The Washington Post reports that the Alt-Right conspiracy theorists have created fake portraits and videos to attack student leader Emma Gonzalez. The most infamous is a doctored video allegedly showing her tearing up the Constitution, changing the original, in which she ripped an NRA target.
Disgraceful. There is no limit to how low the far right will go.
The Michigan House decided to let charters share in the bounty of votes on millage, where citizens vote to fund their public schools. 80% of charters in Michigan operate for profit, so this will boost their bottom line and steal taxpayer dollars intended for the 90% of children in public schools. The decision now goes to the State Senate.
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Charter schools could receive the same designation as public schools in a district’s millage ballot under a bill narrowly approved by the Michigan House.
Legislators on Thursday voted 56-53 to pass an amendment to the General Property Tax Act allowing districts to describe charter schools as “public schools” on ballots. The initiative now heads to the Senate and follows a January law signed by Gov. Rick Snyder to let charter schools receive revenue from certain voter-approved property tax hikes….
Democrats counter that voters would be unaware of their tax dollars being funneled to for-profit education corporations.
Arizona was long known as the Wild West of charters, but that was before Ohio, Florida, and Michigan jumped into the game.
This charter scandal was so bad that even the president of the state charter board denounced it.
“This is probably one of the most egregious, most outrageous things I’ve ever read about a charter school,” Kathy Senseman, President of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, said in a special session Tuesday.
“The board was made aware of an investigation by a bankruptcy court and U.S. Department of Justice into potential fraud at the Starshine Academy. Investigators allege founder Trish McCarty used taxpayer money for personal expenses. Recent records show the school nearly $3 million in debt.
“I’ve done absolutely everything that I can do in every single case to do everything right,” McCarty told ABC15 by phone.
“Investigators questioned a cash advance made at a Sante Fe casino, car rentals and Walmart purchases paid for by the school. McCarty said the purchases were legitimate because Starshine had a location there. Still, the state board said many financial records were missing or incomplete.
“According to the most recent overall academic rating in 2014 by the charter school board, Starshine ranked 48.96 on a 100-point scale, classifying it “does not meet standard.” The school fell from a 70 out of the 100-point ranking in 2012.
“McCarty said around half of the school’s 90 students are refugees and Starshine faced dropping enrollment, accounting for the low rating.
“Starshine filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016 after failing to keep up with payments on a $12-million expansion.
“This case “is the poster child of basically what’s wrong with charter schools in Arizona,” said Jim Hall, Founder of Arizonans for Charter School Accountability.”
Betsy DeVos has been put in charge of a task force to make recommendations on school safety. The only members are Cabinet members. No students, teachers, principals, or Superintendents will be on the task force or commission. Anyone who has worked in the federal government will tell you that Cabinet members are very busy people, and they are surrounded by yes-men and -women and assistants and speech writers. In their own domains, they are sovereign. They will give very little time or attention to this sham assignment. This is a farce. Chances are that the report has already been drafted by an NRA member of Betsy’s staff.
Politico reported this morning:
WHY TRUMP’S SCHOOL SAFETY COMMISSION OMITS STUDENTS, TEACHERS: The new White House commission on school safety will consist of just four Cabinet secretaries – prompting concerns from parents, students, teachers and school administrators who feel they should play a bigger role. But the Trump administration says it’s about getting to work quickly.
– Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday testified during a hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees education funding. While she was there to discuss the Trump administration’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal, she offered new details about the commission’s makeup. DeVos will chair the commission, which was recently unveiled by the White House in response to the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last month that left 17 people dead. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will join her, she told lawmakers.
– “Is that it? Just four Cabinet secretaries? No experts? No Democrats?” asked Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.). DeVos replied, “This is an urgent matter and we want to ensure that we’re able to move and operate as quickly as possible and without getting bogged down by a lot of bureaucracy.”
– What does DeVos mean by “bureaucracy”? Keeping the commission to just four federal officials who have jurisdiction over school safety issues means the group can “get up and running as quickly as possible,” said Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill.
– “Advisory commissions with non-Federal employees have to follow Federal Advisory Committee Act rules, which adds significant bureaucratic bloat,” Hill said in a statement. “FACA imposes many bureaucratic hurdles, such as requiring a charter that must be approved by the General Services Administration and the appointment of an Agency Committee Management Officer and a Designated Federal Officer, as well as other requirements that would delay the start of this important effort.”
– Input from students, parents and teachers “will be critical,” Hill added. “The Commission will receive input from and hold meetings over the coming weeks and months with students, parents, teachers, schools safety personnel, administrators, law enforcement officials, mental health professionals, school counselors and others holding a wide variety of views.”
– Still, education groups want to ensure they’re heard. “It is critical that parents have a seat at the table whenever decisions are made that impact their children, and particularly on the critical issue of school safety,” said Jim Accomando, president of National PTA, which represents parent-teacher associations nationwide.
– “As school building leaders, principals must be heard on school safety and student well-being issues,” said L. Earl Franks, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals. Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for policy and advocacy at AASA, The School Superintendents Association, said that “by keeping it only to Cabinet members, it’s necessarily political … I would venture a guess that the commission described by Secretary DeVos today isn’t set it up to be super productive.”
Renegade Teacher hast taught in both public schools and charter schools in Detroit. He writes here about the highly profitable fraud of online charter schools. Among their most prominent supporters are Betsy DeVos (who invested in them, and now advocates for them) and Jeb Bush, who relentlessly promotes online learning.
From his own experience as a teacher, he saw what online learning lacks: human relationships between students and teachers and between peers. It is soul-deadening.
“Online education in the K-12 sphere is a growing trend- as of 2015, there were some 275,000 students enrolled in online charter schools. In my home state of Michigan, from 2010 to 2014, the number of students in Online Charter Schools increased from 718 students to 7,934 students (over 1000% increase).
“Private, for-profit companies (using public funds) are cashing in- the two largest online charter companies, K12 and Connections Academy, are raking in an estimated $1 billion per year (as of 2014). The motive is profit over substance: less operating costs, less teachers, and less building maintenance.
“The results have been damning: according a study from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CREDO), students in online charters lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math IN THE COURSE OF AN 180-DAY SCHOOL YEAR. They could have had equal math progress if they had spent the entire year asleep.
“In Philadelphia, a system composed of mainly poverty-stricken Black and Latinx students, online schools educated more than one-third of students as of 2014 [1]. The kicker is that, between 2011 and 2014, 100% of those students failed their state achievement tests. 100%!!! [2].”
The biggest online charter school in Ohio recently collapsed, both an academic and financial disaster.
Renegade Teacher thinks they should be banned. They are educational frauds.
Ever since D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the D.C.public schools and named Michelle Rhee as its leader, corporate reformers have hailed the long-struggling district as a model of school reform. Rhee was a blazing meteor in the world of reform, appearing on the covers of national magazines and as a frequent guest on national TV. She starred in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” and prominent reform-loving journalists burbled in print about her miraculous achievements.
She “knew” that “bad teachers” caused low student test scores, so she set about firing teachers and principals and designed an evaluation system tied to test scores to weed out the bad apples.
Her stle was mean. She gloried in her lack of empathy and her contempt for collaboration.
Now, Tom Ultican (like John Merrow before him, whom he cites) dismantles the Rhee legacy as a fraud, an exemplar of the Destroy Public Education Movement, a testament to the failure of the “portfolio model.”
Inflated test scores, inflated graduation rates, doctored data, a regime of deception and boasting. A model of corporate reform. Educators in Atlanta were sentenced to jail for the same things that happened in D.C. yet D.C. was hailed as a model.
Rhee is gone. Her successor Kaya Henderson is gone. Her successor Antwan Wilson is gone. But the hype and spin survives. When will the Mayor and City Council and people of D.C demand accountability?
E.J. Montini, a regular columnist for the Arizona Republic, wrote an opinion piece wondering whether taxpayer in Arizona care that charter schools are wasting their money, closing without notice, discriminate against kids they don’t want, and are not subject to state laws requiring accountability or transparency, not even required to avoid conflicts of interest.
Lawmakers don’t care.
Not long ago the ACLU of Arizona published a report outlining how a number of Arizona charter school manage to discriminate against students they’d rather not have in their classrooms.
This would include minority students, kids with disabilities, special education students, discipline problems and children who weren’t as advanced as other academically…
The centrist Grand Canyon Institute has produced lengthy reports on the lack of financial accountability for charters.
Remember, these are public schools.
They use your tax money. Lots and lots of it.
But they don’t have to share financial information or be monitored by the state Auditor General like regular public schools.
They don’t have to be transparent about how much they pay their administrators, or anyone else.
There is no competitive bid process, so nepotism runs rampant.
And even when the charter board finds out that a school is failing financially, like the Discovery Creemos Academy, it doesn’t have to power to intervene.
It’s a crazy system.
Ripe for abuse at every level.
And that situation exists only because the people currently in control of state government allow it to exist
They’ve gone nowhere.
Charter schools spend more on administrative overhead than public schools. So?
Does anyone care?
Or do Arizona voters like to be ripped off?
A new report from the California-based nonpartisan group “In the Public Interest” documents systemic fraud and waste in California’s charter schools
Public funding of California’s charter schools now tops $6 billion annually. ITPH finds that, despite this substantial investment, governments at all levels remain unable to proactively monitor the private groups that operate charter schools for fraud and waste.
In the report, Fraud and waste in California’s charter schools, In the Public Interest reveals that total alleged and confirmed fraud and waste in California’s charter schools has reached over $149 million. Yet this is likely only the tip of the iceberg, as the state lacks the oversight necessary to proactively identify fraud and waste.
The report highlights several instances of fraud and waste, such as:
The entrenched culture of self-dealing at the Bay Area’s Tri-Valley Learning Corporation, whose CEO misappropriated tax-exempt public bonds totaling over $67 million.
The founder of Celerity Education Group who allegedly used public funding for personal expenses, including nearly $1,700 on meals at restaurants in one month in 2013 alone.
The recent spectacle at Partnerships to Uplift Communities, in which cofounder and former director—and current Los Angeles school board member—Ref Rodriguez, allegedly authorized $285,000 in payments to nonprofit organizations he oversaw during his tenure.
Fraud and waste in California’s charter schools also includes an analysis of flaws in existing oversight, recommendations for reform, and an appendix of instances of fraud and abuse from 1997 through 2017.
In the Public Interest is a nonprofit research and policy center committed to promoting the values, vision, and agenda for the common good and democratic control of public goods and services.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a series of essays about the Supreme Court and its treatment of important issues like gun control. The Washington Post excerpted one of them here, in 2014.
“Following the massacre of grammar-school children in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012, high-powered weapons have been used to kill innocent victims in more senseless public incidents. Those killings, however, are only a fragment of the total harm caused by the misuse of firearms. Each year, more than 30,000 people die in the United States in firearm-related incidents. Many of those deaths involve handguns.
“The adoption of rules that will lessen the number of those incidents should be a matter of primary concern to both federal and state legislators. Legislatures are in a far better position than judges to assess the wisdom of such rules and to evaluate the costs and benefits that rule changes can be expected to produce. It is those legislators, rather than federal judges, who should make the decisions that will determine what kinds of firearms should be available to private citizens, and when and how they may be used. Constitutional provisions that curtail the legislative power to govern in this area unquestionably do more harm than good.
“The first 10 amendments to the Constitution placed limits on the powers of the new federal government. Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of the Second Amendment, which provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
“For more than 200 years following the adoption of that amendment, federal judges uniformly understood that the right protected by that text was limited in two ways: First, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of states or local governments to regulate the ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in United States v. Miller, decided in 1939, the court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that sort of weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated Militia.”
“When I joined the court in 1975, that holding was generally understood as limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to uses of arms that were related to military activities. During the years when Warren Burger was chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge or justice expressed any doubt about the limited coverage of the amendment, and I cannot recall any judge suggesting that the amendment might place any limit on state authority to do anything.
“Organizations such as the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and mounted a vigorous campaign claiming that federal regulation of the use of firearms severely curtailed Americans’ Second Amendment rights. Five years after his retirement, during a 1991 appearance on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Burger himself remarked that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Got that? The conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger, appointed by President Richard Nixon, said that the NRA had perpetrated a fraud on the American people by twisting the words of the Second Amendment to deregulate military weapons and put then in the hands of civilians.
Justice Stevens added:
”In response to the massacre of grammar-school students at Sandy Hook Elementary School, some legislators have advocated stringent controls on the sale of assault weapons and more complete background checks on purchasers of firearms. It is important to note that nothing in either the Heller or the McDonald opinion poses any obstacle to the adoption of such preventive measures.”
Republican Governor Eric Greitens was indicted for invasion of privacy.
“Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens was indicted and taken into custody Thursday for felony invasion of privacy, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s office announced Thursday afternoon…
“Gardner’s statement said a grand jury found probable cause to believe Greitens violated a Missouri statute that makes it a felony if a person transmits the image contained in the photograph or film in a manner that allows access to that image via a computer.
“The indictment apparently stems from allegations made in media reports last month that, during the course of an extramarital affair, he took a photograph of his bound and partially nude lover and threatened to publicize it if she exposed the affair.”
Greitens is of interest on this blog because one of his first actions was to pack the State Board of Education and force the firing of the uncontroversial state commissioner of education. Greitens is a huge supporter of privatization and was planning to replace the Commissioner with a charter lover.
But the governor forgot that his appointees were supposed to be approved by the Legislature and they were not. Consequently, none of his appointees serve legally, and there is no quorum on the state board.
What is not clear is why Greiten’s non-legal Board was allowed to fire the state commissioner.
Diane Ravitch's blog 