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Jan Resseger: Charters Suck Money Out of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2018 //
18

Jan Resseger writes that ECOT—the $1 Billion black hole of Ohio charters—has collapsed, but charters continue to defund public schools that most children attend.

“Because of the way Ohio funds charter schools, not only the state but also the local school district loses money when a student leaves for a charter school. In Ohio the money follows the child to the charter right out of the general fund of the school district in which the child resides. Many districts lose more money to charters than they receive in state aid. As the Columbus Dispatch‘s Jim Siegel reports: “Ohio does not directly fund charter schools, instead subtracting the money from individual districts based on where a charter student lives. Traditional public school officials and advocates have complained for years that the system also diverts local tax revenue to charter schools along with state funding. Siegel quotes Columbus, Ohio school board member Dominic Paretti, who says ECOT gobbled up enough funds to have used up several local school property tax levies: “If you add up all that local share of dollars that has flowed to ECOT from Columbus schools’ taxpayers, it would erase the need for us to possibly ever have to go to those levies.”

“The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow remains in the news because it will take years to wind up its affairs. Also Ohio waits for a final decision by the Ohio Supreme Court on the matter of ECOT’s final legal appeal to stay in business. In the meantime, Innovation Ohio has now calculated the total amount ECOT sucked out of local school districts’ funds between 2012 and 2018. During the six year period, for example, Columbus lost $62,897,188 to ECOT; Cleveland lost $39,405,981; and Dayton lost $20,200,830. Over the six year period, ECOT drained a total of $590,954,999 from Ohio’s school districts.

“Many people push back with the argument that the money should follow the child; after all, the school district no longer has to pay expenses for that student. In a new report published by In the Public Interest, however, political economist Gordon Lafer dissects the stranded costs the child’s public school district must continue to cover: “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.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization

Alan Singer: Why Didn’t Chalkbeat Cover the Student Unrest at Success Academy?

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2018 //
2

In a provocative and insightful article, Alan Singer wonders why Chalkbeat did not cover the student unrest at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy?

He follows the money and sees who is funding Chalkbeat. How can Chalkbeat be independent when it is funded by reformers and its editor-in-chief thinks that SA is the best education she has ever seen?

And then there is this: SA is flooded with more money than any school in America:

Since January 2018, Chalkbeat New York has posted eight articles on New York’s Success Academy Charter School Network. The most recent article covered the graduation ceremony held for the network high schools SIXTEEN graduating seniors at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. An April article featured the Success Academy’s “Slam the Exam” test rally at the 19,000 seat Barclay’s Arena in Brooklyn. The bill for a 2013 high school graduation held at Barclay Center was $60,000.

According to its webpage, “Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to covering one of America’s most important stories: the effort to improve schools for all children, especially those who have historically lacked access to a quality education. We are mission-driven, in that we believe that every child deserves an excellent education, and that a strong press is vital to making that happen. Yet we are also fiercely independent, in that we do not take a position on the best path for achieving equity.” The webpage also stresses Chalkbeat’s commitment to local news coverage.

I do not understand why Chalkbeat did not cover student protests at the Success Academy Charter School Network’s high schools during the 2017-2018 academic year, especially since the protests were covered in New York’s regular press and in other web news magazines. Complaints about the cost of a new dress code and January 2018 protests against an oppressive disciplinary code were covered by the political website Politico. The Wall Street Journal had a feature on “growing pains” at the Network’s two high schools in March 2018. Student protests about unfair summer homework assignments were reported on in the Daily News. None of these issues were covered by Chalkbeat.

How many public schools can rent a stadium for $60,000 for a test-prep rally? 0.

Last year, SA rented Radio City Music Hall. No word on the cost of that very expensive venue.

Next year, maybe Madison Square Garden or Yankee Stadium.

How many schools can hold a graduation ceremony for 16 students in one of NYC’s most significant concert halls? Singer should find out how much that ceremony cost. It may have been almost as much as the Barclay’s Center and so much more prestigious.

P.S. We still don’t know what happened to the “lone scholar” who was on the senior class rolls until just a few weeks before graduation. Did his shirt tail hang out? Did she forget to walk in a straight line? Did she fail to “track” the teacher?

Categories Funding, Harlem Success Academy, Media

Arkansas: Walton-Funded School Board Refuses to Buy New Science Textbooks

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2018 //
21

The Walton family, which controls most of Arkansas, invested in the purchase of the Pulaski County School Board. At a recent meeting, the board voted 3-2 NOT to purchase new science textbooks to replace obsolete ones. The majority said the district could not afford the $1 million cost, even if stretched out over three years.

The School Board for the Pulaski County Special School District voted 4-2 Tuesday against the immediate purchase of new science textbooks to replace books that are more than a decade old and do not match the state’s new science standards or the district’s science curriculum.

A committee of district teachers, school administrators and others had recommended earlier this year that the district purchase new science books for kindergarten-through-12th grades.

Jennifer Beasley, science program administrator for the district, returned to the board Tuesday with that recommendation but at a newly discounted cost of slightly more than $1 million, and with an alternative option that would spread the purchase of the new science books over three years.

In the first year of the three-year plan, classroom sets of textbooks and digital subscriptions to those books would be purchased for high schools at a maximum cost of $409,544.

Textbooks for middle schools would then be purchased for the 2019-20 school year and for the elementary schools in the following year.

“The committee’s rationale for allowing the high schools to be first to adopt books was that all of our high schools have a D on the state report card,” Beasley told the board, “and committee members agreed it is important for students and teachers to have resources aligned to the new standards.”

The high schools will be teaching to the new state science standards for the first time in this coming school year. The elementary schools incorporated the new standards in the previous two years, Beasley said, and the elementary teachers feel they are better prepared to continue with the instructional materials and lessons they’ve developed. Additionally, the elementary schools typically earned A’s and B’s on the state report card.

The Walton members should have asked their patrons to help out.

Categories Arkansas, Curriculum, Funding, Science, Walton Foundation

CTA to Friends of Public Schools: Support AB 276!

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2018 //
6

The California Teachers Association calls on all friends of public schools to support AB 276, which sets standards for accountability and transparency for charter schools across the state.

Charter Legislation to Stop Waste, Fraud and Abuse Up for Critical Vote

Please take a minute to contact your Senator %%Senator Full Name%% at %%Senator Phone%% and urge %%Her or Him%% to SUPPORT AB 276 by Assembly Member Jose Medina.

As responsible educators and Californians, we need to hold ALL public entities accountable for their use of taxpayer dollars, particularly when it comes to our schools.

The ongoing proliferation of charter schools is hurting students in our neighborhood public schools because of the lack of transparency and accountability, and the disparity in requirements under which charter schools operate.

The Senate Education Committee is set to vote on AB 276, which requires charter school governing boards to comply with laws promoting transparency and accountability to parents and the public in the operation of public schools and the expenditure of public funds; holding charter schools to the same requirements as traditional public schools. However, ALL senators need to hear from you since AB 276 might be up for a floor vote.

It just takes 60 seconds to contact your Senator! Those taking funds away from our neighborhood schools are also contacting lawmakers to pressure them to keep things the way they are, so it is imperative we reach out to our senators now and urge them to STOP this waste, fraud and abuse!

Contact Senator %%Senator Full Name%% at %%Senator Phone%% and urge %%Her or Him%% to SUPPORT AB 276 by Assembly Member Jose Medina.

Recent headlines are mind-boggling!
More than $149 million of waste, fraud and abuse of tax dollars has been documented in California’s charter school environment, hurting our students and communities.

Having private and secret meetings to discuss how tax dollars will be spent is not acceptable.
Too much is at risk when our students are counting on sound financial decisions that will ensure they get the quality public education they need and deserve.

The only ones benefiting from our public schools should be the students, and ultimately our community.
AB 276 prohibits charter school board members and their immediate families from financially benefiting from their schools. Public schools’ conflict of interest laws and disclosure regulations should also apply to charter schools that receive public funds.

Streamlined regulations for charter schools were never intended to grant operators total authority over taxpayer dollars without any accountability.

Show us the money!
We must require companies and organizations that manage charter schools to release to parents and the public how they spend taxpayer money, including their annual budgets and contracts. The public’s business should be transacted in public. Public agencies must take their actions openly and their deliberations must be conducted openly.

We deserve to know how our schools are being run, and our state deserves an education system that is free from unfair advantages and double standards. Companies and organizations that manage charter schools must open board meetings to parents and the public, similarly to public school board meetings.

Read more about AB 276:
Fact Sheet | Letter | Details

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Funding, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Cynthia Nixon Proposes Ambitious Plan to Fund Public Schools: “Schools, Not Jails”

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2018 //
14

Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon released her education plan, which would add funding to reduce class sizes and fully fund schools. Her slogan: “Schools, Not Jails.”

Cuomo spokespeople blasted her for being a front for “parent advocacy groups,”as if that were a bad thing. It’s not.

Cuomo’s education policies are controlled by hedge fund managers, billionaires, and Wall Street advocacy groups. That is a very bad thing.

Categories Billionaires, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats for Education Reform, Funding, New York

Andrea Gabor: An Education Reform That Worked–and That Needs to Be Revived

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
65

Andrea Gabor writes in the Boston Globe about the remarkable success of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which involved a bipartisan agreement: more funding, equalization of funding, in exchange for standards and assessments. Gabor’s new book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, is officially published today. It is a smart book that deeply understands the futility of the corporate reform movement, which substitutes competition for collaboration and guarantees repeated failures.

She writes:

Twenty-five years after Massachusetts passed a historic education reform law that helped make it the gold-standard for American schooling, the Bay State reforms are coming under scrutiny again — and for good reason.

What happened in Massachusetts is actually a tale of two reforms. The first, signed into law on June 18, 1993, was a bipartisan achievement hammered out by a Republican governor and Democratic state legislators, and informed by a vigorous local debate among educators, parents, and business people who agreed on a “grand bargain”: substantially more state spending for schools in exchange for higher standards and increased accountability.

The law worked initially as intended. It infused over $1 billion in extra education funding — mostly to poor communities. Massachusetts achieved top scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. By 2000, the gap between NAEP scores of black and white students had actually narrowed.

But tax cuts, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the mandates of Race to the Top eroded the state’s gains:

A new 2010 education law only made matters worse. While providing a one-time $250 million cash infusion from the Federal government, the law failed to make up for school-funding inequities, yet imposed dire consequences on schools, districts, and teachers who failed to make test-score gains. It also gutted the much-lauded curriculum standards.

It is time to revisit how the original 1993 legislation worked — and why it remains a model worth building on. The law was a response to a decade of property tax cuts that hit poor communities hardest. A successful class-action lawsuit, led by Brockton students, and decided just days before the Education Reform Act was passed, sought to remedy that inequality, arguing that Massachusetts was not meeting its constitutional obligation to “cherish” education for all students — language written into the state constitution by John Adams.

Support for the plan in 1993 was not only bipartisan but had the support of the business leaders.

They were willing to pay more for better schools, and they wanted strong foundation aid for the poorest schools. In a time of charter-mania, charters were capped at only 25 for the entire state.

Erosion of that support in recent years hit Brockton High School, where the rebellion began, extra hard. What was once a miracle story–the failing school that became one of the best in the state–was upended as funding became unequal again.

In recent years, Brockton has struggled to navigate new state and federal mandates, including new teacher evaluations and a common core-aligned MCAS. In 2016, Governor Charlie Baker and his top education officials imposed a charter school on the community against overwhelming local opposition. During the last school year, Brockton ran a $16 million deficit; the town is now exploring a new funding lawsuit.

It is time to restore equitable funding for schools — the aim of an education-funding bill that just passed the state Senate — and to fully realize the vision of the 1993 reforms. This encompassed not just a rich curriculum, but also a robust role for local school-based decision-making and a wide array of accountability measures, and, as the MBAE pointed out in 1993, “not simply results of standardized tests.” All these measures are needed to return schools like Brockton High to their former levels of fiscal and educational sustainability.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Equity, Funding, Massachusetts

Michigan: The Effects of Charters on a State That Once Had Fine Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2018 //
21

It is no secret that the DeVos family controls state education policy in Michigan. As Betsy DeVos has acknowledged, when they make campaign contributions, they expect to see the changes they want.

Since DeVos took control, education in Michigan has been in decline. The state has hundreds of charter schools. Accountability is minimal. DeVos likes it that way. Michigan is the only state where 80% of charters operate for profit. That means less money for instruction because investors come first in a for-profit business.

Last year, the New York Times Magazine ran a very good article about the charter mess in Michigan. It points out that 70% of the charters are in the bottom half of state performance. So much for “saving poor kids from failing schools,” more like privatizing schools for profit without regard to the kids.

“The results have been stark. The 2016 report by the Education Trust-Midwest noted:

Michigan’s K-12 system is among the weakest in the country and getting worse. In little more than a decade, Michigan has gone from being a fairly average state in elementary reading and math achievement to the bottom 10 states. It’s a devastating fall. Indeed, new national assessment data suggest Michigan is witnessing systemic decline across the K-12 spectrum. White, black, brown, higher-income, low-income — it doesn’t matter who they are or where they live.

You will not be surprised to learn that Michigan is systematically underinvesting in its school. Choice is a replacement for adequate funding.

You will also not be surprised to learn that Michigan has a major teacher shortage.

New teachers don’t want to teach in Michigan.

This is why Betsy DeVos, when asked about her home state of Michigan, changes the subject to Florida.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, Teacher Shortage, Teachers

Gerald Coles: Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2018 //
71

Education psychologist Gerald Coles reports that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg plan to fund neurological research to find out why poor children’s brains aren’t working well enough to produce higher test scores.

Coles writes:

“Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.

“Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.

“Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”

“Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.

“In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.”

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Poverty

Mississippi: What Happens When a State Refuses to Fund Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
13

Mississippi is usually ranked #49 or 50 or 51 on any measure of poverty or funding for schools. Of course, its students have low scores because standardized tests accurately measure family income.

A state that refuses to fund its schools will have high poverty, a poorly educated citizenry and workforce, and a stagnant economy.

In 2015, educators and parents tried to pass a state referendum to force the Legislature to spend more, but a coalition of very wealthy people from inside and outside the state swamped the voters with propaganda and defeated the referendum. The Koch brothers debated a quarter million dollars (pocket change for them) to ensure that poor black and white children in Mississippi did not get enough funding to offer a decent education.

I recently posted Jeff Bryant’s Report on the pending state takeover of the public schools in Jackson, Mississippi. First, they underfund the schools, then they declare they are failing. And officials who can’t provide a decent education anywhere in the state plan to impose their will on the children of Jackson. You can be sure that their solution is charter schools, not more funding.

A teacher in Jackson wrote this comment after she read Jeff’s article.


Diane, you and I have corresponded several times over the years about the conditions in my school in Jackson. I regret to inform you that the conditions of the physical plant are now beyond words. When I was moved from a classroom with carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in years, a room where I fought respiratory and skin ailments for years, I found my new room infected with black mold. It took a few weeks and a trip to the doctor, but I got that mitigated to the point where I can deal with it.

Then over the Christmas holidays, the city of Jackson suffered a cold snap that destroyed the city water system. Jackson Public Schools had to close for a week due to the water crisis. When we resumed classes, our building’s pipes, I believe had also frozen, leading to a re-occurrence of a sewer line break that has literally rendered the main hall and its classrooms a s—hole. About fifteen years ago, the same situation had occurred when I was also on the main hall. Eventually the district dealt with the situation by going under the building to dig out the contaminated soil and re-plumbing the pipes.

I’ve told everyone who will listen, but the situation only got worse until they finally closed the restroom when the new poop was coming from. Even so, there is always a lingering odor of raw sewage which becomes unbearable after a rain and when the temperature warms up. When I was checking out of my room this week, the stench gagged me, and I swelled up with tears because the whole situation is just so surreal.

The facilities manager was in the building and I told him that I had been trying to decide whose office I needed to visit with a box of poop to put on the desk and ask “How would you like to smell this all day every day?” I told him that it would be his office. He assured me that they will address it this summer.

I also told this story to the principal who related that there is the intent to go back under the building, dig the dirt out again, and once more re-plumb the pipes. If it is effective, then it should hold out long enough to get me through to retirement.

Jackson Public Schools announced this week that they will issue a bond to put money into repairing aging buildings. Our building is one of the oldest in the city, with the distinctions of once having been the only high school in the state for African Americans. We’ll see if our building’s problems will be adequately addressed.

It is absolutely true that the power brokers in this state don’t want to pay for African American children to be educated. When Jackson Public Schools mainly educated the children of the power brokers, the schools were just fine. Now that those children are educated in the private and suburban schools, we see those schools excelling. Meanwhile, the students left in tax-poor JPS are languishing in second-world conditions.

My experience leads me to advocate for a new school funding mechanism that does not put schools at the mercy or benefit of their local tax base. Our country is clearly OK with relegating a third of our children to poverty and its consequences or we would have already done something about it.

(Thank you for letting me rant.)

Lorraine

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Koch Brothers, Mississippi, Poverty, Privatization, Racism

Oklahoma: What It is Like to Teach in an Underfunded School

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2018 //
11

Melissa Smith is a teacher at US Grant High School in Oklahoma City and a member of the AFT. She writes here about the effect of dramatic budget cuts on her school.

Unless you are in a school every day, you might not see the results of underfunding education. That is because we open our doors no matter what, and my colleagues and I will do everything we can to make sure our students get the education they deserve. But just because the consequences are invisible doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. Isn’t that the definition of privilege? Thinking something isn’t a problem simply because it might not be a problem for you?

You have probably heard about the recent teacher walkout in Oklahoma. While some of that was about teacher salaries, it was more about the conditions in our schools – conditions that resulted from years of underfunding education.

The Oklahoma City public schools district is the largest in the state, serving about 46,000 students. Because of relentless decreases in funding from the Oklahoma legislature, our district has had to cut almost $40m in the past two years. This has resulted in our fine arts budgets being slashed by 50%, our library media budgets being completely eliminated and district officials being forced to end the school year days early.

Our school system also has 58 classrooms that are “split-level”. This means a teacher is required to teach two different curricula to two different grade levels at the same time in the same classroom. And our teachers do this without the help of a teaching assistant…

Our classes are extremely overcrowded, with 30 and 40 students per class. Some of us don’t even have enough desks for our students to sit in. Coach Aaron McVay, one of our PE teachers, has had classes of more than 80 students. How much learning happens in a class of 80?

Some teachers don’t even have classrooms. They keep their belongings, textbooks and supplies on carts and push them from classroom to classroom, hour to hour. I have been a traveling teacher. Like some of our fellow union members who are adjunct college professors and hold “office hours” in their cars and nurses who travel from school to school, fingers crossed, hoping no one at a school across town will suffer a health crisis, it is almost impossible to be an effective educator while carting your work around…

The cut that hurt most was losing our two maintenance workers, Gerald and Joe, whose positions were eliminated when our district was forced to cut the first $30m in 2017. Gerald and Joe kept our building running. Without them, nothing seems to work. Last August, we had days without air conditioning. It was common for my classroom to reach 90 degrees by 9am. In fact, Cristina Moershel taught her class outside because it was cooler there than in her classroom. Outside. In August. In Oklahoma. She used a dry erase marker on the window to teach calculus while her students sat on the ground.

Our current history textbook is so old that the Oklahoma City bombing only gets a couple of pages in the epilogue
Now, think about how much these problems would be exacerbated if some of this year’s proposed cuts to federal funding were to go through.

Cuts would make it impossible to retain qualified teachers instead of losing them at the rate of almost 400 per month. If there are cuts to federal programs for low-income students or students with disabilities, what else will my school have to sacrifice to provide the services they need? How will these cuts help students graduate and take on the world?

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Oklahoma
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