Steven Singer has noticed that the hired hands of the billionaire “reformers” like to play the role of victim.
They are bravely standing up to those teachers’ unions on behalf of “the kids.” All they have on their side are the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons and a long list of other billionaires who want to privatize public schools and get rid of those unions.
Who is Goliath? Who is David?
Who are the real grassroots activists?
Don’t be fooled.
Oklahoma has an online charter school that is growing “at breakneck speed,” but producing pathetic results for students. This is not unusual. It is typical for online charter schools to recruit students, experience high attrition, and produce crummy results.
Oklahoma’s largest online charter school is on a track of explosive growth, nearly tripling its enrollment over three years, to almost 8,500.
That pursuit of lightning growth by Epic Charter Schools – a goal affirmed by its co-founder – shows no signs of letting up. Epic officials predict enrollment will near 10,000 by mid-school year.
But the trend is raising concerns from one top online charter-school regulator about whether there is too much turnover of students. And at least one national report warns that rapid expansion at virtual charter schools can compromise academic achievement.
Epic’s unconventional efforts to drive enrollment also have raised eyebrows. Among other tactics, it gives out concert tickets, vacations and other prizes to students’ families as rewards for referrals of students. The school also spurs referrals by depositing bonus money into “learning fund” accounts that families can use to buy their curriculum or computers or defray fees for extracurricular activities such as dancing or club sports. Epic told state officials the rewards are not paid for with state funds.
Epic administrators say their system is growing rapidly because parents and students love it. Parents of some students applaud the program, saying it gives them the freedom of home-schooling with some of the benefits of a public school.
“Clearly, we’re providing a quality of service and education that families are enjoying and appreciate, or we wouldn’t be continuing to grow year after year,” said Superintendent David Chaney.
But Epic’s academic performance is average or low, as measured by the state’s standard assessment tools. Just over a quarter of Epic’s students last year graduated within four years, compared with 82 percent statewide. Its elementary, middle and high schools received a C-, D and C on the state A-F report cards.
Those marks contrast with Epic’s posting a 100 percent attendance rate for the 2015-2016 school year, achieved by only one other school in the state – ABLE Charter School, a virtual school the state is trying to close.
“There is a good place for virtual charter schools,” said Rebecca Wilkinson, executive director of the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which oversees all of the state’s online schools. “I’ve got lots of stories from individual families and students that it’s the right choice for. But more than anything, these large numbers of kids coming in – it’s disturbing, and overshadows the good it (Epic) can do.”
Epic co-founder Ben Harris said the school is working on improving its graduation rates and A-F letter grades. He added the number that matters most to him is enrollment.
Yes, indeed! Enrollment translates into dollars! For every dollar spent by an ineffective online school, there is a dollar less for a real public school.
Study after study has shown that virtual schools are not good schools. Kids may turn on the computer–or not. They may turn on the computer and learn nothing. The bad results are consistent.
Betsy DeVos doesn’t care about results. She loves online charter schools (like her mentor, Jeb Bush, co-author of that classic Digital Education NOW!, which urged expansion of digital classes and schools with no accountability whatever). In Pennsylvania, which is overrun with virtual charter schools, the graduation rate is 48%. That’s high compared to the graduation rate at ECOT in Ohio, which hovers around 20%. The founder of Pennsylvania’s biggest virtual charter school pleaded guilty to tax fraud and is awaiting sentencing, having been convicted of siphoning off millions of dollars. The founder of another virtual charter skimmed $6.5 million dollars for herself but was not charged with a crime because of her age.
Education Week investigated the online charter industry and reported numerous cases of fraud. It is a fraudulent industry. Why do we need more of it?
Perhaps you saw the raw footage of the massacre in Las Vegas. Perhaps you saw interviews with survivors and first responders. But stories have popped up on YouTube and other sites claiming that there was no massacre, that no one was killed, that everyone you saw was an actor. It was elaborately staged to persuade the public to support gun control.
The Guardian (U.S.) reports:
“YouTube is promoting conspiracy theory videos claiming that the Las Vegas mass shooting was a hoax, outraging survivors and victims’ families, in the latest case of tech companies spreading offensive propaganda.
“It’s only been days since a gunman inside the Mandalay Bay hotel opened fire on a music festival, killing 58 people and injuring nearly 500. But videos questioning whether the shooting really happened and claiming that the government has lied about basic facts have already garnered millions of views on YouTube and are continuing to run rampant.
“It appears YouTube is actively helping these videos reach wide audiences. Searching for “Las Vegas shooting videos” immediately leads to a wide range of viral videos suggesting that law enforcement and others have purposefully deceived the public. Some label the tragedy a “false flag”, a term conspiracy theorists typically use to refer to mass shootings they say are staged by the government to advance gun control.
“Stephen Melanson, whose wife and daughter were both shot in the attack, told the Guardian he believed YouTube should take down videos suggesting the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history had been faked.
“When I see my wife fighting for her life with a gunshot wound to her chest, and my daughter was also shot, it’s pretty conclusive evidence that it did happen,” said Melanson, whose wife, two daughters and two friends escaped alive from the Route 91 Harvest festival on Sunday night. “My daughter texted me … ‘There is a shooting right in front of us’ and another text said, ‘Mom is shot.’”
Immediately after the shooting, stories popped up on Google, Facebook, and other websites asserting that the shooter was an anti-Trump liberal.
The New York Times reported that Google and Facebook displayed this falsehood prominently:
“When they woke up and glanced at their phones on Monday morning, Americans may have been shocked to learn that the man behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas late on Sunday was an anti-Trump liberal who liked Rachel Maddow and MoveOn.org, that the F.B.I. had already linked him to the Islamic State, and that mainstream news organizations were suppressing that he had recently converted to Islam.
“They were shocking, gruesome revelations. They were also entirely false — and widely spread by Google and Facebook.
“In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.
“In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”
Google, Facebook, and other widely read websites have become co-conspirators with the alt-right. They are protected by the First Amendment even as they spread lies, propaganda, and fake news that undermines trust in not only the free press but in the very idea of fact.
I first became aware of this phenomena after the Sandy Hook Massacre. Like everyone else I knew, I was obsessed with this terrible tragedy. Then someone posted a 30-minute video on my blog claiming that Sandy Hook never happened, that it was an elaborate hoax staged by the Obama administration using professional actors, all to support gun control. I vowed I would never permit that video or any other hate-mongering conspiracy theories on this site. The principal of the Sandy Hook Elementary School was a reader of this blog. Obviously, I never heard from her again. There was no hoax. There was a mass murder of children, teachers, the principal and staff. There are also some very sick people out there who try to profit from tragedy for political reasons. They should be ashamed of themselves. If there is a law against fraud in the public arena, they should be prosecuted.
The New York State Allies for Public Education–the state’s leaders of the opt out movement–blasted the new standards adopted by the Board of Regents as nothing more than a rebranding of the hated Common Core standards.
A few changes were made in hopes of mollifying critics, but the standards are the same old test-based accountability system. A failed system survives.
“Parents are no longer content with crumbs, baby steps, and the lesser of evils. These are our children and they are running out of time. For many it is already too late. This was a huge opportunity to put New York on the right educational path and once again we chose the path of test-based accountability and standards written without grade-level practitioner expertise. We intend to hold the Regents to their promise that they will continue to revise the Next Generation Learning Standards and add more Opportunity to Learn factors to our accountability system. And we will continue to ensure that schools pay attention to these issues and focus on providing students with what matters: a quality education and a real chance to thrive.”
Go, NYSAPE!
Free technology! Free state money! More enrollments! Public money for religious schools that state law forbids!
An offer too good to pass up.
A district with declining enrollment opened an online charter school (aka “cash cow”) offered free computers to students in a Catholic school a hundred miles away.
The arrangement allows students in Catholic schools to be enrolled in two schools at the same time. The academic record of online charter schools is dismal.
“That Lennox had created a virtual school was not so remarkable. Online public schools operate across California in almost every form imaginable. Some cater to home-schoolers; others focus on students who have fallen far behind. Many are charter schools that are supposed to be held accountable by the school boards that authorize them, but a handful are run by public school districts that answer mainly to themselves.
“The Lennox Virtual Academy operated in what legal experts have called a murky regulatory environment. Even so, it stood out both for enrolling students already attending school elsewhere and for its willingness, in partnering with Catholic schools, to test the limits of California’s particularly strict interpretation of the separation of church and state.
“The description of the pilot program alarmed Rivera, who is an attorney and could tell she was not being asked to sign an ordinary permission slip.
“It had red flags all over it,” she said of the paperwork, particularly one section that stated, “…all of our students in 5th-8th grade will need to be co-enrolled at both schools.”
“She grew even more concerned after she asked a St. Francis administrator how it could possibly be legal for a Catholic school to get such expensive technology for free from a public school district, and was told the school was taking advantage of a legal “loophole.” St. Francis officials declined to comment for this story, but the Diocese of Fresno and the Lennox School District defended the arrangement as legal.
“Rivera refused to sign the forms.
“There can’t be a loophole in the law that other private schools aren’t using,” she said. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Clayton Christensen, the leading advocate of DISRUPTION, will address the “National Summit on Education Reform,” sponsored by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence. He will speak on Thursday November 30 in Nashville, as Jeb’s group celebrates a solid decade of efforts to privatize public education. Don’t expect to see or hear about charter school frauds or the failure of vouchers to improve student test scores or the looting of public funds by virtual charter schools.
If you are going, be sure to read the debunking of disruption by Harvard professor Jill Lepore. She demonstrates that disruption is a fraud, a hoax. Even the business disruptions that Christensen boasts about were actually failures. “Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence….”
Read Judith Shulevitz’s takedown of disruption in The New Republic, and how it has emboldened those who want to destroy public education and diminish democracy. Eli Broad’s love of disruption produced the failed leadership of Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein.
Shulevitz wrote (in 2013):
“But when Broad’s “change agents” move into the institutions they’ve been taught to shake up, as dozens have now done, we can see how disruption, well, disrupts—not just “the status quo,” but peoples’ lives. Teachers quit en masse or are fired. Nearby schools close, forcing students to travel to distant ones. School boards divide and bicker. Parents picket. Broad-affiliated superintendents all over the country—Atlanta; Philadelphia; Rochester, New York; Sumter, South Carolina—have resigned or been forced out after no-confidence votes, corruption or cheating scandals, or, in one case, the discovery of alleged irregularities with a doctorate degree.”
Bringing a disruptor into your school district is like inviting an arsonist into your home. You will have change aplenty, but you will lose your home and possibly your family.
The One Wisconsin Institute compiled a list of the organizations that have been funded by the far-right Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee. It is a remarkable documentation of the largesse that is showered on advocates for privatization of public schools.
You will notice the relationship with Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, adding more shekels to the school choice honey pot. DeVos’ AFC has pumped millions of dollars into Wisconsin legislative races to assure that its privatization agenda is protected by the legislature. We are reminded again that our Secretary of Education is an extremist who opposes public schools.
Bradley-funded activities work to prevent any accountability or audits for private schools that receive public funds. And they seek every opportunity to siphon money away from public schools to benefit voucher schools.
Among the notable recipients of Bradley funding:
*American Enterprise Institute (where EdWeek blogger Rick Hess is education director) received $4.3 million from their Bradley paymasters.
*Black Alliance for Educational Options (founded by Howard Fuller) got $1,475,000. BAEO sends speakers to black communities to try to persuade them that charters and vouchers are best for black children. You can be sure that BAEO does not tell its audiences that its activities are funded by a rightwing foundation run by reactionary white men.
*Center for Education Reform, run by former Heritage Foundation aide Jeanne Allen, which exists to smear public schools and promote privatization. 620,000.
*Center for Union Facts, led by PR man Rick Berman, whose goal is to defame teachers’ unions: $1,550,000. About 10 years ago, I attended a meeting of the rightwing Philanthropy Roundtable, where Berman gave a pitch for funding, based on his campaign to demonized the New Jersey Educational Association. When I asked him to explain why the top-performing states are unionized, and the lowest are not, he answered: I am a PR man, not an educator.
*Charter Growth Fund: $28 million. Not familiar with this one, but it serves to remind us that charter schools are high priority for the extremists of the right.
*Donors Trust, $3.1 million. An organization assembled by the Koch brothers and Dezvos family to funnel money to pet causes while hiding the donors’ identity. Dark money.
*Foundation for Excellence in Education, $435,000. Jeb Bush’s pastime.
*Heartland Institute, $647,500. Rightwing think tank.
*Heritage Foundation, $623,500. The senior citizen of far-right think tanks.
*Hoover Institution, $1.6 million. Sponsor of Education Next and other school choice initiatives.
*Marquette University, $1.7 million. This may be another subsidy for Howard Fuller and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, since Fuller is based at Marquette.
*National Council on Teacher Quality, $445,000. This organization was founded by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with the explicit purpose of harassing traditional teacher education programs. Started as a maverick, this rightwing group now grades teacher education institutions for US News & World Report and is quoted by the mainstream media as if it were a credible source.
*Partnership for Educational Justice, $200,000. This is Campbell Brown’s organization, whose goal is to eliminate teachers’ rights and unions.
*Rocketship Education, $375,000. The charter chain that piputs poor kids on computers.
*Thomas B. Fordham Institute, $522,000. One rightwing foundation funding another.
*University of Washington, $500,000. This would be a subsidy for Paul Hill’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, which promotes portfolio districts. You know, like stock portfolios.
That’s a sampling.
Think about this list of handouts the next time some rightwingers complains about unions subsidizing civil rights groups. No equivalency.
The report can be found here.
On January 31, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation of the Red Bank Charter School, which local groups accuse of excluding minorities. Will Betsy DeVos continue this investigation or will she shelve it?
Local civil rights groups complain that the charter school is far whiter than the district school and contend that this is no accident.
“Critics of the charter school have long complained that minorities are underrepresented in the charter school, contributing to an over-representation of minorities in the public school district, where the population is also more economically challenged than the charter school’s enrollment.
“According to state data, the charter school is 50 percent white, while the borough schools are about 7 percent white. Hispanics comprise just 38.5 percent of the charter school, while they are 81 percent of the borough schools. Both are about 10 percent black.
“The complaint was brought by Fair Schools Red Bank, a group of parents with children in Red Bank public schools, and the advocacy group Latino Coalition of New Jersey. Both the Education Department and the Justice Department received the complaint, which was filed in November, according to a Education Department official.
“Their complaint accuses the charter school, by virtue of its enrollment practices, of making Red Bank “the most segregated school district in the state of New Jersey.”
Charter schools long ago figured out that careful selection of students is key to high test scores. Unfortunately, they can’t share this lesson with public schools, which must enroll everyone who walks in, at any time of year.
John Merrow has been digging deep into the facts about the D.C schools, working with a veteran D.C. researcher and civil rights attorney, Mary Levy. Their article will appear in the next issue of The Washington Monthly. They decided to do the research and publish the results after reading Tom Toch’s paean to Michelle Rhee’s “reforms.”
Merrow jumped the gun when he read what purported to be new research about Rhee’s IMPACT teacher evaluation program, claiming that this test-based evaluation had been a great success. That did it for Merrow.
We have heard that D.C. is the fastest improving urban district in the nation. But, says Merrow, this claim must be qualified:
“Despite small overall increases, minority and low-income scores lag far behind the NAEP’s big-city average, and the already huge achievement gaps have actually widened. From 2007 to 2015, the NAEP reading scores of low-income eighth graders increased just 1 point, from 232 to 233, while scores of non-low-income students (called “others” in NAEP-speak) climbed 31 points, from 250 to 281. Over that same time period, the percentage of low-income students scoring at the “proficient” level remained at an embarrassingly low 8 percent, while proficiency among “others” climbed from 22 percent to 53 percent. An analysis of the data by race between 2007 and 2015 is also discouraging: black proficiency increased 3 points, from 8 percent to 11 percent, while Hispanic proficiency actually declined, from 18 percent to 17 percent. In 2007 the white student population was not large enough to be reported, but in 2015 white proficiency was at 75 percent.”
But hasn’t IMPACT been a huge success? No, says Merrow:
“Under Rhee and Henderson, spending on non-teaching personnel has swollen dramatically. According to the latest statistics from Census Bureau fiscal reports, DCPS central office spending in 2015 was 9.5 percent of total current expenditures, compared to 1 percent 4 or less in surrounding districts. Today DCPS central offices have one employee for every sixty-four students, a striking change over the pre-Rhee/Henderson era ratio of one to 113 students. Those central office dollars could have been used to provide wraparound social services for children, services that would have allowed teachers to be more effective.
“Many of these highly paid non-teachers spend their days watching over teachers in scheduled and unscheduled classroom observations, generally lasting about thirty minutes—not even an entire class meeting. Why so many of these teacher watchers? Because those who subscribe to top-down management do not trust teachers.”
Why are so many so eager to protect the reputation of Rhee’s reforms?
He writes:
“It’s all part of a fairly well-designed campaign to convince the world that the top-down, test-and-punish approach to fixing schools is just what the doctor ordered. It’s the reform that Democrats for Education Reform and most Republicans favor, despite strong evidence that it does not work.”
Merrow says this tale is like the blind men and the elephant. Each person picks a different part of the elephant and describes it differently.
I would say a better metaphor might be the Emperor Who Had No Clothes, or the futility of putting lipstick on a pig.
Steven Singer is sorry, really sorry for the self-proclaimed crybabies who call themselves reformers.
Their efforts to privatize public education were going well, they were under the radar, until Trump and DeVos came along and joined forces with them.
How could they continue to sell charters as a crusade for poor children when Trump and DeVos want the same?
How could they get away with the ridiculous assertion that turning public money over to private contractors was a matter of civil rights, when the most reactionary, anti-civil rights administration in generations shares their cause?
What’s next? Will they hold a joint press conference with DeVos and Jeff Sessions to denounce the NAACP for daring to demand that charters cease to operate for profit and meet minimal standards of financial and academic accountability?
It was bad enough when they took their cues from the Waltons, ALEC, and the Koch brothers. Now their champions are Trump and DeVos.
Sad.
Singer writes:
“It’s gotta’ be tough to be a corporate school reformer these days.
“Betsy DeVos is Education Secretary. Donald Trump is President. Their entire Koch Brothers-funded, ALEC-written agenda is national policy.
“But their stripes are showing – big time.
“The NAACP has turned against their school privatization schemes. The Journey for Justice Alliance is having none of it. The Movement for Black Lives is skeptical. Even their trusty neoliberal Democratic allies are seeking to put some distance between them.
“And it’s making them look… sad.
“You’d think they’d have much to celebrate. Their policies are right up there with voter disenfranchisement, the Muslim ban and building a wall.
“Charter schools – YES! Voucher schools – YES! Public schools – NO.
“High stakes testing is going gangbusters pushed by the federal government with little interference from the states.
“Common Core is in almost every school while the most state legislatures do about it is consider giving it a name change.
“And in every district serving students of color and the poor, budgets are being slashed to pieces to make room for another juicy tax cut for the rich.
“They’ve taken George W. Bush’s education vision – which neoliberal Barack Obama increased – and somehow found a way to double-triple down on it!
“They should be dancing in the streets. But somehow they just don’t feel like dancing.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 