return of hundreds of millions every year.

Do taxpayers care? It’s their money.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Failure, For-Profit, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Greg Windle Reports on a Zombie Charter in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2018 //
14

You know the story about zombies. They are the walking dead. They can’t be killed.

Crack reporter Greg Windle has discovered a zombie charter school in Philadelphia.

It has been warned and warned and threatened with death, but it fails and appeals and fails and never dies.

I remember the early days of the charter movement, the late 1980s, early 1990s. Charter enthusiasts said that the great thing about charters was that they would always be accountable for results. If they didn’t keep their promise, they would promptly be closed.

How did that work out?

This zombie charter plans to fail forever and live forever. No accountability!

We now know that the charter lobbyists have made it extremely difficult to close a failing charter school. Zombies!

It takes a long time to close a charter school, and the process includes many opportunities to delay closure for years. Khepera Charter School has exhausted all but its final chance and is now appealing to the state’s Charter Appeals Board to overturn the School Reform Commission’s decision to close the school.

Khepera is a K-8 school with 450 students located in Hunting Park. It was awarded its first charter in 2004, which was renewed in 2009. After academic results declined, the charter was renewed in 2014 with explicit conditions, along with the proviso that failure to meet these conditions would lead to the closure of the school.

Many of the conditions were never met; beyond that, the school continued to violate the state charter law. Since signing the 2014 charter, the school failed to hire enough certified teachers. Growth on the PSSAs largely reversed as scores began to plummet. The school promised to revise its discipline policy and reduce student suspensions, but instead, suspensions increased, even among kindergarten students. Board members didn’t file the required conflict of interest forms. Nor did the school submit the required financial reports and independent audits.

In 2015, the SRC’s Charter Schools Office first warned Khepera that it was failing to meet the conditions. Yet the school has been operating ever since and, by all indications, plans to open for the 2018-19 school year.

Khepera’s appeal to the state essentially seeks to dismiss all charges for a variety of reasons. Its lawyers argue, for instance, that a lack of certification paperwork for a given teacher doesn’t prove that the teacher isn’t certified.

The school ignored the first “notice of deficiency” from the Charter Schools Office, sent in October 2015. The charter office sent another notice in May 2016, another in August 2016, and yet another in May 2017.

Khepera did not respond to these notices. So in June 2017, the SRC voted to begin conducting public hearings to determine whether it should revoke the school’s charter — fully two years after the school failed to meet multiple terms of its signed contract. Hearings began Aug. 10, 2017, and ended Sept. 12, for a total of seven sessions.

Then in December 2017, the School Reform Commission voted to close the charter. Case ended? No! The charter appealed to the state Charter Appeals Board, which could keep the charter open for years.

Zombie!

But that’s not all:

After the SRC voted to revoke the charter of Walter Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School in the spring of 2014, the school filed an appeal to the state so that it could open its doors in September for the next school year.

But when it could not pay employees, Palmer abruptly shut its doors in December 2014, stranding students mid-year and forcing the District to scramble to find places for them.

This cut short the hearings before the state Charter Appeals Board, at which administrators for the charter school had invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 77 times.

After closing the charter, Palmer, a longtime civil rights leader in Philadelphia who founded and ran his namesake school, became a consultant to Khepera, where he initially helped with recruitment. At the end of 2016, he was hired to be CEO.

Khepera’s website gives every indication that it intends to operate throughout the 2018-19 school year and is continuing to recruit and enroll new students.

Zombie walks, talks, and enrolls students even though it is a failing school.

Every failing charter in Pennsylvania can find inspiration in the story of this failing charter:

The longest charter revocation process in state history was for Pocono Mountain Charter School. It lasted six years from the initial revocation hearings to the date the school finally closed. The charter revocation hearings ran for two years, starting in 2008, and appealing to the state’s Charter Appeals Board allowed the school to remain open for three more years. Then the school appealed the state board’s decision twice to higher courts, and only closed in 2014 after it declined to file a third appeal.

Toward the end of the process, Pocono Mountain’s CEO was convicted of using the school to funnel more than $1.5 million in tax dollars to himself, his family, and his businesses. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

But taxpayers can take solace knowing that the charter revocation process ended after six years and the CEO was convicted. Justice is slow but sometimes happens.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Failure, Fraud, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Privatization

D.C.: Prominent Charter Chain is Abandoning Its D.C. School, Can’t Make it Work

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
24

Democracy Prep is leaving the District of Columbia. Its charter school is a failure. Interestingly, Democracy Prep was chosen to take over the Andre Agassi Charter School in Las Vegas after that well-funded school failed.

Charters come, charters go. Kids, go find another school. Tough luck. Better luck next time. Walmart opens and closes stores all the time. What’s the big deal? You know, disruption.

A prominent Southeast Washington charter school with more than 600 students announced Friday that the coming school year will be its last.

Leaders of Democracy Prep Congress Heights said in an email to parents that the school, which has students in preschool through eighth grade, was unable “to provide Congress Heights scholars the school they deserve.”

The letter said Democracy Prep will seek a new organization to run the campus for the 2019-2020 academic year. School leaders said they are confident they will find a new operator and that students will not have to be displaced.

Democracy Prep, a New York-based charter network, made big promises when it entered the District in 2014 to take over Imagine Southeast, which was on the cusp of being shut down over poor performance.

The charter network had built a reputation for lifting test scores among poor children from low-income families in New York’s Harlem neighborhood and promised to bring its model of college prep and civic education to Washington. The network operates nearly 20 schools across the country, and the D.C. school is the only one it is closing.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization

Florida: Is It Possible to Close Down a Financially Troubled, Floundering, Under-Enrolled Charter School?

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2018 //
10

Palm Beach County is struggling to close down a floundering charter school called Eagle Arts Academy.

Frustrated so far in their attempts to close Eagle Arts Academy, Palm Beach County public school leaders are going for the nuclear option: an immediate shutdown of the troubled Wellington charter school.

Schools Superintendent Donald Fennoy is proposing to close the school this week, arguing that its financial woes and evident lack of a campus or teaching staff make it unsafe for students.

The school’s “fiscal mismanagement and deteriorating financial condition have reached such a critical point that there now exists an immediate and serious danger to the health, safety and welfare of (Eagle Arts’) students,” Fennoy wrote in a letter to school board members.

Board members are expected to vote Wednesday on the proposal for an “immediate termination” of the school’s charter.

Monday afternoon, the school’s executive director, Gregory Blount, told the school parents via email that it would be “difficult” to reopen the school next month and recommended that they enroll their children in other area charter schools.

The move to close Eagle Arts comes after a series of delays thwarted the district’s first attempt to shut it down before the school year begins Aug. 13. As a charter school, Eagle Arts is publicly financed but operated by a private board of directors.

RELATED: Eagle Arts charter school may reopen despite vote to close it

In March, the school district initiated a gradual shutdown process, one that requires 90 days’ notice and allows the school to remain open if it chooses to appeal.

Eagle Arts appealed the decision and then convinced an administrative judge to twice postpone a hearing in the case. The delays ensured that the school would be able to reopen next month before the case is decided.

This month the school district tried instead to end its monthly payments to the school, but the judge in the case last week ordered that the payments continue.

But the school district had another tool in its belt: an immediate shutdown of the school.

Under state law, the district can immediately close a charter school only if it determines that an “immediate and serious danger to the health, safety, or welfare of the charter school’s students exists.”

Eagle Arts can appeal, but under the law it wouldn’t get to stay open while it does so. The school district could take control of the school, but Fennoy recommends shutting it down instead while any appeal process plays out.

If the school board votes Wednesday to immediately close the school, it’s not clear what becomes of a $255,000 payment that the school district withheld from it this month.

An administrative judge ordered the school district to pay the money by the end of last week, but by Monday the district had not released the money, a school official with knowledge of the case told The Palm Beach Post.

It’s also unclear whether the decision to immediately close the school would override the ongoing appeal, or if the administrative judge overseeing the appeal would attempt to block the board’s new move to close it.

Neither Blount nor a school district spokeswoman responded to requests for comment on the case.

Eagle Arts has been in trouble for a long while, and the law protects the charter, even though it is in financial trouble and has no campus. Why close it down just because it is failing?

For years, Blount has faced criticism for his combative management style and for steering hundreds of thousands of dollars in school funding into his personal businesses.

Once one of the county’s largest charter schools, Eagle Arts’ enrollment plummeted in recent years after a series of scandals and frequent staff turnover. By the end of the last school year, enrollment had fallen to about 273 students.

The district has argued that the school must be closed because it is in “deteriorating financial condition,” has not paid rent for its 13-acre campus since September and is spending “excessive” amounts on administrative salaries while its student enrollment falls.

In making its case to immediately close the school, the school district is citing its latest woes as evidence that it is an unsafe environment for children. The owner of the school’s campus filed an eviction action in June, saying that the school owed it more than $700,000 in unpaid rent.

Okay, so the director puts the school’s money into his personal business. Is that a problem? So it hasn’t paid rent? No problem. The director explained that the test scores are low because the students are visual learners, you know, artistic types.

It must not be a “no excuses” school. It has so many excuses. Open the article for lots of links.

Eagle Arts Academy has been a problem for Palm Beach County for a long while. Last April, the school was struggling to pay its staff, yet paying the executive director for the right to use the name of the school and its logo.

Since June, the financially struggling Wellington charter school has paid at least $42,000 to director Gregory Blount’s company for the right to call itself Eagle Arts Academy and use an eagle logo, website and data-processing system that the company owns, school records reviewed by The Palm Beach Post show.

This charade (joke) has been going on for about two years.

Here are the most recent reports, which include the two above.

July 30 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/pbc-schools-chief-calls-for-immediate-shutdown-eagle-arts-academy/imcd7DdXPVTIYITRpgRblL/

July 17 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/did-eagle-arts-director-steal-church-camera-feud-leads-theft-probe/JVK24WXtdIAoDCmTqUtsEK/

July 10 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/the-school-board-can-close-eagle-arts-cutting-off-its-money/fjXxdbwjURYqMHwPQinQXM/

June 6 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/eagle-arts-charter-school-may-reopen-despite-vote-close/m2VLePcn8kIMqVWMmA0DfM/

May 1 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/eagle-arts-academy-withholds-teachers-pay-for-second-time-month/ts6tgRDgjvCcNev7kpvALO/

April 13 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/despites-worries-eagle-arts-teachers-report-receiving-full-paychecks/tFJU8OOfXsWVIO0gcIyEAK/

April 13 – https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/local-education/while-struggling-pay-staff-eagle-arts-pays-its-leader-for-its-own-name/09EWrdHvSG9QJCxTjfl2nO/

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

Jan Resseger: How High-Stakes Testing is Ruining Education

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
20

In this post, Jan Resseger reminds us why Daniel Koretz’s book, The Testing Charade, is essential reading.

Read this book about the failure of NCLB and Race to the Top before you listen to Arne Duncan repeat his baseless claim that we need more testing and more of what already failed.

How has high stakes testing ruined our schools and how has this strategy, which was at the heart of No Child Left Behind, made it much more difficult to accomplish No Child Left Behind’s stated goal of reducing educational inequality and closing achievement gaps?

Here is how Daniel Koretz begins to answer that question in his 2017 book, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better: In 2002, No Child Left Behind “mandated that all states use the proficient standard as a target and that 100 percent of students reach that level. It imposed a short timeline for this: twelve years. It required that schools report the performance of several disadvantaged groups and it mandated that 100 percent of each of these groups had to reach the proficient standard. It required that almost all students be tested the same way and evaluated against the same performance standards. And it replaced the straight-line approach by uniform statewide targets for percent proficient, called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)…. The law mandated an escalating series of sanctions for schools that failed to make AYP for each reporting group.” Later, “Arne Duncan used his control over funding to increase even further the pressure to raise scores. The most important of Duncan’s changes was inducing states to tie the evaluation of individual teachers, rather than just schools, to test scores… The reforms caused much more harm than good. Ironically, in some ways they inflicted the most harm on precisely the disadvantaged students the policies were intended to help.”

Koretz poses the following question and his book sets out to answer it: “But why did the reforms fail so badly?”

I recommend Daniel Koretz’s book all the time as essential reading for anyone trying to figure out how we got to the deplorable morass that is today’s federal and state educational policy. I wish I thought more people were reading this book. Maybe people are intimidated that its author is a Harvard expert on the design and use of standardized tests. Maybe it’s the fact that the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. But I don’t see it in very many bookstores, and when I ask people if they have read it, most people tell me they intend to read it. To reassure myself that it is really worth reading, I set myself the task this past weekend of re-reading the entire book. And I found re-reading it to be extremely worthwhile.

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

This is What Privatization Looks Like: Schools Bought and Sold

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
16

Why should taxpayers subsidize corporations that buy and sell schools to one another as one fails and the other picks up the offloaded franchise?

Vote them all out of office in November!

Reader Chiara wrote:

“By June of this year, White Hat’s once prolific presence in Ohio had shriveled to a single online school — Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy (OHDELA) — and 10 “Life Skills” centers, which deliver computer-based GED courses to academically faltering teens and young adults.

Virginia-based Accel Schools, which is amassing an education empire the likes of which hasn’t been seen since White Hat dominated the Ohio landscape, has bought out the contract for OHDELA.

Utah-based Fusion Education Group (FusionED) is taking over contracts for seven of the Life Skills centers, including the North Akron branch in a Chapel Hill storefront at 1458 Brittain Road.

Life Skills Northeast Ohio on Larchmere Boulevard in Cleveland has hired Oakmont Education LLC, a company associated with Cambridge Education Group. White Hat could find no buyer for the last two centers, which will close at 4600 Carnegie Ave. in Cleveland and 3405 Market St. in Youngstown.

Information on White Hat’s off-loading of assets came via the schools’ sponsors: the Ohio Council of Community Schools, which oversaw OHDELA and two Life Skills schools, and St. Aloysius Orphanage, a Cincinnati social service provider. ”

This is what privatization looks like. These schools are 100% taxpayer-funded yet they’re being bought and sold by private entities.

All they’re doing is replacing one garbage contractor with others.

Ohio needs to clean house of state-level politicians and get some new people in there.

This situation will not improve until we break the stranglehold these contractors and their lobbyists have on state government.

Old wine, new bottles.

https://www.ohio.com/akron/news/local/schools-out-for-white-hat-david-brennans-pioneering-for-profit-company-exits-ohio-charter-scene

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio: Supreme Court Rules Against ECOT and the Virtual Charter School is DEAD!

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2018 //
26

It has taken nearly 20 years, and cost Ohio taxpayers $1 billion or more, but the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) died in court this week.

The owner William Lager became a millionaire many times over, supplying goods and services to his corporation.

The “school” had a high attrition rate and the highest dropout rate of any high school in the nation, but it was protected by politicians who received campaign contributions from Lager. The contributions were piffle compared to Lager’s profits.

After embarrassing stories, the ECOT authorizer withdrew its sponsorship. The state, after years of ignoring the horrible performance of ECOT and its huge profits, eventually got around to auditing it and found many phantom students and asked ECOT for an accounting. ECOT insisted that when students turn on their computer, they were learning even if they didn’t participate in activities.

ECOT attorneys argued that the state illegally changed the rules on how to count students in the middle of a school year, and that state law did not require students to participate in class work in order to be counted for funding purposes.

Perhaps foreshadowing the final decision, as attorney Marion Little’s argued before the court in February that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow should get full funding for students even if they do no work, Chief Justice O’Connor interjected, “How is that not absurd?”

After a long battle in court, the Supreme Court voted 4-2 to support the state in its decision to force ECOT to pay back money for students who never received instruction.

Since opening the school in 2000, Lager went from financial distress to a millionaire, with his for-profit companies, IQ Innovations and Altair Learning Management, collecting about $200 million in state funding for work done on behalf of ECOT. At its peak, the school was graduating more than 2,000 students annually, but also had the highest dropout rate in the state.

Lager and his associates also donated $2.5 million to Ohio politicians and political parties, the vast majority to Republicans, with the ECOT scandal boiling into a major issue ahead of the Nov. 6 election featuring the gubernatorial race between DeWine and Democrat Richard Cordray.

Be it noted that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a huge fan of online charter schools and was an investor in K12 Inc., which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Farewell, ECOT. You won’t be missed. Besides, K12 Inc. and other e-schools are rushing in to Ohio to grab your market share.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Scandal, Virtual Charter Schools

Arne Duncan: The U.S. Education System “Is Not Top Ten in Anything”… It “Runs on Lies”

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2018 //
40

Arne Duncan spent seven years as U.S. Secretary of Education, imposing bad ideas every year of his tenure.

Now, having been in charge for longer than almost anyone (except Richard Riley, Clinton’s Secretary of Education), Duncan is smearing U.S. education wherever he goes, all to promote his new book.

Nowhere does he admit that everything he did was a failure.

Evaluating teachers by test scores was a massive failure. States used teacher evaluation as an excuse to level fund their schools, leading to a national teacher shortage and massive disinvestment.

Common Core was a massive failure.

Arne’s school turnaround program was a massive failure.

Most states have dropped out of the federal testing consortia, in which Arne invested $360 million.

Expanding school choice set the basis for Betsy DeVos’ privatization agenda.

Charter schools do not get better results than public schools unless they cherrypick their students and kick out those with low scores.

NAEP scores were flat in 2015 and again in 2017, having absorbed Duncan’s failed policies.

Does he ever learn?

No.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Failure, Fake

Mitchell Robinson: What We Need to Do Instead of Opening Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2018 //
13

Mitchell Robinson of Michigan State University has been debating charter advocates lately. Given the abundant evidence of charter failure in Michigan, they have a lot to defend, but their chief debating point is: Well, what would you do?

Here is his answer.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Michigan, Privatization
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