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New Orleans: One of City’s Oldest Charter Organizations Closes Down Amid Multiple Scandals

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2019 //
7

 

The University of New Orleans was one of the first to jump into chartering after Hurricane Katrina, and it just announced that it is closing down its charter organization, New Beginnings, as a result of a slew of academic problems and malfeasance.

After allegations of grade-fixing and a major fiasco involving class credits that left dozens of students unable to graduate, the public charter board overseeing John F. Kennedy High voted Thursday night to surrender its charters to operate both of its schools.

The surrender of the charters, which will take place at the end of the 2019-20 school year, was approved unanimously by the New Beginnings Schools Foundation board.

The decision stemmed from a lengthy investigation into management problems at the charter network that led earlier to the resignation of its CEO, career educator Michelle Blouin-Williams, and the firing of five high-ranking administrators at Kennedy…

The problems leading to the collapse of one of the city’s oldest charter organizations first surfaced in February, when the organization’s data director, Runell King, alleged that other staff members had improperly changed grades for a group of seniors who had recently taken an Algebra III class. 

King, who was fired a month later in what he said was retaliation for reporting the alleged grade-fixing, submitted documents showing that F’s were changed to D’s and D’s to C’s, a move that ultimately could have helped the school bolster its graduation rates and, in turn, improve its performance score issued by the state…

By July, the grade issues along with other management problems resulted in a determination that more than half of Kennedy’s senior class of 177 students had not actually earned enough credits to graduate.

The seniors included 69 who walked in a graduation for 155 students, but did not actually qualify to graduate. They were given folders with no diplomas during the school’s May 17 graduation ceremony, and had college or other plans thrown into turmoil as officials tried to unravel how the problems had happened.

I wonder if the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University will revise its glowing report about dramatic improvements caused by market reforms, specifically its reference to increased graduation rates.

Perhaps an audit is needed to find out how many other charters falsified their data.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Graduation rates, New Orleans, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: All Student Records in NOLA Will Be Audited After Scandal

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2019 //
4

 

Mercedes Schneider reports a welcome development in New Orleans: in the wake of a grade-fixing scandal, all student records will be audited.

As she says, it is about time. After so much boasting from NOLA, it’s time to check the facts.

She writes:

This is a long time coming.

As a result of the grade-fixing scandal at a New Orleans charter high school– a scandal that resulted in 49 percent of the school’s Class of 2019 being found to lack credits and/or exit exam scores– Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) superintendent, Henderson Lewis, vows a criminal investigation of that school, Kennedy High School (operated by New Beginnings Schools Foundation) as well as an audit of student records for students attending New Orleans high schools.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Graduation rates, High School Graduation, Louisiana, New Orleans

Mercedes Schneider: 49% of NOLA Charter “Graduates” Lacked Credits to Graduate

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2019 //
6

Mercedes Schneider Reports the story of the New Orleans charter school that awarded diplomas to its seniors, but had to revoke 49% of them after a whistleblower pointed out that these students lacked the credits needed to graduate. 

She writes:

Just shy of half of the Class of 2019 at John F. Kennedy High School at Lake Area did not meet graduation requirements and are therefore not eligible to receive the diplomas that they may have expected to receive when they participated in a graduation ceremony on May 17, 2019. (I write “may have expected” because at the time of the ceremony, both students and the general public knew the school was under investigation for grade fixing.)

That’s 87 out of 177 graduates, or 49 percent (which, by the way, indicates a four-year graduation rate that is at best 51 percent.)

Scandals like this do not begin and end in a single year. And this scandal was not uncovered by state or district oversight. Like too many charter school scandals nationwide, revelation of what you will see described by the board president of the charter organization (New Beginnings Schools Foundation) as “malfeasance and negligence that had for years gone undetected” depended for its detection upon a whistleblower.

How sad for the students that no one warned them. Some will make up their credits in summer school. Others are so far behind that they will have to repeat the year.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Graduation rates, New Orleans

Jeff Bryant: The Waste of Millions of Federal Dollars on Charters in Louisiana

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2019 //
3

Jeff Bryant reports here on the waste of millions of federal dollars poured into charter schools in Louisiana. 

Usually, when the media writes about New Orleans, they tell you about success stories, but they don’t mention the many failures.

Between 2006 and 2014, on the watch of both Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan, millions of dollars were awarded to open or expand charter schools in New Orleans.

Nearly half of those charters closed their doors or never opened. Nearly $24 million was wasted.

The large numbers are bad enough. The individual stories are even worse.

While the numbers alone are startling and a cause for concern, individual examples of charters in Louisiana that received CSP money and then closed throw into further doubt the prudence of using federal seed money to spread schools that open and close, repeatedly, and fund charter organizations that churn through districts and neighborhoods without any obvious regard for what parents and local officials want.

One of the examples I singled out from Burris’ research is Benjamin Mays Prep School in New Orleans, which received a $600,000 CSP grant. Mays Prep had long-standing academic issues and persistent budget shortfalls. The school had to move to a different building in 2012 and then lost that location in 2014 when its charter wasn’t renewed and a different charter moving into the space refused to enroll the Mays students. The school closed officially in 2014.

Another New Orleans charter, Miller McCoy, received a $600,000 CSP grant but eventually closed in 2014 after “a long downward spiral,” according to a local news source. The charter school’s two founders left in 2012 under alleged ethics allegations, and the school had a series of unsuccessful leaders after that. An “F” academic rating from the state seemed to have been the final straw.

The school had promised to be equivalent to a prestigious all-male private prep school in New Orleans, only free. Its closure left the teachers and remaining students and families with “a sense of loss, sadness, a grieving for what could have been,” reported a different local news outlet.

Another New Orleans charter, Gentilly Terrace, received a $600,000 CSP grant. The school was operated by a charter management group, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, that was cited for being out of compliance with several federal laws, including misdirection of federal funds for Title I schools—­money earmarked for high-poverty students. New Beginnings also had chronic problems with employee turnoverin its schools and non-transparent practice by its board of directors.

Gentilly Terrace closed in 2014 with a “D” rating from the state’s academics report card. Recently, the CEO of New Beginnings resigned amid allegations of falsifying public records and allowing one of its three remaining schools to engage in grade-fixing.

Really, you have to wonder whether anyone at the U.S. Department of Education ever read the applications, ever followed up to see how the money was used. Or do they just hand out millions and forget about it?

This year, Betsy DeVos has $440 million to toss to her favorites. KIPP got $89 million, and no one could ever say that KIPP was needy. The IDEA corporate charter chain won $116 from their friend Secretary DeVos, adding to the many millions she give them in previous years.

The federal Charter School Fund is truly a slush fund for the corporate charter industry.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Louisiana, New Orleans, Privatization

Jonathan Rodrigues: When Segregation Is the Innovation

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2019 //
24

 

The privatizers got badly beaten in 2016, when they tried to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts. Funded by the Waltons and the usual coven of billionaires, they asked the public to endorse a proposal to launch 12 charter schools every year, wherever they wanted to open. The referendum was overwhelmingly defeated, much to the surprise of its sponsors.

Governor Charlie Baker is a Republican who has appointed a choice-friendly State Board, so the privatizers have not given up hope for undermining democracy.

Now they are back with a proposal for “innovation zones.” 

Jonathan Rodrigues writes:

In a world where we’re more and more accustomed to jargon inherited from corporate start up world like “disruption” and “big data”, “innovation” stands out as one of the most empty vessels in which we project meaning without much thought of it.

In the education world in particular, almost anything can be “innovative”. Even bringing back purposeful segregation and differential treatment under the guise of educational opportunity. Governor Baker’s latest “Innovation Partnership Zones” may be clever, but it’s certainly not very innovative.

If only segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace had known it would be this easy to fool people, he’d had changed his 1963 speech to “innovation today, innovation tomorrow, innovation forever!”.

So what are “Innovation Partnership Zones” (IPZs), and what would the governor’s bill do? It’s important to note here this idea has prominent Democratic support as well, it was only last year that Education Committee co-chair Alice Peisch (D-Wellesley) and Senator Eric Lesser (D-Longmeadow) sponsored very similar legislation.

The bill allows groups of 2 schools or more (or one school with more than 1,000 students) to create an IPZ which would allow an outside organization to manage these schools and give the “zone” autonomy over things like budget, hiring, curriculum, etc. Essentially third-partying away the public good, but doesn’t “partnership” sounds so much better than “takeover”?

The IPZ can be triggered in two main ways.

  1. Through local initiative of school committee members, a superintendent, a mayor, a teachers group or union, and parents. .
  2. Through the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Commissioner’s choice from schools determined to be “underperforming” by high stakes testing metrics.

The process would then call for proposals jointly with an outside entity that may include nonprofit charter operators and higher ed institutions….

If past is prologue, the results should look familiar. Brown University Annenberg Institute’s 2016 report “Whose Schools?” analyzed the board composition of charter schools in Massachusetts. 60% of charter schools in the Commonwealth had no parent representation at all. 31% of charter board members were from the corporate sector, heavily from finance.

We should all look forward to our IPZs filled with executives from places like TD Bank, who certainly might live in the “region,”, but have no respect for Boston’s biggest neighborhood.

It is especially worrisome that IPZs will be inevitably pushed on communities of color, continuing a nationwide trend of stripping away voice from families of color from Philadelphia to Chicago, Detroit to New Orleans.

A 2015 Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools “Out Of Control” report examined the disenfranchisement of black and brown families through mechanisms such as appointed school boards, and state and district turnovers. In their 2014–15 analysis, there were 113 state takeover districts nationwide. 96 were handed to charter operators. 98% of affected students were Black and/or Latinx. In New Orleans, parents had to navigate 44 different governing authorities; in Detroit, 45.

The most important innovation of all would be the full funding of schools in poor communities.

He concludes:

In no place where black and brown families are the majority in the school district is the innovation of a fully funded quality public school with adequate staffing, special education services, mental health supports, art and music, full-time librarians, and school nurses ever even attempted.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Inequity, Innovation, Massachusetts, New Orleans, Privatization, Segregation

Democrats Who Support Charters Now Face Criticism in Presidential Contest

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2019 //
82

 

It’s about time. A story in the Los Angeles Times notes that those Democratic candidates who supported charters (and still do) are facing a backlash by their party’s voters. The wave of teachers’ strikes have brought into sharp relief the fact that most families enroll their children in public schools, not charter schools; that charter schools are a priority for Republicans, Wall Street, and far-right libertarians like Betsy DeVos; and that support for public schools is a bedrock principle of the Democratic Party.

The candidate who was most outspoken as a supporter of both charters and vouchers was Cory Booker. He worked in alliancewith anti-union Governor Chris Christie to bring chartersto Newark. He worked closely with Betsy Dezvos and gave a speech to her organization. He was honored by the rightwing Manhattan Institute for supporting school choice. He wanted to turn Newark into the New Orleans of the North, with no public schools and no teachers’ union. He still defends that record.

Michael Bloomberg was a big supporter of charters in New York City and favored them over the public schools he took control of. He’s now out of the race, so no need to worry other than that he will find a Democratic DeVos to fund. He despises public schools.

Michael Bennett of Colorado supported charters when he was superintendent of schools in Denver. Governor Hickenlooper appointed Bennett to the Senate.

Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State did not stand up to Bill Gates after the Washington State Supreme Court decided that charter schools and not entitled to receive public money. Gates persuaded his friends in the legislature to give lottery money to charters, and Gov. Inslee neither signed nor vetoed the law, allowing Gates to get state funding. Not a profilein courage.

The election of 2020 will be a deciding moment, when Democratic candidates are asked to declare whether they support the public schools, or the privately-managed, scandal-ridden charters that enroll 6% of the nation’s students.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Orleans, Newark, Privatization, Scandals, School Choice

Mercedes Schneider: Louisiana Legislature Requires NOLA Charters to Add a Parent Member to Board

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2019 //
2

Well, here is a shocking story, as told by Mercedes Schneider. The Louisiana legislature has passed a law requiring all charter schools in New Orleans to have a parent of a child in the school or alumnus to be member of its board. Next year, the charters will have to have boards in which at least 60 percent are locals and reflect the gender and racial composition of the neighborhood.

This might cause panic at the Walton Family Foundation, which apparently thinks that charters must be governed by hedge fund managers.

The 2018-19 school year was the first in which New Orleans charter schools were required to include at least one parent or school alumnus on their boards. In 2019-20, all New Orleans charter schools (except those drawing from the entire state) must be comprised of boards in which both gender and racial makeup of the board must reflect that of the locality of the school– with at least 60 percent of board members being locals.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Orleans

Cory Booker Opens His Presidential Campaign in New Orleans

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2019 //
55

Cory Booker sent a complicated message at his campaign kickoff in New Orleans at Xavier University, where he was sponsored by charter chain and spoke to students.

He told the audience that the power of the people outweighs the power of money.

This is inspirational indeed. It says that those of us fighting the power of the Walton family, the Sackler family, the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the DeVos family, Paul Singer, and the many other billionaires attacking our public schools will WIN and the billionaires WILL LOSE.

We–the people–will defeat the powerful.

We will not let them close our public schools with their lies and propaganda. We will not let them turn other American cities into New Orleans.

We want every aspirant for the presidency in 2020–any party–to say where they stand on the issue of the future of public schools, the future of the teaching profession, and the future of collective bargaining.

Thanks, Cory, for reminding us that the power of the people can beat the billionaires and Wall Street, especially those privatizers and hedge funders now supporting your campaign. Itworked for Obama, but it won’t work for you. We know now about the privatization movement.

Tell us where you stand on privatization, the teaching profession, and unions. Or let us guess.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, New Orleans, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teacher Tenure, Teachers, Unions

New Orleans: Major Scandal, Principal with Criminal History Hired, Allegations of Sexual Improprieties

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2019 //
11

This story is one for the record books. When Reformers boast about New Orleans, tell them this story. Open the link and read the transcript of the recording of a conversation between the principal and a teacher. It is a weird story, and the bottom line seems to be a lack of oversight by any central authority.

A federal sexual harassment trial begins Monday in New Orleans against former elementary school principal Stanley Roy Green.

The allegations against Green include a shocking audio recording, made by former William J. Fischer social studies teacher Lindsay Garcia, who claims Green is the man in the recording telling her he wants to “snatch up, kidnap, subdue… someone we both know.”

The evidence presented by Garcia in court also raises questions about a lack of oversight for the 42 charter school organizations now operating most of New Orleans’ public schools. One concern is how they hire staff – a concern that already helped inspire a change in Louisiana law last year to prohibit schools of any kind from employing convicted felons.

The evidence in the court record shows that Algiers Charter Schools Association, which operates Fischer, hired Green even after he acknowledged having a criminal record, after his Louisiana teaching certificate had already been revoked for failure to disclose a felony conviction, even though his application stated that he had been asked to resign from a previous job because a coworker had accused him of “physical abuse in the workplace.”

Green presented himself as “Dr. Stanley Green.” He claimed on his application to Algiers Charter to have a PhD. from Maryville University in St. Louis, conferred in May 2015. But he later testified in a deposition, under questioning from Garcia’s attorney, that Maryville never gave him the doctorate because he still owed the university money.

What’s more, WWL-TV found that another charter organization, New Orleans College Prep, hired Green as a principal right after he was fired by Algiers Charter for sexual harassment. New Orleans College Prep’s excuse: Green simply left his experience at Algiers Charter off his resume and acted like he hadn’t been principal at Fischer at all.

“He never indicated he was employed during the gap and was dealing with personal family issues,” said Troave Profice, New Orleans College Prep’s director of communications.

Algiers Charter Schools Association’s interim CEO, Stuart Gay, stood by his organization’s decision to hire Green after performing a full background check.

“In accordance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Algiers Charter does not automatically disqualify candidates due to their criminal record,” Gay said.

It’s unclear if the new state law, Act 634 of 2018, could run afoul of federal law.

Charter schools do not have to comply with state Education Department requirements for teachers and administrators to hold certain certificates. But the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) is in the process of promulgating new policies for issuing other authorizations for charter school educators.

Green had his Louisiana teaching certificate revoked in 2012 by BESE, which said he failed to disclose a 1998 conviction in Jefferson Parish on access device fraud. The conviction, which was for fraudulent credit cards, has since been expunged, but BESE certification rules still required it to be disclosed.

The new state law also prohibits schools from hiring people with convictions, even if they have been expunged.

He was also convicted of possession of an unregistered firearm in New Orleans in 1994, which was later expunged, and arrested in 2008 in Fulton County, Ga., for simple battery against his brother-in-law, according to his deposition testimony last year.

On his 2016 application to Algiers Charter, Green admitted that he had been convicted of crimes, but claimed his brother had used his identity to commit the offenses.

Green told Algiers Charter in his 2016 job application that he was in the process of applying for a new Louisiana educator’s certificate. But BESE records show he had not applied again since being denied in October 2012.

But Green still had active educator’s certificates in Georgia and Missouri. After leaving New Orleans’ Recovery School District in 2011, he became a teacher in St. Louis Public Schools and then principal at St. Louis College Prep, a charter school in Missouri.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New Orleans

New Orleans: The Last Public School Closes, Despite Objections of Parents and Students and Alumni

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2018 //
13

The Orleans Parish School Board closed the last public school in New Orleans, in a meeting room filled with protesting parents, students and alumni of McDonough 35. New Orleans is now the first city in the United States without a public school. The board disregarded the protesters.

Why do parents and students fight for schools that have been labeled “failing” by authorities? To find out, read Eve Ewing’s book “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” about Rahm Emanuel’s brutal closure of 50 public schools in a single day. There too, parents, students, and teachers were disregarded. They were fighting for values that Reformers don’t understand: tradition, community, history, relations between families and schools, a spirit of connectedness that binds past to present. These are values that Reformers are determined to stamp out.

New Orleans is the Crown Jewel of “Reform,” even though 40 percent of its charter schools have been labeled either D or F by the state, and every one of these schools is segregated. On the much treasured measure of test scores, New Orleans ranks below the state average, in a state that is one of the lowest performing in the nation (and whose ranking on NAEP dropped in 2017). For more than a decade, Louisiana has been controlled by Reformers. Its leader currently is John White. The only jurisdiction in the nation that has worse test scores than Louisiana is Puerto Rico. And New Orleans is below the state average. What a triumph for Reform (not)!

Here is the story of another Reform takeover:

The Orleans Parish School Board has chosen InspireNOLA Charter Schools as the future operator of McDonogh 35 Senior High School, positioning New Orleans to be the nation’s first major city with an all-charter school district.

At the board’s November meeting Thursday, Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. recommended and received approval for InspireNOLA’s application to start a new high school starting in August 2019. It was unclear last month if the operator’s application was designed for McDonogh 35, but on Thursday (Dec. 20) the new school was added to the OneApp school selection system as McDonogh 35 College Preparatory High School.

The school board’s charter agreement with InspireNOLA requires the school to keep its name, school colors and mascot, the Roneagle.

McDonogh 35 was founded in 1917 as the first public high school in Louisiana for black children. Although the former magnet school was once considered a “School of Academic Achievement” by the Louisiana Department of Education, its academic ranking has declined since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The “D”-rated school now teaches 451 students in the St. Bernard area, according to state data.

The Orleans Parish School Board is trying to revive struggling schools such as McDonogh 35 by either closing them or turning their operations over to charters. The school district currently manages McDonogh 35 directly, but the board voted Thursday night to award a “short-term operator” contract to InspireNOLA to teach the school’s remaining 10th, 11th and 12th graders starting in August 2019.

A copy of the new contract wasn’t immediately available Thursday, but the district’s plan is to have InspireNOLA phase out the direct-run school until all current students have either graduated or transferred elsewhere within the next two school years.

The short-term contract, district sources say, essentially creates two schools on the McDonogh 35 campus: one for current students and a new school for freshmen who enroll in August. This implies McDonogh 35 will receive two individual school performance scores from the Louisiana Department of Education when its 2019 freshmen are graded in November 2020…

More than 100 parents, students and advocates weighed in on the district’s actions for more than two hours during the public comment period at Thursday’s meeting. Dozens of attendees had to stand.

A representative from New Schools for New Orleans, an InspireNOLA administrator, and an Edna Karr High sophomore were among the handful of residents who struggled to speak in favor of InspireNOLA as opponents shouted over them. Those who were against chartering every school in the city included state Rep. Joseph Bouie, D-New Orleans, McDonogh 35 alumni and dozens of education advocates from Louisiana and out of state…

Gertrude Ivory, president of McDonogh 35’s alumni group, told the school board its “experiment” with charters is “failing” the city’s families. McDonogh 35 alumna Yvette Alexis said the school’s performance scores have dropped because the district “pulled resources” and “didn’t fill vacancies.” Alexis’s claims came after district employees told board members Tuesday the school is projected to have a $145,000 deficit in fiscal year 2019.

Tomme Denney, a McDonogh 35 senior and student ambassador, asked the school board to continue running his school. He has witnessed “a vast amount of growth” among students in this year alone, he said.

“Stop the decline of the school, which has been used to justify giving the school a private operator,” Denney said.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Fraud, New Orleans, Privatization, Resistance
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