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Enrollment Falls at For-Profit “University” as Former Obama Officials Await Purchase

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2016 //
9

In one of the most ethically-challenged actions of former Education Department officials, a group made a bid for the for-profit University of Phoenix, whose fortunes were waning due to regulations and oversight by the prospective new purchasers. The Wall Street Journal cried foul when the deal went public months ago, saying that the same government officials who drove down the UP stock price were taking advantage of the low price for their own gain.

Politico reports that enrollment at UP continues to fall, but the deal is moving ahead:

“WITH SALE ON THE LINE, UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX ENROLLMENT DOWN AGAIN: The parent company of the University of Phoenix reported another sharp drop in enrollment Thursday, while a proposed sale of the for-profit college giant continues to hang in the balance. Apollo Education Group told investors that enrollment at the University of Phoenix was 142,500 as of Aug. 31 – a more than 25 percent decline from a year earlier. New enrollments also fell by nearly 27 percent, to 19,400. A group of private investors with ties to the Obama administration are seeking to buy Apollo. The company had previously warned that if the sale wasn’t completed by early October, its worsening financial condition might sink the deal. But Thursday Apollo Education told investors that it currently meets the minimum financial standards required for the deal to close – and expects to continue meeting those standards going forward. Michael Stratford has more.”

To read the links, read here: http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-education/2016/10/obama-administration-pushes-new-block-grant-216991

Graduation rates at for-profit institutions are abysmal.

They have been called predators in Cipongressional hearings. They prey on the unwary.

Their defenders and lobbyists are described here.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Higher Education

Andre Agassi Making Big Money Building and Selling Charter schools

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2016 //
24

Former tennis star Andre Agassi opened a charter school in Las Vegas a few years back. He collected millions of dollars from adoring fans. He promised that his school would prepare every student for college. It was supposed to be easy. But there were many problems. Principals came and went. Teachers came and went. The school was a disaster. An article written in 2012 said:

More than 10 years after it opened, Agassi Prep, one of the first charter schools in Nevada, and arguably the most high-profile, is still finding its way. The school serves students from kindergarten to 12th grade (it’s arranged into elementary, middle and high schools), and graduated its first class in 2009. Like all public schools, it receives more than $6,000 per student from the state and county, and supplements that with private funding. During the last school year, Agassi Prep spent $11,069 to educate each of its 600 students.

“My impressions were that everyone wanted the school to be one of the best schools in the nation,” Piscal said. “It hasn’t all come together, and there is some frustration about that. But people still wanted to make it happen.”

Piscal has been on the job for more than a year. He is the sixth person to lead the school since it opened in 2001. But high turnover is not restricted to the chancellor’s office. Teachers, principals and staff come and go like visiting teams. Former teachers said the constant turnover creates a chaotic learning environment. Although the school has a high graduation rate and sends most of its graduates to college, it has had little success getting students into top-tier institutions, and many of its graduates attend community college.

Piscal wants to change that. The charter school veteran came to Agassi in January 2011. Not only is he trying to increase academic rigor, especially at the high-school level, he’s also supervising an increase in enrollment that will almost double the student body.

He’s already had some success staunching turnover at the high school and middle school. When he arrived, many positions were held by long-term substitutes. Some students had four or five teachers over the school year. Most of those subs have since been replaced by teachers who survived a rigorous interview process, Piscal said.

(The interesting thing about this article–which is unique in describing the struggles of the school– is that I quoted it in my 2013 book “Reign of Error.” At the time, it was easily discovered through googling by the school’s name. However, when I searched for it to link for this post, the article had disappeared. It took repeated efforts to find it, and it is filed under the name of a state assemblyman. I can’t help but suspect that an Internet mechanism was used to bury this piece.)

Agassi, bear in mind, is a high-school dropout.

But he saw a good money-making deal and he went for more, leaning on the alleged success of his Las Vegas charter school. He teamed up with an equity investor named Bobby Turner, and they raised nearly a billion dollars for charter investment deals. The first one they built was sold to KIPP in Philadelphia, and the Agassi team made a profit of $1 million.

The team recently opened its fifth charter school and its first charter in Washington, D.C., called the Rocketship Rise Academy. On the day it opened, it declared itself a high-performing school.

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

Carol Burris on the Charter Mess in California: Part 3

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2016 //
19

Carol Burris is writing a four-part series about charter schools in California. She recently traveled to California to visit charter schools. She found it difficult to get information on certain charter schools, because some are not located in the district that authorized them. Transparency and accountability appear to be non-existent. A recent newspaper series about the online charter K12, Inc., demonstrated that it makes a handsome profit while delivering poor education. But the state has taken no action.

Public money meant for public schools is freely handed out to charters with no supervision or oversight.

She learned about a charter school called WISE, and it sounded good on paper:

The Wise Academy is tucked away on a Girl Scout camp on the Bothin Youth Center in Fairfax, Calif. Its students attend classes in yurts and barns. Wise, which stands for Waldorf-Inspired School of Excellence, follows the curriculum taught in Waldorf private schools — its students garden, enjoy a games class, and celebrate All Souls Day and Michaelmas.

Students must apply to attend, and its preliminary application makes it clear that parents are supposed to pony up cash. The full application demands that families provide all sources of income. The school’s donate button has a default donation of $2,000. A cash-strapped parent would quickly infer that their family “need not apply.”

How many students attend Wise Academy and how well do they achieve? For the taxpaying public, that is a mystery.

You cannot find this K-6 charter school, which has been in operation for three years, on the state’s Education Department website. Rick Bagley, the superintendent of the Ross Valley School District in which Wise is located, was never informed of its presence as required by law.

The state has thus far refused to monitor charter schools or hold them accountable.

A bill that would have banned for-profit charters in California was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015. An additional bill, which would have prevented financially troubled districts from authorizing charters in other districts, was vetoed by Brown last month. The president of the California State Board of Education, Michael Kirst, worked as a K12 consultant, before his appointment by Brown.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Georgia: Governor Deal to African-American Ministers: “Trust Me.”

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2016 //
21

Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia is pushing a constitutional amendment to allow the state to take over low-scoring public schools. He calls it an “opportunity school district” and points to New Orleans and the Tennessee Achievement School Districts as models. He brought called together a group of African-American ministers and asked for their support.

Here is the response from one of the attendees, who knew that neither New Orleans or the Tennessee ASD had helped the neediest students. Governor Deal couldn’t answer his questions, because the ALEC model legislation doesn’t explain why cessation of democracy helps schools or what to do after privatizing the schools and giving them to corporations.

Here is the report by Rev. Chester Ellis:

Governor’s Ministers Summoning Meeting was a School Takeover Sales Pitch
By Rev. Chester Ellis 912-257-2394
Pastor of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia

Governor Nathan Deal is working hard to sell the voters on what he calls an Opportunity School District. But this is an opportunity that Georgia should not take.

Recently, The Governor made a pitch to twenty-nine African American ministers in the basement of the mansion. No media was present. But I was one of those ministers.

If Amendment One was about education and opportunity for our communities and children, we could at least hold a logical discussion about evidence-based solutions. As a retired educator and community activist, it is very clear to me that his Opportunity School District is not about education or the community. He has no plan or roadmap to improve schools.

Gov. Deal was looking for our support. He stated, “I need your help.” But we left with more questions than we had answers. It truly is a takeover, and one whose extent is clear to very few voters.

I was disappointed. I thought the Governor would be able to lay out his plan in detail to us. But, what I got from the Governor is he’s making it up as he goes. There’s really no plan. At best, it was guesswork.

Bishop Marvin L. Winans, who has a charter school in Detroit, was the first to speak to us. Brother Winans is a minister and an award winning Gospel singer. He does not live in Georgia. Marvin talked about why he had established his school in Detroit and why he thought it was a good idea that the Governor was willing to do something to help failing schools. But we didn’t have a chance to dialog with him, ask questions or shed light on anything here in Georgia for him. He left for a concert, almost as quickly as he appeared!

Afterwards, the Governor followed with a spiel about why he thought he needed to take over the schools and why the Black clergymen needed to be in support of Amendment 1, The Opportunity School District. He then opened the session up for questions.

I asked him, what is the student to teacher ratio per class of all the schools on your list for takeover? He said he did not have the answer to that question.

My rationale for asking that question was that research tells us ideal pupil to teacher ratio should be 18 to 1, and the further schools and classrooms go past that recommended ratio, the more they are setting students up for failure. Districts need resources to address that problem. The A plus Act of 2000 provided such resources. In fact, this Governor has taken more resources from our public schools. The governor added that he needed to do more research on that issue, so I invited him to do that and gave him some websites he could Google.

I also asked the Governor if all of the schools that are having trouble, as defined by him, are predominately African American schools. He replied, not so much, but that when they looked at schools that were failing they looked at schools that were in a cluster. And that the ministers summoned to the meeting were invited more for being in those identified clusters of schools.

One of my colleagues asked the Governor for the specifics of his Opportunity School District plan. Deal replied that he was using different models, and two of the models he mentioned were the Louisiana Recovery School District and the Tennessee Achievement School District models. Then the question was raised about both of those state’s backing away from the models because they failed to accomplish their achievement goals. In fact indicators prove that New Orleans is worse off now The Governor replied, “We are going to look at what they did wrong, and correct their mistakes so that ours will be right. You know, we have to do something, we are willing to try this and then if it doesn’t work, we are willing to work on what doesn’t work and straighten it out.” The problem with the Governor’s logic is that he is asking the voters to change the state’s constitution. We can’t back up if the voters do that!

The Governor says OSD is a “plan in the works”. . So I urged the Governor to use Massachusetts as a model rather than one from Tennessee or Louisiana, which have both failed.

According to a recent article in Education Week, scholars at the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation and Philadelphia-based Research in Action organization found that some states are proposing to mimic “opportunity school district” takeover models despite evidence that prototypes of these models have gone awry. The esteemed Education Week reports that imitating these models are not an appropriate prescription for providing support for schools that needs it.

Massachusetts put their plan in place with on the ground, in the classrooms education practitioners. . Legislators met with them and applied the educator’s advice and professional know how. They set out on a course working together and didn’t change the course until they got the results they were striving for. They are now one of the celebrated and better school systems in the country. I asked the Governor, why didn’t his planners and plans look at that type of successful model?

He replied, “It’s because of demographics.” I responded that clearly Massachusetts doesn’t look like Georgia but education isn’t rocket science …..It requires an understanding of what you are working with. I also referenced just one of many of our state’s successful public school model, Woodville Thompkins High School in Savannah. I’m a graduate of that school and I have worked since 2006 with that school and the community. As a result it is an award winning school in many disciplines.

For the last two years, Woodville-Tompkins Technical and Career High School has had a 100 percent Graduation rate. They have also been cited as being one of the top 30 programs worldwide in Robotics. There is a way to turn schools around and it doesn’t require a Constitutional Amendment. I don’t see the need. It takes a little elbow grease and total involvement from parents, community and legislators to sustain evidence based solutions and models that are already working.

I don’t buy the Governor’s program or plans. He’s selling the public on a quick fix. I think the Governor has some friends who see education as a carte blanche card; something they can make money off of. It’s about the money, not about the children. The legislation doesn’t even define what a failing school is. The Governor has spent little or no time educating the public on the thirteen pages that compose all of the little devils in his plan per Senate Bill 133. He is spending lots of time though, selling his plan.

The Governor is a lame duck, yet he’s asking citizens to trust him blindly and give him all the power over their schools, public property, pocketbooks and children by changing the constitution.

I thanked the Governor for inviting me, but I told him before I left that there are too many uncertainties and too many unanswered questions to go before my congregation and say we should support this. I’m not comfortable with the Governor’s answers or his solutions. His Opportunity School District has no facts and no plans to improve schools. This is an opportunity that citizens can’t afford to take. It is all about the money. It’s just that simple.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Georgia, New Orleans

Civil Rights Activists Ask the Candidates: Where Do You Stand on K-12 Education?

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2016 //
5

Before the second debate tonight, the Journey for Justice asks the candidates to respond to these questions:


NEWS RELEASE MEDIA CONTACT: Jaribu Lee
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(773) 548-7500
October 8, 2016
info@j4jalliance.com

Education activists release statement ahead of second presidential debate: “Will the next president be tone deaf…”
​

CHICAGO – Today, Jitu Brown, national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance (J4JA) released the following statement ahead of the second presidential debate in St. Louis on Sunday, September 9th. Thousands of African American and Latino parents, students and activists have challenged both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (and third-party candidates) to release their K-through-12 public education platforms, as well as identify how, if elected, they will work to end federal education policies that have destabilized communities and hurt students of color:

“As parents, students and residents of communities impacted by corporate education interventions in 24 cities across this nation, we are dismayed by the omission of public education as an issue during this presidential election season. Public education repeatedly polls as a top tier issue, but has been largely ignored by both major and third party candidates,” said Brown.

“Will the next president be tone deaf to the tremors from the ground? As a national network of grassroots community organizations across America, we have seen first-hand a determined resistance to failed, top-down corporate education interventions that cannot be ignored; Title VI civil rights complaints filed in 12 cities, thousands of people in determined protest against school closings, sit-ins and traffic blockades, students occupying the superintendent’s office in Newark, a 34-day hunger strike to save a neighborhood’s last open-enrollment high school in Chicago, the rejection of punitive standardized test across the nation and from those who wish to be the leader of the free world; silence.

“The next president must base their advocacy in relationship with people’s lived reality, not corporate relationships. When a mother cries in Detroit because her child’s school is being closed, or students walk-out by the thousands in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Camden and Newark, Baltimore and Philadelphia; it matters. The next president must understand that the United States ranks 19th in the world in public education among OECD countries but when you remove poverty we are number 2. The next president must have the courage to stare down inequity in public education with a commitment to hear the voices of the people directly impacted. The next president must understand that we do not have failing schools in America, as a public we have been failed,” he continued.

“We are asking the next president to meet with the Journey for Justice Alliance and adopt our education platform. Include J4J on your education transition team so that public policy can be rooted in our lived experiences, not someone’s opinion of our communities. We were disappointed that the vice-presidential candidates said nothing about public education in their October 4th debate. We want to hear from both candidates on October 9th about their education agenda. Will they be honest about the harm inflicted on our communities by school closings and the unwarranted expansion of charter schools? Will they acknowledge that the “illusion of choice” must be erased by the reality of strong, high quality neighborhood schools within safe walking distance of our homes? We will be watching.”

​###

The Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J) (www.j4jalliance.org) is a national network of inter-generational, grassroots community organizations led primarily by Black and Brown people in 24 U.S. cities. With more than 40,000 active members, we assert that the lack of equity is one of the major failures of the American education system. Current U.S. education policies have led to states’ policies that lead to school privatization through school closings and charter school expansion which has energized school segregation, the school-to-prison pipeline; and has subjected children to mediocre education interventions that over the past 15 years have not resulted in sustained, improved education outcomes in urban communities.

Journey For Justice Alliance
4242 S. Cottage Grove
Chicago, IL 60653
773-548-7500

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry, English Language Learners, Equity, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Inequality, Injustice, Poverty, Privatization, Race

Eclectablog: The Three Things That Should Never Be Privatized

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2016 //
15

Chris Savage of Eclectablog writes about the disasters of privatization in Michigan.

There are at least three public services, he says, that should never be privatized:

Healthcare, education, and prisons.

Why? Because the bottom line is profit, not service or quality.

Yet Governor Snyder just can’t get over his certainty that privatization must work, if only he can find the right vendor. He can’t. The incentives to game the system for profit are too great, and they are baked in.

Categories For-Profit, Michigan, Privatization

Cheri Kiesecker: What Parents Need to Know About Google Apps for Education

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2016 //
41

Cheri Kiesecker is a Colorado parent who pays close attention to technology that invades student privacy.

She left the following warning as a comment:

In response to the question about GAFE. Below are a few links that may be of help.
GAFE, Google, Chromebooks… seem to suffer transparency issues on how they track and use and analyze student data. When parents have asked to see what data points Google collects, how that information is analyzed, who it is shared with, there are no transparent answers.

Many privacy organizations and advocates have concerns and questions about the algorithms used and data collection/ sharing in GAFE.
Google Chromebooks are pre-set to send student data, all user activity, back to Google.

This article explains how ChromeSync feature tracks students. Some schools purposely leave the SYNC feature on. Others, however, turn off Sync before asking students to use Chromebooks. MANY schools and parents are NOT AWARE of the Chrome Sync tracking feature.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/internet-companies-confusing-consumers-profit

This blog does a great job explaining GAFE issues in Where The Sidewalk Ends: Wading Through Google’s Terms of Service for Education:

Google defines a narrow set of applications as “core” Apps for Edu services. These services are exempt from having ads displayed alongside user content, and from having their data used for “Ads purposes”. However, apps outside the core services – like YouTube, Blogger, and Picasa – are not covered by the terms of service that restrict ads. The same is true for integrations of third party apps that can be enabled within the Google Apps admin interface, and then accessed by end users. So, when a person in a Google Apps for Edu environment watches a video on YouTube, writes or reads a post on Blogger, or accesses any third party app enabled via Google Apps, their information is no longer covered under the Google Apps for Education terms.

To put it another way: as soon as a person with a Google Apps for Education account strays outside the opaque and narrowly defined “safe zone” everything they do can be collected, stored, and mined.

So, the next time you hear someone say, “Google apps doesn’t use data for advertising” ask them to explain what happens to student data when a student starts in Google apps, and then goes to Blogger, or YouTube, or connects to any third party integration.” read more…

https://funnymonkey.com/2015/where-the-sidewalk-ends-wading-through-googles-terms-of-service

EFF COMPLAINT against GOOGLE

The privacy watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a complaint with the FTC about Google’s deceptive tracking of students.
Chrome books are set to send back students’ entire browsing history to Google but that is not all.

Google’s Student Tracking Isn’t Limited to Chrome Sync

Many media reports on (as well as at least one response to) the FTC complaint we submitted yesterday about Google’s violation of the Student Privacy Pledge have focused heavily on one issue—Google’s use of Chrome Sync data for non-educational purposes. This is an important part of our complaint, but we want to clarify that Google has other practices which we are just as concerned about, if not more so.
In particular, the primary thrust of our complaint focuses on how Google tracks and builds behavioral profiles on students when they navigate to Google-operated sites outside of Google Apps for Education. We’ve tried to explain this issue in both our complaint and our FAQ, but given its significance we think it’s worth explaining again.

To understand what’s going on, you first have to understand that when it comes to education, Google divides its services into two categories: Google Apps for Education (GAFE), which includes email, Calendar, Talk/Hangouts, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Contacts, and the Apps Vault; and everything else, which includes Google Search, Blogger, Bookmarks, Books, Maps, News, Photos, Google+, and YouTube, just to name a few.

Google has promised not to build profiles on students or serve them ads only within Google Apps for Education services. When a student goes to a different Google service, however, and they’re still logged in under their educational account, Google associates their activity on that service with their educational account, and then serves them ads on at least some of those non-GAFE services based on that activity.

In other words, when a student logs into their educational account, and then uses Google News to create a report on current events, or researches history using Google Books, or has a geography lesson using Google Maps, or watches a science video on YouTube, Google tracks that activity and feeds it into an ad profile attached to the student’s educational account—even though Google knows that the person using that account is a student, and the account was created for educational purposes.

This is our biggest complaint about Google’s practices—that despite having promised not to track students, Google is abusing its position of power as a provider of some educational services to profit off of students’ data when they use other Google services—services that Google has arbitrarily decided don’t deserve any protection. read more

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/googles-student-tracking-isnt-limited-chrome-sync

Google and other apps may be “free”, but as privacy experts warn, your child’s data is the price. GAFE is just one example of needing transparent and enforceable privacy laws to protect students and why schools and teachers should read the privacy policies, terms of service surrounding data collection and use…and communicate that information with parents before signing a child up for GAFE or any app. Ideally, every parent should be given the choice to opt-in, as many parents are not aware of data privacy issues surrounding edtech.
…and as privacy groups warn, Google is playing with [COPPA] fire in promoting GAFE to children under 13.

http://www.cio.com/article/2855414/google-will-target-kids-with-redesigned-versions-of-its-products.html

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology

Ohio: Online Charter Argues in Court That It Should Not Be Audited for Student Participation

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2016 //
6

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) is one of the most profitable charter schools in the nation. Its owner, William Lager, is one of the biggest donors to the Republican party in Ohio. ECOT offers K-12 instruction online and is paid full state tuition for every student. Most of this money is deducted from the funding of the local school district where each student lives. ECOT has the lowest graduation rate in the nation. According to the New York Times, in the 2014 fiscal year, the last year for which federal tax filings were available, the school paid the companies associated with Mr. Lager nearly $23 million, or about one-fifth of the nearly $115 million in government funds it took in.

The state recently asked ECOT to demonstrate that its students are actually logging on and participating in instruction. The issue is in court because ECOT says that the state is overstepping its bounds and the company has no obligation to demonstrate that its students participate even for a minute a day.

Here is the story.

The state’s fight over whether the giant ECOT online school deserves the $106 million in state money it receives hit the courtroom today, with ECOT lawyers saying the state is using rules that are “unenforceable” and the state saying the school’s objections are “absurd.”

The school and Ohio Department of Education are expected to be before Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jennifer French for the next three days to present their differing views on a crucial issue: Whether online schools have to show that students actually participate in their online classes, or just that the schools provide classes.

In opening arguments this morning, lawyer Marion Little said state rules and a 2003 contract with ODE only require the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow to prove that students are enrolled, not that they are engaged in their lessons.

Little said that e-school funding is set by enrollment but the state this year has tried to “merge” the “distinct” and separate ideas of participation with enrollment to audit the school and put its funding at risk.

The original idea of charter schools, as espoused not by Albert Shanker but by people like Chester Finn Jr., was a deal: Autonomy in exchange for accountability.

ECOT offers a different deal: Autonomy without accountability. Just give us the money and trust us.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization

Valerie Strauss: Why Did Donald Trump Give His Big Education Speech in a State with Multiple Charter Scandals?

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2016 //
47

Valerie Strauss found many ironies in Donald Trump’s decision about where to give his big education policy speech.

To begin with, he parroted Jeb Bush’s line about public schools as a government monopoly. He mocked him in the debates, now he steals his lines.

Next, he made his speech in Ohio, which has been celebrated for the public exposure of numerous charter school scandals. The biggest charter operators have the worst schools and donate the most money to Republican politicians.

And amazingly, he chose a for-profit charter as his venue, which recently was given an F by the state for poor student growth.

Another irony: the absurd idea of rating schools with a humiliating letter grade was devised by none other than “low energy” Jeb Bush, who has not endorsed Trump.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Trump

Stephen Dyer Responds to Fordham Institute Critique about the Charter Where Trump Spoke

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2016 //
18

Stephen Dyer said that the for-profit charter school in Cleveland where Donald Trump spoke is a failing school, based on its letter grades. The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is an official authorizer of charters in Ohio (though not this one), said that Dyer was wrong. As you may know, the A-F report card idea was invented by Jeb Bush in Florida and has spread to accountability-obsessed states like Ohio. It tends to be an accurate measure of family income. Dyer points out that Fordham was gung-ho to adopt the A-F grades, but doesn’t like them so much now. Ron Packard, the owner of the charter in Cleveland, was previously CEO at the online charter corporation K12, where he was paid $5 million annually. His background is McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. K12 Inc. gets bad reviews for its terrible education record, even from charter advocates.

Dyer responds here:

As you know, Donald Trump came to Cleveland to visit a charter school and announce a massive federal infusion of dollars for school choice programs. Regardless of the wisdom of that plan, I found it curious that he would visit a school with an F grade from the state on student growth — considered the most important metric by many charter school advocates. So I called the grade “failing” in several news accounts.

The Fordham Insitute took me to task for that today. So I felt I needed to respond bceause I actually agree that school performance needs more nuanced measures than the simple test regime we have today. But I found it amazing that Fordham, which pushed for Ohio to go to an A-F report card system because it would give parenhts more transparency about how their schools performed so they could then choose whether a charter would be a better option, is now saying that the F grade at the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy doesn’t actually mean it’s failing. Especially given that Fordham said the drop in grades this year (due to PARCC and Common Core) gave Ohioans a more accurate assessment of how kids are “actually doing.”

Here’s my response: http://bit.ly/2cJ7PpM

Best Regards,

Stephen Dyer
Education Policy Fellow
Innovation Ohio
35 E. Gay St.
Columbus, Ohio 43215
330-338-1486
http://www.innovationohio.org

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Testing
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