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Mercedes Schneider Investigates Joe Biden’s Brother and His Role in the Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2019 //
19

 

Mercedes Schneider reports on her examination of Joe Biden’s brother Frank and his role in the charter industry in Florida. 

Let me begin by saying straight out that I don’t judge people by what their relatives do. I have seven brothers and sisters (five living) and I am not responsible for their decisions and activities, as they are not responsible for mine.

Having said that, I think the public needs to know where Joe Biden stands on charter schools such as the ones in which his brother was deeply involved, as we should know where every candidate stands on the privatization of education.

The facts that Schneider has assembled are vastly Important as they reflect on the shoddy oversight of for-profit charters in Florida. Forget the famous name involved. Read this fascinating account to see how children and taxpayers are being bilked by shady operators who know nothing about education. Lousy results have no impact on the bottom line.

An awful lot of people are cashing in on kids and on the infinite gullibility of the public and the cupidity and greed of politicians who enable these for-profit frauds.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Betsy DeVos Gave This Charter Chain $225 Million. It Doesn’t Pass the Smell Test

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2019 //
10

 

Betsy DeVos recently gave $116 million to the IDEA charter chain, mostly to expand in Texas. Previously, she had already given millions to IDEA, altogether this lucky business has received $225 million in federal funds.

In El Paso alone, IDEA will open 20 new charters. That’s bad news for the El Paso public schools, because IDEA is known for pushing out the kids it doesn’t want and sending them back to the public schools, which will have to slash their budgets to adjust to lost enrollment.

Veteran Texas educator Tim Holt says that this IDEA invasion doesn’t pass the smell test. Parents and taxpayers are being fooled. He wrote this before DeVos gave IDEA its latest plum, $116 million.

“In the next few years, IDEA plans to increase from one school today in El Paso to over 20, making them larger than either the Anthony, Canutillo, San Eli, Fabens, or Clint ISD’s in terms of number of campuses. (“IDEA’s big goal is to serve 100,000 students by 2022” in Tejas according to the IDEA website.

“That would make them larger than Ft. Worth or Austin ISDs, which each have about 88,000 students each.) Of course, local districts are concerned because they get funding based on the number of students attending. Less students means less money. Even if it is for a year or so, as parents find out IDEA is not such a good fit for their kids. Less funding means more crowded classes, elimination of popular programs (say adios to that Mariachi band your young Vicente Fernandez wanna-be is in)…

“Public charter schools like IDEA use a combination of taxpayer funds, grants, and large-scale private donations to operate. Like public schools, they are accountable to meeting standards, but unlike public schools, they are businesses, beholden to those with a financial vested interest in their success or failure.

“Did you get that? They use your taxes to fund their business. You are paying for them whether they last a year or a decade. They can, as a business, pick up and leave at any time, shuttering their doors with no notice as many charter schools have done across the nation. Nothing prevents this.

“And like any business that needs to grow to get money, they have to advertise. Check out the slick work of this ad agency on behalf of IDEA.

“Smelly.

“Public schools in Texas have locally elected officials, that are responsible for watching the checkbooks of the districts. Don’t like the way money is being spent? You can vote them out and replace them. Not so with Public Charter Schools like IDEA. The Board of Directors of IDEA schools are mostly made up of well-to-do east Texas business people.

Think your kid is represented at the table? Check out the IDEA Board. Look like people from El Chuco? Yeah, maybe a meeting of the El Chuco Millionaires Club, but other than that, no, they are not your type. Unless you think that Dallas and Houston millionaires are your type.

Stinky.

“IDEA schools have a model of teaching that looks something like this: Curriculum is canned, pre-scripted and designed in such a way that even non-teachers can conduct classes. It is designed solely to focus on the standardized tests, that all students must pass. It is homework-heavy even though study after study has found that a heavy homework load is probably overall detrimental to students learning. Failure on tests mean dismissal from the school.

“Sorry kid, we don’t take no dummies.

“Since it is a scripted curriculum, IDEA can hire non-teacher teachers, ones that do not have any kind of education experience or degree. Think about that: Anyone that can read a script can teach at IDEA. That is perfect for young, inexperienced Teach-for-America rookies, from where IDEA likes to recruit their teaching ranks. Less experience equals less expensive to pay.

“Less pay means the chances that the teacher can deal with “non traditional” or troubled students is low. Want something for your kid that is innovative? Don’t bother enrolling at IDEA. Success is measured by how many pages the teacher can plow through in a week on the way to the test.

“Smells bad…

”Now consider this: On top of the millions in Federal funds that the State has awarded to IDEA, if they achieve their goal of having 100,000 students, that means, that every year, $915,000,000 will NOT be going to Texas’ traditional public schools, your neighborhood school, but into the hands of for-profit businesses that have little to no local accountability.”

Well, it’s a terrific article. Read it all.

And don’t believe those pundits who say that Betsy DeVos is so hemmed in that she can’t do any harm. Her $225 million gift to IDEA will eventually cause Texas public schools to lose nearly $1 billion a year, every year.  Really good for the IDEA bank account.  Terrible for the millions of children in Texas public schools.

That really stinks.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Graduation rates, Privatization, Texas

Florida: The State That Welcomes Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2019 //
49

 

In most states and in the federal government, conflicts of interest are prohibited and even illegal. But not in Florida!

State legislators regularly vote on legislation that enriches themselves and family members, and NO ONE CARES!

Conflicts of interest are peachy keen. Doesn’t everyone line their pockets at the public trough?

This article in the Miami Herald describes a master at the game of doing what’s good for himself and his loved ones.

Fred Grimm of the Herald writes:

If Erik Fresen was … say … a county or city commissioner, a blatant conflict of interest would keep him from voting on charter school funding issues.

As my Herald colleagues Christina Veiga and Kristen Clark reported Sunday, laws governing ethical behavior would bar local officials from even discussing proposals at public meetings that have a direct or indirect financial impact on their interests. Or their families’ interests.

The Fresen clan has a lot riding on charter school construction funds. Erik Fresen earns $150,000-a-year as land consultant for Civica, an architecture firm that specializes in charter school construction. Civica has designed a number of schools for Academica, the largest charter school management company in Florida. Fresen’s sister and brother-in-law just happen to be Academica executives.

But state Rep. Fresen’s ethical deportment in the state Legislature is governed by such tepid regulations that the chairman of the House Education Budget Committee can get away with sponsoring legislation that would deliver a windfall to the family business.

The Miami Republican has fast-tracked a bill that would not only limit what school districts spend on their own capital projects, it would also force districts to share their construction money (even when that money was derived from local property taxes) with charters.

No worries. All that conflict-of-interest stuff only applies to local elected officials.

He has argued that his legislation was designed to rein in out-of-control construction spending by school districts (a characterization hotly disputed by the state’s school superintendents). Fresen, however, hasn’t had much to say about charter school building scandals. Last month, The Associated Press reported that since 2000, about $70 million in state money spent on charter school construction and building improvements had essentially disappeared when the schools failed. Out of that lost $70 million, the state Department of Education recovered only $133,000. The balance of those taxpayer-funded capital improvements now belongs to private interests.

See how easy it is to get rich in Florida? You just have to have the right political connections.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fred-grimm/article60512891.html#storylink=cpy
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization

Jan Resseger: Time to Close Down the Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2019 //
17

 

Jan Resseger is a voice of moral clarity in a time of moral turpitude.she reflected on the NPE report “Asleep At the Wheel,” about the slipshod, failed federal program to pump money into the charter industry and concluded the program should be terminated, with the money transferred to high-needs schools. 

She writes:

“The Network for Public Education published its scathing report on the federal Charter Schools Program three weeks ago, but as time passes, I continue to reflect on its conclusions. The report, Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride, is packed with details about failed or closed or never-opened charter schools.  The Network for Public Education depicts a program driven by neoliberal politicians hoping to spark innovation in a marketplace of unregulated startups underwritten by the federal government. The record of this 25 year federal program is dismal.

“Here is what the Network for Public Education’s report shows us. The federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has awarded $4 billion federal tax dollars to start or expand charter schools across 44 states and the District of Columbia, and has provided some of the funding for 40 percent of all the charter schools that have been started across the country. Begun when Bill Clinton was President, this neoliberal—publicly funded, privatized—program has been supported by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.  It has lacked oversight since the beginning, and during the Obama and Trump administrations—when the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General released a series of scathing critiques of the program—grants have been made based on the application alone with little attempt by officials in the Department of Education to verify the information provided by applicants.  Hundreds of millions of dollars have been awarded to schools that never opened or that were shut down: “We found that it is likely that as many as one third of all charter schools receiving CSP grants never opened, or opened and shut down.”  Many grants went to schools that illegally discriminated in some way to choose their students and served far fewer disabled students and English language learners than the local pubic schools.  Many of the CSP-funded charter schools were plagued by conflicts of interest profiteering, and mismanagement. The Department of Education has never investigated the scathing critiques of the program by the Department’s Office of Inspector Genera; neither has the Department of Education investigated the oversight practices of the state-by-state departments of education, called State Education Agencies by CSP, to which many of the grants were made. Oversight has declined under the Department’s leadership by Betsy DeVos.

“One of the shocking findings in the Asleep at the Wheel report is that a series of federal administrations—Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have treated this program as a kind of venture capital fund created and administered to stimulate social entrepreneurship—by individuals or big nonprofits or huge for-profits—as a substitute for public operation of the public schools. This use of the Charter Schools Program as a source for venture capital is especially shocking in the past decade under Presidents Obama and Trump, even as federal funding for essential public school programs has fallen. The Center on Budget and Policy priorities reports, for example, that public Title I formula funding dropped by 6.2 percent between 2008 and 2017.”

Betsy DeVos defended the high failure rate by saying that in the business world, some start-ups fail. Why is the federal government using education money to invest in start-ups? Why shouldn’t the federal government review the applications carefully before awarding millions of dollars? What bank will lend you money without carefully reviewing your proposal and financials? Since 1994, this program has been a giant cookie jar, filled with free money.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, U.S. Department of Education

Peter Greene: Charter Thievery and the Worst Legislature in America

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2019 //
20

 

Peter Greene writes here about the open theft of public funds, transferred from public schools to to charter schools, in Florida. He raises a question that I have often wondered about: When did Republicans become the enemies of local control? The answer in Florida is obvious: when the money is there to pay the legislators to change their views, they change their views. It is not about improving education, since they are reducing the funds available to educate the vast majority of Florida’s children. This is a pay-to-play sellout of public education. When people vote to put thieves in office, they should not be surprised when the thieves rob them and their schools.

He writes:

“Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that’s futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbish the curbs, and just generally fix the place up. And then the city sends a message– “That money you just collected? You have to give some of it to the neighborhood in the 400 block.”

“Congratulations. You live in Florida.

“Florida’s elected Tallahassee-dwellers have pretty much dropped all pretense; under Governor Desantis, the goal is to completely demolish public education, with no more cover story than to insist that the resulting privatized system is still a “public school system.” I have seen better gaslighting from a fourteen year old saying, “I did not throw that pencil at Chris” even though he watched me watch him do it.

“The Tampa Bay Times offers some background:

“Let’s check the record. For years, Republicans who control the Legislature have attacked teacher unions as the enemy and complained about under-performing public schools while starving them of financial resources. They would not let local school districts keep additional tax revenue created by rising property values. They gave them little or no money for construction and renovation. And last year, they increased base spending per student by a grand total of 47 cents.

We’ll put Swampland Charter right here.

“Florida has been systematically starving its public school system, so some districts took the most logical step available to them– they levied taxes on themselves to raise teacher salaries, replace programs that were cut, and basically use their own local money to reverse the problems caused by state-level neglect. They stepped up to solve the problems the state caused.

“Last week, Florida GOP legislators pooped out a proposal to stop all this locally controlled self-reliant bootstrapping (because, you know, conservatives hate local control, self-reliance, and bootstraps, apparently, now). The bill, proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee led by Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Miami Springs, says those local districts must hand over some of those tax dollars to charter schools or the state will just cut their state funding even more.

“This is just nuts on so many levels. In addition to pissing on the conservative values of local control and self-reliance, this also thumbs its nose at one of the traditional arguments for charter schools– that competition will make public schools up their games. I’d call bullshit on that point, except that’s exactly what happened here– with their ability to compete hamstrung by Tallahassee tightwads, these local districts found a way to be competitive, including competing for teachers in the midst of Florida’s well-deserved and completely predictable teacher shortage.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Pennsylvania: Court Rules that Charter Is Not Tax-Exempt

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2019 //
5

A judge in Berks County, Pennsylvania, ruled that a charter school’s property was not tax-exempt, prompted by some unusual financial arrangements. 

Judge Madelyn S. Fudeman upheld a ruling by the Berks County Board of Assessment Appeals denying I-LEAD Inc. an exemption from property taxes.

The building at 401 Penn St., which houses the I-LEAD Charter School, is assessed at $9.7 million, according to Berks County property records.

The property was placed on Berks County’s September upset tax sale for four years of unpaid property taxes totaling $2.8 million; the unpaid years spanned 2014-17.

The property’s owner, I-LEAD Inc., Philadelphia, was ordered to pay a bond of $500,000 to be removed from the tax sale list, which it did in December…

In her ruling, Fudeman takes I-LEAD Inc. to task, saying it appears to be more of a for-profit operation.

She said the testimony of [CEO David ] Castro and Angel Figueroa, the charter school’s CEO and chief operating officer, “fell far short of establishing” the charter school operates at a loss.

In her ruling, Fudeman noted a revenue-sharing agreement between I-LEAD Charter School and Harcum College.

Harcum is a two-year college offering associate degree that operates from the same building as the charter school.

For every student that I-LEAD referred to Harcum College, I-LEAD would receive 40 percent of tuition and fees received by Harcum, the ruling states.

I-LEAD received more that $8.6 million from Harcum from July 2014 to June 2017…

Castro was paid over $195,000 for the most recent year and Figueroa was paid over $240,000 for the most recent year, court documents showed.

“The salaries paid to Mr. Castro and Mr. Figueroa appears more in line with a profit making institution than a truly charitable organization,” Fudeman said in the ruling.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Questions for Ann O’Leary: Why Are You Protecting California’s Corrupt, Wasteful Charter Industry?

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
39

Ann O’Leary is Chief of Staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Previously she was education advisor to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She is a lawyer and a very accomplished person, with a long history in Democratic politics. She was leading the Clinton transition team right before the election of 2016. For several years, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which strongly defends charter schools and Obama’s failed Race to the Top program.

During the 2016 campaign, when it was clear Hillary would be the nominee, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and I went to see O’Leary at the Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn. We tried to persuade her that Hillary should oppose charters. After all, school choice is a Republican priority. It is supported by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, ALEC, the DeVos family, and every Red State Governor. Democrats should support public schools, we argued, not privatization. We failed. We went back again, after the convention. O’Leary was unmovable. The best we could get from her was a promise that Hillary would oppose for-profit charters.

We knew that was a meaningless offer, because large numbers of nonprofit charters hire for-profit management companies.

We were thrilled when Gavin Newsom and Tony Thurmond were elected, because the charter industry placed its bets on Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor, who ran third, and on Marshall Tuck for Secretary of Education. Tuck’s campaign spent twice as much as Thurmond’s and vilified him with false advertising. Thurmond barely beat Tuck, the charter industry’s favorite and former leader of a charter chain.

Newsom promised to create a task force to advise on reforming the state’s notoriously weak charter law, which has enabled fraud, embezzlement, and grifters to cash in. Thurmond would chair the task force.

But then the task force was named, and it was clear that the charter industry was running the show. Of the 11 members, seven are connected to the charter industry. Two appointees are directly employed by the charter lobby.

Here are the members:

The task force members are:

  • Cristina de Jesus, president and chief executive officer, Green Dot Public Schools California (charter chain);
  • Dolores Duran, California School Employees Association;
  • Margaret Fortune, California Charter Schools Association board chair; Fortune School of Education, president & CEO (charter lobby);
  • Lester Garcia, political director, SEIU Local 99 (Local 99 took $100,000 from Eli Broad to oppose Jackie Goldberg, a critic of charters, and its former national president, Andy Stern, is CEO of the Eli Broad Center);
  • Alia Griffing, political director, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 57;
  • Beth Hunkapiller, educator and administrator, Aspire Public Schools (charter chain);
  • Erika Jones, board of directors, California Teachers Association;
  • Ed Manansala, superintendent, El Dorado County; the El Dorado County Office set up a Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) specifically to service students with disabilities in charter schools and wooed charter students away from their local districts, even students who live hundreds of miles away; 
  • Cindy Marten,  superintendent, San Diego Unified School District;
  • Gina Plate, vice president of special education, California Charter Schools Association (charter lobby);
  • Edgar Zazueta, senior director, policy & governmental relations, Association of California School Administrators (ACSA endorsed Marshall Tuck against Tony Thurmond). 

Only four members of the task force are not connected, politically or financially, to the charter industry: Cindy Marten; Dolores Duran; Alia Griffing; and Erika Jones.

Who selected this skewed task force?

A tip came from someone with a direct line to the Governor’s Office.

Ann O’Leary.

Ann, I hope you read this because I want you to know that you are protecting an industry that tolerates corruption and malfeasance.

Please read this report, “Charters and Consequences,” written by Carol Burris, which begins with a description of charter operators in California who hire family members, run multiple charters with appallingly low graduation rates and continues to describe a state law that is sorely in need of real reform.

Why does California have a law that ignores graft and corruption? The California Charter Schools Association fought any reform. Yet you put the chair of the board of this lobby on the task force to reform the charter law! And to make it worse, you added another employee of CCSA! This is the lobby that fought any reform of the law, that fought previous efforts to ban nepotism and conflicts of interest, that fought accountability and transparency.

And now the Network for Public Education has documented how charter operators in California have wasted millions of federal dollars. 

Nationally, about one-third of federally-funded charter schools either never opened or closed soon after getting the money. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federally funded charters is 39%.

California charters won almost $326 million from the federal Charter School Program between 2006-2014. To be exact: $325,812,827. Of that amount, $108,518,463 went to 306 charter schools that either never opened or soon shut down. Of that 306, 75 never opened at all. But the charter operator kept the money.

In addition, the ACLU of Southern California in its 2016 report, ”Unequal Access,” identified 253 charters in the state that engage in discriminatory—often illegal—practices. That number, they said, was the tip of the iceberg, because these were the charters that put their discriminatory policies on their website! Thirty-four California charter schools that received federal CSP grants appear on the ACLU of Southern California’s updated list of charters that discriminate—in some cases illegally—in admissions.

One can only imagine how much the waste has grown since 2014, with the Obama and Trump administrations adding even more millions to expand charters that divert resources from public schools.

So, this is on you, Ann.

Will the task force protect the charter industry? Will it come up with meaningless “reforms” that do nothing to rein in waste, fraud, and abuse?

Will it protect the power of districts to authorize charters in other districts, far away, without the permission of the receiving district, so the authorizers gets a fee and the charter has no oversight?

Will it continue to allow charters to open with no consideration of the fiscal impact on the district where it chooses to open?

Will it continue to allow endless appeals when the host district rejects a new charter?

Will it continue to allow corporate chains to Walmartize what were once public schools? Will it continue to allow non-educators to open and operate charter schools?

Will it ignore the expansion of Gulen schools, schools run by a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania, schools which import Turkish teachers and relies on Turkish boards?

Is it possible for a task force to regulate an industry when industry insiders are a majority of the task force?

I know you are very busy, but I hope you will take the time to think about these questions and respond.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Fraud

Ohio: School Districts Sue Facebook for Helping to Defraud Them

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2019 //
2

Eight school districts in Ohio are suing Facebook for recruiting students for the failing online charter school ECOT (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow). Real public schools that enroll and educate real students lost money to the for-profit virtual charter school, whose owner pocketed millions and ultimately went bankrupt rather than pay back any of the millions it collected from the state. Over the nearly 20 years that ECOT operated, it received close to a billion dollars that did not go to public schools where students actually showed up and were counted.

Ohio School Districts Sue Facebook Over Failed Online Charter School

By Doug Livingston, The Akron Beacon Journal Education Week April 14, 2019

Cuyahoga Falls, Woodridge and six other Ohio school districts are suing Facebook for about $250,000 in public education funding lost when the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow imploded last year.

The districts, which may never be made whole for state funding they lost when ECOT inflated attendance, are alleging that Facebook knew the online charter school was financially failing when it sold ads to help ECOT boost enrollment. That, under Ohio law, would be an illegal and “fraudulent transfer.”

Founded in 2000, ECOT grew to be the largest charter school in Ohio, claiming 15,239 students enrolled in 2016 when the Ohio Department of Education ran an attendance audit.

The virtual headcount found students spending as little as an hour a day on home computers. But the state was funding the charter school, using tax dollars diverted from local school districts, as if kids were attending full time.

Related

The attendance scandal forced ECOT founder Bill Lager, who had donated $2.1 million to school choice supporters, to return $2.5 million monthly until taxpayers got back the $80 million the school overbilled the state in just 2016 and 2017.

ECOT folded in January 2018 before making the first repayment.

Now, every public school district in Ohio that lost students and state funding to ECOT is in line for what’s left. Governor and then-Attorney General Mike DeWine announced in August a lawsuit to hold Lager, his companies and top ECOT executives personally liable for the lost public funds.

 

From Bill Phillis, unofficial ombudsman for school funding in Ohio:

School Bus
Facebook ‌ Twitter ‌ LinkedIn ‌
Districts that are attempting to intervene in the Attorney General’s lawsuit against the ECOT gang have added Facebook to their pursuit for recovery of funds
Attorney General DeWine brought suit against ECOT, ECOT companies and some employees of ECOT. Eight school districts are attempting to intervene in the suit. Additionally, the districts are pursuing claims against three companies with which ECOT did business. Most recently the districts added Facebook to the list. They are alleging Facebook knew ECOT was financially failing when it sold ads to help ECOT enroll students.
A lot of individuals and companies were attracted to ECOT for the purpose of making easy money. Taxpayers were the losers.
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| www.ohiocoalition.org
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Critics Protest Outrageous Award for Corporation Hawking Online Instruction for Pre-Schoolers

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2019 //
20

 

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is outraged that The Audacious Project is honoring the Waterford online preschool program, which will use this platform to expand their efforts to open additional  online preschools. Early childhood experts agree that this is harmful to children. I say it is a mean and stupid idea. Efforts to put little children in online schools should be denounced, not celebrated. Children need real interaction with real human beings.

Please sign the petition.

 

For Immediate Release

Contact:
David Monahan, CCFC: david@commercialfreechildhood.org; (617) 896-9397

Early Childhood Advocates Call On The Audacious Project to Reconsider Major Award for Online Preschool
A TED philanthropy project would widen educational inequality and deprive children of the hands-on preschool experiences they deserve.

BOSTON, MA – April 12, 2019 – Early childhood advocates are calling on The Audacious Project, housed at TED and designed to fund ideas for social change, to postpone plans to designate Waterford UPSTART, an online “preschool” program, as one of the participants in its funding program for 2019.  Award winners will be announced at TED2019 in Vancouver on April 16. Last year’s award winners averaged $63 million in new funding. According to a Waterford representative, the funding will allow UPSTART to dramatically increase the number of children enrolled in its program.

In their call for The Audacious Project to postpone funding, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Defending the Early Years (DEY) point to their October 2018 Position Statement on Online Preschool, which has been endorsed by more than 100 experts in child development and early education. The experts and advocates say that online preschool programs like UPSTART are poor substitutes for high-quality early education, and that funding online programs instead of high-quality early education will make inequality worse, not better.

“There is a tremendous need for universal pre-K, and it’s admirable that The Audacious Project wants to address educational inequalities, but online preschool is not the answer,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, EdD, Professor Emerita at Lesley University and DEY Senior Advisor. “Kids learn by playing, exploring, and interacting with peers and caring adults – not by memorizing letters, numbers, and colors presented to them on screens. Children who receive UPSTART’s screen-based version of a preschool experience will be disadvantaged compared to children from more resourced communities who have play-based, experiential early education. A truly audacious project would take the funding intended for these online programs and direct it instead to giving low-income, rural, or otherwise underserved children the high quality, face-to-face education they deserve.”

UPSTART, which started with public funding from the state of Utah and has spread to at least seven other states, claims to promote “kindergarten readiness” through 15 – 20 minutes per day of online instruction. But advocates say that UPSTART’s lessons are poorly designed and developmentally inappropriate. An analysis of one UPSTART lesson by DEY found it was pedagogically unsound, “confusing” and “overloaded with distracting images.” UPSTART also recommends that children wear headphones and complete lessons alone, contrary to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that parents “co-view with your children [and] help children understand what they are seeing.”

“Online preschool should never be rewarded or considered a legitimate alternative to high-quality early care and education,” said Denisha Jones, PhD, JD, Director of Teacher Education at Trinity Washington University and Director of Organizing for DEY.  “I implore The Audacious Project to reconsider giving money to a screen-based program at a time where early childhood experts are increasingly concerned with screen time and the loss of high-quality interactions between children and educated early childhood teachers. Programs like UPSTART may be less expensive than real universal preschool, but those savings come at the expense of the low-income kids and kids of color they purport to help. We should be investing our money, time, and resources to ensure all children have access to affordable, high-quality, early childhood education.”

Last year, seven of The Audacious Project designees were granted a total of $441 million from partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. It is not yet known which groups are funding UPSTART, or exactly how much money the program will receive, but an email from a Waterford PR representative indicated that the award will be enough to “provide an opportunity for every four-year-old to be ready for kindergarten.” (Emphasis in original.)

The DEY/CCFC letter pointedly states, “We don’t believe your impressive list of funders and partners would be satisfied if their own children spent 75 minutes a week on a computer in isolation as a substitute for face-to-face preschool rooted in caring relationships and social interaction.” It also warns that a major expansion of online preschool could derail the growing movement for real universal preschool. It asks The Audacious Project to postpone the award and meet with advocates to better understand their concerns.

Added Josh Golin, Executive Director of CCFC, “Over and over, we’ve seen educational technology such as 1:1 programs, virtual charter schools, and personalized learning software falsely marketed as a panacea for inequality. Now the EdTech evangelists have set their sights on preschoolers. Isolated children on computers guided by algorithms can never replicate the joyful exploration and interactions at the core of the preschool experience. We urge The Audacious Project to rethink this award.”

The DEY/CCFC letter can be read in full here.

Categories Childhood, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Online Education

Florida: The Graveyard of American Public Education

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2019 //
36

 

Florida has the worst education policies of any state in the nation, and it is about to get even more destructive, more ignorant, more backward.

Read this alarming article and remember that Betsy DeVos points to Florida as a model.

A model, yes. A model of how religious extremists, rightwing ideologues, and uneducated political hacks can destroy public education, drive away teachers, and fund “schools” that indoctrinate students in religious dogma.

The post was written by Kathleen Oropeza Parent Activist in Orlando.

Jeb Bush started the descent into the swamp of ignorance. Now the torch is carried by Ron DeSantis, who wants to arm teachers, expand the state’s voucher programs to include middle-class families with income up to $100,000 a year, reduce the power of local school boards so they can’t block new charter schools, and undercut public schools in every way their little minds can imagine.

Oropeza writes:

“Pay attention, because what happens in Florida usually shows up in the thirty or so other states under GOP control.

“Step one for DeSantis was to stock the State Supreme Court with three conservative judges. Next, DeSantis charged the Board of Education with appointing Richard Corcoran as State Commissioner of Education. As the immediate past Speaker of the Florida House, Corcoran was the architect of the “school choice” expansions logrolled into multi-subject, opaque omnibus bills that became law over the past several sessions.

“DeSantis, a known Trump ally, made it clear in his proposed education visionto legislators before the the start of the 2019 session that they should “send me a bill” for a new private school tax-funded voucher program. The DeSantis voucher became SB 7070/HB 7075, the radical Family Empowerment Scholarship Program. Funded through the Florida Education Finance Program from property taxes, this is a dangerous co-mingling of the already thin dollars designated for Florida’s district public schools.

“In a state that prizes high-stakes accountability for its public-school students, these vouchers go to unregulated private schools that maintain their right to discriminate against certain students, charge more than the voucher for tuition, teach extreme curriculums, and are not required to ensure student safety or hire certified teachers. This dramatic expansion of private religious school vouchers, once meant for low-income recipients, is morphing into a middle-class entitlement program for families of four making close to $100,000 a year….

”On teacher pay, DeSantis wants to double down on the awful policy of providing bonuses instead of raises via SB7070. Teacher pay in Florida ranks 45th in the nation: $47,858 on average. The state is struggling with a massive teacher shortage projected by the Florida Department of Education to reach 10,000 vacancies by the start of next school year.”

As Oropeza points out, no one ever bought a home with a one-time bonus (except on Wall Street).

”DeSantis supporter Representative Kim Daniels continues to insert religioninto public schools this session by sponsoring HB 195. This is model legislation from ALEC-like Christian Nationalist Project Blitz. Daniels, a Democrat, passed a 2018 law requiring “In God We Trust” to be displayed in public schools. This year Daniels is pushing Blitz legislation requiring public high schools to offer a religion class that teaches only Christianity.”

Another bill allows schools to withdraw any book that is “morally offensive,” such as Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes.” Expect to see demands to remove a lot of “morally offensive” classics by authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, and Mark Twain.

“Another bill, HB 330 by Senator Dennis Baxley, the original sponsor of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, seeks to revise curriculum standards and force public schools to teach “science” theories such as creationism and alternate views to subjects such as climate change.”

Florida is indeed a model: a model of kakistocracy.

Look it up.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Standardized Testing, Vouchers
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