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Rafe Esquith Wins His Day in Court

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
19

Rafe Esquith, the celebrated Los Angeles public school teacher and founder of the Hobart Shakespeareans, won an important legal victory. He is suing LAUSD, which fired him, as a class action on behalf of all teachers in the district who have been removed from their jobs and placed in limbo awaiting due process. LAUSD moved to dismiss his lawsuit, but the judge denied the district’s request. This brings the fifth-grade teacher to a trial of his claims.

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-rafe-esquith-lawsuit-20160713-snap-story.html

http://laschoolreport.com/just-in-judge-denies-la-unified-request-to-dismiss-lawsuit-filed-by-fired-teacher-rafe-esquith/

Categories Los Angeles

Los Angeles “Reform” Group Makes Grants to Other Reformers

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2016 //
14

We were told when “Great Public Schools Now” began functioning, it would support all schools, whether they were public schools or charter schools. This is the group funded by Eli Broad and his friends that intends to take over half the student population in the Los Angeles public schools and put them into privately managed charters.

But Great Public Schools Now made its first grants, and none of the money went to public schools.

A group that has vowed to start high-quality schools across Los Angeles on Thursday announced its first grant recipients: a charter school that is expanding, an after-school and summer enrichment program for children, and an organization that recruits recent college graduates for two-year teaching stints.

None of the money went to the Los Angeles Unified School District, although it’s likely to benefit from the teacher-recruitment effort.

Of course, it is doubtful that the public schools will benefit from a program that recruits more inexperienced, ill-prepared Teach for America recruits. Why not fund a program that recruits experienced teachers or creates a pipeline to develop career teachers?

What has logic got to do with it?

We knew all along that Eli Broad and his fellow billionaires don’t want public schools in Los Angeles, except as a dumping ground for kids kicked out of charters.

My bet is that the group will make a contribution to a public school to maintain the illusion of even-handedness. But we know where its heart is. Privatization.

Categories Broad Foundation, Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Times Struggles to Understand How to Improve High School Students’ Knowledge and Skills

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2016 //
29

Your advice is needed. What is the best way to improve graduation rates, without cheating or gaming the system.

The Los Angeles Times recently published two editorials about high school graduation rates.

The first looked at the new phenomenon of “online credit recovery” as a means of helping students get credits to graduate. As a general rule, online credit recovery has a poor reputation. A few years ago, the NCAA conducted its own investigation and found online programs in which the questions were so simple that students breezed through them. In some cases, they were given more than one chance to answer a multiple choice question. The Los Angeles public schools are using a program with a better reputation than most, but questions still remain about the educational value of online courses for students who should have face-to-face encounters with teachers.

The second editorial reviewed the methods that states have devised to boost their graduation rates, such as lowering standards, eliminating exit exams, online credit recovery, reclassifying students as “leavers” rather than dropouts, etc.

The editorial contains some startling good sense, as in this section:

Russell Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara, is not a fan of measuring a school’s success by its graduation rate for precisely that reason: Doing so encourages schools to lower their standards or to use misleading numbers or to find ways to get failing students out of their schools without having to count them as dropouts. In any case, he says, “a diploma is a blunt instrument” for measuring learning; one study found that low-income students need to show better mastery of the material than merely a pass in order to have a real shot at reaching the middle class.

Under pressure to produce better numbers, school officials in California and nationwide have often done whatever it takes to get to those numbers.
Like it or not, Rumberger says, higher standards — such as those in the Common Core curriculum standards recently adopted in California and most other states — tend to mean lower graduation rates, and it’s disingenuous for states to say they can raise both at once, and quickly.

This is the first time I have seen a public admission in the editorials of a major newspaper that raising standards lowers graduation rates. This is a contrast with the usual blithe claim by pundits and legislators that making tests harder will force kids and teachers to try harder, to “up their game,” thus producing more learning. Rumberger is right: When the tests are harder, more students will not pass.

The editorial concludes:

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, which never did much to encourage higher graduation rates, might be dead, but its successor will have little chance of succeeding if policymakers aren’t realistic about the work and patience required to raise standards, test scores and graduation rates. It’s slow, hard, incremental work without magic solutions, and improved numbers aren’t always evidence of better-educated students.

The editorial is thoughtful, and I don’t mean to cast aspersion on the writers’ efforts to puzzle through this dilemma. But the quest for higher test scores and higher graduation rates was the singular goal of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. An honest assessment compels a frank admission that NCLB and RTTT failed. Even if one can find examples of higher numbers, do they really demonstrate that students are better prepared or do they reflect the result of twelve years of test prep?

Chasing better data is not the purpose of education, and we make a grave error by doing so. As the LA Times acknowledges, most of what has been produced at a cost of many billions over the past 15 years are creative efforts to game the system.

It would be far more fruitful to ask different questions: How can American schools do a better job of preparing students to succeed in life after high school? How can they encourage students to pursue learning on their own? How can they awaken a need to know? How can we reduce the growing racial segregation in our schools? (If only the $5 billion wasted on Race to the Top had been used to promote desegregation and to collect data on successful efforts to do so!) Are they adequately resourced and staffed to meet the needs of children growing up in extreme poverty, students without medical attention, students who come to school hungry, students who are homeless?

Until we ask these questions, the data are meaningless, as are such noble aspirations as “No Child Left Behind” by the magic of annual testing or “Every Student Succeeds” by a combination of standards, testing, and data.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Los Angeles, Online Education, Real Education, Standardized Testing

LA Times Reports on Eli Broad’s Bold Move to Take Over Public Schools and Open More Charters

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
18

Forget about the elected L.A. School board. Eli Broad has picked his own school board, one run by his surrogates and the charter-happy privatizers of the Walton Family Foundation. Why not make the elected board irrelevant and let a billionaire from L.A. and a billionaire family from Arkansas run schools for half the children in Los Angeles?

This is one of the boldest, brashest, most outrageous attempts to destroy public education in the history of education in the U.S. What a legacy Eli Broad and the Walton family will leave behind. Destructive, anti-democratic, union-busting, a need to control whatever they can buy, a belief that everything–even public schools–are for sale. They are utterly shameless.

Here is Howard Blume’s report on the story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization

Eli Broad Releases Plan to Take Over and Privatize Public Education in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
34

The Eli Broad-funded group “Great Public Schools Now” (sic) has released its plan for the destruction of democratically controlled public education in Los Angeles.

Despite the failure of charter schools to improve the education of low-income students unless they are free to choose the students they want and kick out the ones they don’t want, billionaire Eli Broad wants to put 160,000 children who are now in public schools into privately managed charters. The twist in this plan is that Broad and his allies have promised to take control of public schools, magnet schools, and other schools as well as their own charters. It seems that the billionaires and their minions know how to create successful schools. One wonders if this means that even the public schools will adopt “no excuses” discipline and kick out the kids who refuse to conform. To do this, the corporate reformers have to retain some public schools where they can drop the kids they don’t want.

The goal is to expand access for 160,000 students GPSN has identified as attending failing schools in 10 low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods to successful schools it wants to help replicate or expand.

The neighborhoods are in South LA, East LA and the northeast San Fernando Valley, chosen because they have “chronically underperforming schools and few high-quality school choices for struggling families,” the plan states.

GPSN says it will provide funding and support to high-performing schools no matter what type of school — charter, traditional, pilot, magnet or partnership — so they can be replicated and expanded. It will also support proposed schools with the potential to be high quality.

The widening focus is a shift from an early plan leaked last year that was developed by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to expand charter schools in LA.

“This is a different kind of initiative, very different than has been attempted in Los Angeles before,” said Myrna Castrejon, GPSN’s executive director. “I am particularly excited about the opportunity to really work across sectors to really strengthen all of public education.”

GPSN also is revealing today the makeup of its seven-person board, all of whom boast decades of experience in education. In addition to Siart and Flores, who is also a senior fellow at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, the board members are Gregory McGinity, executive director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation; Maria Casillas, founder of Families in Schools; Virgil Roberts, chairman of the board of Families in Schools; Marc Sternberg, K-12 education program director for the Walton Family Foundation, and Allison Keller, senior vice president and chief financial officer and executive director of the W.M. Keck Foundation.

All of these are corporate reformers with “decades” of privatizing public schools.

Bear in mind that in California, charter schools are not only deregulated, they operate without any supervision. There have been numerous charter scandals involving fraud and misappropriation of funds.

This is a disgrace. Eli Broad was educated in the public schools of Michigan, and he has become–along with the rightwing Walton Family Foundation–the major destroyer of public education in the nation. Naturally, the Walton Family Foundation’s education director Marc Sternberg is on the board of Eli Broad’s latest venture, bringing together the two most powerful and union-hating, public school-hating organizations in the US.

Expect a billionaire-funded drive to take control of the Los Angeles school board in the spring of 2017, to pave the way for the end of democratic public education in Los Angeles.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Los Angeles: High School Students Give Their Graduation Speeches

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2016 //
5

Listen to the students who are graduating!

Their optimism gives us hope for the future.

Those of you who teach know these young people.

For an old-timer like me, it is good to hear their voices.

Categories Los Angeles

Anthony Cody: The L.A. Times is Complicit in Failures of Gates Programs (Link Fixed!)

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2016 //
14

As readers know, the Los Angeles a Times published a scathing indictment of Bill Gates and his ill-fated forays into education policymaking. The Times noted Gates’ serial failures, one of which was his naive belief that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students. This idea appealed to his technocratic, data-driven mindset.

Some cheered the Times’ about-face, but Anthony Cody did not. He argues that Los Angeles Times was complicit in some of Gates’ worst ideas, despite the absence of evidence for their likely success. It gave full-throated support to John Deasey when he ran the city’s public schools with a heavy hand and spent profligately on ed technology. While wiser heads were skeptical about Gates’plan to evaluate teachers by test scores, the Times decided to create its own test-based rating system and published the results.

Cody calls for accountability. The line between advocacy and reporting is thin, and he believes the Times’ reporters crossed it. They should have investigated the Gates’ theory, but instead they acted on it, assuming its validity.

Cody writes:


“I have a question related to journalistic integrity. How can the LA Times chastise the Gates Foundation – and their disciple John Deasy, without acknowledging their own embrace of Gatesian reforms? The LA Times did not just report on the issue – they created their very own VAM system, and criticized Los Angeles Unified for not using such a system to weed out “bad teachers” and reward those identified as “effective.” They were active advocates, instrumental in the war on teachers that has been so devastating to morale over the past decade.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Los Angeles, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Howard Blume: Los Angeles Charters Try to Offload Teacher Pensions on District

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2016 //
70

Howard Blume reports that charters in Los Angeles are trying to avoid the cost of paying pensions by advising teachers who near retirement age to go to work for the public school system.

 

His fascinating story begins:

 

 

“A Woodland Hills charter school recently made an unusual offer to its veteran teachers: We’ll give you $30,000 if you return to the Los Angeles Unified School District before you retire.

 

“It wasn’t the teachers that El Camino Real Charter High School wanted to get rid of. It was the cost of their retirement benefits.

 
“The school’s cost-shifting strategy is one of many flashpoints between traditional public schools and the independent charters they compete with for students and money.

 

“In this case, it’s a battle over who should pay for an employee’s health benefits after retirement — the charter school or the larger school district.

 
“Financial challenges are all-but-universal in the education world, and retiree benefits are particularly costly. L.A. Unified’s unfunded liability for employee benefits has escalated to $13.6 billion.

 

“The El Camino plan would add from $2.5 million to $4.2 million to that deficit, based on district estimates. The idea is that teachers would spend their careers in the charter school, but later transfer to LAUSD to qualify for the huge institution’s retirement benefits.

 

“Except the district has decided not to play ball.

 

“Teachers who return to the district, simply to retire, are not entitled to district retirement benefits, general counsel David Holmquist said.

 

“This would be an obligation that in my view would be the charter’s responsibility,” Holmquist said.”

 

Blume points out that this decision raises interesting questions about Eli Broad’s plan to open 260 new charter schools, which will require some rethinking when they can’t dump their pension obligations on the public schools.

 

Guess Eli’s charters will have to stick with Teach for America, whose teachers are usually long gone before qualifying for a pension.

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Funding, Los Angeles, Pensions

How Bad Must a Charter Be to Lose Its Charter?

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2016 //
12

I recently posted about a charter school in Los Angeles that lost its charter after an audit revealed serious financial irregularities. The charter operator was fined $16,000 although millions of dollars may have been misappropriated.

 

The Los Angeles Times story noted:

 

“Some of the allegations bordered on the bizarre.

 

“Auditors questioned, for example, the use of school funds to pay a $566,803 settlement to a former teacher who sued the organization for wrongful termination after she was directed by Okonkwo to travel with her to Nigeria to marry Okonkwo’s brother-in-law for the purpose of making him a United States citizen.”

 

Apparently, the owner of the charter was not required to repay to the school the $566,803 used to pay the teacher for wrongful termination.

 

The story is even more bizarre:

 

A reader posted the following summary of the investigation. Why wasn’t the charter owner prosecuted for immigration fraud? Why did the California Charter School Association support the renewal of this charter? Many questions, no answers.

 

********************************
Our reader wrote:

 

 

The L.A. County BOE hired a team to do an “extraordinary audit” of the charter in question, “Wisdom Academy of Young Scholars”.

 

It’s quite a read:

 

http://fcmat.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/03/LACOEWAYSAB139finalreport3-20-14.pdf

 

Among its many mind-blowing findings is the one pertaining to the immigration fraud.

 

in what might be the wildest story of extortion I’ve ever heard of in a school setting, the charter operator, Mr. Godfrey Okonkwo, engages in a unique way of helping his brother-in-law, a Nigerian citizen, obtain his U.S. citizenship;

 

This charter honcho, Mr Godfrey Okonkwo, gives an ultimatum to one of the non-tenured teachers working at the charter school:

 

… as a condition of continued employment … as in “Do this or else your fired.”

 

— this teacher must fly to Nigeria, marry the brother-in-law of the charter honcho, Mr Godfrey Okonkwo, then fly back to California, then live in a sham marriage long enough to satisfy immigration officials.

 

Halfway through, though, the teacher backs out of the deal. Incredibly, she went as far as to fly to Nigeria with her charter school boss, Mr Godfrey Okonkwo, actually marry Mr. Okonkwo’s brother-in-law, and then the three of them flew back to Los Angeles together.

 

However, it is at this point the teacher gets cold feet, and tells her boss, Mr. Okonkwo, that she’s backing out of such an unsavory and highly illegal proposition. The prospect of having to fill out detailed Homeland Security documents — with severe jail penalties and huge fines for those who are ever caught providing false information on this form — leads to this decision.

 

(To prove the charter honcho’s involvement, the audit shows that the Repuplic of Nigeria marriage certificate has the Mr. Okonkwo’s name and signature, as the “witness” to the marriage.)

 

As promised, Mr. Okonkwo fires the non-tenured teacher fore refusing.

 

In response, the teacher files a wrongful termination lawsuit against both Mr. Okonkwo, the “Wisdom Academy of Young Scholars, and the Merle Williamson Foundation (MWF), a non-profit 501(c)(3) under which WAYS operates. A jury later found in favor of the teacher plaintiff, and against Mr. Okonkwo, WAYS, and MWF. In a subsequent judgment, this teacher was awarded of $566,803. Mr. Okonkwo eventually pays the teacher this $566,803 in school funds that were supposed to go the classroom.

 

In defending himself in the lawsuit, Mr. Okonkwo defiantly claims that all of this happened off-campus during a holiday break from school, and thus, outside of the school’s scope of employment. “Therefore, butt out. This is none of the L.A. County BOE’s (the charter authorizer’s business.), or anyone else’s business. It’s a private matter between the bride, the groom/my brother-in-law, and myself.”

 

The problem with this line of defense, however, is that Mr. Okonkwo settled the wrongful termination lawsuit with the teacher for $566,803, but did not use his own private funds to do so. Mr. Okonkwo cut a check out of the charter school’s bank account, with the charter school “Wisdom Academy of Young Scholars”, as the payer on the check.

 

This also leads to Mr. Okonkwo being shown up to be a liar in another area. Mr. Okonkwo claims that she took no days off from school. However, multiple teachers — those interviewed regardin the marriage / immigration fraud confirmed that Mr. Okonkwo took many school days off, and traveled to Nigeria on those days.

 

Here’s the relevant passage:

 

(page 22 on the bottom footer ,

 

OR

 

page 30 of the PDF page counter)

—————————————–

“Professional Liability for Founder/Former Executive Director

 

“Documents from a lawsuit settled against the Merle Williamson Foundation (MWF) for wrongful termination of a former teacher at WAYS against the school show that the founder/former executive director traveled to Omtsha, Nigeria and directed one of the school’s teachers to go with her to marry her sister’s husband (brother-in-law) for purposes of making the brother-in-law a United States citizen.

 

“Although the teacher married the brother-in-law, she ultimately refused to complete the Department of Homeland Security form I-130, Petition for Alien Relative, and brought suit against MWF. On December 4, 2012, a jury found in favor of the teacher plaintiff and subsequent judgment was awarded of $566,803.

 

“The contract dated July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2011 clearly states that the executive director shall be held harmless and be indemnified ‘from any and all demands, claims, suits, and legal proceedings brought against the Executive Director in her official capacity as agent and employee of the MWF, provided the incident arose while the Executive Director was acting within the scope of employment.” (emphasis added)

 

“Clearly this action by the ‘Executive Director’ was not within the scope of employment, was conducted during winter break in Nigeria, and yet the settlement was paid by WAYS charter school.

 

“The Certificate of Marriage document from Federal Republic of Nigeria shows the founder/former executive director’s signature as witness to the marriage between the teacher and Joseph Njor Enwezor (the founder/former executive director’s brother-in-law) on January 4, 2010.

 

“According to staff at LACOE who conducted interviews, these interviews with former teachers and board members indicate many trips to Nigeria to visit a personal residence in that country by the founder/former executive director, yet she asserts that she took ‘zero’ days off during the last five years.”
———————————————————

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the financial corruption that these creep engaged in. Read the whole thing. Again, it’s at:

 

http://fcmat.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/03/LACOEWAYSAB139finalreport3-20-14.pdf

 

All of this begs the questions:

 

“How egregious must a charter school’s transgressions — both legal and ethical — be in order to close that school?

 

“How bad must if be for the California Charter School Association to denounce these practices, and withdraw its support for the charter authorization by either a county BOE, or the state BOE?

 

“How bad must it be order to trigger a criminal prosecution?”

 

Mind you, immigration fraud involving sham marriages is felony.

 

Why is THAT not being prosecuted?

 

The very fact that, after all this corruption was uncovered, that this charter operator even thought that she had a chance at authorizing by the State Board of Ed. shows how entitled the charter industry players think they are.

 

Indeed, the Callifornia Charter School Association supported their appeals to the L.A. County BOE and State BOE.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Fraud, Los Angeles

Los Angeles: Charter Operator Fined $16,000 for Conflicts of Interests That Netted Her $19,000 a Month and Possibly Millions

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2016 //
26

Another amazing but true story from Los Angeles about the loose rules under which charters operate.

 

This charter operator opened a charter school in 2006 called the Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists. She bought a building and leased it to the charter for $19,000 a month. She paid herself a salary of $223,615. She renovated the building and charged it to the state. Auditors think the charter operator may have funneled millions of dollars to her own accounts from public funds. The violations were too egregious to overlook.

 

Some of the allegations bordered on the bizarre.

 

Auditors questioned, for example, the use of school funds to pay a $566,803 settlement to a former teacher who sued the organization for wrongful termination after she was directed by Okonkwo to travel with her to Nigeria to marry Okonkwo’s brother-in-law for the purpose of making him a United States citizen.

 

The school was closed in 2014. The operator claimed bias. She was fined $16,000.

 

In papers filed with the state, Wisdom’s leaders accused auditors and the county office of misconduct and “open hostility … against this African American operated school,” calling it “the culmination of years of unfair treatment and retaliation … because a few [county office] staff members dislike our school’s founder Kendra Okonkwo, her family, the thickness of her accent, and the color of her skin.”

 

Ordinarily, this degree of theft of public funds would merit a criminal prosecution. The California Charter Schools Association supported this charter’s appeals to the county board and the state board.

Categories Charter Schools, Fraud, Los Angeles
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