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Betsy DeVos Funds IDEA and Kipp to Saturate San Antonio with Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2019 //
29

 

Texas Public Radio describes Betsy Devos’s audacious plan to overwhelm San Antonio with charters created by two corporate chains: IDEA and KIPP.

Some of the new charters will open in middle-class areas with good public schools.

Apparently, DeVos just wants to torpedo public schools in a major Texas city.

Camille Phillips of TPR reports:

San Antonio’s largest charter school network is gearing up for a fast-paced expansion over the next three years. IDEA Public Schools plans to add 15 schools in Bexar County by 2022, doubling its local enrollment to nearly 24,000 students.

It is part of an ambitious larger plan by the Rio Grande Valley-based charter network plan to add 120 schools in Texas, Louisiana and Florida by 2024. IDEA has gotten a big boost to help make that plan happen: four federal grants in five years worth more than $211 million combined.

This year, the U.S. Department of Education awarded IDEA its largest grant yet: $117 million to expand classrooms and launch new charter schools.

“We cast a vision for our growth plan, and then it has to be paid for somehow. So this just gives us confidence that what we envision in terms of growth will actually become a reality,” IDEA regional director Rolando Posada said.

When Posada came to San Antonio seven years ago, he said he made it his goal to have an IDEA school less than 10 minutes away from every family.

“We realized that this was one of the biggest cities in the country with one of the biggest needs. And so my vision was to put a school everywhere on the map of the city of San Antonio,” he said….

Several of IDEA’s new schools will likely be located in the Northside school district, one of the region’s wealthier and higher performing districts.

Northside Superintendent Brian Woods said he finds it interesting that charter schools are no longer limiting themselves to areas where the traditional public schools are struggling.

“If you have an area that’s being served extremely well, why would you need to introduce a duplicative service?” Woods asked.

DeVos gave KIPP $88 million, and it too plans to expand its presence in Texas.

Mark Larson, chief external officer for KIPP Texas, said KIPP is creating a growth plan to determine where to expand next in the state, but “a sizeable chunk” of the $88 million awarded to the national KIPP Foundation is reserved for Texas.

“We have full intention to continue to grow and continue to grow in the San Antonio market,” Larson said.

DeVos gave $15 million to another charter network to open new schools in Texas.

One of our readers, who identifies herself as Chiara, recently explained why charters rely on federal funding to expand.

She says they know they would never be funded by popular vote as public schools are. The purpose of the federal funding is not only to help charter schools (like KIPP, funded by billionaires like the Waltons), but to bypass democracy.

She wrote:

“The second of 20 San Antonio IDEA Public School campuses is headed to the South Side and and is scheduled to open in fall 2019.

”The new campus — which has yet to be named — will be built on an eight-acre plot of land on the corner of South Flores Street and West Harding Boulevard.”

If IDEA had to go to the public and ask for facilities financing to build and operate each of 20 new public schools, the public would reject all or some of the new schools, because they would (rightfully) ask why they’re replicating a system they already have. There would be a long public debate on public investment. They would have to scale back plans or scrap them completely.

Charters know this, so they use federal and private financing. If they used local facilities funding they would have to get the consent of the public.

When ed reformers say they want local facilities funding remember that if they had local facilities funding the approval process would have to go thru the public, and the public would object to funding 20 new school buildings that replicate schools they already have. That would make it impossible to plunk down 20 new charter schools.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization, San Antonio

Arkansas: Walmart Loses First Round In Bid to Reduce Property Taxes

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2019 //
55

 

A judge in Arkansas rejected the effort by Walmart (owned by the richest family in the nation, the Waltons) reduce their property taxes.

Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times writes:

County Judge Barry Hyde, sitting as the county court in considering appeals of appraisals of property for tax purposes, held that Walmart had failed to meet the burden of proof to reduce the assessor’s valuation of the property, and thus its tax bill in the county by about $4.5 million. The reduction would mostly be felt by public school districts, but city and county governments, libraries and Arkansas Children’s Hospital as well.

Walmart is attempting this theory all across the country. Its “dark store” theory is that its stores, even though currently immensely profitable, would have far less value for any other purpose if vacant and have also been negatively affected by Internet competition.

This is an interesting theory. If my house were vacant, it would havelessvalue so I should have my property taxes reduced even if my house is not vacant.

Why does the Walton Family want to reduce their taxes? They increase their wealth by $4 million an hour!

Why do they think it just to cut public school funding and other public services solely to enrich them?

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Clearly the mega billionaire Walton Family believes that civilization is not necessary so long as they can find people to work for them at low wages and can hire an army to protect them.

 

Categories Accountability, Funding, Walton Foundation

Laurene Powell Jobs: Another $10 Million XQ School Fails

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
31

You may recall that Laurene Powell Jobs decided to reinvent the American high school by creating a design competition for new models. In 2026, she offered prizes of $10 million each to the ten best plans. Over 700 proposals came in. She called it the XQ competition. She hired leading lights from the Obama administration, including Arne Duncan and Russlyn Ali, to advise her. She bought airtime on all three major networks to bring together celebrities to proclaim the failure of U.S. education and the need for Mrs. Jobs’ XQ Initiative.

The awards were announced. Earlier this year, an XQ school in Delaware closed. It was called the Design Thinking Academy.

About 5he same time, an XQ project in Somerville, Massachusetts, was killed by the School Committee, the Mayor, and the superintendent, who were once enthusiastic about it. 

The Boston Globe tells the story, which is behind a pay wall. I will try to summarize it briefly and hope to do it justice.

It begins like this:

ALEC RESNICK AND SHAUNALYNN DUFFY stood in Somerville City Hall at about 6:30 on March 18, a night they hoped would launch the next chapter of their lives. The two had spent nearly seven years designing a new kind of high school meant to address the needs of students who didn’t thrive in a traditional setting. They’d developed a projects-driven curriculum that would give students nearly unprecedented control over what they would learn in a small, supportive environment. Resnick and Duffy had spent countless hours shepherding this school through the political thickets that all new public schools face. Approval by the teachers union, which became the most time-consuming obstacle, had finally come through in early January. Tonight, the School Committee members would cast their votes.

Resnick had reason to be optimistic. Mayor Joseph Curtatone sat on the School Committee, and he had been the one to suggest Resnick and Duffy consider designing a new public school in the first place, back in 2012. Mary Skipper, Somerville schools superintendent, had been instrumental in keeping the approval process moving forward when prospects looked bleak. She wouldn’t be voting, but she planned to offer a recommendation to elected officials. And then there was the $10 million. Resnick and Duffy had won the money in a national competition to finish designing and ultimately open and run their high school, and the pair knew it had helped maintain interest in their idea. Voting against them would mean walking away from a lot of outside funding.

The two had met as students at MIT. THey became interested in how children learn. They began making plans and trying them on a small scale in 2012. They called their school Powderhouse Studios. At full capacity, it would enroll 160 students. They intended to match the diversity of the district. The heart of their plan was “ambitious, self-directed, interdisciplinary projects focused on computation, narrative, and design — unheard of in a typical high school. Their work would be driven by goals laid out in individualized learning plans geared toward real-world concepts and would be supported by faculty serving more as mentors than as teachers. The school day would last from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the academic calendar would stretch year-round.”

In 2016, the pair had worked with middle-schoolers, trying out their project-based ideas. That year they applied to the XQ Project and had the support of the mayor and the superintendent. And they won. What could go wrong?

Finances. That’s what went wrong. Despite the initial enthusiasm of the school officials, they realized that the Somerville High School would lose $3.2 million each year to the new school when it had 160 students. The budget for the entire district is $73 million. The district’s comprehensive high school has 1,250 students. The new school planned to enroll about 13% of the existing high school’s students.

On the night of the decisive vote last March, the superintendent told the School Committee that “opening the new school would force the district to cut at least 20 teacher or counselor positions and to eliminate most before- and after-school programs districtwide. “As someone who believes in and has championed the power of new ideas my whole career, it pains me deeply to not be able to solve this problem,” she said. “In this case, the investment to create something that may only add an unknown amount of benefit to 2 to 3 percent of students, at the expense of the remaining 97 to 98 percent, is one I cannot recommend making at this time.”

The School Committee voted unanimously not to open the school. The Jobs grant of $10 million was alluring, but when the startup money ran out, the district would have to absorb the ongoing costs.

And a second XQ project died.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Innovation, Massachusetts

California: State AG Demands End to Sausalito Segregation

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2019 //
29
The Sausalito-Marin City school district is an outrage. Sausalito is a charming groovy traditionally bohemian (now ultra-wealthy) bayfront town. Unincorporated Marin City, adjacent to Sausalito, is largely public housing, built for WWII shipyard workers — traditionally almost all-black but now including some Latino and Pacific Islanders.. Sausalito right now has a lovely privileged darling adorable charter school serving those with social capital, and one struggling public school serving anyone else — known as the “project school” (meaning housing projects, not school projects).
The state Attorney General demanded an end to this segregation.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/School-district-in-Marin-County-agrees-to-14293740.php

School district in Marin County agrees to desegregate in settlement with state

The state settled a racial discrimination case Friday with a desegregation plan for a tiny Marin County school district whose nonwhite students were mostly enrolled in a struggling, underfunded elementary and middle school.

Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office announced the settlement with leaders of the Sausalito Marin City School District. The district said it was “an opportunity to openly and transparently acknowledge past failures” and to “put an end to inequitable education.”

The district had 528 students in 2018-19, about one-third of them white and the rest black, Latino, Asian-American or multiracial, according to district records. One of its two schools, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in unincorporated Marin City, had 119 students, eight of them white.

Becerra said state investigators found that the district had intentionally created Bayside MLK Academy in 2013 as a racially and ethnically segregated school for grades kindergarten through eight. The district “cut critical classroom programming” at the school while providing stable funding for its other school, Willow Creek Academy, a publicly funded charter serving students in Sausalito, Becerra said.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Funding, Privatization, Segregation

Who Funded Cory Booker’s Campaigns? Who Funds Him Now?

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2019 //
28

Read about his funders here.

In the current campaign, he has the support of 18 billionaires, including Bill Gates.

 

Categories Billionaires, Funding, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, NPE Action Fund

In the Public Interest: Inside the LA Teachers’ Strike

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2019 //
16

 

The photograph below was taken during the UTLA strike last January. The guy in the center is famous rocker Stevie Van Zandt, who loves teachers and public schools and unions. Stevie is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He played in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

Stevie is constantly giving back, and he gave back in Los Angeles, where he picketed in the rain. Stevie will be a featured speaker at the Network for Public Education national conference in Philadelphia, March 28-29, 2020. Be there!

Stevie made a great video to celebrate International Teachers Day. 

Jeremy Mohler of “In the Public Interest” writes:

 

 

 

Like many districts nationwide, Los Angeles’s public school system was “broke on purpose.”

It’s suffered through decades of underfunding and anti-government rhetoric—”bad teachers.” Despite being the world’s fifth largest economy, California is 41st in the nation in per pupil funding.

It’s also bore the brunt of the charter school industry’s rapid growth. Los Angeles Unified School District has more charter schools than any other district in the country and now spends nearly $600 million annually to prop up a competing, parallel sector of privately managed schools.

That’s why what the city’s teachers did earlier this year was so powerful.

As a new report from Reclaim Our Schools LA outlines, “The Los Angeles strike resulted in a stunning array of substantive victories well beyond the scope of a typical labor agreement.”

Not only did teachers win pay increases, but they also won more nurses, counselors, and librarians in schools; smaller class sizes; reductions in standardized testing; an end to random searches of students in some schools; and more.

If you’re wondering what democracy looks like in the age of Citizens United, voter suppression, and Trump, what’s being dubbed “bargaining for the common good” is a glimpse.

Read Building the Power to Reclaim Our Schools for the story of how teachers and the community organized and worked together to use government for the common good.

Thanks for reading,

Jeremy Mohler
Communications Director
In the Public Interest
Categories California, Funding, Los Angeles, Unions

Florida: Principal Doubles Salary When Public School Turns Charter

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2019 //
10

 

What a payoff!

A principal in Florida doubled his salary when his public schools converted to a charter, which is what the rightwing governor and legislator want to happen.

Meanwhile teachers In the state are raising money to pay for basic school supplies for their students.

Lincoln Memorial Academy principal Eddie Hundley, the subject of a federal investigation, earned more than twice the average salary of middle school principals in Manatee last year.

Former Lincoln Memorial Academy principal Eddie Hundley, who is currently the subject of a federal investigation into fraud, bribery and embezzlement, earned roughly $204,000 last year, according to Manatee County School District general counsel Mitch Teitelbaum.

Hundley’s salary nearly doubled overnight when Lincoln converted from a traditional district middle school to a charter on June 30, 2018. Before the conversion, school district officials say Hundley was earning $105,560, but as of July 1, 2018, his base pay increased to $174,990 plus a supplement of $2,450 per month.

“This may not be the entire compensation received by Mr. Hundley,” Teitelbaum said in an email.

Hundley’s salary had been a mystery, as school district officials have sought more details about Lincoln’s finances. The school was declared in “dire financial condition” in May. Lincoln was found to have missed roughly $60,000 in payments to the Florida Retirement System, and the city of Palmetto has threatened to turn off the school’s water twice due to unpaid bills…

Hundley’s base salary and monthly supplement, not including benefits, puts his earnings well above middle school principals in Manatee, who on average earned $83,200 in 2018-19, according to the school district.

However, Hundley’s salary it is not out of the realm for charter school principals in the district. In 2017 the Herald Tribune compiled salaries of the highest paid employee at all charter schools in Sarasota and Manatee. At that point, Manatee School for the Arts principal Bill Jones earned roughly $184,000. Fred Spence, the founder of Bradenton’s Team Success, earned $237,000 in 2014, the last year of salary data available before management of the school was handed over to his management firm. The highest paid employee at a charter school in Sarasota in 2017 was Vickie Marble at the Student Leadership Academy, at $143,175.

Local officials said the school’s administrative costs had tripled beyond what was expected..

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, Funding, Privatization

Peter Greene: Charter Schools and the Elephant in the Room

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2019 //
70

Peter Greene points out in this post that legislatures have a nasty habit of overlooking the central question about charter schools: their funding.

They pretend that they can run two publicly funded school systems without any additional cost.

They pretend that the funding for charters is not subtracted from the funding for public schools.

Public schools are getting hammered by the loss of public tax dollars that have been diverted from public school finances into charter and choice school accounts. Charters, having forgotten the era when they bragged that they could do more with less, complain that they are underfunded compared to public schools.

The problem here, as with several other choice-related issues, is in a false premise of modern school choice movement. That false premise is the assertion that we can fund multiple school districts for the same money we used to use to fund one single public system.

This is transparent baloney. When was the last time any school district said, “We are really strapped for funds. We had better open some new schools right away!” Never. Because everyone understands that operating multiple facilities with multiple staffs and multiple administrations and multiple overhead expenses– all that costs more than putting your operation under one roof.

But the choice pitch has always been some version of, “Your community can have twelve different schools with twelve different flavors of education in twelve different buildings with twelve different staffs– and it won’t cost you a nickel more than what you’re paying now!” This is carnival barker talk, the same kind of huckster pitch as “Why buy that used Kia? I’ll sell you a brand new Mercedes for the same price!”

Adding charters and choice increases educational costs in a community. Sometimes we’ve hid that by bringing in money from outside sources, like PTA bake sales to buy a public school office equipment, or pricey benefit dinners for charters, or increasing state and federal subsidies to help charters stay afloat.

But mostly school choice is the daylight savings time of education– if we just shuffle this money around in new and different ways, somehow there will be more of it.

This trick never works. And we talk all too rarely about why it never will.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Funding, Hoax, Privatization

Bernie Sanders Speaks to UTLA leadership Conference about His Agenda

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2019 //
37

Bernie Sanders recently was invited by the United Teachers of Los Angeles to speak to its Leadership Conference.

I was invited to make a tape introducing him. I did but you won’t see it or hear it. Technical problems. Just wait. You will hear Bernie loud and clear. He is still the only candidate with a thoughtful education agenda.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Testing

Providence: State Will Takeover District, But Does It Have a Plan?

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2019 //
7

 

The State Education Department is taking over the Providence School District but thus far it has not released any hint of a plan. 

The only thing that seems sure is that the state will not put any new money to the district where schools are in disrepair.

Despite having been working towards a Providence School takeover for more than three months, Rhode Island’s Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green is now backing away from promises of transparency.

Her office is now refusing to layout plans as to how to improve Providence Schools.

Appearing on GoLocal LIVE this week, Speaker of the House Nick Mattiello discussed Rhode Island Department of Education voting to take over the beleaguered Providence public schools, following the Johns Hopkins report which identified the glaring problems in Providence — including school buildings. He voiced concern that there is no public plan.

Mattiello warned that the state was not prepared to assist with additional financial resources beyond those already provided. 

“If you don’t invest each and every year you’re going to have a disaster on your hands. They have a problem in Providence and that’s going to have to be addressed. The state is not going to come in with a large sack of money and address the Providence infrastructure needs,” said Mattiello. “They have to come up with a plan. I’m disappointed that I don’t see one at this point.”

Categories Accountability, Funding, Providence
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