Archives for category: Failure
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Newark: Charter School Begins to Close Down Less Than Two Months After Opening

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2017 //
22

On August 28, 2017, Governor Chris Christie proudly cut the ribbon with an over-sized scissors to mark the opening of the M.E.T.S. Charter School in Newark. He told the students that they would get every opportunity to succeed, and now it was up to them to decide how hard they wanted to work in school.

During Christie’s two terms in office, he has doubled the number of charter schools to 89.

Well, change that to 88.

Mercedes Schneider reports that the brand new charter school, not even two months old, has announced its plans to close by the end of the school year. Starting immediately, it is sending its students in 9th and 10th grades back to the much-maligned Newark Public Schools.

She writes:

“On October 19, 2017, M.E.T.S. sent the parents of its 9th and 10th graders this “special message” that their so-called school-choice “empowerment” was being immediately overridden by the vague determination of M.E.T.S. to immediately send all 9th and 10th graders back to the Newark Public Schools.

Of course, this profound, “special announcement” jolt– delivered by an “interim lead administrator”– is being framed as responsible, caring, and smooth.”

Then follows the text of the “special announcement.”

A story on a New Jersey website provides a few horrifying details about the shabby treatment of the children of Newark, bounced from one charter to another by “reformers:”

“Almost half of the students at the charter school have already been displaced once.

“District officials said 110 of the 140 students in grades 10-12 came from three closed charter schools — Newark Prep Charter School, Paulo Freire Charter School or Merit Prep Charter School — which were shut down by the state last school year for academic problems.“

Hey, Mark Zuckerberg, is this what your $100 million paid for? Constant disruption of children’s lives.

Categories Charter Schools, Failure, New Jersey, Newark

Gary Rubinstein: The Collapse Of Tennessee’s Achievement School District

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2017 //
22

Gary Rubinstein has been tracking the progress—and the hubris—of the Tennessee Achievement School District. The ASD was created with millions drawn from Tennessee’s $500 Million Race to the Top Grant, the first in the nation. The basic idea was that the ASD would create a special district for the state’s lowest performing schools, turn them over to charter operators, and within precisely five years, these schools would be “catapulted”into the top 25% of the schools in the state.

The first cohort of six schools were in the bottom 5% of schools in the state.

“Two years into the five-year mission, the superintendent at the time, TFA alum Chris Barbic, declared in an interview that of the original six schools, two were on target to get to the top 25% in five years while one of the six schools, Brick Church Elementary, was on a trajectory to reach the goal after just four years.

“Three years into the five-year mission, the improvements that he had based these projections on did not continue and Barbic was saying that they underestimated how difficult this would be, even admitting that the ‘immigrant poverty’ he worked with as a charter school founder in Houston is very different than the ‘generational poverty’ he works with in Tennessee.

“Four years into the five-year mission, Barbic resigned from the ASD, citing among other things, his health as he had recently had a heart attack. He soon got hired by the John Arnold foundation to work on education issues for them.”

In the fifth year, the state testing system was messed up by technical glitches, so there were no scores. So the ASD got six years to work its magic.

Now the scores are out, Gary analyzed the results, and one thing is clear: the ASD was an abysmal failure.

Of the original 6 ASD schools, one is in the bottom 7%, the rest are still in the bottom 5% with two of them in the bottom 1%.

This is what is called a total and complete failure. It was not “for the kids.” It was for the ego-gratification of arrogant deformers.

Gary writes:

“There are actually other states considering starting their own ASDs, I just read that Mississippi is working on it. Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada already have them in the works. There was one in Michigan which folded and there is still the original one in New Orleans which continues to post awful test results.”

Most of the ASD schools were in Memphis. Jeannie Kaplan reported earlier today that author David Osborne was in Denver touting Memphis as a reform Success. Six out of six of the state’s lowest performing schools are still the state’s lowest performing schools. If this is success, what does failure look like?

The definition of a reformer today: Never look at evidence, never admit failure, never learn anything new, just keep pushing privatization, lower standards for teachers, and high-stakes testing. Fail, fail, fail, and do it again.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Memphis, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Washington Post Calls on Democratic Candidate for Governor in Virginia to Stick with Failed NCLB “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2017 //
73

The Washington Post editorial board chastised Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam for admitting that the NCLB reforms have failed, and Virginia needs to find a new paradigm for school improvement.

Lt. Governor Northam’s opponent, GOP functionary Ed Gillespie, is running on a Trump kiss-up platform, calling for the protection of Confederate statues and accusing Northam of having ties to a violent gang of Latinos, MS-13.

No doubt Gillespie will endorse the NCLB approach beloved by the Washington Post editorial board.

The Post is dead wrong. A new book by the eminent Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz says in no uncertain terms that NCLB test-based accountability was a failure that seriously damaged American education. It is titled “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” The high-stakes testing mandated by NCLB and now the Every Student Succeeds Act, produced, in Professor Koretz’s words, score inflation, cheating, and teaching to the tests. Any “gains” are an illusion, because they represent test prep, not learning. (My review of the book will appear in “The New Republic” in the next few weeks.)

Lt. Gov. Northam is right. The Washington Post is seriously out of step on education. It supported Michelle Rhee’s punitive, test-focused regime and never admitted its error, long after John Merrow revealed the D.C. cheating scandal and long after Rhee slipped quietly into oblivion.

What’s the ideal accountability system? Northam admitted to the editorial board that he doesn’t know. Professor Koretz admitted he doesn’t know either. He throws out some ideas drawn from Finland, the Netherlands, and Singapore. There may be others as well, but frankly no one knows. For sure, the Washington Post editorial board doesn’t know, and the little it knows is wrong.

What doesn’t work is one-size-fits-all standards like Common Core. What doesn’t work is promising rewards or threatening punishment to teachers and principals, tied to test scores. Yet that is what the Washington Post advocates: Test-based accountability has failed, but the Post says, “stick with it.” The Post is wrong.

If you live in Virginia, vote for Northam for Governor, not the guy who has wrapped his arms around Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos and the others in the Trump Clown Car.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

Arizona May Revise Phony School Letter Grades, and They Will Still Be Phony

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2017 //
7

Giving letter grades to schools is a fraud.

In New York City, the Department of Health gives letter grades to restaurants, and almost every restaurant gets an A unless there are unhealthy, unsanitary conditions discovered by inspectors, like mouse droppings in the kitchen.

School letter grades attempt to grade schools largely by test scores, whether performance or growth. The scores largely reflect the affluence or poverty of the students. If you want to understand how stupid it is to judge schools by test scores, read Daniel Koretz’s new book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Improve Education.” Give a copy to your superintendent and the school board.

A school is a complex institution with a complex mission, far more complex than a restaurant.

Arizona has decided to recalculate it’s fraudulent school grades.

Could it be because the charter school in Snowflake, Arizona, got an F? That is the Charter beloved by Sylvia Allen, chair of the State Senate Education Committee?

However they are recalculated, they will still be fraudulent.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Testing

Denis Smith: Charter Abuses in Ohio Are Proliferating

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2017 //
5

Denis Smith worked in the charter office of the Ohio Department of Education until he retired in 2011. He continues to be amazed by the growth and scale of charter fraud, waste, and abuse, which the legislature ignores. Of course, the charter industry has been shielded because charter lobbyists wrote the law!

In this post, he describes some of the most flagrant abuses, several of which involve real estate and exorbitant rentals and leases that allow the charter company to pocket taxpayers’ dollars.

Here is one of the most flagrant abuses:

“The Columbus Primary Academy, part of the Imagine Schools charter chain, is saddled with a lease that requires exorbitant rent to Imagine’s for-profit real estate subsidiary. In two other states, federal courts deemed the leases “self-dealing’’ and ordered Imagine to pay $1 million fines. The latest state audit shows the academy’s current lease extends to 2033, while the latest state report cards shows the school continues to fail our kids.”

An inflated lease that runs through 2033 for a failing Charter School!

Why do Ohioans tolerate this misuse of taxpayer dollars?

How many more scandals will be exposed before the legislature stops waste, fraud, and abuse in the charter industry?

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

Nancy Bailey: Why Do We Inflict FORCE AND FLUNK on Young Children?

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2017 //
24

Nancy Bailey describes one of the worst ideas that is current in the world of corporate-style reform: Forcing little children to read at a very young age, as early as kindergarten or first grade, which turns reading into a chore, not a joy.

Then, if they have not met arbitrary standards in third grade, shaming them by holding them back.

This is a child-hostile idea that got started in Florida, where so many bad ideas have begun. It did wonders for fourth grade reading scores, because the kids with the lowest scores flunked.

But it is a truly dumb idea because it forces reading on children before they are ready and it does not make children better readers. Whether children begin to read at age 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 doesn’t matter. What matters is that they learn that reading is a wonderful skill to master and that it opens worlds of enchantment and knowledge. By the time they are 10 or 11, no one remembers when they first began to read. Little children are not global competitors. They are children.

Categories Childhood, Failure, Florida

Arizona: Charter School Graded F in Home District of Charter Booster

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2017 //
10

The most important thing you should know about school grades is that they are a failed and absurd policy cooked up by Jeb Bush to stigmatize schools and set them up for privatization. Usually, they reflect the demographics of the school community. Often, they are totally meaningless. The school in my neighborhood went from an A to an F in one year, even though nothing had changed. School grades are stupid, and I’m happy to say that Mayor de Blasio abandoned them in New York City.

However, they were just initiated in Arizona, and there was a big surprise in store for State Senator Sylvia Allen. She is chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee. The charter that she helped to bring to her district rated an F. She was dumbfounded. She couldn’t believe it.

“Josselyn Berry, co-director at ProgressNow Arizona, said in a press release this week that Allen “for years preached the benefits of charter schools and vouchers for students and parents, but ironically the school she co-founded has gotten the lowest rating a school can get.”

Senator Allen couldn’t accept that her favorite charter school got an F.

“Allen also shifted blame to the new grading system, which the State Board of Education spent more than a year creating because state law requires schools be graded.

“I have grandchildren who go to this school and I have personally seen the help it has given to children. It is not an F school,” Allen said of George Washington Academy. Allen said she only works part-time for Edkey, George Washington Academy’s charter holder, leading a character program at the school.

“I have visited many schools in my district and if you had asked me to give them a grade I would have said they are all A’s but when I looked at what this new system gave them it was not a true reflection of what they do and how successful they are.”

Maybe Senator Allen will take the lead in abolishing the school grading system. Even though ALEC thinks it is a good idea, she can see with her own eyes that it doesn’t work. Besides, the school is already a charter. You can’t privatize a school that is already private.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Arizona, Education Industry, Failure

Why the D.C. Voucher Program Is Failing

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2017 //
10

Thomas Toch and Phyllis W. Jordan write here about the failure of the D.C. voucher program, which has been hailed by the Trump administration as a great success. As they explain, it is not.

Mike Pence called it “a case study in school choice success.”

Far from it.

As the authors point out, significant numbers of families have turned down vouchers or abandoned their voucher school. Many students struggle academically.

“The theory behind the initiative is to give D.C.’s low-income families more and better educational opportunities by supplying them with tax dollars to send their children to private schools. Fine. But voucher enrollment in the nation’s capital dropped for four straight years, from 1,638 in the 2013-2014 school year to 1,154 in the 2016-2017 year. More striking, greater than half the new students offered vouchers last year didn’t use them…

“Low-income parents unfamiliar with the private school landscape must navigate each school’s admissions system separately. Students are awarded vouchers after many private schools have finished their admissions processes. And voucher winners must meet the admissions standards of the schools to which they apply. In this sense, the 47 schools participating in the program are choosing students, rather than the other way around…

“While federal law lacks accountability for schools, it calls for independent assessments of student progress. Between 2012 and 2014, federal researchers tested three sample cohorts of D.C. students in the year after receiving vouchers. Those who won vouchers did worse in math in their first year than students who competed in the voucher lottery but did not receive them.

“Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that nearly half the students in the program attend private schools that sprung up to serve voucher students, sometimes in storefronts, according to a 2013 report by the federal government. About 3 percent were enrolled in independent schools such as Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Day. Most of the rest attended Catholic schools, though few went to the most competitive Catholic schools, such as St. Anselm’s Abbey School.”

Toch and Jordan support charter schools, so believe that the voucher program pales in comparison to the charter and public sectors.

Some of us don’t believe that school choice is the solution to the problems of urban districts. It may in reality be a false solution, since both charters and vouchers choose their students and operate under laxer supervision than the public schools.

Nonetheless it is good to be reminded that the Trump administration’s education agenda of choice-choice-choice is a shell game.

Categories Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Failure, Mike Pence, School Choice, Vouchers

Tennessee: Thousands of Test Scores Are Inaccurate

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2017 //
9

Tennessee has had years of problems with test vendors. This year, then state thought all the glitches were fixed. Wrong. Thousands of scores were wrong.

About 9,400 students across the state received incorrect scores after the testing vendor, Questar, used a scanning program that included an error.

Our friend and reader Duane Swacker would say that all the scores are meaningless and measure nothing. I just finished reading Daniel Koretz’s new book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Improve Education,” and he might agree with Duane. The chances are that the scores have been corrupted by test prep and score inflation. Throw them all out.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Tennessee, Testing

California Releases Audit of Online Charter Giant, Imposes Less Than $2 Million Fine

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2017 //
9

Earlier today, I posted the question: Whatever happened to the audit of the California Virtual Academies, which was supposed to be released in March 2017?

The California Department of Education contacted me to say that the audit was released two days ago, and CDE ordered the Virtual Academies to repay nearly $2 Million in misspent funds.

Let me be clear: I don’t think that for-profit Virtual Charters should be allowed to exist. If districts want to offer online instruction, not for profit, that is their prerogative.

But the for-profits, especially K12 Inc. (founded by Michael Milken and known for paying its executives multimillion dollar salaries) recruit students constantly, have high attrition, and get poor results.

In light of Jesse Calefati’s stunning expose of K12 Inc. in the San Jose Mercury-News, I am surprised that these scam online academies got by with a tap on the hand. According to Calefati, the Virtual Academies have collected hundreds of millions from California taxpayers to run low-performing, ineffectual “schools.” ECOT in Ohio was audited and required to pay more than $60 Million. Excuse me, but a fine of less than $2 Million is trivial for these corporations. Chicken feed.

I hope that the fine of “less than $2 Million” is the beginning and not the end of the Audits. The for-profits are notorious for inflating enrollments and collecting money for phantom students.

Here is the audit.

Here are the articles that CDE sent.

CDE: Online Charter Schools Must Repay Misused State Dollars

By Richard Bammer

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson on Monday said a pair of online charter schools must pay back nearly $2 million of improperly used Common Core education funds.

In a press release, he cited California Virtual Academies and three Insight Schools (together forming CAVA) must remit the dollars to the California Department of Education.

This latest among several other actions stems directly from an audit by the State Controller’s Office and commissioned by the CDE.

The Vacaville Reporter
http://www.thereporter.com/article/NG/20171010/NEWS/171019986

Former Lodi Virtual Academy Fined $2M

By Jennifer Bonnett

A virtual academy that once had a key role in the Lodi Unified School District has been fined close to $2 million by the state for falsifying enrollment figures.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson has announced that the California Virtual Academies and three Insight Schools (together CAVA) must remit nearly $2 million to the California Department of Education in improperly used Common Core education funds.

Lodi News-Sentinel
http://www.lodinews.com/news/article_a8ab29bc-ae42-11e7-8ded-03b98ff003ed.html

Virtual Charter Academies In California Must Refund Nearly $2 Million To State

By Louis Freedberg

As a result of a just released state audit, the California Department of Education says a network of virtual charter schools must refund nearly $2 million in improperly used state funds that were intended for implementation of the Common Core standards in English and math.

In addition, the department will require the schools to conduct a new audit of its average daily attendance records and a number of other actions.

“The California Department of Education is committed to ensuring public schools follow the laws and regulations that safeguard taxpayer funds,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson. “It’s critical that our students receive the resources they need to succeed.”

EdSource

Virtual charter academies in California must refund nearly $2 million to state

California Fines Charter School Chain $2 Million

By Sharon Noguchi

In long-awaited results of a 1½-year investigation, California’s finance and education chiefs on Monday issued a critical audit of the online charter-school chain California Virtual Academies, finding several contractual violations and irregularities and imposing a nearly $2 million fine.

The report ordered the charter firm to provide documentation around student progress, student-teacher ratios and excess oversight fees, among other things. It also demanded California Virtual Academies produce an audited opinion on the accuracy of its average daily attendance — on which California bases its payments to public schools, including charters — and to pay the California Department of Education $1,995,148 for improperly handled funds.

Mercury News

California fines charter school chain $2 million

Categories California, Failure, K12 Inc., Virtual Charter Schools
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