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Mississippi: Pastor Speaks Out for Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2019 //
8

 

Reverend Dawn Douglas Flowers of Madison, Mississippi, speaks out on behalf of public schools and the newly formed Pastors for MS Children.

Writing in the Mississippi Business Journal, Rev. Flowers makes the moral case for funding public schools and supporting their teachers. She writes that it is time to invest in our children, our families, and our teachers.

She writes:

I am the product of the Mississippi public school system.  Both of my parents were public school teachers in Mississippi, and my husband currently works within the public school system in Mississippi.  My three children are receiving their education within our public schools, and my oldest has been in 3 different public school districts since she began kindergarten. 

This is what I know.  My children are loved and supported by wonderful teachers, and are being shaped in a positive way by their experience within our community public schools.      

This is what I know.  90% of all school age Mississippi children are educated within our public schools.  Supporting public schools is a faithful response to my call as a person of faith to love my neighbor.  Every child has the right to an education and the best way for this to be fulfilled is for us to support public policies that ensure access for all children to free public school.

This is what I know.  Mississippi is not currently providing adequate funding to meet the needs of every child because Mississippi is not adequately funding our public schools. 

This is what I know.  In the last seven years, Mississippi public schools have suffered their worst underfunding ever.  By underfunding MAEP, our Legislature is fostering inequity, and every child in every community deserves equitable, fully funded public education.      

This is what I know.  Mississippi pays our teachers less than any of our neighboring states. 

This is what I know.  Funding matters.  I am always amazed at what our teachers and our schools do for our children with the limited resources available.  Just imagine what fully funded public schools and supported teachers could do.

Pastors for Texas Children has organized clergy across the south to advocate for children and public schools. The other bpnew organization is Pastors for North Carolina Children. These pastors are dynamic. They are motivated by love of God and people, and they can’t be stopped. They bear witness and demand justice. It is exciting to see them supporting the important American tradition of separation of church and state.

 

Categories Accountability, Funding, Mississippi, Separation of church and state

Steven Singer: Eight Things I Like About Elizabeth Warren’s Plan, and One I Don’t Like

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2019 //
19

 

Steven Singer was excited to read Elizabeth Warren’s plan for K-12 education. 

There was just one thing he was troubled by.

He begins:

My daughter had bad news for me yesterday at dinner.

She turned to me with all the seriousness her 10-year-old self could muster and said, “Daddy, I know you love Bernie but I’m voting for Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth Warren?” I said choking back a laugh.

Her pronouncement had come out of nowhere. We had just been discussing how disgusting the pierogies were in the cafeteria for lunch.

And she nodded with the kind of earnestness you can only have in middle school.

So I tried to match the sobriety on her face and remarked, “That’s okay, Honey. You support whomever you want. You could certainly do worse than Elizabeth Warren.”

And you know what? She’s right.

Warren has a lot of things to offer – especially now that her education plan has dropped.

In the 15 years or so that I’ve been a public school teacher, there have been few candidates who even understand the issues we are facing less than any who actually promote positive education policy.

But then Bernie Sanders came out with his amazing Thurgood Marshall planand I thought, “This is it! The policy platform I’ve been waiting for!”

I knew Warren was progressive on certain issues but I never expected her to in some ways match and even surpass Bernie on education.

What times we live in! There are two major political candidates for the Democratic nomination for President who don’t want to privatize every public school in sight! There are two candidates who are against standardized testing!

It’s beyond amazing!

Before we gripe and pick at loose ends in both platforms, we should pause and acknowledge this.

Woo-hoo!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Funding, Hope, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Testing

Denver: Scott Baldermann for School Board

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2019 //
16

 

I am happy to endorse Scott Baldermann for District 1 on the Denver school board.

Scott is a native of Denver, a graduate of Aurora public schools, and a parent of children who attend Denver public schools.

He is an architect and software developer. He sold his small business and is now devoted to his children and their school. He is president of the PTA.

He has been endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the Colorado Education Association, and other professional groups, as well as by former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb.

Former Mayor Webb put the issue succinctly:

The Denver Public Schools philosophy of education reform has destroyed Cole Junior High and Manual High School, which houses three different schools. The current DPS Board of Education’s philosophy of education reform is not addressing these concerns and other issues. Therefore, I am endorsing a slate of three new candidates for the board supported by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. They are: Tay Anderson for At-Large, Scott Baldermann for District 1, and Brad Laurvick for District 5.

Baldermann’s critics complain that he is funding his own campaign. This is the reverse of the usual scenario in Denver, where out-of-state groups like Democrats for Education Reform spend large sums to maintain control of the board by advocates for charters and testing.

If Scott can pay for his campaign, good for him!

Too often, the genuine supporters of public schools have been beaten by plutocrat money.

Scott Baldermann doesn’t need money from the Waltons, Charles Koch, Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg or others who want to disrupt and privatize Denver’s public schools.

Scott is exactly the kind of public-spirited good citizen who should serve on the school board.

He is a true friend and supporter of Denver’s public schools.

I hope he is elected.

Another reason to vote for Scott Baldermann and the other grassroots candidates: Arne Duncan showed up in Denver to endorse their opponents and urge voters to continue supporting Obama’s “legacy” of charter schools, school closings, and high-stakes testing.

Vote for Scott Baldermann and vote for real public schools and a board led by public school parents, not NYC hedge funders or out-of-state billionaires.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Denver, DFER, Funding, Supporting public schools

Class Size Matters: The Cost to New York City of Paying Rent for Charter School Facilities

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2019 //
5

 

Leonie Haimson and her colleagues Patrick Nevada and Emily Carrazana of Class Size Matters released a report on the cost that New York City pays for charter school facilities, even for richly endowed charters like Success Academy. The city is now spending more than $100 million a year to pay the rent for charters. This includes almost $15 million a year paying for rent where the charter or its management organization is the landlord!

In 2014, Governor Andrew Cuomo advanced legislation that required the City to pay the rent for charter schools in private buildings when the city was unable to provide suitable space in public school buildings. At the time, he declared himself the champion of charter schools, which helped him raise campaign funds on Wall Street. Charter students are 4% of the state’s students, and 10% in the City.

Here is the press release:

On Monday, October 21, Class Size Matters released a new report revealing how the NYC Department of Education has spent more than $377 million on charter school facility costs from FY 2014 to FY 2019.  This amount includes both matching funds for facility upgrades for public schools, co-located with charter schools that spent more than $5000 for this purpose, and on paying the rent for new and expanding charter schools in private space. Nearly $15 million of that total since FY 2015 was spent by DOE to help charter schools to help pay for their space, even though their buildings are owned by their Charter Management Organization, affiliated foundation or LLC.

In FY 2019, DOE spent about $25 million last year on matching funds to public schools co-located with charter schools.  Yet between FY 2014 and FY 2019, more than $22 million in charter school expenditures on facility upgrades were not matched in 175 public schools that shared their buildings, according to spreadsheets provided by DOE, in apparent contradiction to astate law passed in 2010. By FY 2019, only one third of co-located DOE schools received their full complement of matching funds.  

The two schools which experienced the largest shortfalls were both District 75 schools that serve students with serious disabilities: Mickey Mantle School (M811), located in two sites in Harlem, which lacked $1.5 million, and P.S 368 (K368), located  in two sites in Brooklyn, which lacked about $1.2 million. All four sites are co-located with different branches of the Success Academy Charter schools.

Mindy Rosier is the UFT chapter delegate from Mickey Mantle School, which enrolls students with multiple disabilities, including autism, emotional/behavioral difficulties and/or significant language and communication disorders.  As Mindy pointed out, “The $1.5 million in matching funds for facility upgrades would have been incredibly helpful to our school.  Our District 3 site needs new wiring, since the internet is very slow, and much of our curriculum is online. Our site in District 4 needs new bathrooms and water fountains, and nine classrooms out of ten badly need repainting.”

The DOE currently holds leases for 12 private buildings that house 15 charter schools, with a cost to the city of $17.1 million during FY 2019 alone. In addition, there are 88 charter schools that receive a per student “lease subsidy” to help pay for their own private space, which has increased by 72 percent since FY 2017. In 2019, DOE was projected to spend about $83.6 million in lease subsidies for charter schools, with an estimated $50 million of that total reimbursed by the state.

By analyzing property records, charter school financial reports, and sales records, the authors found that the payments made by DOE included $14.8 million for eight charter schools which are housed in buildings owned by related parties of these schools, that is, their own Charter Management Organization or an affiliated LLC or foundation.  

For example, DOE provided lease subsidies of $2.2 million in FY 2019 for two Success Academy charter schools even though the Success CMO owns their space in the Hudson Yards complex on the west side of Manhattan, reportedly the most expensive real estate development in US history. In another case, the city paid $461,965 in lease subsidies in FY 2019 towards the rental costs of Beginning with Children II charter school, despite the fact that the Beginning with Children Foundation bought this Brooklyn building for only ten dollars in 2017 from the Pfizer Corporation. More examples are provided in the report.

Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education said: “It is outrageous that the taxpayers of New York City and the state are required to pay $2.2 million a year to house two Success Academy charter schools located in a building in the Hudson Yards that the Success Academy Charter Management Organization owns. And Success is not alone. This report documents eight charter schools for which taxpayers are footing the facilities bill in buildings owned by the charters themselves or affiliated organizations. The Network for Public Education has studied all of the various charter laws and their loopholes.  I have never seen any other that requires the district to cover the costs of private facilities like this one does. One wonders whether this is about educating children or building a real estate empire at taxpayer expense.” 

“NYC has more than 500,000 students in overcrowded public-school buildings, as well as class sizes far higher on average than classes in the rest of the state.  Yet we are also the only district obligated to cover the cost of private space for charter schools, or offer them space in public school buildings,” said Leonie Haimson, one of the co-authors of the report. “The cost of providing space for charter schools in private buildings has risen sharply over the last five years.  If the current trend continues, the amount spent annually may soon exceed the cost of the payments that the city spends to finance the construction of new public schools.”  

Concluded Diane Ravitch, celebrated education historian, “The findings of this report, if validated, should shock the conscience of the Governor and Legislature.  They should amend the law as soon as possible so that the city is no longer forced to subsidizethe acquisition of private space by charter schools, even as our public schools continue to be badly underfunded and overcrowded. “

The powerpoint can be downloaded here.

The document can be downloaded here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, New York City, Privatization

Maurice Cunningham: Waltons Are Trying to Block Funding Increase for Massachusetts Schools

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2019 //
4

 

Maurice Cunningham is the ghostbuster of Dark Money in education. He is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts. He is a hero of the Resistance in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH.

In this post, he details the efforts of the Walton Family of Arkansas to block the Massachusetts’ legislators who are trying to increase funding for the public schools of their state.

He writes:

The three interest groups pushing to undermine the Massachusetts senate’s education funding bill are all Walton funded, two of them essentially full-time agents of the Waltons. They have to solve a problem for the right-wing Wal-Mart heirs: not that funding public education might fail, but that it will succeed.

The Waltons, who contributed over $2 million in dark and gray money to the pro-charters side in 2016 through mechanisms set up by Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, would prefer to promote charter schools and charge toward a fully privatized system with employee relations mimicking those of Wal-Mart itself. But the political momentum now is all in the direction of a vast increase in public funding, and the Waltons’ best hope is to throw sand into the implementation gears.

He quotes from two books that explain the Walton ideology. This is one:

This is the ideological mind set of the Waltons, as explained by historian Nelson Lichtenstein in The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Of The Walton family’s interest in education, Lichtenstein writes:

Because so much of Walton and Wal-Mart philanthropy is crudely self-interested, critics are tempted to find a pecuniary motive for the Walton family’s interest in education. But their support for competition and privatization is an entirely ideological project, based on a desire to enhance the social and cultural value of a free market in which government is weak while public goods like hurricane relief, education, and health care are the fodder for entrepreneurial transformation. Since public schools are by far the most pervasive of public institutions, and highly unionized to boot, this “$700-plus-billion-a-year industry”—John Walton’s phrase—has been a good place to start.

If you think all this sounds somewhat Koch-like, Charles and the late David Koch committed to K-12 education reform too –by which they also mean to destroy public education. The Kochs and Waltons have kicked in $5 million each as partners in a project called 4.0 that will be an ideas factory for privatization. Also, never untangle the Kochs or Waltons ideology with their fervor for low taxes on themselves.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Massachusetts, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Betsy DeVos Floods North Carolina with Charter Cash

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2019 //
14

Betsy DeVos just dropped $36 million on North Carolina to lure children out of their public schools and into charter schools. The state is not sure it can spend the money.

North Carolina will now have more than $36 million in federal funding to help increase enrollment in charter schools, particularly for children from low-income groups.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction announced Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Education is awarding the state an additional $10 million to support a statewide initiative to use charter schoolsto help meet the needs of educationally disadvantaged students. This comes on top of the $26.6 million federal grant awarded last year to increase the number of charter schools across the state.

It’s a financial windfall that has caused charter school leaders across the state to apply for a share of the federal funding.

“The reality is — let the elephant out here — that we’re going to have difficulty spending this money perhaps,” Joseph Maimone, a member of the N.C. Charter Schools Advisory Board, said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’ve got to really think about how difficult it’s going to be to use up the entire grant.”

State officials say they’re confident that they can spend the $36.6 million.

Charter schools are taxpayer-funded schools that are exempt from some of the rules that traditional public schools must follow, such as providing school meals and bus service. Charter schools have a lower percentage of students receiving free and reduced-price lunches than traditional public schools.

There are 198 charter schools open in North Carolina serving more than 100,000 students. Enrollment has surged since state lawmakers voted in 2011 to eliminate the state limit of 100 charter schools.

Supporters say charter schools provide families with more education options. But critics say charters siphon money away from traditional public schools and increase school segregation.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, North Carolina, Privatization

Chicago Teachers Union: The Status of the Strike

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2019 //
2

Day 2 of CTU strike will bring educators, allies to City Hall at 1:30 pm

Some movement at bargaining table Thursday, but no agreement on special ed needs, classroom overcrowding, salary floor for low-wage teaching assistants, staffing shortages.

CHICAGO—Educators and frontline staff will hit the picket lines for a second day today, as rank and file union members attempt to bargain a fair contract for 25,000 CTU teachers, clinicians, teaching assistants and support staff. While some progress was made at the bargaining table Thursday, the union and CPS ramain far apart on efforts to reign in exploding class sizes and find a path to remedying dire shortages of school nurses, social workers, special education teachers and other critical staff.

Late this afternoon, CPS refused to discuss a proposal on special education needs with the expert special education teachers and clinicians at the table who had crafted the proposal, because not every CTU officer was present. The CTU’s 40+ member rank and file bargaining team must sign off on any tentative agreement to be sent to members for approval.

Today’s schedule: Thursday, Oct. 17

 

  • 1:30 p.m.: Mass rally and march, City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St. with CTU rank and file, grassroots community groups, CTU officers, elected officials, allies.

Fast facts:

  • The State’s new equity-based school funding formula is sending a billion-plus additional dollars each year to CPS to reduce sizes of chronically overcrowded classes, support students in poverty and increase services to special education students and English language learners.
  • CPS passed the largest budget in its history this year: $7.7 billion. Yet CPS cut the amount of dollars it is spending in school communities this year.
  • Juarez High School in Pilsen, which enrolls over 1,300 overwhelmingly low-income Latinx students, saw its school budget cut this year by $840,000, costing the school nine teaching and staff positions.
  • CPS cut the budgets of more than 200 CPS schools by at least $100,000, and cut the budgets of more than 40 schools by more than half a million dollars for this school year.
  • CTU educators are fighting for better wages, smaller class sizes, adequate staffing, and educational justice for students and their families. They want the additional state revenue CPS receives to increase equity to go to school communities and student needs.
  • Almost half of CPS’ students are Latinx. Yet the district has acute shortages of ELL teachers—teachers for English language learners—and is severely short of bilingual social workers. Bilingual education services are chronically short of both educators and resources—a key issue at the bargaining table.
  • CPS is desperately short of school nurses, social workers, librarians, special education teachers, ELL teachers and more. CPS has staffing ratios three to five times higher than those recommended by national professional organizations and best practices. Fewer than 115 school nurses serve over 500 schools. Most schools have a nurse only one day a week.
  • One out of four schools has a librarian—and that number falls to barely one in ten for Black-majority schools. A decade ago, most schools had a librarian.
  • CPS is desperately short of social workers and special education teachers, even as CPS is under the oversight of a state monitor for shortchanging its diverse learners.
  • This year, more than 1,300 CPS classes are overcrowded under CPS’ own high class caps, up from more than a thousand overcrowded classrooms last year.
  • Almost 25% of elementary students attend overcrowded classes, with some kindergarten classes topping 40 students. Roughly 35% of high school students are enrolled in overcrowded classes; at schools like Simeon, virtually every core class is overcrowded, with math, social studies and world language classes topping 39 students.
  • The CTU’s school clerks and teaching assistants earn wages as low as $28,000/year—so low the children of two-thirds qualify for free and reduced lunch under federal poverty guidelines. Over 1,100 cannot afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment at prevailing rent rates in ANY zip code in the city. In year 5 of the mayor’s proposed contract, most of those workers would still be earning poverty wages. And in the last ten years, NO CTU member’s wages have kept pace with the inflation rate.
  • Candidate Lightfoot ran on a platform calling for equity and educational justice—including a nurse, a social worker and a librarian in every school—all proposals her negotiating team has rejected at the table. She also ran in support of an elected, representative school board—but moved to stall that legislation in the Illinois Senate after she was elected.
  • CPS has said it has budgeted to improve staffing shortages, but refuses to put those commitments in writing in an enforceable contract. The union wants those promises in writing, in an enforceable contract—the only way we have to hold CPS and the 5th floor to their promises.
Categories Accountability, Chicago, Class size, Education Reform, English Language Learners, Funding, Librarians, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

Rachel M. Cohen: When Bernie Sanders Stood Up to Teach for America

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
27

 

Rachel M. Cohen tells an important and powerful story of the time when Senator Bernie Sanders stood up to Teach for America.

His efforts were ultimately defeated by Arne Duncan, Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, and Eli Broad.

In 2011, the Obama administration and TFA’s friends in Congress were eager to call the program’s inexperienced and ill-trained recruits “highly qualified,” to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Law. At that time, Sanders was the only member of Congress to question how a recent college graduate who had never taught could be considered “highly qualified.”

TFA enjoyed the vigorous support of the Obama administration, which gave the wealthy organization $50 million in 2010 (as did the ultra conservative, anti-union Walton Family Foundation). In addition, TFA placed its alums on the staff of every member of the Senate and House education committees, thanks to the generosity of a California billionaire named Arthur Rock, who are then in a position to protect TFA’s interests as well as funding for charter schools. TFA recognized that few if any members of Congress pay close attention to education, since the federal role in education is small, especially compared to issues like healthcare, Social Security, and foreign policy. Thus, most rely on junior staff to inform them, which gives extraordinary power to the TFA plants.

Cohen tells the story of TFA’s battle to ensure that its uncertified recruits were considered “highly qualified” teachers, an oxymoron.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the group was enmeshed in a dispute over teacher credentialing under the No Child Left Behind Act that demonstrated its ability to marshal influence in D.C. Under the law, a school district was permitted to hire educators who did not meet the “highly qualified” bar if there were teacher shortages. Schools that did so, however, had to then inform parents if their child was taught by such a teacher, publicly disclose how many teachers in the entire school were not highly qualified, and develop a plan to reach 100 percent highly qualified teachers. The law also barred schools from disproportionately concentrating inexperienced and uncertified teachers in classrooms with low-income students and students of color. In other words, if noncertified teachers had to be hired, they also had to be fairly distributed across schools.

Teach for America and its allies in the education reform community lobbied the government, and in 2002, the Department of Education issued a regulation that said “highly qualified” teachers could now also include unlicensed teachers for up to three years if they were making progress toward their certification. This effectively resolved the problem for Teach For America, as most program recruits planned to leave the classroom at the end of their assignment anyway.

In 2007, the civil rights law firm Public Advocates filed a suit against the Department of Education over this regulation. In effect, the lawyers argued, it created an exemption that condoned the assignment of novice, inexperienced teachers to students in high-poverty schools, which are disproportionately nonwhite and low-income.

“It seemed pretty simple to us all along that you can’t have a law that requires ‘full state certification’ for teachers to be highly qualified and also say that people who are in the process of getting their certification meet that designation,” said John Affeldt, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. “Those are two different states of being.”

Affeldt said there was little question as to why the 2002 regulation came about. “Teach for America applied pressure because they saw the original statute as threatening to their model and to the growth of their organization,” he said. “At some point between its founding and the mid-2000s, Teach for America had changed its belief system from ‘Every student needs fully qualified, highly effective teachers’ to ‘Every student needs us.’ TFA’s model depends on being able to concentrate their people in low-income, high-minority schools, and they thought that was a good thing. And if the law incentivized districts to hire other types of teachers ahead of TFA, well, they didn’t want that. They wanted to be seen on the same level, and some in leadership truly believe that TFA’s teachers-in-training are as good or even better qualified than certified teachers who might apply.”

TFA fought the lawsuit in court and lost, then flexed its political muscles in Congress to protect its interests. The Democrat-controlled Congress overrode the court decision, which infuriated civil rights groups, which actually wanted highly qualified teachers in the classrooms of the neediest students.

The civil rights groups turned to Senator Sanders to fight their battle against TFA. He took up their banner, insisting that “highly qualified” should actually mean “highly qualified.”

In a Senate HELP committee hearing, Sanders emphasized that his amendments would not conflict with the goal of attracting new, bright teachers to the classroom, and said he is “a strong supporter of programs like Teach for America and other efforts to attract young people into education.” But, he stressed, it is wrong to characterize someone starting in the classroom two months after college graduation as already highly prepared.

“I think most of the people around this table would agree that doesn’t make any sense,” Sanders said. “That doesn’t make that person not a good teacher, not an inspired teacher; it simply does not make that teacher ‘highly qualified.’”

“If you had a heart condition, and you were going to go to a surgeon, you would go to a surgeon who has many surgeries successfully done,” he added. “And while another surgeon may be wonderful, a young surgeon who hasn’t yet performed his first surgery, you would probably go to the experienced [surgeon] who has already achieved a certain level of accomplishment.”

But Sanders’ efforts were countered and ultimately defeated by the persistent opposition of Senator Michael Bennett, recently appointed to the Senate after serving as superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. Bennett was and is a huge supporter of corporate reform. He is not an educator. Before his appointment to manage the Denver schools, he was a financier.

When the issue came up again a year later, members of Congress were lobbied by billionaire Eli Broad, who was then vice-president of the neoliberal Center for American Progress and an array of corporate charter chains, which needed TFA recruits. They falsely claimed that without the TFA loophole, “hundreds of thousands of tremendously gifted teachers who have a significant impact on students will not be able to continue to teach.”

Cohen points out that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro conducted a study that determined that more than 800,000 of the nation’s neediest students had teachers who were still in training, not certified, certainly not “highly qualified.”

This is an excellent analysis of how TFA flexed its muscles and power to defend its self-interest, undermine the plain language of the law, and inflict unqualified teachers on children who actually needed—but didn’t get—highly qualified teachers.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teach for America TFA

Chicago Teachers Union Will Strike Starting Thursday

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2019 //
17

 

The Chicago Teachers Union announced that it would begin a strike on Thursday.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is paying the price for years of neglect under Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Mayor Richard Daley.

Teachers in Chicago announced Wednesday evening that they would go on strike, forcing the cancellation of classes for more than 300,000 public school students in the nation’s third-largest district starting Thursday.

The strike threatened to upend life in the city, as parents raced to make arrangements for child care and as city officials began to activate a contingency plan for supervising and feeding students in school buildings.

The strike in Chicago is the latest in a string of more than a dozen major walkouts by teachers across the country since early last year. It is an important early test for Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was elected this year after a campaign in which she called for more nurses and social workers in the city’s schools — some of the very changes Chicago’s teachers are seeking now.

The city and the Chicago Teachers Union, which represents more than 20,000 educators, had been in tense contract negotiations for months, and there had been signs of progress in recent days. But as a midnight deadline approached on Wednesday with no deal, Ms. Lightfoot canceled Thursday classes and both sides signaled that a walkout was inevitable.

The split between the city and the union stretches beyond traditional debates over pay and benefits, though representatives for each side disputed details of what had been offered during negotiations and what the exact points of contention were now.

The city said that it has offered teachers pay raises totaling 16 percent over a five-year contract, while union leaders have called for increases of 15 percent over a shorter three-year term. More pressing, union leaders say, are their calls for a promise — in writing — of smaller class sizes, more paid time to prepare lessons and the hiring of more school nurses, social workers, librarians and counselors. Other issues, including affordable housing provisions and protections for immigrant students, have also been raised.

The strike is the first for Chicago’s school system since 2012, when teachers walked out for seven days as part of a defining battle with the city’s previous administration.

About 7,500 school support employees represented by a different union also rejected a contract offer and planned to go on strike Thursday. Those workers include security officers, bus aides, custodians and special education classroom assistants.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Funding, Teachers, Unions

Jan Resseger: Why Democrats Should Fight for Public Schools and Oppose Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2019 //
17

 

Jan Resseger is a profound thinker and a clear writer. I love reading what she writes. Jan is one of the Resistance leaders in my new book SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

In this post, she explains to Democratic candidates why they should not waffle in their support for public schools.

Her explanation is a rallying cry for educators and parents. Print it out and pin it on the bulletin board next to your computer or tape it to your filing cabinet. Read it over and think about it.

She writes:

Here are my seven reasons for believing Democrats running for President ought to express strong support for public schools and opposition to charter schools:

First:   The scale of the provision of K-12 education across our nation can best be achieved by the systemic, public provision of schools.  Rewarding social entrepreneurship in the startup of one charter school at a time cannot possibly serve the needs of the mass of our children and adolescents. In a new, September 2019 enrollment summary, the National Center for Education Statistics reports: “Between around 2000 and 2016, traditional public school, public charter school, and homeschool enrollment increased, while private school enrollment decreased… Traditional public school enrollment increased to 47.3 million (1 percent increase), charter school enrollment grew to 3.0 million students (from 0.4 million), and the number of homeschooled students nearly doubled to 1.7 million. Private school enrollment fell 4 percent, to 5.8 million students.”

Second:   Public schools are our society’s most important civic institution. Public schools are not perfect, but they are the optimal way for our very complex society to balance the needs of each particular child and family with a system that secures the rights and addresses the needs of all children. Because public schools are responsible to the public, it is possible through elected school boards, open meetings, transparent record keeping and redress through the courts to ensure that traditional public schools provide access for all children. While our society has not fully realized justice for every child in the public schools, it is by striving systemically to improve access and opportunity in the public schools that we have the best chance of securing the rights of all children.

Third:   Charter schools are parasites sucking essential dollars from the public school districts where they are located. The political economist Gordon Lafer explains that the expansion of charter schools cannot possibly be revenue neutral for the host school district losing students to charter schools: “To the casual observer, it may not be obvious why charter schools should create any net costs at all for their home districts. To grasp why they do, it is necessary to understand the structural differences between the challenge of operating a single school—or even a local chain of schools—and that of a district-wide system operating tens or hundreds of schools and charged with the legal responsibility to serve all students in the community.  When a new charter school opens, it typically fills its classrooms by drawing students away from existing schools in the district…  If, for instance, a given school loses five percent of its student body—and that loss is spread across multiple grade levels, the school may be unable to lay off even a single teacher… Plus, the costs of maintaining school buildings cannot be reduced…. Unless the enrollment falloff is so steep as to force school closures, the expense of heating and cooling schools, running cafeterias, maintaining digital and wireless technologies, and paving parking lots—all of this is unchanged by modest declines in enrollment. In addition, both individual schools and school districts bear significant administrative responsibilities that cannot be cut in response to falling enrollment. These include planning bus routes and operating transportation systems; developing and auditing budgets; managing teacher training and employee benefits; applying for grants and certifying compliance with federal and state regulations; and the everyday work of principals, librarians and guidance counselors.” “If a school district anywhere in the country—in the absence of charter schools—announced that it wanted to create a second system-within-a-system, with a new set of schools whose number, size, specialization, budget, and geographic locations would not be coordinated with the existing school system, we would regard this as the poster child of government inefficiency and a waste of tax dollars. But this is indeed how the charter school system functions.”

Fourth:   While some predicted the expansion of charter schools would improve academic achievement on a broad scale, children in traditional public schools and charter schools perform about the same.  According to the new report from the National Center for Education Statistics, “Academic Performance: In 2017, at grades 4 and 8, no measurable differences in average reading and mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were observed between students in traditional public and public charter schools.”

Fifth:   Opposing for-profit charter schools misses the point.  In most states, charter schools themselves must be nonprofits, but the nonprofit boards of directors of these schools may hire a for-profit management company to operate the school. Two of the most notorious examples of the ripoffs of tax dollars in nonprofit (managed-for-profit) charter schools were in my state, Ohio. The late David Brennan, the father of Ohio charter schools, set up sweeps contracts with the nonprofit schools managed by his for-profit White Hat Management Company.  The boards of these schools—frequently people with ties to Brennan and his operations—turned over to White Hat Management more than 90 percent of the dollars awarded by the state to the nonprofit charters. These were secret deals. Neither the public nor the members of the nonprofit charter school boards of directors could know how the money was spent; nor did they know how much profit Brennan’s for-profit raked off the top. Then there was Bill Lager, the founder of Ohio’s infamous Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow—technically a nonprofit.  All management of the online charter school and the design and provision of its curriculum were turned over to Lager’s privately owned, for-profit companies—Altair Management and IQ Innovations. ECOT was shut down in 2018 for charging the state for thousands of students who were not really enrolled. The state of Ohio is still in court trying to recover even a tiny percentage of Lager’s lavish profits.

Sixth:   Malfeasance, corruption, and poor performance plague charter schools across the states. Because charter schools were established by state law across the 45 states where charters operate, and because much of the state charter school enabling legislation featured innovation and experimentation and neglected oversight, the scandals fill local newspapers. The Network for Public Education tracks the myriad examples of outrageous fraud and mismanagement by charter schools.  Because neoliberal ideologues and the entrepreneurs in the for-profit charter management companies regularly donate generously to the political coffers of state legislators—the very people responsible for passing laws to regulate this out-of-control sector, adequate oversight has proven impossible.

Seventh:   The federal Charter Schools Program should be shut down immediately. Here is a brief review of the Network for Public Education’s findings in last spring’s Asleep at the Wheel report.  A series of federal administrations—Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have treated the federal Charter Schools Program (part of the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education) 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. Since the program’s inception in 1994, the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) has awarded $4 billion in federal tax dollars to start up 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 across the country. The CSP 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. The Network for Public Education found that the CSP has spent over a $1 billion on schools that never opened or were opened and subsequently shut down: “The CSP’s own analysis from 2006-2014 of its direct and state pass-through funded programs found that nearly one out of three awardees were not currently in operation by the end of 2015.”

Last June in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner defined the political philosophy known as neoliberalism and showed how this kind of thinking has driven privatization across many sectors previously operated, for the public good, by government: “Since the late 1970s. we’ve had a grand experiment to test the claim that free markets really do work best… (I)n the 1970s, libertarian economic theory got another turn at bat…  Neoliberalism’s premise is that free markets can regulate themselves; that government is inherently incompetent, captive to special interests, and an intrusion on the efficiency of the market; that in distributive terms, market outcomes are basically deserved; and that redistribution creates perverse incentives by punishing the economy’s winners and rewarding its losers. So government should get out of the market’s way.”

For three decades, neoliberalism has reigned in education policy. The introduction of the neoliberal ideal of competition—supposedly to drive school improvement—through vouchers for private school tuition and in the expansion of charter schools has become acceptable to members of both political parties.

The late political philosopher Benjamin Barber explains elegantly and precisely what is wrong with neoliberal thinking in general. I think his words apply directly to what has been happening as charter schools have been expanded to more and more states. The candidates running for President who prefer to waffle on the advisability of school privatization via charter schools ought to consider Barber’s analysis:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all.  Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Privatization, Supporting public schools
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