Nancy Bailey calls out Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos for talking about “education freedom” at the same time that she is doing everything within her power to snuff it out.
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All it took to make American education “great again” was two-and-a-half years of Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos.
So saith Betsy DeVos to the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in Michigan.
DeVos vigorously defended charter schools, especially in Detroit, even though most Detroit charters underperform Detroit public schools and are run as profit-making businesses.
DeVos opened Saturday’s program at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference by celebrating her mission to spread education freedom across the country. The Michigan native slammed teacher unions and Democratic primary candidates for offering a vision for the education system that will produce worse outcomes for students and cost taxpayers trillions of dollars.
DeVos said she is solely focused on doing what’s best for students, though she has been a frequent target of Democrats running to oppose President Donald Trump in 2020. She said Democrats who criticize the proliferation of charter schools ignores their results and falsely claim they are the “enemy of the people.”
“You’ll hear repeatedly that public charter schools are bad,” DeVos told Republicans Saturday. “The truth is they are the best thing to ever happen to Detroit students.”
Amy Frogge was a two-term elected member of the Metro Nashville school board. She is a lawyer and a parent activist. She posted this fascinating account on her Facebook page.
Amy Frogge is one of the heroes of the Resistance who is featured in my forthcoming book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance Against Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (January 21, 2020).
She writes:
Nashville just got taken for a ride. Here’s how it happened:
Back in 2007, Superintendent Joseph Wise and his Chief of Staff, David Sundstrom, were fired from their jobs in Florida for “serious misconduct.” Wise is a graduate of LA billionaire Eli Broad’s “superintendents academy,” which trains business leaders as superintendents with the purpose of privatizing schools (closing existing schools and opening more charter schools).
After losing their jobs, Wise and Sundstrom founded Atlantic Research Partners (ARP) and began making millions from Chicago schools. ARP then acquired parts of SUPES Academy, a superintendent training company, and merged with the recruiting firm, Jim Huge and Associates. SUPES Academy, however, was shut down after Chicago superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett pled guilty to federal corruption charges for steering no-bid contracts to SUPES Academy, her former firm, in exchange for financial kickbacks. Baltimore superintendent Dallas Dance was also involved in this scandal.
Wise and Sundstrom also had their hands in other pots. They created a new entity called Education Research and Development Institute (ERDI), which charged education vendors to arrange meetings with school superintendents and simultaneously paid the same superintendents to “test out” the vendor products.
Now the story shifts to Nashville: In 2016, the Nashville Public Education Foundation pushed the school board to hire Jim Huge and Associates to perform our search for a new superintendent. The search brought us three “Broadies” (superintendents trained by or affiliated with the Broad academy), a Teach for America alum with no advanced degree and no degree in education whatsoever, and Shawn Joseph, who was planning to attend the Broad Superintendents Academy at the time he was hired.
Jim Huge lied to the school board, telling us that the only highly qualified and experienced candidate, an African American female named Carol Johnson (who had served as superintendent of three major school systems, including Memphis and Boston), had withdrawn her name from the search. This was not true. Ultimately, the board hired Shawn Joseph.
When he arrived in Nashville, Joseph brought his friend, Dallas Dance, with him as an advisor- only about six months before Dance was sentenced to federal prison in connection with kick-backs for no-bid contracts in the SUPES Academy scandal. Joseph also brought in former Knoxville superintendent Jim McIntyre, another “Broadie” who had been ousted from his position in Knoxville amidst great acrimony, to serve as an advisor. Joseph began following a formula seen in other districts: He prohibited staff members from speaking to board members and immediately began discussion about closing schools. Like Byrd-Bennett and Dance, Joseph also began giving large, no-bid contracts to vendors and friends, some of which were never utilized. Some of the contracts were connected with ERDI, and Joseph’s Chief Academic Officer, Monique Felder, failed to disclose that she had been paid by ERDI (just like Dallas Dance, who committed perjury for failing to disclose part-time consulting work that benefitted him financially).
You can read the rest of the story- and much more- in the attached article. But the long and short of it is that the very same people who rigged our search to bring Shawn Joseph to Nashville are also the same people who stood to benefit from no-bid contracts with MNPS. These folks were also connected with illegal activities in other states.
In the end, Nashville suffered. “Among [the] negative outcomes are increased community acrimony, wasted education funds, and career debacles for what could perhaps have been promising school leaders.
In the case of Joseph and Nashville, controversies with his leadership decisions strongly divided the city’s black community, and taxpayers were stuck with a $261,250 bill for buying out the rest of his contract. As a result of the fallout, Joseph lost his state teaching license, and he vowed never to work in the state again.”
Feeling the backlash in a big way, Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change” issued a call to end the “Toxic Rhetoric” about school choice, especially charters.
Chiefs for Change are strong proponents of privatization. Here are the current members. Is your superintendent a “Chief for Change” who wants to divert money from public schools to the Betsy DeVos agenda of school choice?
They say:
Recent attempts to halt or severely limit school choice—including legislative debates over caps or moratoriums for charter schools—are misguided at best. Effective mechanisms of school choice—those that ensure quality, accountability, equitable access, and equitable funding—provide opportunities that our students need and deserve.
Families with financial means in America have always been able to choose the school that is best for their child, by moving to a certain part of town or by sending their children to private schools. But most American families do not have that opportunity. The school in their neighborhood may fall short in meeting their child’s needs in any number of ways—but they’re stuck.
Our nation’s history of redlining to separate both housing and schooling based on race and income, along with local zoning ordinances that restrict and confine affordable housing, alongside the recent wave of “school district secessions” by higher-income neighborhoods, have compounded the problem. Our nation’s children often live in neighborhoods just a short distance from each other but worlds apart in terms of school quality. This is unacceptable. Every child deserves school options where they will learn and thrive.
That is why today we are calling on policymakers across the nation to end the destructive debates over public charter schools. Proposed caps and moratoriums allow policymakers to abdicate their responsibility to thoughtfully regulate new and innovative public school options: like banning cars rather than mandating seatbelts. They are a false solution to a solvable problem.
The backlash against school choice, the demand to halt charter expansion, comes from an outraged public that supports their community public schools.
Only 6% of the students in the U.S. attend charter schools, most of which perform no better than or much worse than public schools. An even smaller number of students use vouchers, even when they are easily available, and the research increasingly converges on the conclusion that students who use vouchers are harmed by attending voucher schools.
The claim that poor kids should get “the same” access to elite private schools as rich kids is absurd. Rich parents pay $40,000-50,000 or more for schools like Lakeside in Seattle or Sidwell Friends in D.C. The typical voucher is worth about $5,000, maybe as much as $7,000, which gets poor kids into religious schools that lack certified teachers, not into Lakeside or Sidwell or their equivalent.
Perhaps Chiefs for Change should advocate for for housing vouchers worth $1 million or more so that poor families can afford to live in the best suburban neighborhoods where “families with financial means” live.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
What this press release really means is that the advocates of privatization know that the public is turning against them.
That’s good news.
The public wants to invest its tax dollars in strong, equitable public schools that meet the needs of all students, not in ineffective charters or vouchers that divert money from community public schools.
Arthur Camins insists that voters should stand by their principles in the 2020 elections.
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2019/9/6/1883805/-Fight-for-First-Principles
In 2020, let’s elect people who don’t temper and undermine first principles like high-quality universal education and health care, with a soul- and hope-crushing, “But let’s be realistic about what’s achievable.” Don’t start with the workaround. Start with the energizing principles and fight for them.
Since this is an education blog, we will keep track of where candidates stand on “high-quality universal education.”
We will listen to what they say about charters and vouchers and what they don’t say. We will assume that some will attempt to deceive us by denouncing only “for-profit” charters. Only one state allows for-profit charters—Arizona—yet many states have nonprofit charters operated by for-profit EMOs.
What about corporate charter chains that take over what were once public schools? What about Gulen charters, part of a shadowy network that imports Turkish teachers and relies on corporate boards led by Turkish men?
We will also pay close attention to whether candidates express their views about the reign of high-stakes testing imposed by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Every Student Succeeds Act. The billions expended on testing have enriched the corporations that sell them, but harm children and the quality of education.
We will be watching, and NPE Action is maintaining a score card on the candidates.
Carol Burris: The Charter Industry in Pennsylvania is Rife with Profiteering, Greed, and Corruption.
In this post, Carol Burris lays out a devastating bill of indictment against the charter industry in Pennsylvania. Technically, it is run by “non-profit” Boards, but most of the time those words are fig leaves for for-profit corporations that are growing rich with the help of the state legislature.
Governor Wolf recently announced his determination to hold charter schools accountable, and the charter industry howled with rage. They don’t want any of their cushy deals to be jeopardized.
Jessica Bakeman and a team of investigative reporters at WLRN in Florida report here on the state’s takeover and privatization of Jefferson County, the state’s first all-charter district. It was forced on the district by the state against the wishes of local elected officials and funded by state legislators with close financial ties to the charter school company (and its for-profit parent) that took over the district. It’s also setting the stage for a massive expansion of charter schools in the state.
The Republicans who run state government in Florida have abandoned local control. They worship the Almighty Dollar.
Bakeman writes:
Florida’s first and only all-charter school district was engineered by unelected state bureaucrats at then-Gov. Rick Scott’s Department of Education, funded by the Legislature and carried out by Somerset Academy, Inc., a rapidly expanding network that’s affiliated with a politically connected for-profit company in Miami.
Two years into Jefferson County’s transformation, the still-unproven charter-district “experiment” is being used to justify a potentially massive expansion of charter schools in the state’s poorest communities. A state law dubbed “schools of hope,” first passed in 2017 and broadened this year, offers millions of dollars to charter schools that open near traditional public schools that have struggled for years.
Jefferson County is home to the first charter “schools of hope.” Neighborhoods in Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville are next…
South Florida legislators with close financial ties to Somerset and its for-profit contractor, Academica, played a key role in facilitating and bankrolling the all-charter district, which critics argue is a conflict of interest.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reviews an important new book.
Lawrence Baines’ Privatization of America’s Public Institutions: The Story of the American Sellout combines analyses of assaults on four public sectors, the military, corrections departments, public schools, and higher education, to reveal the immense scale of privatization and its dangers. Dr. Baines, the Associate Dean of Education at the University of Oklahoma, shows that “Privatization is no longer an occasional strategy to help improve efficiency of a particular public service.” It “has become an automatic response to any perceived governmental inefficiency.” Baines carefully documents the ways that “Privatization is changing the nature of America’s public institutions and consequently, the character of the country.”
The first chapter, “Privatizing the Military: Profiting from the Carnage of War,” foreshadows a frightening pattern that explains why I, for one, was slow to see the full nature of the threat. It starts in 2007 with the killing of 17 persons in Baghdad by mercenaries employed by Erik Prince’s Blackwater. The people I know were horrified by that and other behavior of contract fighters when Dick Chaney, formerly of Halliburton, was Vice President. I had no idea, however, that by 2015, private contractors in the Mideast would outnumber soldiers by a 3 to 1 margin.
By that time, 44% of Department of Defense discretionary spending went to private contractors. As one military analyst said, contractors had become “the fifth branch of the military.” Baines explains how the inability to hold contractors accountable leads to an unknowable number of killings, meaning that we can’t evaluate the human and moral costs of military privatization any more than we can calculate the true financial costs.
Baines reports that we have reached the point where ROTC officer training is contracted out. Since the program acculturates cadets who will become the leaders of our democracy’s armed forces, an analyst says, this form of privatization may produce “‘longer-term effects on the overarching values that motivate military service.’”
This reader thought he had a more thorough understanding of the topic in the next chapter, “Privatizing Corrections: Making Money from Misery,” which documents the costs in money, lives, and our values of privatized prisons. I had read about numerous individual scandals, such as Montana Two Rivers Detention Center which was funded with a $27 million bond issue in 2007, but I had not seen the bigger picture described by Baines. Two Rivers remained vacant for 9 of 10 years but the private corporation which ran it still made money. Similarly, Mississippi had to pay off the debt of about $121 million for a closed prison, but its operators, Geo Group made over $2 billion. And with the scandal-ridden Pennsylvania institution, where the program was dubbed “kids for cash,” private operators walked away with profits for a million-dollar condominium and a $1.5 million yacht.
It’s bad enough that private operators charge more for detentions that were more brutal towards adult inmates, but since crime has declined, they’ve moved into even more disgusting systems for making big bucks, such as juvenile detentions. More than half of incarcerated juveniles are locked up for nonviolent crimes; 21% committed no crime. They are locked up due to “technical violations,” and “status offenses.” So, an institution profits from detaining a 13-year-old who didn’t show for a hearing about a fight he didn’t witness and a 15-year-old girl who ridiculed an assistant principal on social media.” The median time for a juvenile for status offense is 128 days.
Then the story grows more horrific. As states like Oklahoma over-incarcerate on the cheap, fees and fines become an essential funding source. I knew how cruel the situation is in Oklahoma, where we are #1 in the world in incarceration rates, but I had no idea that 48 states have gone down that path. And since fees and fines are a doomed method of funding the overgrown incarceration complex, monitored release of inmates is growing. That creates another market for privatizers, electronic bracelets to oversee parolees. And, surprise!, the lucrative, private market for monitoring those devices is “subject to virtually no judicial oversight.”
And the story became even more unconscionable as private prisons moved into another growing market, immigrant detentions. Since 2003, 176 immigrant deaths have gone largely unreported by for-profit institutions. And private prisons have enabled Trump’s attacks on immigrant families.
Moreover, the dangers and costs of privatized prisons, like those of privatized schools, have grown worse during the Trump administration. And that leads to Baines’ concise indictment of the privatization of public schools through charter schools and vouchers. Readers of this blog are well-versed in the ways that privatization has undermined public education, so I will merely touch a few of Baines’ insights in Chapter Three, “Privatizing K – 12 Public Education: How the Profit Motive Is Changing Schools,” as well as recommend a full reading of his evidence.
The use of privatization as a tool for corporate school reform has denigrated teacher quality and fostered dumbed-down education. It uses technology to reduce number of teachers needed in the culture of data-driven competition it created. It has gotten to the point where 5,000 emergency certificates were issued in Oklahoma in 2017 and 2018. Next door, Texas adjudicated 222 cases of teacher misconduct in 2016, with most involving sex acts with minors. The backlogged caseload is over 1,100.
And privatization has increased inequality and segregation. Baines offers a corrective to the spin of charter advocates who deny they have promoted segregation, “Most minority students who attend privatized schools have few white classmates; most white students who attend privatized schools have few minority classmates.”
The next topic that Baines analyzes, higher education, is intertwined with the legacy of privatization by charters and vouchers, as well as the budget-cutting that has devastated k – 12 education in Oklahoma and many other states.
Early in the chapter, “Privatizing Public Education: Selling Off the Alma Mater,” Baines lists the ten states that have cut higher education by 26% to 54% from 2008 to 2017. Oklahoma is 6th, with cuts of 34%. In 1996, higher education privatization was basically limited to five support services. By 2017, there were 17 categories of privatized services, culminating with academic programs. Moreover, in 2016, 1/3rd of universities outsourced their online programs.
Public school teachers have more than enough experience with the testing toxicity pushed by the Pearson corporation and Eli Broad. Less well known is their intrusions into universities. Privatizers have even moved into micro-credentialing, making money off of credentials for skills like “Checking for understanding using whiteboards.” Moreover, when these online providers are both a private company and a LLC (Limited Liability Company), they aren’t obligated to reveal their instructors’ qualifications.
To take just a couple of Baines’ examples, the Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University gets 32% of the gross revenue in partnership with Bisk, “a corporation specializing in curricular design, online education, and student support,” which gets 68% of the gross revenue from the Business Analytics master’s program. Baines notes that most students probably don’t know that they will not be taught by M.S.U. faculty, as opposed to Bisk employees who may not have a degree in the subject they are teaching.
A similar lack of transparency is illustrated by Arkansas State University’s Academic Partnership program where students aren’t told that they may not have instructors from their university, and that A.S.U. program’s website is virtually identical to its counterpart at U. of Texas, Arlington, which has 18 tenure-track faculty and a 1000-1 ratio for tenure track faculty.
Finally, Baines listed the costs to graduates, and students who failed to graduate from our privatized universities. Ironically, these debts are, in large part, a legacy of corporate school reform which claimed to be a “21st century civil rights movement.”
From 2010 to 2016 individuals with at least some college “captured 11.5 million of the 11.6 million jobs available.” Pay for workers without a high school diploma is less than half of that for workers with a college degree, so access to high-quality education should have been an important tool for achieving equity. But even when a student earns college degree, privatization has undermined the prospects for many or most graduates. Pell Grants used to pay 75% of 4-year college costs but now they only pay for about 30%. Consequently, former university students have accumulated $1.5 trillion in debt.
Too often, the value of university degrees has been compromised. Today, 70% of higher education instructors are adjuncts. The university’s mission of service to society has been de-emphasized. College is supposed to be a transformational experience “a rush of unfamiliar people, cultures, knowledge, relationships, and interactions.” But now, the “collegiate experience is becoming commercialized, standardized, and monetized.”
Baines wraps up his account of the human and financial costs of privatizations by illustrating ways that the military, prisons, public schools, and higher education are being undermined by interrelated forces. Just as the military’s belief in service to the U.S. is put at risk, the university’s contributions to the public good are being undermined. Privatized prisons lead to more segregation of inmates by race as a means of self-protection. Similarly, privatized schools increase segregation as they foster a culture of competition that increases inequality. And the tragic tale all comes together in the final chapter about the privatization of universities.
Baines explains that, “Privatization is happening so quickly and on such a colossal scale in higher education that it is difficult to stay current.” To take one example of how it is interconnected with k-12th grade schools, he shows how teacher certification is “being transmogrified into a product traded on the open market, teachers are circumventing universities and teacher preparation completely and moving straight into the classroom.” This has led to unqualified teachers being rushed into many states’ classrooms, pushing down school quality and enabling privatizers to blame the public schools.
Privatization of America’s Public Institutions is so full of memorable characterizations of the tragedies of privatization that it is difficult to select one as a concluding statement. So, I’ll borrow Baines’ quote of the Commissioner of U.S. Bureau of Education, whose words from 1891 would be equally true if applied to today’s armed forces or the penal system. The commissioner said, “let us hope, that the time is not far distant when an untrained teacher will be considered a greater absurdity than an untrained doctor or lawyer.”
Will Huntsberry of the Voice of San Diego reports that all the online charters connected to the biggest charter fraud in U.S. history will close.
Huntsberry writes:
An online charter school empire whose leaders have been charged with enrolling fake students and misappropriating $80 million in public funds will be forced to close all of its schools across California.
In May, the San Diego district attorney’s office charged 11 people in a corruption scandal of historic proportions. Prosecutors say Sean McManus and Jason Schrock, who operated A3 Education, were the ringleaders of the operation. Several who worked with McManus and Schrock have also been charged with crimes, including the superintendent of the Dehesa School District in San Diego County.
At its peak, A3 operated 19 online schools across the state, including three in San Diego, according to investigators. One closed before the charges were filed. And two more – one in San Diego and another in Los Angeles – were slated to close. But now a court-appointed receiver has decided to shutter all of the remaining schools.
Students’ records at each of the closing schools will be transferred to their school district of residence by Sept. 30, according to a letter obtained by the Marin Independent Journal, which was sent out to districts associated with the A3 schools. Richard Kipperman, the court-appointed receiver, confirmed to Voice of San Diego that all the schools will close.
How the Scam Worked
Prosecutors painted an intricate picture of a complex organization that managed to turn student records into giant sums of cash. A3 Education enrolled many students who took actual classes, but it also enrolled many students who never did any schoolwork, prosecutors say.
Most of the fake students were participants in summer athletic programs, according to the indictment. Enrollment workers would approach a football program, for instance, and offer as little as $25 a head for each player’s records. The enrollment worker would also get a commission on however many students he or she enrolled. The rest of the money – which totaled in the thousands of dollars for each student – went to companies controlled by McManus and Schrock.
In one instance, Luiz Rigney, an enrollment worker, carried several suitcases of student paperwork, worth roughly $5 million, to one of A3’s offices. Rigney had been asked to backdate that paperwork so A3 could get maximum profit, prosecutors say.
In another instance, two workers texted each other back and forth about the large sums of cash flowing through the company: “I had the weirdest dream last night! One was about us growing all Sean’s schools. I was running all the Facebook campaigns and you were running around my office drinking champagne throwing money everywhere yelling I love bonuses,” the texts read, according to court documents.
Jan Resseger noted that the Colorado state board of education awarded a contract to MGT Consulting based on their “success” in turning around the public schools of Gary, Indiana. She shows in this post that there was no turnaround.
She writes:
Colorado state school board members praised MGT’s record in the so-called turnaround of the only whole school district it has managed—for the past two years—in Gary, Indiana. The fact that MGT Consulting, a for-profit, was praised for work in Gary caught my eye. I have been to Gary, just as I have been to Detroit, whose public schools have shared some problems with Gary’s. Detroit’s school district was assigned a state emergency fiscal manager by former Governor Rick Snyder; in fact Detroit’s school district was assigned an emergency manager named Darnell Earley after he left Flint, where, as municipal emergency fiscal manager, he had permitted the poisoning of the city’s water supply. Fortunately Detroit’s schools have been turned back to the democratically elected local school board, which hired a professional educator, Dr. Nikolai Vitti.
And I have been to the cities in Ohio now in state takeover, and being operated by appointed Academic Distress Commissions. I am thinking of Youngstown, which in four years under an Academic Distress Commission and appointed CEO, has not turned around. I am thinking of Lorain, where outright chaos has ensued under an Academic Distress Commission’s appointed CEO, David Hardy. And I am thinking of East Cleveland, whose schools are just beginning the state takeover process, and ten other Ohio school districts—including Dayton and Toledo—being threatened with state takeover.
All of these Rust Belt cities and their school districts are characterized by economic collapse. They are industrial cities where factories have closed and workers moved away to seek employment elsewhere. When industry collapses, the property tax base—the foundation of the local contribution of school funding—evaporates, and as workers lose jobs or leave, local income tax revenue collapses as well…
In July 2017, the state took over the school district in Gary and turned the schools over to a private, for-profit management company: MGT Consultants. MGT hired Peggy Hinkley, a retired school superintendent to run the schools, but she resigned a little more than a year later. The Post-Tribune‘s Carole Carlson describes Hinkley’s tenure: “Hinkley served 14 months and ruffled the feathers of some elected officials who criticized her decisions, especially the closing of the Wirt-Emerson School of Visual and Performing Arts. When Wirt-Emerson closed in June (2018), it left the district with just one high school, the West Side Leadership Academy. It stoked fears of a continuing exodus of students who would leave for charter schools or other districts… Under Hinckley, Gary reached a deal resolving $8.4 million in back payroll taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS forgave a large portion of the debt, leaving the district with a $320,000 payment. The freeing up of the liens on buildings allowed Hinckley to list 33 vacant schools and properties for sale. By November, the district had accepted five offers, amounting to $480,000. More sales are still being weighed. In all, Hinckley erased about $6 million of the district’s $100,000 million in long-term debts and reduced its monthly deficit from about $1.8 million to $1.3 million… Academically, all seven elementary schools received Fs on state report cards this year.”
Clearly, in Gary, Indiana, MGT Consultants has not miraculously achieved the kind of quick school district turnaround Colorado’s state school board bragged about when it contracted with MGT to take over three school districts.
Read on to learn about the role of ex-Indiana superintendent Tony Bennett and the Corporate Reform-disruption-greed Movement.
Diane Ravitch's blog 