Archives for category: Failure

Tom Ultican, retired high school teacher of advanced math and physics, has embarked on a project to review the Destroy Public Education (DPE) Movement.

His latest topic is Denver. Privatizers point to Denver as a success story, but Ultican says the schools are a “dystopian nightmare.”

Denver is a classic example of impeccably liberal Democrats collaborating to undermine and privatize public schools.

They began, as they always do, by displaying dire statistics about the “failure”of the schools. Radical action is necessary. Denver leaders began by hiring non-educator Michael Bennett as Superintendent of Schools. Bennett had worked as managing director for the investment fund of billionaire Philip Anschutz, oil and gas magnate, fracking advocate, film producer (e.g., “Waiting for Superman,” “Won’t Back Down,” “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”), and an Evangelical Christian and a funder of anti-gay activism.

“A key DPE playbook move is to leverage out of town money with local money and political muscle to purloin control of public schools. DPS schools were not dysfunctional nor were they failing. In several Denver neighborhoods, the schools were the only functional government entity.”

“Colorado launched annual state testing, which helped Bennett in his need to cry failure. He was a great believer in the “bad teacher” theory. He turned to Michelle Rhee New Teacher Project and Wendy Kopp’s TFA to import new teachers.

“Bennett enthusiastically embraced the portfolio model, treating schools like stocks: keep the winners, close the losers. No surprise: Almost all the loser schools were in poor and minority communities.

“The year that Bennet became superintendent, the heirs of the Walmart fortune opened the Charter School Growth Fund just 20 miles up highway-25 from downtown Denver. Carrie Walton Penner, sits on the board of the fund and Carrie’s husband, Greg Penner, is a director. Annie Walton Proietti, niece of Carrie, works for a KIPP school in Denver. There are other Walton family members living in and frequenting the Denver area.

“Joining the Walmart school privatizers is Bennet’s business mentor Philip Anschutz. He has a billion-dollar foundation located in Denver and owns Walden Publishing. “Walden Publishing company was “behind the anti-teachers’ union movies ‘Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Waiting for ‘Superman.’”

“These wealth powered people along with several peers promote school privatization and portfolio district management ideology.

“There is a widely held fundamental misconception that standardized testing proves something about the quality of a school. There is a belief among people than have never studied the issue that testing can be used to objectively evaluate teacher quality. It cannot! A roulette wheel would be an equally accurate instrument for measuring school and teacher quality.

“Another Non-Educator with No Training

“In 2007, Bennet asked Tom Boasberg, a childhood friend, to join DPS as his chief operating officer. Trained as a lawyer, Boasberg had worked closely as chief of staff to the chairman of Hong Kong’s first political party in the early 1990s, when the colony held its first elections in its 150 years of British rule. Before DPS, Boasberg worked for eight years at Level 3 Communications, where he was Group Vice President for Corporate Development.

“In the spring of 2008, Bennet and Boasberg were ready to tackle the pension crisis seen as sucking money out of classrooms. One month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Boasberg and Bennet convinced the DPS board to buy a $750,000,000 complicated instrument with variable interest rates. During the melt-down of 2008 Denver’s interest rates zoomed up making this a very bad deal for DPS. (Banking was supposed to be Bennet and Boasberg’s strength.)”

So these two financial geniuses cost the school district some $25 Million on a bad bet with district funds, but no one hel them accountable. They got rid of “bad teachers,” but no one got rid of them.

Instead, Bennett was appointed to fill an empty U.S. Senate seat, and he was succeeded by his friend Tom Boasberg. Boasberg is a “graduate”of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, which teaches the virtues of top-down management, closing schools, charter schools, and high-stakes testing.

Despite the usual reformer hype and boasting, test scores rose higher before Bennett started than after, yesterday reformers drooled over its “success,” which was in the eye of the beholder.

Ultican goes on to assert, with evidence, that Denver’s strategy has been ineffective and bad for kids. He shows that changing schools destabilizes neighborhoods and hurts kids; that the portfolio model is nonsense; and that inexperienced TFA teachers are not good teachers; and that running multiple school systems is more costly than running a unified system.

No miracle in Denver. Just disruption.

Categories Denver, Disruption, Failure, Rhee, Michelle, Teach for America

Gary Rubinstein: A Model of Abject Failure: The Tennessee Achievement School District

By dianeravitch

February 4, 2018 //

Gary Rubinstein has chronicled the creation, the hype, the premature claims of success, and the utter collapse of the Tennessee Achievement School District.

It was created with Race to the Top funding. It promised to take the schools ranked in the bottom 5% of the state and “catapult” them to the top 25%. This would take only five years. It would be done by turning them into charter schools.

But, five years later, Rubinstein finds, 5 of the six original schools are still in the bottom 5%, and the sixth is in the bottom 9%.

Tennessee ‘Cusp List’ 2017: 5 of 6 Of Original ASD Schools Still In Bottom 5%

This outcome could be fairly characterized as abject failure.

Unfortunately, reformers are never deterred by failure. Several other states, including Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina have started a similar program, modeled on the Tennessee ASD.

Worse, the ASD concept is embedded in the federal Every Student Succeeds act, which directs states to develop a plan to intervene in the schools in the lowest performing 5%.

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

Peter Greene: Why the Charter Movement is Declining

By dianeravitch

February 3, 2018 //

The original idea on the Charter Movement was noble: Teachers would create them as part of their school or district; they would seek out the most vulnerable students, the ones who had dropped out or who slept through class. They would use their freedom from the usual rules to find new ways to educate the reluctant students.

That was Albert Shanker’s vision. He sold it to his members in 1988 and kept selling it until 1993, when he announced in his weekly paid column in the New York Times that charters were no different from vouchers. He declared that business was moving into the charter industry and using it to break teachers’ unions and destroy public schools. Too late. The movement went into high gear, and the sector turned into a.m. industry, with corporate chains and for-profits, relying on inexperienced teachers and cutting costs (teacher salaries).

But suddenly, the Charter Movement has stalled. New ones still open, and old ones close, for financial or academic reasons.

Peter Greene here assesses the report from the charter-friendly Center on Reinventing Public Education. Peter has a somewhat different take than the previous post by Steven Singer.

The bottom line is the same. The charter industry literally wants free space by closing public schools. They can’t hold on to teachers, not only because of low wages, but because of poor working conditions. The teachers they attract are not in education as a career but as a stepping stone.

And two other factors hobble the growth of charters. First, most don’t keep their promises; they are not better than public schools. Second, the public reads almost daily about charters that close in mid-year, Charter founders who were convicted of theft, charter leaders using public funds as an ATM.

Peter Greene writes about the report’s “Solutions”:

“CRPE wraps up the report with some proposed solutions to the problems listed above. These are…. well, these are solutions only if you decide that the interests of charter operators are the only interests that need to be served.

“Facility shortage? Make public districts hand over more publicly owned property to charter schools, change zoning laws, and get the legislature to underwrite the funding charters need to grab real estate. And create a commission to “coordinate” the handover of public facilities to private charter operators.

“Bad competition? Create some central planning authority to coordinate the expansion strategies of charters. How that translates into anything other than telling charters where they’re allowed to expand, and how THAT translates into anything other than charter operators saying, “No, I don’t want to” is not clear. CRPE acknowledges that no charters are saying, “Please give us less autonomy.”

“Staff? Do some recruiting. From wherever.

“Limited choices? Increase a diverse supply of operators. Man. Why is it that people whose whole argument is “Free market! Free Market!” do not understand how the free market works. The free market does not give you what you wish for– it gives you what it thinks it can make money giving you. It may be cool to think, “Wow! With 500 cable channels, we could have an arts channel and a stand-up comedy channel and a channel with nothing but music videos,” but the free market does not care what you think would be cool. Well, says CRPE, we could invest heavily in the more diverse models. Who would do that, and why?

“More data? CRPE thinks more data about the charter market is needed. Who would collect that, and why?

“Toxic local politics? Maybe charter operators could negotiate some sort of deal whereby they didn’t completely suck the financial life blood out of public schools (and the schools would hand over real estate just to, you know, be cool).. Maybe they could keep trying to pack local school boards. Maybe they could convince district leaders to “think of their jobs as overseeing a broad portfolio of options with various governance models” except of course some of the items in the portfolio they “oversee” would be completely outside of their control and would be hostile and damaging to the parts of their portfolio that they are actually, legally responsible. Honestly, most of these solutions boil down to “let’s wish real hard that public school people will just like us more because it’s inconvenient for us when they don’t.”

“Bottom line

“I’m happy to see the modern charter tide ebbing. And I’m not sad to see that folks like CRPE and the interviewees don’t really have a handle on why it’s happening. I agree that it doesn’t have to be this way, but it will be this way as long as modern charter boosters fail to acknowledge their major systemic issues, insist on inadequate funding in a zero-sum system, disenfranchise the public, underperform in educating students, and behave as businesses rather than schools. As I said above, time is not on their side, and neither is their inability to grasp the problems they create for public education in this country.”

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

Steven Singer: Charter-Friendly Group Reports Dramatic Decline in New Charter Schools

By dianeravitch

February 3, 2018 //

Steven Singer reviews a new report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. This is a Gates-funded think tank whose belief is that the best way to “reinvent” public schools is to privatize them.

The charter sector had been booming but this past year, the boom fizzled. What once seemed to be an unstoppable steam roller, intent on crushing public schools, has slowed to a crawl.

The problems, says the report, are real estate cost, teacher shortages, and political backlash.

Singer writes:

“How did the hippest new thing to hit education since the chalk board suddenly hit such a wall? After all, it wasn’t so long ago that every celebrity from Magic Johnson to Andre Agassi to Deion Sanders to Sean “Puffy” Combs to Pitt Bull had their own charter school. Even Oprah Winfrey, the queen of multimedia, donated millions to charter networks in Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas and her home state of Illinois.

“How could something with so much high profile support be running out of gas?

“The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has a theory.

“The charter school funded think tank (read: propaganda network) released a report boiling the issue down to three factors: real estate costs, a teacher shortage and political backlash.

“Real estate costs? Yes, few public schools want to offer you public property to put your privately run school that will inevitably gobble up a good portion of its funding and turn a portion of that into profit for private investors.

“Teacher shortage? Yes, when you pay your educators the least, don’t allow your employees to unionize, and demand high hours without remuneration, you tend to find it harder than most educational institutions to find people willing to work for you.

“Political backlash? DING! DING! DING!

“Of course, most people who aren’t paid by the charter school industry – as those working for CRPE are – would simply call this a charter school backlash – not political, at all.

“This isn’t one political party seeking advantage over another. It’s concerned citizens from both sides of the aisle worried about the practices of the charter school industry.”

Singer’s post includes some nifty charts. Be sure to open it.

The bottom line is that the bloom is off the rose.

The public is beginning to understand that charter schools are meant to destabilize their community public schools. They take away money meant for the public schools. They take the students they want and exclude those they don’t want. They open and close like day lilies. The for-profits are interested in profit, not education.

And it destroys their reputation when the public knows that Trump, DeVos, Wall Street, and the Koch brothers are leading the charge to destroy what belongs to the entire community.

Resist!

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization

Arizona: Bradley Success Academy Charter Schools Suddeny Closes, Leaving Students in the Lurch

By dianeravitch

February 1, 2018 //

Just two days ago, the Bradley Success Academy in Goodyear, Arizona, shuttered, stranding its students.

The school sent a letter to parents expressing its regret.

One parent said she was finished with charter schools.

“”I will never put my child in another charter school again … because they are financially unstable,” Stephanie McMullen said.

“And then there are the practical concerns.

“I’m afraid he’s going to be behind and other kids like him are going to be behind,” McMullen said. “It’s not right. Teachers are out of work, too.”

“Preschool teacher Michelle Miller is one of them.

“For all the hard work that we’ve done all year long, it’s heartbreaking that they would do something like this to us,” she said as she held back tears.”

The school enrolled 450 students. It was started in 2003.it was managed by for-profit Imagine, which has a record of making money in real estate.

A reader of the Blog alerted me with this comment:

“And, another charter school closed its doors abruptly. The Bradley Success Academy shuttered his doors & locked the gate in Goodyear, Az,. a small suburb to the west of Phoenix. (One of those cookie cutter developments built on the edges of an old western town) It signed charter papers in 2003. The letter cited overwhelming financial problems. In looking through their Facebook pages, it seems many parents were unhappy. The Facebook page also touted their expertise in Special Ed. But, looking at the credentials and expenses, no monies were spent on Spec. Ed. Could be wrong, I’m not an expert at finacial reporting.

“I am currently investigating how much money they’re going to abscond with. One of the things that stood out in the financial report turned into Arizona Department of Education is they have over $8 million worth of capitol assets. Didn’t see any real problems with finances, other than revenue & expenses don’t quite line up.

“One of the charter holders is Paula Poultridge, Regional finance Director for Imagine Schools. Hmmmm…………………something to look at?”

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

My Review of Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” No More Paywall.

By dianeravitch

January 11, 2018 //

I reviewed Harvard Professor Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade” in “The New Republic.” It was behind a paywall until a few days ago. The paywall has been lifted.

Here are the main points.

Koretz demolishes the test-and-punish regime of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. He says in no uncertain terms that they failed. He says they ignored Campbell’s Law, which declares that attaching high stakes to tests distorts both the measure and distorts the process they were meant to measure. The emphasis on testing led to inflation of scores, so any rise in scores as a result of pressure is of little or no significance and surely does not mean that students are better educated. I enjoyed reading the book, and my reservation is that Koretz is not at all sure what to do about accountability. I am not either. I wish that the leaders of Congress understood what a complicated subject of accountability is. I would like to see greater accountability at the top, where decisions are made about funding and autonomy. We have a wacky system where teachers, principals and students are held accountable without the power to change the conditions under which they Labor.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

North Carolina: How a Once Great State Destroyed Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch

January 8, 2018 //

This Report was written by Kris Nordstrom, who works for the North Carolina Justice Center. He previously was a research analyst for the North Carolina General Assembly. The report tells the story of a state that was once the envy of the South for its education policies, but is now in rapid decline, copying failed policies from other states,

Home

PRESS RELEASE and SUMMARY

By Kris Nordstrom
Contracting Analyst, Education & Law Project

North Carolina was once viewed as the shining light for progressive education policy in the South. State leaders—often with the support of the business community—were able to develop bipartisan support for public schools, and implement popular, effective programs. North Carolina was among the first states to explicitly monitor the performance of student subgroups in an effort to address racial achievement gaps. The state made great strides to professionalizing the teaching force, bringing the state’s average teacher salary nearly up to the national average even as the state was forced to hire many novice teachers to keep pace with enrollment increases. In addition, North Carolina focused on developing and retaining its teaching force by investing in teacher scholarship programs and mentoring programs for beginning teachers.

North Carolina innovated at all ends of the education spectrum. The state was one of the first in the nation to create a statewide pre-kindergarten program with rigorous quality standards. At the secondary level, North Carolina was at the forefront of dual credit programs for high school students, and the Learn & Earn model (now known as Cooperative Innovative High Schools) became a national model, allowing students to graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in five years. Students graduating from North Carolina public schools could enroll in the state’s admired, low-cost community college system or its strong university system, most notably UNC Chapel Hill. For much of the 1990s through early 2000s, policymakers in other states often looked to North Carolina’s public schools as an example of sound, thoughtful policy aiming to broadly uplift student performance.

Unfortunately, over the past seven years, North Carolina has lost its reputation for educational excellence. Since the Republican takeover of the General Assembly following the 2010 election, the state has become more infamous for bitter partisanship and divisiveness, as reflected in education policies. Lawmakers have passed a number of controversial, partisan measures, rapidly expanding school choice, cutting school resources, and eliminating job protections for teachers.

Less discussed, however, has been degradation in the quality of North Carolina’s education policies. General Assembly leadership has focused on replicating a number of education initiatives from other states, most lacking any research-based evidence of delivering successful results to students. The General Assembly has compounded the problems though by consistently delivering exceptionally poorly-crafted versions of these initiatives.

Sadly, these controversial, poorly-executed efforts have failed to deliver positive results for North Carolina’s students. Performance in our schools has suffered, particularly for the state’s low-income and minority children.

So how did we get here? How is it affecting our students?

Lack of transparency leads to poor legislation

The past seven years of education policy have been dominated by a series of not just bad policies, but bad policies that are incredibly poorly crafted. This report provides a review of the major education initiatives of this seven-year period. In every case, the major initiatives are both:

Based on very questionable evidence; and
Crafted haphazardly, ignoring best practices or lessons learned from other states.
These problems almost certainly stem from the General Assembly’s approach to policymaking. Over the past seven years, almost all major education initiatives were moved through the legislature in a way to avoid debate and outside input. At the same time, the General Assembly has abandoned its oversight responsibilities and avoided public input from education stakeholders. The net result has been stagnant student performance, and increased achievement gaps for minority and low-income students.

One commonality of nearly all of the initiatives highlighted in this report is that they were folded into omnibus budget bills, rather than moved through a deliberative committee process. Including major initiatives in the budget, rather than as stand-alone bills, is problematic for three reasons:

Stand-alone bills are required to be debated in at least one committee prior to being heard on the floor. Committee hearings allow public debate and bill modifications from General Assembly members with subject-area knowledge, and can permit public input from stakeholders and other outside experts.
Stand-alone bills require majority of support to become law. While the budget bill also requires majority support to become law, there is great pressure on members to vote for a budget bill, particularly one crafted by their own party. Budget bills are filled with hundreds of policy provisions. As a result, members might vote for controversial programs that are incorporated into the budget that they would not support if presented as a standalone vote.

Budget bills are very large, and members are often provided limited time to review the lengthy documents. For example, the 2017 budget bill was made public just before midnight on June 19 and presented on the Senate floor for debate and vote by 4 PM on June 20. As a result, members are unable to adequately review programs and craft amendments that could improve program delivery.
Compounding matters, the General Assembly has effectively dismantled the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee (Ed Oversight), while joint meetings of the House and Senate Education Appropriation subcommittees (Ed Appropriations) are becoming increasingly rare. In the past, these two committees were integral to the creation and oversight of new initiatives.

From its formation in 1990 through 2015, Ed Oversight regularly met during the legislative interim to recommend ways to improve education in the state. However, the committee met just once in the 2015-16 interim, and not at all during the 2016-17 interim.

Similarly, Ed Appropriations—which is responsible for crafting the state budget for public schools, the community college system, and state universities—is meeting less often. Historically, Ed Appropriations meetings during long sessions have been the venue through which General Assembly members undertake detailed, line-item reviews of each state agency’s budget.

2017 marked the first time in known history that Ed Appropriations meetings featured zero in-depth presentations of K-12 funding issues. The General Assembly’s education leaders stood out for their lack of effort. Every other budget subcommittee received detailed presentations covering all, or nearly all, agency budgets.

North Carolina’s teachers, Department of Public Instruction employees, and the academic community are an incredibly valuable resource that should be drawn upon to strengthen our state educational policy. Instead, these voices have increasingly been ignored. As shown below, the net result has been a series of poorly-crafted policies that are harming North Carolina’s children.

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Hoax, North Carolina, School Choice

Ohio: Charter School Graduation Rates Way Below Rates of Urban Districts

By dianeravitch

December 26, 2017 //

A study in Ohio reveals that the state’s charter schools have far lower graduation rates, even when compared to urban districts and excluding dropout recovery schools. This story appeared in the Columbus Dispatch.

“Even when excluding dropout-recovery schools, the four-year graduation rates of charter schools in Ohio are half that of traditional schools, and 28 points lower than the largest urban districts.

“Charter schools not classified as dropout recovery have a four-year graduation rate of just under 45 percent, compared with 73 percent in Ohio’s six biggest urban districts — Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton, Akron and Toledo.

“Having it be that low is surprising. Very surprising,” said Howard Fleeter, chief analyst for the Ohio Education Policy Institute, who produced the data.

“Given that Ohio charter schools draw most of their students from urban districts, and those urban districts have a higher concentration of poverty than the non-dropout charter schools, the graduation numbers should be closer, Fleeter said.

““The (charter) school numbers look really bad. The question then is to figure out why,” Fleeter said, stressing that some charters are showing high graduation rates, so it’s not an indictment of the whole system. “The next step is, let’s look behind the averages and see what’s going on. There are places where they’re not doing nearly as good a job as others. Why is that?””

Categories Failure, High School Graduation

Tom Ultican: The Billionaires’ Plan to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch

December 19, 2017 //

Tom Ultican lays out in gruesome detail the billionaires’ plan to destroy public education.

The documentation is solid. The billionaires are jointly funding every anti-public school organization they can find, and they create them when they don’t exist.

Gruesome, yes. But it is a fact that their spending has not accomplished much, other than to ruin the lives of children, teachers, families, and communities. Nowhere has it produced better education. They sow chaos and disruption, then move on to the next big idea.

He begins like this:

“Three researchers from Indiana coined the terminology Destroy Public Education (DPE). They refuse to call it reform which is a positive sounding term that obfuscates the damage being done. America’s public education system is an unmitigated success story, yet, DPE forces say we need to change its governance and monetize it.

“We are discussing the education system that put a man on the moon, developed the greatest economy the world has ever seen and wiped out small pox. It is the system that embraces all comers and resists all forms of discrimination. In the 1980’s, it was laying the foundation for the digital revolution when it came under spurious attack.

“Not only are great resources being squandered on DPE efforts but the teaching profession is being diminished. Organizations like Relay Graduate School and the New Teachers Project are put forward as having more expertise in teacher education than our great public universities. That would be amusing if wealthy elites were not paying to have these posers taken seriously.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud