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Ohio: Districts Demand Return of Millions Allotted to “Parasitical” Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2016 //
10

William Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy, has been tracking the movement by school districts to bill the state for money lost to charters. Ohio has many charters rated D or F by the state that divert funding from public schools.  Be sure to read the linked letter.

He writes in his latest post:

“Morgan Local School Board invoices the state for $1,138,235 in local funds deducted for charter schools

 

“School districts continue to invoice the state. The Morgan invoice is for local levy funding only. Superintendent Lori Snyder-Lowe’s thoughtful letter to the state emphasizes the education abuse suffered by charter students residing in the Morgan Local School District. The dismal performance of charters should be of grave concern to all local district officials and educators. Is it not a fiduciary responsibility of local school officials to ensure their students the most efficacious educational opportunity possible?

 

“State officials have the constitutional responsibility to secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools. The Ohio system was declared unconstitutional four times by the Ohio Supreme Court. Since those declarations, $7 billion has been deducted from school districts for the parasitical charter industry.”

William Phillis

Ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Ohio

Cleveland: Charter School Teachers Form a Union

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2016 //
5

One of the main reasons that billionaires like the Waltons fund charters is to cripple the teachers’ unions. Ninety percent of charter schools are non-union. The teachers are often unlicensed and lack certification. A large number are Teach for America and have no intention of making teaching their career. Charter teachers serve at-will and may be fired for any reason.

 

The American Federation of Teachers announced that charter teachers in Cleveland have joined their union.

 
Educators Win Historic Union Charter School Organizing Victory in Cleveland

 

Teachers and Support Staff at University of Cleveland Preparatory School Join the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers to Address High Turnover and Improve Education for Their Students

 

CLEVELAND—In a historic first for Cleveland, teachers and support staff at University of Cleveland Preparatory School voted overwhelmingly today to join the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers, hoping to improve conditions for students and teachers. UCP is part of the network of charter schools operated by Cleveland-based I CAN SCHOOLS.

 

The successful vote represents the first union charter school organizing victory in Cleveland, adding to a growing national movement of charter school educators demanding a voice for their profession.

 

Educators across the I CAN SCHOOLS chain are organizing to form a union to challenge the conditions that lead to high teacher turnover. Teachers and support staff say lack of job security has a chilling effect on raising concerns or suggestions to better support students’ individual needs. Teachers have had no voice in professional development or their evaluation process.

 

Today’s win was hard-earned. In 2014, in response to teachers’ organizing efforts, I CAN SCHOOLS undertook a brazen anti-educator campaign. Seven teachers who were instrumental in union organizing were fired as punishment.

 

In spite of this, teachers did not back down. They continued their organizing efforts and remained committed to a shared vision of real partnership among families, the administration and teachers; transparency in school policy, procedures and decision-making; a strong voice for educators to promote student achievement; reasonable expectations and workload; adequate staffing; protected planning time; educational support; and accountability. Families of I CAN students joined the effort by issuing an open letter to the administration demanding turnover be addressed, demanding meetings with members of the administration and circulating an online petition to support teachers.

 

“This takes us one giant step closer to our goal of a contract for educators and support staff that improves school accountability, respects our professionalism and gives us a strong voice to advocate for students,” said Abi Haren, a second-grade assistant teacher at UCP.

 

Haren was among the fired I CAN teachers. All seven were reinstated with full back pay after the National Labor Relations Board found I CAN had violated their rights by wrongfully terminating them based on their union activity. In total, 17 unfair labor practice charges were filed against I CAN SCHOOLS in 2014. Currently the National Labor Relations Board is investigating additional unfair labor practice charges involving illegal surveillance and retaliation against pro-union teachers at UCP and Northeast Ohio College Preparatory School.

 

“These hardworking educators deserve a seat at the table, and the students and families served by UCP deserve teachers and staff who are empowered to deliver the best education possible—that’s what forming a union is all about. We’re proud to welcome our new union sisters and brothers at UCP,” said Cleveland Teachers Union President David Quolke, who is an AFT vice president. “Those closest to the education process must have a voice in education policy and practice.”

 

“We welcome the teachers and support staff of UCP into our union. We know we share many common challenges and a common vision of professionalism and high-quality, student-centered education,” said Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper, also an AFT vice president.

 

“This vote to have a voice through a union is a historic move for the charter educators in Cleveland. There is now a growing movement of teachers at charter schools across the country who are committed to raising their voices so they can better advocate for the students they serve,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

 

“I CAN teachers and staff have overcome serious anti-union tactics, and they have stuck together and united with I CAN families to speak out for their students. They want the same things all educators want: a voice in decisions that affect their students, fair evaluations that help them grow professionally, due process protections, and transparency and accountability from their employers.”

Categories Education Reform, Ohio, Support for public schools, Unions

Mercedes Schneider: Save Detroit’s Children from Predatory Reformers

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2016 //
8

Mercedes Schneider, relentless investigator, here analyzes a proposal to turn Detroit public schools into an all-charter district.

 

Detroit is drowning in debt, most of it incurred since the state took control of the district. In particular, state-appointed superintendent Robert Bobb added $300 million in debt during his brief tenure.

 

The district’s schools are in terrible physical condition, unfit in many cases for children or adults.

 

The reformer proposal: fix everything by turning every school into a charter. Open and close charters at will.

 

Only a corporate reformer could come up with a plan that completely ignores the needs of students and teachers. Students need stability and security, not churn. Teachers need an environment conducive to teaching and learning, one where they get to know their students and can plan ahead and work together as a team.

 

Mercedes checks out the fellow who made this dumb proposal. It turns out he is affiliated with the Mackinac Center, Governor Rick Snyder’s favorite policy tank, which enjoys funding by the Koch brothers.

 

He is also associated with groups sponsoring charters in Ohio. Mercedes documents the multiple embarrassments of the scandal-ridden charter sector in Ohio.

 

Why would anyone want to inflict disruption on the children of Detroit? It is not for their benefit. Who does benefit?

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Detroit, Education Reform, Ohio

John Kasich Claims He Saved the Cleveland Schools

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2016 //
43

I am having a bad week. I watched the Democratic debate last night and the Republican debate tonight. My brain hurts. Who thought it was a good idea to put the candidates and the public through a marathon of endurance?

 

Tonight the Republicans all praised charter schools. Donald Trump loves charters. So do all the other Republicans. They all dismiss public schools. They agree that this is a great nation, the greatest nation in the world, but they don’t give the teachers and educators of our public schools any credit.

 

Most surprising, however, was John Kasich’s boast that he worked in a bipartisan way to reform the schools of Cleveland. Does anyone fact check? The federal government reports that 100% of the students in Cleveland are poor. On NAEP, Cleveland is one of the lowest performing urban districts in the nation. It has made meager gains during Kasich’s time in office.

 

I wish some journalist would ask the Kasich campaign for evidence of the reform in Cleveland’s schools for which he claims credit.

 

I have no particular animus towards Kasich. All of the candidates tonight showed no insight into any aspect of American education.

Categories Education Reform, Ohio, Politics

Jan Resseger: Kasich is “Delusional” about School Reform in Ohio

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2016 //
11

Jan Resseger, a social justice activist in Ohio, writes here about John Kasich and his lack of knowledge of his own education policies. In one of the most recent presidential debates, Kasich boasted about the rebirth of Cleveland public schools and pretended that he knew how to fix the Detroit public schools.

 

As Resseger writes, he is wrong about Cleveland and Detroit. His policy has been to disinvest in public schools and to rely on charters. Ohio has some of the worst charters in the nation. His plan for Youngstown was hatched behind closed doors, and it follows the ALEC script of a state takeover, followed by privatization.

 

Kasich implied that mayoral control might fix the public schools in Detroit, but mayoral control hasn’t helped the public schools of Cleveland. Of course, he didn’t know that Detroit had mayoral control for a few years, but the voters vetoed it. That mayor, if memory serves, subsequently went to jail for something he did wrong.

 

Kasich plays the role of the adult among a bunch of squabbling kids. But when it comes to education, he is as clueless as the rest of them.

Categories Corporate Reform, Detroit, Education Reform, Ohio

Ohio Resident: John Kasich Is No Moderate

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2016 //
22

The mainstream media has been trying to portray John Kasich, a compassionate conservative who cares about everyone, not just corporations.

 
This resident of Ohio disagrees, in a comment posted here:

 

 

Let’s remember that Kasich eliminated the tangible personal property tax last year. This tax on businesses helped fund school districts (along with other entities dependent on levies such as park districts), and a lot of school districts are hurting as a result.

 
It wasn’t so much that years ago state Republicans decided to do away with this tax in the name of making the state “more business friendly,” it’s that they intentionally did not take action to find another source of support for the entities that would be affected. There was push back, and a freeze on what had been the gradual phase-out of this tax was put in place.

 
Kasich lifted the freeze and ended the gradual phase-out in one motion. Poof — an important revenue stream was gone!

 
One result will be school districts asking for higher levies, as mine is about to do. The effect is money from my and my neighbors’ pockets will go to fund a tax break for businesses. And even if the levies all pass, there will still be cutbacks, just not as severe.

 
This is similar to what happened when Kasich did away with the Ohio estate tax. Local governments lost a fair amount of revenue, and local services were cut and taxes were raised to make up the difference.

 
When Kasich gets teary-eyed and starts talking about America’s strength being its people, how it is up to all of us, he is really saying, “When I am President, all of you are on your own.”

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Ohio, Politics

The Scandal in John Kasich’s Backyard

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2016 //
9

Readers of this blog have been informed of the misuse of taxpayer monies to pay off campaign contributors in Ohio, if they were canny enough to invest in charter schools. The general public is not. They keep hearing from the mainstream media that Kasich is the moderate in the race. The MSM forgets that Kasich tried to eliminate collective bargaining, but the voters of Ohio overturned the law Kasich pushed through. The MSM is completely clueless about the ongoing charter scandals in Ohio, where for-profit charter owners give big bucks to the Republican party or individual legislators and get preferential treatment.

 

Here is one effort to tell the charter scandal story.

 

Here is another. This is a big story, the story of ECOT, the state’s most profitable online charter, whose owner donates about a quarter million to politicians every year while he cleans up.

 

Here is an excerpt from the story linked above in “Plunderbund” about ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) and the plundering of taxpayers and children:

 

Question: Would the Columbus Dispatch cover a story in which the Superintendent of the Columbus City Schools hired his own two privately-held companies to provide services for the school district at a cost of over $22,000,000 per year without having to disclose how that money was being spent?

 

And then what if that same Columbus City Schools superintendent bought two $300,000 homes, paid them off, gave one to his daughter (who he hired to help run one of his companies), then proceeded to purchase a million-dollar estate?

 

And what if he did so while still managing to donate well over $200,000 per year to political campaigns?

 

And what if this all occurred while the district was putting up performance numbers that are lower than the district’s results that the Dispatch loves to criticize on such a regular basis?

 

Would that superintendent have lasted the sixteen years that Lager has been in power while receiving significant raises every year?

 

Ask yourself a question, what would your annual income have to be to so readily give away $246,000 per year to people who “supposedly” aren’t giving you anything in return? If Lager worships at the Republican altar, then his “tithe of 10%” would put his annual income in the neighborhood of $2,460,000!

 

Would the Columbus Dispatch ignore this story if the Columbus City Schools superintendent was making over $2 million per year?

 

Now to be fair and bring this to an apples-to-apples comparison, since Columbus has 3.5 times as many students as ECOT, the Columbus City Schools superintendent’s annual salary would have to be at least $8,610,000 to be comparable to equivalent to Lager’s annual take. Would the Columbus Dispatch write about that? Would they create a cheap graphic to post in the left margin every time they wrote about this scandal?

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio

John Kasich and Charter Schools: Privatization and Fraud

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2016 //
11

The media has swallowed the myth that John Kasich is a moderate. They have forgotten that he tried to eliminate collective bargaining but was rebuked by Ohio’s voters. Certainly the media doesn’t know about the shameful profiteering in Ohio’s charter sector, where wealthy campaign contributors have been excused from any accountability. Just keep those campaign bucks coming!

 

At least the Cleveland Plain Dealer knows the story. Kasich’s campaign manager is Beth Hansen. Her husband David Hansen resigned as director of charter school operations after he presented phony data to the feds and won a $71 million grant to create more charter schools. Unfortunately–it must have been a “lapse of judgment”–he neglected to include in his report to the US Department of Education the F grades of Ohio’s online charter schools (a source of great profit to their owners and a reliable source of political donations).

 

In an editorial the newspaper said:

 

At this point, it’s nearly impossible to trust anything the Ohio Department of Education has to say on charter school performance, the subject of so much chicanery last year that in November the federal government froze a giant $71 million charter school expansion grant to Ohio.

 

And it just gets worse.

 

The latest news? A Jan. 29 letter from ODE to federal regulators sent in an attempt to win back the grant reveals that Ohio has nearly 10 times as many failing charter schools as it first reported to the U.S. Department of Education in its 2015 charter-school-expansion grant application.

 

The letter was in response to a federal government request for more information from Ohio as it reviews the state’s once-successful grant that would allow the best charter schools to expand using federal funds.

 

The state department of education seems to be more committed to the well-being of the charter industry than to Ohio’s children, say the editorial writers.

 

Here is the latest restatement of the charter data:

 

In the letter, the state increased the number of failing charter schools to 57 in 2013-2014 compared with six in the original application. That’s a nearly tenfold difference. At the same time, the letter reported 59 high-performing charter schools instead of 93, a 36 percent decrease.

 

So Ohio has 57 failing charter schools, and 59 high-performing charter schools. Picking a successful charter is akin to flipping a coin. Meanwhile, scarce taxpayer dollars are subsiding an inexcusable number of failing charter schools. And the state wants more.

 

If you want a candidate to take from the middle class and give to the rich, if you want a candidate to protect the powerful, if you want a candidate to attack unions and working people, Kasich is for you.

 

Valerie Strauss posted earlier today a review of Kasich’s education record. It is a mess and nothing to boast about. He is no more a moderate than Cruz, Rubio, or Bush.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Ohio

Dayton, Ohio: Most Charters Fail to Teach K-3 Reading

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2016 //
10

Most Dayton charter schools received an F grade from the state of Ohio for failing to teach children in grades K-3 to read.

 

Most local charter schools got F’s in K-3 Literacy on the recently released state report card, failing to help struggling kindergarten through third-grade readers make adequate improvement.

 

Of the 15 Montgomery County charter schools that were graded in K-3 Literacy improvement, 13 received F’s. Charter schools accounted for eight of the 10 worst K-3 Literacy improvement scores in the county (of 69 graded schools), with two Dayton Public Schools also on that list.

 

State Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, wondered whether smaller charter schools are making the changes required by the state’s new K-3 requirements, as well as larger public districts that have more infrastructure. She also advised patience with any new measure.

 

“K-3 Literacy is a new metric, and I think the jury is still out on exactly what it is telling us,” said Lehner, chair of the Senate Education Committee. “But this is troublesome. We’ll have to look at this much closer, and hear from the charters why they think we’re seeing this.”

 

The two top scoring charters managed to teach half their students to read.

 

While top charters scored better than DPS, the worst charters scored worse than the public district. Only two of Dayton Public’s 19 graded schools scored below 15 percent on the K-3 Literacy measure, while more than half of charters (eight) scored that poorly. The only graded Greene County charter, Summit Academy, also received an F.

 

Meanwhile Governor John Kasich–and every other Republican candidate– is in New Hampshire and Iowa, touting the success of charter schools. When will our elected officials be honest and admit that there is no secret recipe in charter schools? In Ohio, public schools outperform charter schools, yet state officials are obsessed with charters, charters, charters.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Ohio

Plunderbund: Kasich and State Superintendent Plotted Youngstown Takeover

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2015 //
22

The Ohio blogger Plunderbund produces documents to show that Governor John Kasich and State Superintendent Richard Ross planned the takeover of the Youngstown City school district. Up until now, they claimed that they were responding to a request from Youngstown leaders to get involved. But Plunderbund says Kasich and Ross initiated the process, not Youngstown residents.

 

The plan involves having the state takeover after the school board resigns, the local superintendent resigns, and the union contracts are canceled. Then…we may speculate that the goal is to turn the district into an all-charter district, which would meet ALEC specifications. This kind of structural change doesn’t improve schools or education; it doesn’t reduce class sizes or provide more teachers of the arts, more libraries, or more resources for the schools that need them most. It is a fast-track to privatization. We still need to see a proof point to show that privatization has anything to do with improving education.

 

We know what good education is, and it is not produced by driving out experienced teachers and bringing in low-wage, inexperienced temps and new technology. For examples, look at the best public and private schools in Ohio or any other state. What do they value? Experienced teachers, small classes, the arts, well-maintained facilities, and a supportive community. Neither charters nor vouchers produces those conditions.

 

The irony of the Youngstown plan is that, as Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio showed with state data, the charter schools in Youngstown do not perform as well as the public schools that Governor Kasich wants to get rid of. If the state wants to improve test scores in Youngstown, it should close down those low-performing charter schools.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization
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