Archives for category: For-Profit
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A Message from James Meredith to BATS

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2014 //
3

This just in from the BATs:

”
On February 12th the Badass Teachers Association was honored to get this amazing message from James Meredith via his co-author William Doyle. BATs will be honoring Meredith’s The American Child’s Education Bill of Rights with a special event on February 10-13. Here is that amazing message:

A MESSAGE TO AMERICA’S TEACHERS

The destiny of America is in your hands. We are in a Dark Age of American public education, but you will lead the nation to a new dawn, to a New Renaissance of Education for all of our children that can transform America and the world.

This new age will be based not on politics or profit, but on evidence, and based on love and respect for teachers and children above all else.

As Sam Cooke said 50 years ago, “There been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long, But now I think I’m able to carry on. It’s been a long, a long time coming, But I know a change is going to come. Yes it will.”

James Meredith

with William Doyle

Co-Authors of A Mission from God: a Memoir and Challenge for America

BATs will be supporting James Meredith vision for education by producing videos that will have teachers commenting on aspects of The American Child’s Education Bill of Rights. To be a part of this amazing venture please join BATs on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/BadAssTeachers/ or you can email BAT Managers Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson at contact.batmanagers@gmail.com for more information.”

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Resistance

I Am Bummed Out: Rhee Will Speak in Minneapolis Instead of Debating Me

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2014 //
106

As readers of this blog know, Michelle Rhee promised to debate me at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania last spring.

The date was set, at her request, on February 6.

Then she demanded a second, and I agreed. (Her second was going to be Rod Paige.)

Then she demanded a third, and I agreed.

Then she said she couldn’t find a third, and she canceled.

Now I learn she is speaking to the Chamber of Commerce in Minneapolis on February 6, where she will bring the message that the way to have great schools is to fire teachers and use test scores as the absolute judge of students, teachers, principals, and schools.

She is speaking during the day so it is not likely that there will be teachers or students present.

I wish she would debate me. I would even accept a fourth or a fifth. We could each bring a team and mud-wrestle.

But no basketball. She would bring you-know-who, and I am not that tall.

Come on, Michelle. Just do it.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Testing

John Austin, President of the Michigan State Board of Education, Writes the Readers of This Blog

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
15

I have posted several articles about Governor Rick Snyder’s all-out assault on public education, most recently, this one earlier today. Some 80% of charters operate for profit, fiscally troubled districts have been handed over to for-profit charter corporations (with poor track records) that extract as much in profit as the district’s deficit (this happens only in majority African-American districts), schools and districts are incentivized to poach students from each other to get the money they need to function (and waste millions of taxpayer dollars advertising for students from other districts). In addition, the governor created the ill-named Education Achievement Authority, a super district made up of the state’s lowest-performing schools and overseen by John Covington. Covington, trained in the unaccredited Broad Academy, previously was superintendent of Kansas City, which lost its accreditation under his leadership. Tomorrow, I will post an article containing interviews with teachers who work in the EAA and describe it as a dangerous environment, unsafe for teachers and students alike.

Governor Snyder is achieving his goal: dissolving public education as a civic obligation and turning it into a free-for-all marketplace.

In response to a post about Governor Snyder’s actions, the blog received this comment from the president of the elected Michigan State Board of Education. The state board is dominated by Democrats (like Austin) but seems unable to slow the governor’s wrecking ball. The most outspoken critic of the Snyder assault on public schools is State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton. In a few minutes, I will post an interview with Representative Lipton about the EAA.

John Austin writes:

John Austin, President of Michigan State Board of Education here. We do have an unfortunate proliferation in Michigan of new charter and cyber schools, both good, mediocre and truly bad at educating children. The legislature’s, and to date the Governor’s unwillingness to insist on quality control in new school creation, to ensure they educate kids, and the fueling of a wild-west free market of largely for-profit new school creation is doing damage both financially, and educationally to all our schools and children.

The EAA was an effort, well-intentioned, to create a functional and effective state turnaround district to improve performance in our worst schools. Unfortunately, it too was tied up in knots, when legislation to codify it was loaded up with ornaments of the unlimited new school creation policy being pushed last year. It also has had real growing pains, problems and transparency issues.

However, different from the account my friend Ellen Cogen Lipton seemed to suggest in the Electabog article, the State Board of Education twice asked Dr. Covington to come and discuss progress or lack thereof with us, and he certainly did so, and we had as recently as last September a useful and robust public discussion of all the issues– hopefully towards helping the EAA work better, and do better with the legitimate concerns raised by Rep Lipton and many others.

Categories Charter Schools, For-Profit, Michigan

Michigan: Governor Snyder Is Succeeding…..in Destroying Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
24

One of our readers brought this sad article to my attention.

Under Governor Rick Snyder, more school districts have collapsed into emergency status than during the time of any of his predecessors. Failing districts get taken over by the state and put into its Emergency Achievement District, an oxymoron. Once in the EAA, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy arranges to dissolve democratic control and turn the schools over to for-profit charter chaplains.

Snyder encourages charters and loves for-profit charters.

80% of Michigan’s charters operate for-profit.

What a racket!

How much longer will Michigan voters tolerate the plundering and sacking of public education?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan

Tom Friedman Is As Clueless As Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2014 //
71

Most educators and even most legislators seem to recognize that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have failed to “reform” American education. After 13 years of test-based evaluation and school closings, no one claims success. We need what: More of the same! Congress doesn’t know what to do to change a failed status quo. Feckless Arne Duncan, having failed in Chicago, now looks for scapegoats for the failure of the Bush-Obame bipartisan consensus.

Duncan has one sure ally: Tom Friedman of the Néw York Times

They are certain that American schools are terrible, even though test scores and graduation rates are at a historic high. They want us to be just like South Korea, where exams determine one’s life (see Mercedes Schneider on examination hell in Korea).

They blame parents. They blame teachers. They blame students. They blame schools.

They blame everyone but the obvious perpetrators: failed federal policies that undermine the autonomy of teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and states; budget cuts that have increased class sizes and narrowed curricula, closed libraries and eliminated social workers, nurses, psychologists, and guidance counselors; the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation; the largest inequality gap in a century; rising levels of segregation; a popular culture that celebrates instant success, not the earnest hard work required for academic success; the ubiquity of distracting electronic toys: the intrusion of philanthropic behemoths like Gates, with its own failed solutions; a media indifferent to a rapacious privatization movement that cares more about budget-cutting and profiteering than education.

They are looking for blame in all the wrong places.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Private Firms=No Accountability

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2014 //
22

Morgan Smith of the Texas Tribune (published in thr New York Times) wrote about the secrecy that surrounds the finances of private corporations that manage schools and claim to be “public.”

They are “public” when it is time to get the money but their finances are private when asked to account for taxpayer money.

Basis, an Arizona charter chain, submitted an application to open a charter in San Antonio and this is what happened:

“On a recently approved Texas charter school application, blacked-out paragraphs appear on almost 100 of its 393 pages.

“Redactions on the publicly available online version of the application often extend for pages at a time. They include sections on the school’s plan to support students’ academic success, its extracurricular activities and the “extent to which any private entity, including any management company” will be involved in the school’s operation. The “shaded material,” according to footnotes, is confidential proprietary or financial information.”

Smith writes:

“In Texas, commercial entities cannot run public schools. But when a school’s management — including accounting, marketing and hiring decisions — is contracted out to a private company, the distinction can become artificial. Such an arrangement raises questions about how to ensure financial accountability when the boundary between public and private is blurred, and the rules of public disclosure governing expenditures of taxpayer money do not apply.”

Some of the most secretive companies run virtual schools, paid for with public money:

“When The Texas Tribune made an open-records request for employee salary records and marketing expenses at the state’s full-time virtual schools, it received responses from all but one of those connected with for-profit entities indicating either that the records were not available or were not subject to public information laws.

“The Huntsville Independent School District, which went into partnership with K12 Inc. to open a virtual academy this year, said the district did not have documents responding to the request at the virtual campus as “it contracts with a private company to handle all employment of personnel and staffing-related data.”

“In other instances, The Tribune was directed to make a request to the private company. A lawyer for Responsive Ed Solutions, a charter school that also contracts with K12 Inc., wrote that most employees of its virtual school were hired by the company and provided the email address of a K12 lawyer. A K12 Inc. spokesman then told The Tribune that “confidential information about K12’s employees” could not be disclosed.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, K12 Inc., Privatization, Texas

Anthony Cody: Confessions of a Teacher in “Virtual Charter School Hell”

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2014 //
76

Darcy Bedortha is a guest writer for Anthony Cody’s blog.

She tells her story as a Lead Teacher for a K12 virtual charter school.

She confirms all the worst fears of critics of virtual charters.

They make a lot of money. They are passionate about profits, not students.

Students need one-to-one contact with a human being. They don’t get it.

In a long and heartbreaking post, she writes:

I was an English teacher, so my students would write. They wrote of pain and fear and of not fitting in. They were the kinds of young people who desperately needed to have the protective circle of a community watching over them. They needed one healthy person to smile at them and recognize them by name every day, to say “I’m glad you’re here!” Many of my former students do not have that.

The last thing these young people needed, I came to realize during my time with K12 Inc., was to be isolated in front of a computer screen. A week or two or three would often go by without my getting a word from a student. They didn’t answer their email, they didn’t answer their phones. Often their phones were disconnected. Their families were disconnected. My students also moved a lot. During my first year at the school I spent days on the phone trying to track students down. This year I struggled to not simply give up under the weight of it all.

In the fall of 2013, 42 percent of our high school students were deemed “economically disadvantaged.” I had a number of students who were not native English speakers. I cannot wrap my head around how to serve a student who is unable to read or comprehend the language that the virtual curriculum is written in, let alone learn the technology (when it is functioning) without sitting beside them in the same space. Many of my non-native speakers had parents who did not speak English at all. These students often struggled for a very short time, and then I never saw their work again. They dropped out, moved on.

The school officials make millions of dollars. The virtual charter works for them.

Why are we allowing public dollars to flow to these non-educational institutions?

Silly question. They give campaign contributions. They lobby. They are strategic in advancing their goal: Profit.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, K12 Inc., On-Line Education

Red Queen in L.A.: Where Is the Outrage?

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2014 //
17

Blogger redqueeninla takes a hard look at what is happening to the schools and the children and asks the inevitable question: “Where’s the outrage?”

Why do parents tolerate classes with 50 students? Teachers can’t teach such large classes. Does anyone care?

Why does the media report calmly about self-enriching deals for corporate interests without treating it as a scandal?

Why do we ignore segregation of our most vulnerable children when we know it’s wrong?

She writes:

“And yet therein lies the irony. Reported anger does not register; only blandishments do. The means to move change are so hampered by our unwillingness to hear unpleasantness. We wrap up the old year and hope for betterment in the next, but we school ourselves to ignore what ought to be infuriating. Bad things – injustice, poverty, denied opportunities — are being meted out upon our very own children. As a parent, I see the structure of our society as intended to support this next generation. Why do we do any of what we do if not to provide opportunity for them? Opting for disengagement equates to sanctioning inequity. The most important accounting this new year could bring is an acknowledgement of the harm our complacency catalyzes. Let these lists infuriate you. Hear the anger and do not just shut it off. Demand an accounting with accountability.”

What should we do this new year?

Get angry. Demand an accounting.

Get active. Reject complacency.

Find allies. Make noise.

Defend the children. Defend their teachers. Defend their schools.

United, we have the power to make a difference.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Poverty, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Students

Robert Freeman: How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2013 //
49

We know the formula by now for destroying public education and handing it off to entrepreneurs who can cut costs, package it, extract a profit (or remain nonprofit while paying exorbitant executive salaries):

Cry “crisis.” Set impossible targets (100% success on tests normed on a bell curve). Demoralize teachers. Fire the most experienced teachers. Hire low-wage temporary teachers who will leave within three years, thus eliminating future pension obligations. Close schools and disrupt communities. Turn schools over to entrepreneurs, to amateurs, to non-educators, to sports stars, to charter chains. Watch as public schools are dissolved and disappear. Watch as people become consumers, not citizens.

But now others get it, even if most of our major editorial boards do not.

Robert Freeman writes here about the public theft that is underway.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Lee Fang: Obama Picks Prominent Privatizer for Key Role in Department of Education

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2013 //
65

Lee Fang is one of our most extraordinary investigative journalists. He is one of the few who has looked behind the rhetoric of the privatization movement that calls itself a “reform” movement. Unfortunately, the goal of “reform” is to dismantle the public sector and turn it over to entrepreneurs. In 2011, Fang wrote a blockbuster exposé about the online industry and its ties to politicians.

In this article, Lee Fang describes Ted Mitchell, who has been nominated to serve as Undersecretary of Education, the second most powerful spot in the U.S. Department of Education.

Mitchell is chief executive officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which promotes and funds charter schools and for-profit ventures.

Fang writes:

“As head of the NewSchools Venture Fund, Mitchell oversees investments in education technology start-ups. In July, Zynga, the creators of FarmVille, provided $1 million to Mitchell’s group to boost education gaming companies. Mitchell’s NewSchool Venture Fund also reportedly partners with Pearson, the education mega-corporation that owns a number of testing and test-book companies, along with one prominent for-profit virtual charter school, Connections Academy.

“Jeff Bryant, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future, says it seems likely that Mitichell will “advocate for more federal promotion of online learning, ‘blended’ models of instruction, ‘adaptive learning’ systems, and public-private partnerships involving education technology.”

“Mitchell did not respond to TheNation.com’s request for comment.

“His ethics disclosure form shows that he was paid $735,300 for his role at NewSchools, which is organized as a non-profit. In recent years, he has served or is currently serving as a director to New Leaders, Khan Academy, California Education Partners, Teach Channel, ConnectED, Hameetman Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Silicon Schools, Children Now, Bellwether Partners, Pivot Learning Partners, EnCorps Teacher Training Program, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Green DOT Public Schools.

“In addition, Mitchell serves as an adviser to Salmon River Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in education companies. Mitchell sits on the board of Parchment, an academic transcript start-up that is among Salmon River Capital’s portfolio.

“Salmon River Capital helped create one of the biggest names in for-profit secondary education, Capella University. “As a foundational investor and director, [Salmon River Capital’s] Josh Lewis made invaluable contributions to Capella’s success. From leading our landmark financing in 2000, when Capella was a $10 million business operating in a difficult environment, through a successful 2006 IPO and beyond, he proved a great partner who kept every commitment he made,” reads a statement from Steve Shank, founder of Capella.”

In sum, the fox has been put in charge of the henhouse.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Obama
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