Please consider registering for the long-delayed annual conference of the Network for Public Education, April 30-May 1 in Philadelphia.
The speakers and panels will be outstanding. You will meet your favorite bloggers and supports of public schools.
Join us!
Due to the the Omicron surge of COVID, the Network for Public Education and NPE Action has again rescheduled our in-person conference. It will now be April 30-May 1.
Still in Philadelphia. Still a star-studded roster of parents, educators, and friends of public schools.
Certainties: Great speakers. Terrific panels. Ample time to discuss your concerns. Wonderful opportunity to meet your favorite bloggers. Guaranteed: excitement about joining with old and new friends to learn from one another and to plan for the future.
Please register now. All the details are here.
The Network for Public Education will host its annual conference in Philadelphia on March 19-20. The conference has been repeatedly delayed by COVID. We now feel confident that we can meet safely in person. Please join us!
Carol Burris writes:
We have reopened registration for our conference to be held in Philadelphia on March 19 and 20. We believe that when the current Omicron surge subsides, we will enjoy a safe and healthy conference. We appreciate that so many of you have remained registered these past two years.
If you previously registered for the conference, and never asked for a refund, there is no need to register again.
However, you must register for your hotel room. You can do that here. These are discounted rooms and they will go quickly.
If you have not registered, or, canceled your registration, you can register here.
Because we need to preorder food, which is a large part of the registration cost, no refunds will be issued after February 21.
In order to attend, you must be fully vaccinated. That is a requirement of both the hotel and the Network for Public Education. At this point, there is also a mask mandate in place (surgical or KN95 please).
It has been a difficult and long haul for all of us. Hopefully, we are nearing the pandemic’s end. We can’t wait to see you again! Let’s draw strength from each other this March.
President Diane Ravitch is happy to announce that Cassandra Ulbrich and Keith Benson have joined the Network for Public Education Board while Gloria Evans Nolan joined the NPE Action Board.
You can read about these three accomplished public education advocates below. Last month we announced the addition of Georgina Cecilia Pérezto the NPE Board. We thank retiring Board members Denisha Jones, Susan Ochshorn, and Roxanazww as Marachi for their service.
Casandra E. Ulbrich, Ph.D.was elected to the Michigan State Board of Education in 2006 and re-elected in 2014 to serve a second eight-year term expiring January 1, 2023. She serves as the President of the Board.
Casandra has spent the majority of her career in higher education administration, currently serving as the Vice-Chancellor for Institutional Advancement at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Prior to joining UM-Dearborn, Casandra was the Vice President for College Advancement and Community Relations at Macomb Community College for eight years, where she oversaw the college’s marketing and communications, public relations, cultural affairs, and foundation, as well as serving as the College’s Title IX Coordinator. Casandra began her career as a Press Secretary to the former U.S. House Democratic Whip David Bonior, acting as the official spokesperson for the Congressman.
Dr. Keith E. Benson is the author of Education Reform and Gentrification in the Age of #CamdenRising: Public Education and Urban Redevelopment in Camden, NJ (2019) and is currently the President of the Camden Education Association. A dedicated community and public education advocate, Keith taught in Camden City public schools for fourteen years prior to being elected to the Association’s presidency. Keith is also an adjunct professor at Rutgers University-Camden.
Gloria Evans Nolan has joined the NPE Action Board.
Grounded in her experience as a St. Louis Public School graduate and parent, Gloria is now serving as Interim Parent Liaison in the St. Louis Public School district. She has over 17 years of experience working in non-profits and fostering excellence in the lives of young people through her work supporting mentoring teams, managing school partnerships, and developing volunteers and caregivers.
Nolan holds a Masters’s Degree in college student personnel administration and a Bachelor of Science in therapeutic recreation. Gloria is a fierce advocate, championing equity and transformational policy change in true public education. Gloria draws her inspiration from being a devoted wife of Kevin Nolan (also known as Cocoa Santa) and the mother of Dylan & Evan.
There is no doubt that the privatizers will continue their fight to destroy public education in 2022. We already see voucher bills introduced and we are watching for charter expansion legislation as well. You can be assured that we will keep on fighting for our democratically governed public schools, the pillar of our democracy. Happy New Year and we hope to see you in March!!
Thanks for all you do,
Executive Director
The Network for Public Education is a 501 (c)(3) organization. You can make a tax deductible donation here.
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Dear Friends,
NPE wishes you happy holidays and Merry Christmas! Open the link to learn about our plans for 2022.
Join us in our work of supporting, defending, and improving our nation’s public schools. Join the 350,000 devotees of public schools who are part of NPE. Help us to fight budget cuts and privatization of our most valuable public assets. Help us defeat the billionaires and grifters who want to grab the funding of public schools and devote it to charters and vouchers. Stand with us as we press for reduced class sizes and the misuse of tests and technology.
2021 has brought both good and bad news for our public schools.
Schools were able to open, and although COVID is surging and difficult to manage, our students are in class with the teachers they love. We thank all of our educators for their heroic efforts during such difficult times.
The bad news is that a new war on public schools has begun. Public schools and teachers became a target after the 2008 recession; sadly, it is happening again. Post-2008 brought teacher evaluations by test scores, Common Core testing, and a push for charter schools. This time we face book-banning, anti-CRT laws, and more charter schools and vouchers.
Here is a quote from The New York Times:
Chris Rufo, the right-wing intellectual entrepreneur behind the anti-critical race theory campaign, told me last month that the next phase of his offensive will be a push for school choice, including private school vouchers, charter schools, and home-schooling. “The public schools are waging war against American children and American families,” he said, so families should have “a fundamental right to exit.”
The Network for Public Education will defend our communities’ right to have well-funded, neighborhood schools open to all students and governed by the public. We believe in the ultimate goodness of our communities, even when times are dark. Public education is a pillar of our democracy; privatized “choice” is its wrecking ball. We must fight it in all of its forms.
Won’t you help us keep the lights on and continue the fight? Please give generously.
On behalf of NPE,
Diane Ravitch, President
Carol Burris, Executive Director
Darcie Cimarusti, Communications Director
Marla Kilfoyle, Grassroots Coordinator
Today is #GivingTuesday, a day to support the organizations and causes you believe in. If you care about public schools, if you oppose the efforts to privatize them, please support the Network for Public Education.
Whether it is voucher legislation, charter expansion, wild disruptions of school board meetings, or the slashing of school funding, it is clear that the extreme right-wing is waging war against public schools. NPE is the only national organization dedicated to stopping school privatization, which is the extremists’ ultimate goal. That is our primary mission.
Please give to NPE this Giving Tuesday and join us as we push back against the school privatization agenda. If you give $250 or more, we’ll send you a signed copy of one of NPE President Diane Ravitch’s books.
Privatization is making progress. In Arizona, almost 20% of all students attend charter schools. An additional 99,000 students are receiving vouchers. For the first time, more than half of our states have a voucher program–many with multiple programs. Ohio now has six! All of these programs rob our public schools of precious resources, and when disappointed families return to public schools, their children are often woefully behind.
Won’t you join the fight and give to NPE this Giving Tuesday?
Your gift supports our research and advocacy. Our reports receive national attention and combat the campaign of disinformation and biased reporting from privatization think tanks like Ed Choice, Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
But we can’t do that work without your help. Please make your tax-deductible donation today.
Speaking of privatization, consider giving yourself a holiday present by purchasing this important new book written by good friends of NPE.
The Privatization of Everything by Donald Cohen, the founder of In the Public Interest, and bestselling historian Allen Mikaelian chronicles the efforts to turn our public goods into private profit centers from the era of Libertarian Milton Friedman to the present. Privatization has touched every aspect of our lives, from schools, water, and trash collection to the justice system and the military. You can find the book at your local independent bookstore or on Bookshop.org.
We wish you a wonderful and healthy beginning to your holiday season. Thank you for all that you do, and please, help us keep the lights on by giving to NPE.
You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/fight-school-privatization-give-to-npe/
Carol Burris is executive director of the Network for Public Education.
She writes:
For the past four years, the Network for Public Education has collected and posted charter school scandals from across the United States on a special page of its website entitled Another Day Another Charter School Scandal which you can find here.
NPE has now turned that page into an interactive research tool, allowing you to find a collection of stories by state, by scandal type and by keyword. For example, if you want to search any published story on scandals associated with Success Academy, just type in Success Academy into the query box and ten stories pop up.
Looking for stories regarding charter theft or fraud? Use the drop down menu and 177 stories appear.
At the beginning of the month, we load up all of the stories we found during the prior month. Check back in early December to see November’s scandals. We have presently cataloged stories from 2019 to the present. We plan to add 2017 and 2018 to the research tool shortly. One thing we know from doing this work is that if it is another day, there is another charter school scandal-which is quite remarkable given that there are only about 7500 charter schools in the United States.
Laura H. Chapman was a devoted supporter of public education, the Network for Public Education, and this blog. I was honored to post her carefully researched and well documented comments on this blog. Although her health clearly was in decline, she faithfully attended every annual meeting of NPE.
Laura was a distinguished arts educator. Please read her obituary in The Cincinnati Enquirer. We have lost a treasured friend.
Laura shared my dislike of billionaire reformers who didn’t know much about education but imagined they could solve its problems with Big Data. She was opposed to privatization of public funds. She opposed the substitution of technology for real teachers. She was a fierce and eloquent supporter of a rounded liberal arts education. she never failed to inspire me with her wisdom.
I’ll be sending you occasional notices to remind you that the end of the pandemic means the return of the annual conference of the Network for Public Education. This will be your opportunity to make connections with friends and allies fighting for public schools across the nation. Join us!
Our Network for Public Education Action conference will be an in-person conference on October 23 and 24 in Philadelphia.It will be terrific. So much has happened in the world since the 2020 conference was canceled due to Covid-19.
We will have wonderful keynote speakers including Little Steven, Jitu Brown, and Noliwe Rooks.
We will have panels that include stopping school privatization, lifting up community schools, creating inclusive schools free of systemic racism and valuing democracy in schools. That is just a sample. The full schedule will emerge soon.
Best of all, we will be together in a beautiful hotel in the City of Brotherly Love.
The conference theme is Neighborhood Schools: The Heart of our Community. As we emerge from a year of isolation, that theme is more important than ever.
If you registered for the 2020 conference and did not request a refund, you are registered for the conference but be sure to register for the hotel.
The discounted rooms are going fast.https://book.passkey.com/gt/218126437?gtid=3b2e4f0403f2a2b9544e40207d650ccb
If you did not register for the 2020 conference, don’t wait. We have only about 50 spots left.
https://npeaction.org/2021-conference/
We need each other and NPE needs all of us to adovocate for public education.
See you in October!
Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post reviews the Network for Public Education report on for-profit charters, which explains how such money-grabbers function in states where they are supposedly illegal. Arizona is the only state where for-profit charters are legal, yet the report says they operate in 26 states and D.C. In Florida and Michigan, the majority of charters are run by for-profit companies.
Strauss points out that Joe Biden promised to cut off federal funding to for-profit charters. Here is a road map he can use to keep his promise.
She writes:
Now a new report, titled “Chartered For Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain,” details how many for-profit management companies (referred to as EMOs) evade state laws banning for-profit charters.
They set up nonprofit schools and then direct the schools’ business operations to related corporations. For example, it says, one of the largest EMOs, National Heritage Academies, “locks schools in with a ‘sweeps contract’ where virtually all revenue is passed to the for-profit management corporation, NHA, that runs the school.”
“In other cases, the EMO recommends their own related companies for services that include leasing, personnel services, and curriculum,” it says.
The report was produced by the Network for Public Education, an education advocacy group that opposes charter schools. It was written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning New York principal, and Darcie Cimarusti, the network’s communications director.
The authors wrote that despite “strict regulations against the disbursement of funds from the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) to charter schools operated by for-profit entities,” they identified more than 440 charter schools operated for profit that received grants totaling approximately $158 million between 2006 and 2017.
They also found that fewer disadvantaged students, proportionally, attend charters run for profit than at traditional public schools.
“Comparing the five cities with the most for-profit charter schools (by the proportion of students attending these schools) revealed that in all but one city — Detroit — for-profit run charters served far fewer students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch,” the report says. “In all cities, for-profit-run schools serve fewer students who receive services” under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.
Charters schools are publicly financed but privately operated. About 6 percent of U.S. schoolchildren attend charter schools, with 44 states plus the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico having laws permitting them.
Charter advocates say that these schools offer choices to families who want alternatives to troubled schools in traditional public school districts. Critics say that charter schools take money from public districts that educate most American children and are part of a movement to privatize public education. This report is the third on federal funding of charter schools that the Network for Public Education has published since 2019. The earlier reports chronicle the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on charter schools that did not open or were shut down — and revealed that the U.S. Education Department failed to adequately monitor federal grants to these schools. You can learn about the first two reports here and here.
For years, charter schools enjoyed bipartisan support — and were backed by the administrations of presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But more recently, many Democrats have become skeptical of the charter movement, especially those schools that are operated or managed by for-profit entities — and Biden has vowed to stop federal funding for-profit charters.
But what is a for-profit charter? “The term ‘for-profit charter school,’ while commonly used, does not accurately describe the vast majority of charters designed to create private profit,” the new report says.
While only one state — Arizona — legally allows for-profit entities to be licensed to operate charter schools, for-profit entities find ways to set up schools in states that only allow nonprofits to operate, it says. The new report explains that typically, an EMO would find individuals interested in operating a charter school and then help “them create a nonprofit organization and apply for a charter license.”
Then, the board of the nonprofit group “enters into a contract with the for-profit EMO to run the school,” the report says. For-profit owners “maximize their revenue through self-dealing, excessive fees, real estate transactions, and under-serving students who need the most expensive services,” the Network for Public Education says.
Between September 2020 and February 2021, the authors said they identified more than 1,100 charter schools that have contracts with one of 138 for-profit organizations to control the schools’ key — or total — operations, including management, personnel and curriculum...
The report’s authors make recommendations to the U.S. Education Department and states regarding charters that are operated for profit, including:
• The Education Department “should conduct an extensive audit of present and former grantees to ascertain compliance with all regulations that define the for-profit relationship.”
• The federal government “should define a for-profit charter school as a school in which more than 30 percent of all revenue flows directly or indirectly to for-profit vendors.”
• All states should “follow the lead of Ohio by listing the management providers and posting their contracts with charter schools. To that information, the profit status of the EMO should be added.”
• Sweeps contracts should “be outlawed in every state.”• Related corporations of for-profit and nonprofit management companies should “be prohibited from doing business with their managed charter schools.”
• All charters should “be held by the school or campus itself, and not by a nonprofit subsidiary.”• A national database should “be developed that lists all charter EMOs and their corporate status (for-profit or nonprofit), along with their address and the name(s) of the private corporation’s owner(s).”
Marla Kilfoyle, director of the Network for Public Education’s Grassroots Network, summarizes the work of the 160 or so organizations across the nation in 2020, that used their energies to promote, defend, and improve public schools.
Marla begins like this:
The NPE Grassroots Education Network is a network of over 160 grassroots organizations nationwide who have joined together to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen our public schools. If you know of a group that would like to join this powerful network, please go here to sign on. If you have any questions about the NPE Grassroots Education Network, please contact Marla Kilfoyle, NPE Grassroots Education Network Liaison, at marlakilfoyle@networkforpubliceducation.org
Notes from Marla
Needless to say, 2020 was a very difficult year. Despite the many hardships that individuals and organizations in the network have faced, we continued to rise up to help others. As you read the year-end roundup, you will see organizations and individuals ravaged by the impact of COVID and social injustice continue to organize with impact. The NPE Grassroots Education Network 2020 roundup is a testament to a small sample of work that has had a lasting impact on our nation. The 2020 roundup is organized into regions. I know that 2021 will be a year of continued solidarity and respect for the work we each do every single day.
National Front
The Network for Public Education was very busy this year. In August of 2020, NPE published Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999-2017. Thereport provides the first comprehensive examination of charter failure rates over time—beginning in 1999 and ending in 2017. By following all charter schools from the year they opened, we were able to determine how long they lasted before closing down. We also determined how many students have been displaced by failing charter schools and where those closures are most likely to occur. In November 2020, NPE exposed that charter schools took between $1-2 Billion in PPP COVID funds meant for small business owners. To read that report, go here. Mark your calendar for the new date for the NPE/NPE Action National Conference. Due to the ongoing dangers posed by COVID-19, the National Conference has been rescheduled to October 23/24, 2021. The conference will still take place at the same location, the Doubletree Hotel in Philadelphia. NPE will be sending more information to registrants shortly. Know that your conference registration is secure, as is NPE’s commitment to speakers and panels. FairTest launched a petition in late 2020 to call for the federal government and states to suspend high-stakes standardized testing in spring 2021. Please make sure you sign and share the petition. Bob Schaeffer, interim Executive Director of FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing, sent a great update on what Fair Test is working on. “In part due to COVID school closings, 2020 was a surprisingly good year for the testing reform movement. By the numbers: Colleges and universities with ACT/SAT optional policies for fall 2020 applicants were at 1,070. In 2021 colleges and universities with ACT/SAT optional policies increased to 1,685. States waiving federal standardized testing requirements in spring 2019 was at 0. In 2020 that number increased to 50. Jurisdictions requiring seniors to pass high-stakes exit exams to graduate in spring 2019 was at 13. Jurisdictions requiring seniors to pass high-stakes exit exams to graduate in spring 2020 fell to 0. Pages viewed by visitors to fairtest.org in the calendar year 2019 was at 995,000, and by 2020 that number increased to 1,637,000.” Defending the Early Years has had a successful year of working toward and accomplishing their mission by providing resources for parents and teachers of young children, advocating for appropriate early childhood education, and fighting for the rights and needs of young children. Here are their 2020 accomplishments…by the numbers! Published one COVID-19 resource to help parents and teachers in the early days of the pandemic, published two comprehensive reports, produced three videos, broadcasted three webinars, announced seven policy priorities, awarded thirteen mini-grants, wrote eighteen op-eds, articles, and blogs, had sixty-two advocates sign up for DEY’s Working Groups, had five hundred and fifty-nine parents and teachers participate in their DEY survey, one thousand twenty-one people registered for the DEY Summer Institute, reported over four thousand subscribed to their DEY monthly newsletter, and have over ten thousand followers on social media. In the Public Interest is a research and policy organization that studies public goods and services. They have published so many powerful newsletters that the list would be enormous. Please head over to their website to see all that they did in 2020. The Journey for Justice Alliance’s powerful Equity or Else campaign highlighted the demand that schools are opened safely and equitably. Schott Foundation and Journey for Justice Alliance were two organizations that co-hosted the Democratic Presidential Candidates in a Public Education Forum in December of 2019. Rethinking Schools book Rethinking Ethnic Studies was named 2019 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. Here is a list of some of the other outstanding 2019/2020 accomplishments. Rethinking Schools made effective and powerful use of their important book Teaching for Black Lives by hosting webinars for thousands of educators, parents, and community activists to enhance anti-racist teaching. They expanded The New Teacher Book webinar into a series of bi-weekly workshops to apply the book’s themes to teaching in the pandemic and to build ties with one another. They also produced new teaching guides to give educators practical, hands-on strategies for bringing social justice teaching to life. They published Teacher Unions and Social Justice, an anthology of more than 60 articles documenting the history and the how-tos of social justice unionism. Together, they describe the growing movement to forge multiracial community alliances to defend and transform public education. Rethinking Schools also redesigned and strengthened their digital infrastructure to bring social justice teaching stories to the fingertips of thousands of more educators to better serve their readers. They expand their focus on climate justice education work through their Teach Climate Justice campaign with the Zinn Education Project, and regular articles in the magazine. Finally, they published four issues of Rethinking Schools magazine — including an expanded “Teaching and Learning in the Pandemic” issue — and launched a new feature in the magazine of contributions from a diverse selection of education activists.
Diane Ravitch's blog 