Bob Braun, the veteran investigative reporter who has covered New Jersey politics for many years, describes an astonishing ripoff of taxpayers.
Archives for category: Failure
Glenn W. Smith, an opinion writer for the Austin American-Statesman eviscerates the sinister motives behind the A-F grading of schools. This plan was promulgated by Jeb Bush and his team of privatizers. My home state of Texas is the home of NCLB accountability. Nearly 20 years after that law was passed, we are still waiting for “no child [to be] left behind.] Fortunately, we now have a federal law in which Congress promises that “Every Child” will Succeed. More snake oil. Comply or die.
The leadership of the Republican Party in Texas and around the country is hell-bent on ending public education as we know it and replacing it with private corporations that will get rich on our tax dollars while educating fewer of our children.
The dream of a universally educated citizenry will be killed in a premeditated attack on perhaps the most important institution of democracy there is. In fact, its importance to democracy is one reason why the authoritarian-minded want to kill it.
There are other reasons. Many may wonder how the Christian Right can ally itself with Donald Trump, his greed-soaked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other school privatizers. The equation is simple enough: The rich get richer, and the Right gets public tax dollars for private, fundamentalist schools.
Children in public schools will, over time, receive fewer and fewer resources and fall further and further behind. Then, there will come a moment when the underfunded public education system perishes like a starved prisoner in a forgotten cell.
The state recently released its latest version of school ratings, this one called A-F report cards. The “simplified” ratings are used, it seems, so Texas parents — already victims of underfunded public schools — have a shot at remembering what A and F grades mean.
Such ratings are sold to us on the premise of increased accountability. Instead, they used to destroy confidence in public schools to advance the cause of publicly funded private schools.
Think for a moment of all the time and money spent on questionable standardized testing and the casting of dark bureaucratic spells — I mean development of ratings systems — upon public education. Think of the anguish of educators and students who are sentenced to Dr. Standardized’s Hamster Wheel Test of Accountability.
Now, imagine if you can that all that time and money was spent on educating our public schoolchildren instead of on the purchase of great barrels of ink to paint scarlet F’s on schoolhouse doors. Why, gosh and golly, maybe all our schools would get A’s and B’s…
If we look carefully, we might find that the efforts of the privatizers to embarrass public education sometimes backfire. Let’s put two facts back to back:
• Democratic state Rep. Donna Howard of Austin recently pointed out that charter schools get 100 percent of their funding from the state. Public schools get 33 percent. The rest comes from local property taxes. Local districts’ efforts to overcome the state’s funding failure is the reason your property taxes increase, by the way.
• As a public school advocate and former state school board member, Thomas Ratliff put it in a tweet after the A-F grades for schools were released: “8 percent of charter schools are rated F while only 1.2 percent of public schools [are].” Ouch.
Looky there on the blackboard: Charter schools, treated lavishly by the state, don’t quite pass on that lavish treatment to our children’s education.
Adding a profit motive to public education does not lead to better performance; we pay more for less. That doesn’t make that much difference when we’re talking about our socks costing more and wearing out sooner than they should.
Howard Blume reports in the Los Angeles Times that a charter school in the chain founded by convicted felon Ref Rodriguez closed due to low enrollment. It had projected a student body of 275 but only 114 signed up.
“On the fourth day of its second school year, an Eagle Rock charter school closed its doors this week, leaving parents and students disappointed, angry and tearful — and bucking the usual narrative of ceaseless charter growth.
“PUC iPrep Charter Academy had dual-language programs in English and either Spanish or Mandarin — the sort of offerings that are usually popular. But it was in an area with too many good school options, and it enrolled too few students.
“It may or may not have been a factor that the school was part of Partnerships to Uplift Communities, the group of charter schools co-founded by Ref Rodriguez, who resigned from the Los Angeles Board of Education in July after pleading guilty to criminal charges related to his campaign for office.
The school aimed to enroll 275 students this year, although the organization told parents it would try to make things work with 200. But by Wednesday, it had only 114 students — and PUC’s board voted to shut it down.”
Charter advocates like to claim that tens of thousands of students are on charter waiting lists, but those lists are never audited, and in the rare instances when anyone checks (it happened in Boston), the waiting list contained names of students who had applied to multiple charters and had long ago been enrolled elsewhere.
Fred Smith and Robin Jacobowitz published a paper analyzing the tests that students in New York are required to take. Their conclusion is devastating.
They examine the quality of the tests, not just the scores of the students. And they conclude that the tests are inaccurate, unintelligible, and indechipherable.
Taxpayers are spending millions of dollars for flawed instruments that harm students and corrupt education.
Questions are not only flawed but developmentally inappropriate for the children to whom they are administered.
Expanding the testing time did not fix the inherent problems.
Smith and Jacobowitz conclude:
Our boldest conclusions tie together important aspects of the testing story: children upset and dumbstruck
by the exams, especially the youngest ones; unhappy parents whose views were disparaged; SED’s suppression of data needed by the public, especially parents to stay informed and make intelligent decisions about their children’s education; the surge in zero scores and omissions that this study uncovered; ill-conceived tests and their perpetuation; the strong case parents have for opting out; the overriding need for transparency, timely data and unfettered review by analysts. These rest most solidly on findings for grades 3 and 4, and for ELLs, students with disabilities, and minority students.
In the final analysis, we are dealing with children here at a formative time in their lives, when education matters most. For every discussion and news story about the increase or decrease in test scores, we must remember that behind each statistic is a child—a young child— who lives each day with the decisions that we make about testing. The 3rd graders who took the first CCLS-linked test in 2013 are taking the 8th grade test this spring. Everything that has been wrong with the core-aligned tests has framed the education of these young people.
It’s time to create a legitimate assessment process, unified with standards and curricula that work in harmony to foster the development of every child’s intellect, abilities, and dreams. Federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), dictates that we test our young students in math and ELA each year.
We must determine how to do that in a way that serves children and the educational goals we value.
Message to parents:
The testing corporations have never been held accountable.
The New York State Education Department has never been held accountable.
Nothing has been fixed.
Opt out.
Do not allow your children to take these tests.
They harm your child and corrupt what we value most in education.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 