Archives for category: Hoax
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New Orleans: An Amazing Feat of Spinning Poor Results!

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2019 //
15

The Education Research Alliance at Tulane University has accomplished a spectacular feat with its latest report about the “academic progress” (or lack thereof) of the all-charter district in New Orleans. The report claims that the disruption strategy of school takeovers and closures is responsible for the academic improvements in the district, but at the same time admits “The average school improved from the first to the second year after it opened, but school performance remained mostly flat afterwards. Schools starting off above the state average saw slightly declining performance in later years.” Furthermore, “quality peaked around 2013 and has either stagnated or started to decline during 2014-2016.”

So, here is the New Orleans model: Close almost all public schools. Replace them with private charters. Fire all the teachers. Replace most of the teachers with inexperienced, ill-trained TFA recruits. Close low-performing charters and replace them with other charters. Keep disrupting and churning. In the first two years, scores will go up, then stall. By year eight, “quality” will stagnate or decline. The schools will be highly stratified and racially segregated. The few high-performing schools will have selective admissions.

Here is the report, released this morning.

This report should be read in tandem with the latest state scores, which shows the all-charter district lagging far below state average scores, actually declining. Most charter schools in New Orleans, as detailed in this link prepared by a pro-charter organization, are very low-performing. The high-scoring schools have selective admissions.

New Orleans is one of the lowest performing districts in one of the lowest-performing states.It is a model of how privatization increases stratification and segregation. It should not be copied elsewhere.

But the report claims the success of the venture in school closings and privatization! Remember that the Education Research Alliance won a $10 million grant from Betsy DeVos after its report last year claiming the success of the privatization experiment.

Here is the press release for today’s report:

Study shows average public school quality has increased in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina as a result of school closures, takeovers, and charter openings

New Orleans – The quality of New Orleans’ public schools improved considerably after Hurricane Katrina as a result of performance-based closures and takeovers, as well as charter openings, according to a new study from Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA-New Orleans) at Tulane University. The study also found that variation in school quality has decreased, which means fewer students are in very low-performing schools.

Now an all-charter district, New Orleans public schools have returned to the control of the local school board. The city’s education leaders face challenging decisions about the district’s role in in school improvement, especially when and how the district should help support low-performing schools or take over these schools. This study provides insight into how these decisions can affect school quality.

“There are two main paths to improving the city’s schools: improving the ones we have or replacing them,” said ERA-New Orleans Director and lead author Douglas Harris. “Our findings suggest that we’ve been more successful with closing and taking over low-performing schools.”

The study’s authors analyzed data from 2002-2016 and found that the average New Orleans public school improved from the first to the second year after opening, but school performance remained mostly flat after the second year.

The study also examined factors beyond academic achievement to better understand how the city’s schools have evolved.

“The number of extracurricular activities that schools say they offer has increased over time,” co-author and ERA-New Orleans research analyst Alica Gerry said. “Also, there may have been a slight upward trend in the variety of school options in the city after the reforms, though this could just reflect school marketing rather than actual program offerings.”

“Students now have access to a wider range of higher quality schools than they did before, even in the first few years of reform,” Harris said. “School closures and takeovers should be a last resort, but they also show some promise when schools are consistently low-performing.”

The study’s authors are Douglas Harris (Tulane University), Lihan Liu (Tulane University), Alica Gerry (Tulane University), and Paula Arce-Trigatti (Rice University).

The novice journalist is likely to read the claims made about New Orleans—that outcomes improved because of charters and closing schools with low scores—and assume that this strategy of disruption is the key to good results. But unless they read the report closely, they may not notice that gains ended after the first or second year of an experiment now in its 15th year.

Expect more headlines about the New Orleans “miracle,” about the stagnation of market-based reforms in a city where most schools “perform” far below state averages.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Reform, Hoax, New Orleans

California: “Inspire” Charter Chain Grows While Floundering

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
9

 

The San Diego Union-Tribune featured a front-page top-of-the-fold story by Kristin Taketa about the deepening troubles of the “Inspire” charter chain, which is growing across the state despite academic and financial woes.

The headline: “Inspire Charter Schools Grow As Results Lag.”

The Inspire network of 12 home charter schools is quickly spreading its reach across California as some are calling into question its educational, organizational and financial practices.

At the heart of the Inspire network is a corporation whose CEO makes about $380,000 a year and who helped create the Inspire schools, which now pay his corporation 15 percent of the taxpayer funds they collect.

Inspire has grown in part by advertising that parents can decide how to spend$2,600 or more a year toward their child’s education, with a teacher’s approval. Inspire operates on the idea that parents should have freedom to decide how their children are educated.

Inspire parents have been able to spend state-provided money on expenses they say are educational, from Disneyland annual passes to private ice skating coaching. The list of places where Inspire parents could spend school funds has included Costco, Amazon, Big Air Trampoline Park, Medieval Times, Guitar Center and the DNA testing company 23 and Me, according to Inspire’s list of approved vendors.

Meanwhile, Inspire students are required to meet with teachers and turn in assignments once a month.

The charter network is based in Duarte and enrolled 23,400 students last year.

State data show that Inspire schools underperformed academically. Last year, all Inspire schools performed below the state average in English and math test scores, with some schools showing as few as 16 percent of their students passing math and as few as 25 percent passing English. The state average is 39 percent for math and 50 percent for English.

Put together, Inspire schools had an average graduation rate of 69 percent last year and produced seven graduates — out of 209— who met California state college or university admission requirements.

Why does the State Education Department tolerate this waste of children’s lives and taxpayers’ money?

When will the Legislature crack down on these sham schools?

The good news is that a major newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, is assigning excellent reporters to cover these scandals, which are especially flagrant in California due to the state’s weak charter law, which assures that charters will be unregulated and unaccountable. In the past, the Union-Tribune was considered a conservative paper. It may still be. Conservatives should be outraged by this fraudulent education and blatant misuse of public funds.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hoax, Privatization

Gary Rubinstein: Do YOU Know Any of the 100 Names of TFA Alumni on This List?

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2019 //
12

 

Gary Rubinstein doesn’t believe Teach for America’s claim that 85% of its alumni are either working in education or serving low-income communities. 

He has pulled a random sample of 100 names of TFA’s earliest recruits from its directory.

Do you know any of them?

Categories Education Reform, Hoax, Teach for America

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

The D.C. “Miracle” Disappears

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2019 //
69

I am reposting this post because the main link was dead and I fixed it. Also, it was originally titled “The D.C. ‘Miracle’ turns to Ashes,” and a reader said a miracle can’t turn to ashes. So it has a new title.

 

A year ago, reformers were touting D.C. as their triumphant example. Those graduation rates!

Unfortunately, like every other reformer tale, it was a hoax. The graduation rate was phony. Students were walking across the stage without the necessary attendance or credits. Metrics!

From PBS:

“Critics view the problems, particularly the attendance issue, as an indictment of the entire data-driven evaluation system instituted a more than a decade ago when then-Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the school system and appointed Michelle Rhee as the first chancellor. Rhee’s ambitious plan to clear out dead wood and focus on accountability for teachers and administrators landed her on the cover of Time magazine holding a broom. But now analysts question whether Rhee’s emphasis on performance metrics has created a monster.”

Ya think?

And the teacher-turnover rate is 25% a year! 

The national average? Only 16%. In fact, D.C.’s teacher turnover rate (across both traditional public and public charter schools) is higher than other comparable jurisdictions, including New York, Chicago and Milwaukee.

For both public and charter schools, the highest turnover is taking place at schools with the most at-risk students, with the rate pushing past 30% in Wards 5 and 8.

This is the fruit of Michelle Rhee’s work. A district that continues to have the largest achievement gaps of any urban district tested by NAEP, a phony graduation rate,  and a startlingly high teacher turnover rate. Another “reform” hoax.

Categories Accountability, Data, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Hoax, Teachers

DeBlasio: A Hypocrite on Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2019 //
56

 

DeBlasio recently boasted at the NEA candidates’ panel about his courageous resistance to the charter industry. It is true that he started his first term in office in 2014 determined to stop the charter zillionaires’ efforts to grab money and the students they wanted from the public schools.

When he did not grant Eva Moskowitz all the new charters she wanted, her backers launched a PR blitz against DeBlasio, spending $6 million on emotional appeals on TV.

Eva bused parents and students to Albany, where Governor Cuomo pledged his loyalty to the charter cause. The legislature passed a bill requiring NYC to let the charters expand at will, to give charters any public space they wanted at no cost, and to pay their rent if they couldn’t find suitable public space.

At that point, DeBlasio stopped fighting the charter industry.

Currently, the New York City Department of Education gives the charter industry its lists of students’ names and addresses for recruitment purposes.

Parents have protested this misuse of their children’s private information. This practice of releasing personally identifiable student information is illegal under state law.

Recently Chancellor Carranza pledged to end the practice. But as Leonie Haimson reported, DeBlasio reversed the decision and promised to reach his own decision. He has not made any decision and the charter industry continues to bombard public school parents with recruitment letters.

So much for those mythical long waiting lists!

Speaking of mythical waiting lists, Leonie Haimson also reported on an exciting new development at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain:

More recently, Moskowitz created what is described as a “full service, brand strategy, marketing, and creative division within Success Academy” called the “The Success Academy Creative Agency” according to the LinkedIn profile of its Managing Director, Meredith Levin. 

In an earlier version of her profile, Levin described this internal marketing division of Success as a  “group of over 30 creative directors, designers, copywriters, strategists, e-learning architects & project managers to develop, execute and optimize campaigns to recruit 1,000+ teachers, enroll families, donors, influencers, and cultivate community engagement.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Hoax, Oakland, Privatization, Propaganda

Angie Sullivan: Is Soner Tarim Opening a Charter in Nevada?

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2019 //
15

 

Angie Sullivan teaches in a Title 1 elementary school in Las Vegas. It is underfunded. The state is willing to fund failing charter schools but not pay for the public schools that most children attend. Angie wants to know why.

She recently learned that Soner Tarim wants to open a charter in Nevada. This is the same man who wants to open a charter in rural Washington County in Alabama and set off a firestorm of controversy. This is the same man whose proposal for a new charter chain was just rejected by the Texas State Board of Educatuon.

Angie writes:

Google:  Soner Tarim lawsuit
 
 
Why is Soner Tarim pictured at Switch with these local Nevada folks?   
 
Soner Tarim is a constantly under investigation all over the United States.  As soon as he gets caught – he goes to the next place. 
 
Someone in the NVDOE needs to be accountable for this and fired.   
 
Google:  Soner Tarim lawsuit
 
Folks in other states are contacting me to warn Nevada.   This huge charter scammer keeps reinventing himself and opening charter shells in various states to try to attract investors.  
 
Why is he opening new charters in Nevada?   Who gave permission for this?   He been kicked out of so many other states?  Does anyone in charge have google?  
 
Google:  Soner Tarim lawsuit
 
80% of Gulen Schools have been closed across the world for good reason.  
 
Alabama just kicked Soner Tarim out for fraud, hiring and other sketchy practices.  
 
 

 

The New York Times wrote an article about the misuse of federal money. 
 
 
Memphis denied their application – School of Excellence. 
 
 
List of Gulen Charters- Soner Charters are listed as low performing and closing or denied. 
 
 
Are they funding a terror group using Texas education money?  
 

 

 
This is bad. 
 
We have no education money and this is what we do with the money we have?  Fund a scammer?  
 
He uses local folks to scam the Nevada Tax Payer?  
 
Google:  Soner Tarim lawsuit
 
We do not have money to waste like this.  I’m not convinced the Gulens we have are honest or doing an education service.   Please. Make.  It.  Stop. 
 
I am
Mad. 
 
The teacher,
 
Angie 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, Hoax, Nevada, Privatization, Resistance

Carol Burris: Don’t Let Democratic Candidates Get Away With: “I’m Against For-Profit Charters”

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2019 //
64

 

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about the efforts by most Democratic candidates to avoid confronting the dangers of privatization:

When Democratic candidates are questioned about charter schools, many typically reply, “I am against for-profit charter schools.” Everyone cheers. Politicians have created a convenient (and false) dichotomy that says nonprofit charter schools are good, and for-profit charter schools are bad.

Don’t be fooled. There are now only 2 states that allow for-profit charter schools—Arizona and Wisconsin. California changed  its laws. 

However, 35 states allow for-profit Charter Management Organizations (CMOS) to run their nonprofit charter schools. 

40% of the charter schools in Florida are run by for-profit charter management companies. While the individual charter is a nonprofit, it can turn over everything from hiring, to curriculum, to financial management to a for-profit corporation. In Michigan, 80% of the so-called nonprofit charter schools are run by for-profit companies. 

To understand how this arrangement works, read this blog I wrote for the Answer Sheet on Florida’s charter schools. You will read about the Zulueta brothers who were on the board of an Academica charter school even while their for-profit real estate companies, including one in Panama, were leasing property to the schools. 

Let me shock you a bit more. The National Alliance for (so-called) Public Charter Schools recently gave the controversial profiteer, Fernando Zulueta, an award at its national conference!

You probably know the names and reputations of the other big for-profit CMOs—BASIS, National Heritage, Academica, K12 and more.

The question candidates need to answer then are:

 “Do you support for-profit Charter Management Organizations, and if you do not, what are you going to do about them?”

The most important questions to ask, however (and don’t let them off the hook), are whether they support the NAACP moratorium on new charter schools and “Will you stop the the federal funding of new charter schools?”

There is a reason the charter lobby never complains when a candidate says that he/she is against for-profit charter schools. It means nothing will change.

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

Michigan: Gov. Whitmer Wants to Impose Deformers on Benton Harbor

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2019 //
10

 

Thomas Pedroni of Wayne State University writes that Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants to impose corporate reform organizations on Benton Harbor to “save” the underfunded district. A cruel hoax. She is carrying forward the foul legacy of Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

 

Michigan Gov Whitmer Grants Benton Harbor Schools a Trojan Horse-load of School Privatizers 
 
Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, propelled to the state’s highest office just eight months ago by Black, Latino, and other progressive voters, is coming out to her electorate— not as a progressive, but as a third term retread of former Republican Governor and Flint Poisoner-in-Chief Rick Snyder.
 
Not only has Whitmer continued Snyder’s penchant for strong-arming and dismantling predominately Black school districts (he gutted Inkster, Buena Vista, Muskegon Heights, Highland Park, and Detroit; she’s “offered” to close Benton Harbor’s only high school in exchange for not immediately dissolving the entire district), but she also shares her predecessor’s fascination with the disruptive possibilities of some of our nation’s foremost corporate education reform companies.
 
While the Governor has responded to statewide outrage over her indecent proposal for Benton Harbor High School by grabbing her political life preserver and offering to consider alternative suggestions by the elected board (which returns to power after five years of state supervision on July 1), her rhetorical softening comes with a new “proposal”— Benton Harbor trustees must now agree to onboard a “turnaround expert” to guide their return to autonomy.
 
As the Benton Harbor trustees learned on Wednesday, June 26, just days before their restoration, the Governor has given them a choice— they must work with one of the four whole district “turnaround” companies she has laid on the table: AUSL (Academy for Urban School Leadership), TNTP (the New Teacher Project), TfC (Turnaround for Children), or ERC (Educational Resource Strategies).
 
AUSL, of course, has consistently failed to reach its promised benchmarks in the schools it’s taken over in Chicago and, remarkably, has underperformed non-AUSL Chicago schools despite receiving large resource infusions from the Gates Foundation. A recent Chicago Teachers Union analysis of AUSL teacher firing and replacement in Chicago found that the largest impact of AUSL takeover may be on the racial composition and experience level of the teaching workforce— fired teachers were disproportionately more experienced and of color.
 
TNTP, which traces its founding to the teacher-bashing Michelle Rhee and TFA’s Wendy Kopp, has been described by Peter Greene as the “big boys and girls” version of Teach for America, in that its objective is to transform people with established non-teaching careers into teachers. TNTP believes in using computer-administered multiple choice questions to identify better teachers.
 
The final two organizations, Turnaround for Children and Educational Resource Strategies, similarly partner with and are funded by a who’s who of the corporate education reform world— TfC by the Bezos Family Foundation, the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Kipp DC, and America’s Promise Alliance, among others; and ERS by the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, TNTP, and the New Schools Venture Fund.
 
How Governor Whitmer’s staff came up with this short list of corporate education reform organizations for Benton Harbor Schools is unclear; but one thing is clear— the Governor is passing over the insights and recommendations she might garner from the Benton Harbor community; from educational researchers and teacher educators; from officials and researchers at the Michigan Department of Education; from rank and file teachers and their unions. Instead she is laser-focused on whoever it is from the corporate education reform world who is whispering in her ear.
 
Benton Harbor Area Schools, its children, and the people who elected Whitmer deserve much better than this, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t get it. But this can only happen if Whitmer chooses to disavow the corporate education Koolaid and actually listen to the people she claims to value.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Michigan, Privatization

Peter Greene: On Reading “Winners Take All,” a Morality Tale for Our Times

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2019 //
57

Peter Greene read and loved Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

So did I, which is why it is on my short list of books I recommend for summer reading.

Peter writes:

Every so often you come across a book that unpacks and reframes a part of the universe in a way that you can never unsee. Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas has been a book like that for me.

Giridharadas is writing about “the elite charade of changing the world,” and while he is taking a broad look at the way the Betters are trying to influence our country and our world, the connections to education reform are unmistakable. I’m about to go ahead and give my grossly oversimplified take on his work and its intersection with public education; as a general guide, assume everything smart came from his book and everything wrong is my fault. There’s a lot to pack into a blog post, and I will cut corners like crazy; there are so many pull quotes from this book that I have put up an entire supplemental blog post just of quotes from the work. My best recommendation if you find any of this striking is to buy the book…

The elite assumption is that the system that put them on top, the game that they are the winners of, is fair and just and unrigged and not in need of being changed in any major ways. They are not part of the problem, and they are hurt that you would even suggest that was true; they are simply the just winners in a meritocratic system.

So the solutions they will propose meet a couple of standards:

1) It will include no challenge to the fundamentals of the current system.
2) The elites will be in charge (because their eliteness is proof of their fitness to run the show).
3) It will harness entrepreneurial energy (i.e. someone’s going to make money from it).
4) It will hand most of the blame responsibility to the people on the bottom who are being “rescued….”

The fingerprints of this mindset are all over education reform.

* The very notion, popular and bipartisan among the Betters, that education is the fix for everything. All the socio-economic inequity in the country can be solved, not by looking at the system that created that inequity– in fact, we’re not even going to admit that the system had any hand in creating inequity. No the system is swell, and the winners are people who are at the top got there by hard work and wisdom and meritocratic excellence. So, no, we don’t need to look at that system– we just need these people on the bottom to get themselves better educations (including things like grit) so that they can win at the game, too.

* Think Bill Gates, deciding that he needs to rewrite and standardize public education, and will have to circumvent, subvert and co-op the actual government to do it. Nobody elected him Grand Poobah of US Education, but he is perfectly comfortable appointing himself to the job.

* Think the deification of business standards in ed reform, and the notion that the free market will fix the system, that we will know which ideas are working best because they will succeed in the market. Think Eli Broad’s assertion that schools don’t have an education problem, but a business management problem.

* Think the repeated notion that democracy is a problem in education. We need to get rid of elected school boards and we need to give school leaders the kind of freedom that an all-powerful CEO has to create his vision. In ed reform, local control and the democratic process are to be avoided.

* Think the constant rejection of expertise. Reformsters don’t need to talk to teachers. What do teachers know? (If they are really such great shakes, why aren’t they rich?) I’ve succeeded at the game, and the same wisdom that made me a winner at that game will apply to fixing education. No other sorts of wisdom are necessary.

The huge irony of this book, which excoriates the elites and the billionaires who pretend to “save” the world by privatizing it, is that one of the blurbs was written by Bill Gates. He (or more likely, someone in his office) wrote:

In Anand’s thought-provoking book his fresh perspective on solving complex societal problems is admirable. I appreciate his commitment and dedication to spreading social justice.

This is a book that lambastes the likes of Gates. Why did he endorse it?

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