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Oklahoma: For-Profit Online Charter Chain Gobbles Up Rural Districts

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2019 //
23

 

Oklahoma has underfunded its public schools over the past decade. Many districts have switched to a four-day week to save money.

Some rural districts, facing insolvency, are turning their schools over to Epic, a for-profit online charter chain, which can balance the books by putting kids online and cutting teachers’ jobs.

Like all online charter schools, EPIC overstates its “gains” while its actual results are less than mediocre.

“To save his financially imperiled school district, Panola Superintendent Brad Corcoran in 2017 pitched a plan to convert the traditional public district into a charter school. 

“In becoming a charter, Panola Public Schools would turn over its management to a company affiliated with Epic Charter Schools, the largest online school in the state. The school board agreed. 

“The Epic-related firm contributed $100,000 toward Panola’s debt as part of the agreement. That company manages the small district for a more than 10 percent cut of its funding.  Panola’s high school students now have the option to attend most classes online from home.

“The deal was unprecedented. Not only was it one of the first conversions-to-charter in the state, it allowed Epic’s company to operate a school and gain many benefits denied other charter schools: It could tap into and spend local property tax revenue to cover costs of student transportation, school buildings and sports facilities, like traditional school districts.

“And Epic didn’t stop at Panola….”

Epic has 23,000 in Oklahoma and it is growing in California as well.

”Trice Butler, superintendent of Wilburton Public Schools, which neighbors Panola, said she is concerned that Epic is looking to replicate what it’s done in Panola in other districts.

“Butler said her primary concern is her belief that students at Epic are receiving a subpar education. She cited Epic’s low high school graduation rates and high numbers of students leaving Epic and returning to traditional schools with academic credit insufficient for the time they were enrolled. (Epic maintains that some students come to them behind in credits and the school helps them catch up.)

“Epic’s presence in Panola has also raised concerns about aggressive attempts to attract students and teachers from surrounding school districts even in the middle of the academic year.

”Panola spent $650 for postcards, and at least some were sent to addresses in nearby Wilburton school district, promising a customized education for students and touting the school’s “double-digit academic growth.”

“Butler called this “predatory marketing” and said the statements made on the postcard are misleading.

“Panola elementary students did post positive academic growth on the latest school report cards, with 80 percent of students improving between 2016-17 and 2017-18. But only 27 percent of those students scored on grade level, compared with 57 percent in Wilburton and 51 percent statewide.”

Oklahoma has followed a policy of large tax cuts for corporations, especially those in the oil, gas, and fracking industry, and budget cuts for education and other public services. The state is abandoning its future.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, For-Profit, Funding, Oklahoma, Online Education, Virtual Charter Schools

Oklahoma: Virtual Charter School is an EPIC Failure

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
7
John Thompson, historian and recently retired teacher, wonders how much longer Oklahoma’s low-performing Epic virtual charter school can survive scrutiny and continue raking in the big bucks. Even Republicans are beginning to wonder why they are pouring good money into this sinkhole. How long can a failing school avoid accountability?

Even many of the staunchest pro-charter corporate reformers are criticizing virtual charters for their poor outcomes and draining resources from public schools. For instance, Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, criticizes the high rates of “churn” they contribute to, their low graduation rates, and low levels of student proficiency growth. Online charters don’t need to accept the costs that brick and mortar schools must fund, but fair is fair, and virtual schools like Oklahoma’s Epic charters also need to find money for expenses that neighborhood schools aren’t burdened with. 

Ziebarth notes that their poor performance means that virtual charters must find other ways to grow. They must pay for their “aggressive marketing” campaigns. For instance, Tulsa Public Radio reports, “Epic uses giveaways of big-ticket items like concert tickets to reward referrals, and it recently opened a heavily branded children’s play area at (Oklahoma City’s) Penn Square Mall.”

https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/post/oklahoma-lawmakers-interim-study-virtual-charter-performance-inconclusive

https://nondoc.com/2018/09/21/okleg-should-conduct-cost-benefit-analysis-of-virtual-charters/

https://oklahomawatch.org/2018/11/30/virtual-charter-schools-founders-ramp-up-political-contributions/

And recently, Epic supporters were forced to spend $180,000 for the 2018 political campaign season. Co-founder Ben Harris said that the reason why Epic ramped up donations was “we kinda felt like it was us against the entire traditional education establishment.”

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/government-and-politics/us-vs-them-mentality-leads-epic-charter-school-founders-to/article_04398428-d88b-5f8b-8e48-817c88108de7.html#tncms-source=infinity-scroll-summary-siderail-latest

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/state-and-regional/oklahoma-watch-epic-virtual-charter-school-leaders-ramp-up-political/article_364f2619-3a77-5484-bd75-c5d9c8af8139.html

I kid the private charter “juggernaut” leader. But, seriously, he may be facing more unanticipated operating costs. Until recently Epic has successfully evaded efforts to hold the virtual charters accountable. Republican Senator Ron Sharp became so frustrated at trying to obtain meaningful data on Epic’s performance that he used a wonky state-of-the-art research term to characterize the quality of their numbers; he said, “This is crap.”

After Epic Superintendent David Chaney was criticized for “skewing” the data, Chaney replied that they just did things “differently.”

https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/post/oklahoma-lawmakers-interim-study-virtual-charter-performance-inconclusive

https://nondoc.com/2018/09/21/okleg-should-conduct-cost-benefit-analysis-of-virtual-charters/

But more costs may be coming to the virtual charter. A previous investigation into 2013 allegations of fraud by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation was turned over to the Attorney General’s Office, but no charges were filed and no official conclusions were announced. But the Tulsa World’s Andrea Eger reports that the OSBI is “once again” investigating Epic, so it is “now the target of scrutiny by state and federal law enforcement in addition to state lawmakers.”

Apparently Epic is being investigated for dually enrolling students who attend private schools. Eger reports that charter authorizers are provided a contract template which “specifically prohibits the funding or offering of any instruction to home-schooled students or private school students.” It also explains that “charter schools ‘shall implement and enforce policies and procedures prohibiting enrollment of students on a part time basis,’ with one or two limited exceptions allowed under state law.”

Epic’s Harris responded to questions on whether it is illegal to be paid for educating students attending other private schools by saying, “Not to our knowledge. And I would also say that we’re not aware of the specific situations that you’re talking about. It’s hard to imagine how they could fulfill our requirements while going to another school full time.”

Harris also told the World, “We don’t think that our private company should have to make any disclosures that any other private company shouldn’t have just because who our customers are.”  Eger explained however, that Epic’s co-founders are “both owners of Epic Youth Services LLC, a separate company with which the school contracts for its operation. That contract indicates an annual cost of $125,000 for ‘development services’” plus a 10 percent share of the school’s collected revenues as an ‘indirect cost allocation.’”

Eger “put that 10 percent into context,” explaining that “Epic Charter Schools has been allocated $112.9 million in state aid funding alone for fiscal year 2019.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/epic-charter-schools-under-investigation-by-state-federal-law-enforcement/article_22ffe5cc-b6e5-54f8-9612-4f08ae6ae3d2.html

Ironically, one of the institutions where potential misdeeds are being exposed is Facebook! The World reported:

Shelly Hickman, the school’s assistant superintendent for external affairs, then acknowledged that she had participated in an Epic parent Facebook group discussion just last week in which multiple Epic parents openly discussed how their children were enrolled in private schools and home school cooperatives and even receive credit from their Epic teachers for time spent and work done in those outside entities.

Despite its generous donations to 78 candidates for the legislature and state offices, pressure has increased since an interim legislative committee was unable to pry meaningful information from Epic this fall. Then Epic received $38.7 million in annual, midyear adjustments, as the Oklahoma City (OKCPS) and Tulsa (TPS) districts each faced $2.1 million in cuts. Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist, a longtime school choice advocate, complained that her district lost 496 students to Epic in the fall semester, as 196 Epic students returned to the TPS.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/skyrocketing-student-enrollment-nets-epic-charter-schools-nearly-million-more/article_ffe29bc2-25b6-58e2-8172-cdac83915f08.html

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/tulsa-public-schools-students-left-for-epic-virtual-school-since/article_03d32126-b3f6-5e9b-9a19-f0605014ef48.html

It won’t be easy to find understandable accountability information in the new Oklahoma Report Cards, but now that the press that is doing a great job in investigating Epic’s finance, they might also find readers interested in the virtual schools accountability data. In 2018, two Epic districts, Epic One on One Charter and Epic Blended Learning Charter, had nine schools. According to the Report Card, they enrolled 13,532. They reported test scores for 4,164 students or about 30 percent of their enrollees.

Despite their huge attrition rate, the Report Card said that both systems had attendance rates exceeding 99 percent.

Epic One on One reported 8,059 enrollees. It isn’t easy to find a meaningful presentation of the test score progress on its 2,433 test takers, but the seemingly hidden outcomes of the minority who persist until the spring testing is shocking. About 23 percent progressed to higher achievement levels.  About 36 percent of students remained on the same levels, while over 41 dropped into lower performance levels.

In theory, Epic’s Blended Learning charter would produce better outcomes. But, just over 25 percent progressed to higher achievement level.  Around 36 percent of students remained on the same levels, while a little over 38 percent dropped into lower performance levels.

https://oklaschools.com/district/growth/1115/

https://oklaschools.com/district/growth/548/

Although the recent headlines have been dominated by Eger’s excellent reporting, for several years Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer has done great investigative reporting on Epic. Until she documented Epic’s complex story, I just assumed that the virtual charter was just a case of socialism for the rich, a drag on public education funding which helped some kids who were uncomfortable in public schools but which damaged many more by increasing transiency. I no longer see it as an un-slayable dragon that must be endured. And wouldn’t it be great to see Epic held accountable by today’s federal government, as well as Facebook posts?

 https://oklahomawatch.org/2018/11/30/virtual-charter-schools-founders-ramp-up-political-contributions/

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Virtual Charter Schools

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s “Staggering” Teacher Exodus

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2019 //
16

 

John Thompson writes from Oklahoma:

The Tulsa World’s headline nailed the big picture, “‘Staggering’: 30,000 Oklahoma Teachers Have Left Profession in the Past Six Years, Report Shows.” The World’s Michael Dekker cites State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister who explained, “The loss of 30,000 educators over the past six years is staggering — and proof that our schools must have the resources to support a growing number of students with an increasing number of needs.”

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/staggering-oklahoma-teachers-have-left-profession-in-the-past-years/article_32479aa7-9877-55c9-959c-76f7332a7e7d.html

These huge losses occurred in a state which employed only 50,598 teachers in 2017-18.

Hofmeister addressed the immediate problem, “Steep budget cuts over the last decade have made the teaching profession in Oklahoma less attractive, resulting in a severe teacher shortage crisis and negative consequences for our schoolchildren.” The analysis, 2018 Oklahoma Educator Supply and Demand Report, by Naneida Lazarte Alcala, also touched on the ways that the lack of respect and the decline of teachers’ professional autonomy contributed to the massive exodus from the classroom.

https://sde.ok.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/Oklahoma%20Teacher%20Supply%20and%20Demand%20Report%202018%20February%20Update.pdf

The report showed that Oklahoma’s annual attrition rate has been 10 percent during the last 6 years, which was 30 percent more than the national average. This prompted an increase from 32 emergency certifications in 2012 to 2,915 in 2018-19. As a result, the median experience of state teachers declined by 1/5th in this short period.

Given the challenges faced by the Oklahoma City Public School System, it is noteworthy that the highest turnover rate in 2017-18 (almost 25 percent) occurred in central Oklahoma. Over 11 percent of teachers in the central region are new hires.

It should also be noted that charter schools have the highest turnover rate (almost 42 percent), even higher than that of middle schools. 

I kid my colleagues in middle school. But there is a serious point. Choice advocates have had success in their political campaign to defeat traditional public schools, but their turnover rate is another sign that the oversupply of charters shows that privatization isn’t a viable, educational alternative to neighborhood schools. 

But the financial cutbacks were not the only cause of the crisis. Alcala cites a survey of teachers who have left Oklahoma schools; 2/3rds said that increased compensation would not be enough to bring them back to the classroom.  Citing reasons that were beyond the scope of the report, 78 percent said that the quality of the work environment had declined, and nearly half said it had deteriorated a great deal.

On the other hand, the report suggested aspects of teaching conditions that merit further examination. It cited research on the negative effects of teacher turnover on student achievement, especially for low-income students. This stands in contrast with research cited by accountability-driven, competition-driven school reformers who argue that turnover isn’t necessarily bad. After all, they invested heavily in trying to identify and dismiss low-performing teachers.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228248764_Who_Leaves_Teacher_Attrition_and_Student_Achievement

The SDE study cited the value of low student-teacher ratios in terms of raising student achievement, especially for low-income students. It also noted the national pattern where education degrees have “notoriously” declined, as well as the drop in graduates in Oklahoma teacher preparation programs.

And that brings us to the unintended results of features, as opposed to bugs, in the corporate school reform movement which peaked during this era. Reformers who lacked knowledge of realities in schools misinterpreted research on California schools which supposedly said that class size reductions don’t work, and then ignored the preponderance of evidence on why class size matters. Reformers often blamed university education departments for poor student test scores, and experimented with teacher preparation shortcuts. Some reformers even said what many others felt about wanting to undermine the institution of career teaching.

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research/featured/the-class-size-debate-what-the-evidence-means-for-education-policy

https://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Summary-of-US-Class-Size-Reduction-Research.pdf

https://aacte.org/news-room/aacte-in-the-news/312-education-depts-reform-plan-for-teacher-training-gets-mixed-reviews

To understand the decline of working conditions for teachers, the teacher strike in Denver, as well as those in Oklahoma and other states, must be considered. Senator Michael Bennet, the former superintendent of the Denver schools, called for incentives in urban schools by twenty-somethings who would work for 7 to 9 years.  His hugely expensive and complicated incentive system provoked the recent strike.

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1105/01/sotu.01.html

It should have been obvious that teacher churn is bad for students, who need trusting relationships with educators who love them. A decade ago, however, edu-philanthropists and the federal government essentially imposed a rushed and risky experiment on schools in Oklahoma and across the nation. These noneducators praised the gambles as “disruptive innovation.” But they incentivized primitive teach-to-the-test malpractice and drove much of the joy of teaching and learning out of schools.

Evidence that excellent teachers were being “exited” by a flawed statistical model used in these teacher evaluation systems was ignored.  Since these policies incentivized the removal of highly paid veteran teachers during the budget crisis prompted by the Great Recession, Baby Boomers were often targeted.  This resulted in schools such as Upper Greystone, an elementary school with 24 certified staff,  which had 21 teacher vacancies at the beginning of the 2014-15 school year.   

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-teacher-churn-undermining-real-education-reform-in-dc/2012/06/15/gJQAigWcfV_story.html?utm_term=.fa0c4f7e5a2c

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2015/04/05/cognitive-dissonance-and-segregated-oklahoma-schools/

During the 1990s, education experts frequently warned that Baby Boomers would soon be retiring, and sought ways for veteran teachers to pass on their wisdom. During the last decade, however, corporate reform made the staggeringly serious mistake of undermining teachers’ autonomy in order to force educators to comply with their technocratic mandates. Veteran teachers were rightly seen as opponents to their teach-to-the-test regimes, and often they were pushed out of the profession so they wouldn’t undercut the socializing of young teachers into opposing bubble-in accountability. 

Even if we had not made another unforced error and dramatically cut education spending, failed reforms would have wasted educators’ time and energy, damaged teachers’ professionalism, and sucked much of the joy of teaching and learning out of classrooms. When the retirement and the pushing out of Baby Boomers, funding cuts, and drill-and-kill pedagogy came together during and after the Great Recession, this staggering exodus of teachers was triggered.

Categories Funding, Oklahoma, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage

Two Educators Elected to Oklahoma City Council

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2019 //
0

 

Here is a good strategy: If elected officials ignore children and educators, defeat them at the polls.

In Oklahoma City, two educators were elected to the city council. 

Oneisthe council’s first openly gay member. Theover was outspent  almost 10-1 by an oil and gas e ecitive.

Categories Oklahoma, Politics

Oklahoma: Tulsa Charter School, Mired in Chaos and Scandal, Will Close in June

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2019 //
5

The Langston Hughes Academy for Art and Technology, a Tulsa charter school, will close by the end of June.

The school has been caught up in a series of scandals. Grade tampering. Sexual misconduct. Declining enrollments. Chaos. Mismanagement. A deputy reported: “a general lack of structure and order at the school, unfilled teacher vacancies and even faculty meetings held during the day left students unsupervised to the point that there were physical assaults, drug usage, medications kept in the school’s main office being dispensed and consumed without adult supervision, and students freely leaving campus.”

The school wants more time, but is not likely to get it.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/new-issues-keep-popping-up-langston-hughes-academy-ordered-to/article_fe7f1cea-da34-52fb-9b96-c41f9c200a93.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=user-share via @tulsaworld

 

The recommendation to yank the school’s state accreditation came after state accreditation officers reportedly raised new questions about the truthfulness of the school’s student counts, its compliance with federal laws that dictate how special education students must be served and corroboration of some of the Tulsa deputy’s claims about the school not completing required criminal background checks on employees.

“If we do not see the kind of improvement and corrective action plans that have not been met after being agreed to, we as a state are going to have to answer to the Office of Inspector General and U.S. Department of Education for what we allowed to happen,” Hofmeister said. “This is not about intention. It is about capacity and what this charter school board stood before us and told us they would do — and did not do.”

School leaders, their attorney, and even state Sen. Kevin Matthews, who represents the part of Tulsa where Langston Hughes Academy is located, pleaded for more time.

Libby Adjei, who was hired as Langston Hughes’ new superintendent in early September, told the board that she had secured assistance and training for the school’s employees from wherever she could find it, including the charter’s authorizer, Langston University, and the state Department of Education.

And Langston Hughes Board President Carmen Pettie questioned why the sheriff’s office had not shared the school resource officer’s concerns with school leaders — or even made arrests based on some of the described activities.

But state board members said the documented issues were too numerous and too serious.

“What is distressing is the students have spoken with their feet,” said board member Bill Price, pointing to declining enrollment figures at the school, which has added one grade each year since it opened in 2015-16 for only freshmen. “And I know so much of the blame is deserved by the previous administration and they managed to hide it very effectively and I know it seems unfair now that this has been brought to light and it is so difficult to turn around. But I just basically don’t have confidence that the whole team is going to be able to run a school effectively.”

Board member Lee Baxter said, “Every board meeting has given Langston Hughes exactly what they wanted — more time. More time, more time, more time.”

Reports of turmoil at the four-year-old school began in April, when Rodney Clark, the founder and then-superintendent and three other staff members were suspended by the school’s governing board amid allegations of grade tampering.

The school made headlines again in October when a bus driver and football coach at the academy was charged in Tulsa County District Court with second-degree rape and making a lewd or indecent proposal to students at the school.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Privatization, Scandals

John Thompson: What Mike Petrilli Doesn’t Know About Oklahoma, Part 2

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2019 //
35

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote a three part series on education “Reform” and politics in his state.

This is part 2.

The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli seemed to be whistling through the graveyard in “The End of Education Policy.” The corporate reformer argued that “Our own Cold War pitted reformers against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw, and reached something approaching homeostasis. Resistance to education reform has not collapsed like the Soviet Union did. Far from it. But there have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily undone, at least for the next decade.”

https://edexcellence.net/articles/the-end-of-education-policy

In fact, the failed school “reform” experiment is losing politically as the public rejects test-driven, competition-driven reform. The Billionaires Boys Club and federal and state governments have wasted billions of dollars on their theories. Now their political campaign is stumbling.

Not surprisingly, the attempt to use the stresses of high stakes testing and nonstop competition between schools to remedy the stresses of poverty and trauma, created a fiasco. They used increased segregation by charter schools to counter the stress of racial segregation. They even used untested and unreliable value-added models, that are biased against teachers in high-challenge schools, in order to recruit more talent to those schools!?!?!

The Obama administration and edu-philanthropists tried to entice charters into serving more high-poverty students with hundreds of millions of dollars of grants. As the reliable Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay explains, only 18 percent on the era’s innovations produced “any positive impact on student achievement,” and “some of these positive impacts were very tiny.” And even in many charters that initially claimed to produce big test scores gains, the result was “‘quiet churn’ of students from year to year, which slows achievement for both students who change schools and those who stay.”

The ‘dirty secret’ about educational innovation

High student mobility in Milwaukee stalls achievement, despite well-planned school reforms

The Hechinger Report’s Caroline Preston describes a state-authorized charter school in Seminole, Ok. as a test case as to “whether these privately operated, publicly funded schools can open in small communities without eroding public education.” The article’s title, “A rural Charter School Splits an Oklahoma Town.” The subtitle is: A businessman makes an end run around community opponents. Now, he wants to expand others like it,” should serve as a warning.

A rural charter school splits an Oklahoma town

Even though it seems inexplicable, especially in a state that has too many rural school systems, Oklahoma allows charters in small towns like Seminole that only has around 1,600 students. If the charter school could meet its goal of serving as many as 700 students, the public school system would be wrecked.

Even more illogical is a law that allows the state Board of Education to override local decisions on granting charters. And due to one of the “reforms” in the full corporate reform agenda which was adopted at the beginning of the decade, the board is dominated in true believers by choice and the edu-politics of destruction for blowing up the “status quo.” It’s unlikely that the board will ever meet a charter application that it doesn’t love. Even if the charter isn’t capable of helping kids, it hurts the privatizers’ opponents.

Preston explains that the charter founder, Paul Campbell, runs a company, Enviro Systems, that wants graduates who could staff his business. She notes that Campbell lacked knowledge about schools, but his “can-do, pro-business attitude fits in with the ethos of this working class, Trump-supporting town.”

However, many patrons believed:

It could inappropriately blur the lines between schools and the workplace. Opponents also felt that Campbell, who had no background in education, had put together a proposal pockmarked with problems, one that didn’t offer students any opportunities they couldn’t already get from existing programs. Church services grew tense. Friendships soured.

At first glance, it might seem like Seminole is lucky that the charter’s goal was 60 students in the first year, and it only served 29. But the overall threat remains. As a former school board member said, “she worried the charter school would be a private school ‘in sheep’s clothing,’ benefiting only students of families with the means to sort out the school’s application process and ferry their kids to and from school.” And sure enough, about 45 percent the charter’s inaugural class qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, in contrast to 73 percent in the Seminole district.

And once again, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli stakes out a position about schools, a community, and a state he doesn’t know. Petrilli says of Campbell, “More power to him.” He endorses Campbell’s “vision of helping lift local school performance with market-style inducements. ‘Here is a person who is trying to bring up the quality of education in the community. He’s an employer; this is where a lot of the energy for education reform has come from, the employers who find they are just not getting the workers they need or they don’t have the schools to recruit people into the community.’”

The point should be clear. Charters have failed in terms of school improvement. Regardless of whether charter expansion is spun as a “portfolio” or an “innovation” school, it is a tool for economic gain as opposed to an education investment.

In urban districts, privatization is a means to spur gentrification, as well as to break unions. My approach has been to schmooze with Oklahoma City leaders, hoping to ground policy decisions in at least some education facts. As one of the most powerful and candid business leaders told me in response, “You may be right. I don’t know that much about education.” But low-performing schools make economic development more difficult, and “I believe economic growth will lift all boats.”

As will be explained in the next post, political and business leaders are still hearing nonstop spin from Fordham, edu-philanthropists, and portfolio advocates, and their pitch often sounds pretty good to business people who don’t know much about education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization, Testing

John Thompson: The News from Oklahoma, Part 1

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2019 //
9

This is the first of a three-part series. Last spring, Oklahoma experiences a mass teacher walkout to protest underfunding of public schools.

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, writes:

Oklahoma made national headlines in 2018 because of its teacher walkout; teachers running for the legislature; and a “Blue Wave” in Oklahoma City and the nation’s biggest congressional upset. But the election of a vocal Trump supporter as governor has emboldened privatizers. In some ways, the drama is more common in states, like Oklahoma, that have cut schools and public services in the most extreme manner. Mostly, however, the assault on the state’s schools and the teachers’ counter-attack is representative of national privatization campaign.

Test-driven, charter-driven reform failed, so now the Billionaires Boys Club is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in selling the “Portfolio Model.”

The Portfolio Model is new and different. Its strategy is the opposite: charter-driven, test-driven reform.

Seriously, the Oklahoma education crisis and teacher shortage has been extreme, but a large part of our ordeal was the predictable result of the corporate reform agenda. It was imposed on our schools just like it was across the nation. Oklahomans now need to ask what would have happened to our dramatically underfunded schools had a grassroots teachers’ revolt not rolled back the “reforms” of 2010 to 2014. We then need to ask what will happen to our still-weakened public education systems if we can’t fight off these new, supposedly kinder and gentler reforms, like the portfolio model.

Non-Oklahomans might not recognize the full, frightening message conveyed by the Oklahoman’s editorial entitled, “A Welcome Shift to Oklahoma Education Reform.” It was accompanied by a photograph of the conservative Speaker of the House Charles McCall, who now has a majority (if he doesn’t lose Republican legislators who were teachers) so large that it can’t be stalled by Democrats. McCall’s frightening glare previewed the message he conveyed to the extremely conservative newspaper editors: spending increases are needed but “We need to look at educational outcomes.” Sounding like he is oblivious to the fiasco which resulted from the accountability-driven, competition-driven experiments imposed at the beginning of the decade, the Speaker said we need to “look at both sides of the ledger.”

https://newsok.com/article/5617174/a-welcome-shift-to-oklahoma-education-reform

The editorial then quoted Senate Pro Tem Greg Treat, who leads an even more daunting Republican majority, who said that the Oklahoma City (OKCPS) and Tulsa districts (TPS) will be targeted. The Oklahoman then editorialized for Treat’s call for reforms in the urban districts, “That echoed comments Treat previously made to The Oklahoman editorial board, when he warned that continued struggles in the state’s two largest districts are ‘detrimental’ to the state’s economic future.”

For that reason, Oklahomans, as well as educators and school patrons across the nation, should review the last decade of corporate reforms. I’ll admit to being naively hopeful when the Gates Foundation announced its district-charter collaboration grants and I understood why Tulsa accepted the Gates teacher quality grant. But I had no way of knowing that the Gates Teacher Effectiveness Model (TLE) value-added teacher evaluations would become the model for the state’s dysfunctional TLE law. As the TPS leaders said at the beginning, before they fired or “exited” 260 teachers and 26 school leaders, the TLE wouldn’t become a “gotcha” system; they claimed to understand that Tulsa faced a teacher shortage, so the system would focus on improving teacher quality.

Even before the Chiefs for Change’s Deborah Gist staffed the TPS administration with nine Broad Academy graduates, Gates grants for charter/district partners required value-added school reports across district and district-authorized charters, and opening more “high-performing” charter schools in high-needs areas. Another grant funded “innovative professional development systems to create personalized learning systems for teachers;” and an “experiment with innovative modes of delivery.” After Gist took over, edu-philanthropists funded the salaries of three central office administrators, including a “director of portfolio management” to “absorb the duties of the director of partnership and charter schools.”
https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/tulsa-public-schools-teacher-evaluation-system-is-changing-culture-has/article_6be79be3-d934-5d4a-98ef-5ec90bcea9e9.html

https://www.tulsaschools.org/our-schools/charterpartner

https://www.lighthouse-academies.org/news/item/tulsa-public-schools-gets-gates-grant-to-improve-charter-collaboration/

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2014/09/OPP1114657

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/tulsa-public-schools-to-add-three-administrative-positions-paid-for/article_ca88f531-2f29-5232-88c1-0d6316957f1a.html
So, did the millions of dollars of money from Gates and other edu-philanthropists improve teaching and learning?
Because of Tulsa’s previous commitment to early education, students enter 3rd grade ahead of their peers in the OKCPS but TPS students’ progress from 3rd to 8th grade is the nation’s 7th slowest according to data from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis. Its student growth advances only 3.8 years over the next five. By contrast, OKCPS students progress 4.4 years from third to eighth grade. Despite – or because of – the district’s reforms, Tulsa has about 75 percent more inexperienced teachers than the even more challenged Oklahoma City schools.

A recent Tulsa World article praised the TPS Teacher Corp led by Quentin Liggins, the Broad-trained director of talent initiatives, calling it a success because it helped 74 emergency certified teachers secure jobs.
https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/tps-educators-discuss-benefits-of-tulsa-teacher-corps-as-program/article_bd9c898c-938e-512d-acb4-257ea9edba45.html?utm_source=Education+Watch&utm_campaign=ad277b68cb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_17_02_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0ec15fa3fb-ad277b68cb-101023449&mc_cid=ad277b68cb&mc_eid=05d2eb1443

But, that sidesteps the key question that the legislature and the governor should ask: Given all the money and effort invested in the Gates TLE, why the TPS can’t retain experienced teachers, resulting in 34 percent of TPS’s teachers being hired in the past two years?
The World enthusiastically praised the system where applicants spend “about 15 to 20 hours completing online coursework during the spring” and attend “the six-week program in June with in-classroom training.” It then quoted a Teacher Corp teacher who praised its classroom management training which “went a long way in helping Martin [the teacher] instill some order in her class of kindergartners.”

And that leads to the question that legislators should ask that will be explored in a subsequent post. Given the importance of teaching reading for comprehension, hopefully by 3rd grade, why are we dumping that responsibility on rookie, emergency certified teachers?

Could that help explain why Oklahoma is #2 in the nation in retaining k through 2nd graders?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization, Testing

Oklahoma: Businessman Splits Rural Town by Opening a Charter to Compete with Public School

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
7

I read this story with a growing sense of disgust. A businessman in Oklahoma opened a charter school in a small town to focus on career readiness and job training, functions already offered by the local public school.

This man, with no experience in education, lured 29 students to share his vision and abandon the community public school. He did so over the objections of the local school district.

Within the walls of the Academy of Seminole, eight rented rooms in a community college library, it can be hard to see why the little school has kicked up so much dust in this former oil boomtown, population 7,300. On a recent Friday, businessman and school founder Paul Campbell addressed the students, just 29 freshmen and sophomores, to tell them what it’s like to run a business.
What he dislikes? Making small talk at political events and “firing people.” What he enjoys? “I love doing something that no one thinks can be done. That’s why we’re sitting in this school.”

Campbell said the “thesis” of the school is that “on day one of your ninth grade, literally hour one … we start talking about what you want to do with your life.” Speakers have included a health care CEO, professional dancers and a speech pathologist. Academy students mapped out various careers they might pursue, and spent their first semester doing a research project on their chosen path. That focus on jobs is a direction in which more schools are headed, amid rising concern that young people are graduating unprepared for the workforce, especially in rural towns like this one. Last year Oklahoma joined a growing list of states requiring students to develop a career plan in order to graduate. And, in a sense, Campbell’s can-do, pro-business attitude fits in with the ethos of this working class, Trump-supporting town.

But while Campbell may dislike politicking, he’s had to do a lot of it to get his school off the ground and keep it going in the face of a chorus of concern from local residents. That’s because the Academy of Seminole is a rural charter school; its establishment is part of a small movement to bring this taxpayer-funded version of school choice to more remote corners of the country.

How much money will the local district lose to this charter?Will the public school lose a teacher or two? Will class sizes increase?

Oklahoma was singled out by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities as the state where general per-student funding had fallen more than any other state—by 28.2% from 2008-2018.

Because of low funding, many districts in Oklahoma offer only four days a week of school.

And we are supposed to be impressed that some egotistical businessman in Seminole, Oklahoma, has opened a charter school for 29 students?

Mike Petrilli, writing from the comfort of his think-tank perch in D.C., is delighted about the opening of a charter in a town of less than 8,000 people, where the school budget is tight. “More power to him,” says Mike.

But others say residents are right to worry about the sprouting of charters in their hometowns. Schools often play an integral role in the life of a small community, offering a central meeting place, social services and additional support. If a charter grew popular enough to draw hundreds of kids and capture those students’ share of funding allocated by the state, it could erode not just schools but the fabric of communities. Bryan Mann, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama’s college of education, has studied charter schools in Pennsylvania and noted that, while the research on rural charters is still new, these schools could pose a threat to public education.

“Choice is great, but if having choice is undermining the dominant choice that the majority of families rely on and have relied on for decades or longer, then what good ultimately is that doing?” he said.

The original proposal envisioned that the school would open with 60 students and grow to 500. It opened with 32 and three dropped out. The owner plans to expand to become a Pre-K-12 school. Imagine those three- and four-year-olds, planning their futures as workers!

The funding for the charter school comes from the districts that lost students.

But guess who else paid to open a rural school with 29 students? We did.

The academy has had to make a number of changes since Campbell first pitched his idea. Not only has the school’s approach to career preparation been refined, but Campbell decided to forego the services of the charter operator, whose use was core to his application, instead relying on Hawthorne, the head of school, in part to save costs. While the charter received $600,000 in federal start-up money and $325,000 from the Walton Family Foundation, the school’s viability will depend on additional fundraising.

Betsy DeVos supplied $600,000 in federal funds to create this job-training institution to suck money out of underfunded public schools.

Here’s a reform that would make charter schools viable: no charter should be authorized over the objections of the local school board.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Funding, Oklahoma, Privatization

John Thompson: Oklahoma Republicans Long to Copy Florida’s Mediocrity

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2018 //
1

Betsy DeVos says that Florida is a national model.

She loves Florida because she invested millions of dollars imposing vouchers and charters, despite the provision of the State Constitution that requires a uniform system of common schools.

Actually, Florida’s performance on NAEP is mediocre. Its fourth grade scores are swell because low-scoring third-graders are not allowed to enter fourth grade. A really neat trick! Pay attention to eighth grade scores: In eighth grade math, students in Florida are well below the national average. In eighth grade reading, Florida is right at the national average. Nothing impressive about Florida, other than gaming the fourth grade scores by holding back third-graders with low scores. By eighth grade, the game is over, and the results are not impressive.

Thompson says that Oklahoma lawmakers are in love with a libertarian study claiming that spending less produces the best education! Is that why the elites spend $50,000 a year or more on tuition to get lower class sizes and experienced teachers? The only time that money doesn’t matter is if you have a lot of it.

Despite Florida being average on NAEP, Oklahoma legislators hope to be just like Florida!

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, brings us up to date:

Oklahoma edu-politics remains in the spotlight after the 2018 election and it illustrates plenty of national issues. Despite many electoral gains, educators must worry about the state’s inexperienced governor, Kevin Stitt. It sometimes seems like Jeb Bush’s “astroturf” think tank, ExcelinEd, has found a second home in our State Capitol. Will the governor believe their spin?

Even worse, as reported by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, Republicans are being pressured by their own party to even “‘abolish public education, which is not a proper role of government, and allow the free market to determine pay and funding, eliminating the annual heartache we experience over this subject.’” The claim is that the state can reduce “‘its dependence on the tax structure by funding it through such means as sponsorships, advertising, endowments, tuition fees, etc.’”

https://www.excelined.org/team/matthew-h-joseph-2/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/11/27/republican-party-an-oklahoma-county-makes-clear-its-opposition-public-education/?utm_term=.e7b666b89e01

More importantly, the Oklahoman newspaper recently editorialized that our state should learn from the Reason Foundation, and from Florida, which supposedly is “the state achieving the greatest efficacy in education spending.” The editorial mistakenly claimed that the reforms Oklahoma implemented in 2011 and 2012, but that have been watered down in our state, have worked in Florida. The newspaper concludes, “Instead of backing off, Reason’s education rankings indicate Oklahoma lawmakers should double down” on their accountability-driven, choice-driven reforms.

https://newsok.com/article/5616294/education-report-merits-review-in-spending-debate

In fact, Florida’s 3rd grade retention policy has not been shown to do more good than harm to students, although “if you hold back low-performing third graders, the fourth grade scores the next year will appear to jump.” Even charter supporters such as those at CREDO acknowledge that Florida’s charters have not increased student outcomes, largely resulting in a decline of student performance. And the state’s online for-profit charters have a three-year attrition rate of 99 percent, and have driven down student performance gains by as much as -.46 std, which is approaching the loss of a year of learning, per year.

Click to access TT_Mathis_BushEd.pdf

http://credo.stanford.edu/reading-state-charter-impacts/

Click to access Online%20Charter%20Study%20Final.pdf

Reason’s “Find Everything You Know about State Education Rankings Is Wrong,” by Stan J. Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly claims to be the antithesis of “the self-serving interests of education functionaries who only gain from higher spending.” If the tone of the article doesn’t set off alarms, a review of its methodology shows its conclusions were preordained by a journal devoted to “Free Markets.” These sorts of papers serve as props for advancing the claim that money doesn’t matter.

https://reason.com/archives/2018/10/07/everything-you-know-about-stat

As Rutgers’ Bruce Baker explains, Reason’s authors “confidently assert that the higher performing states are those with a) weaker teachers’ unions and b) more children in charter schools.” However, they overlook a vast body of research to the contrary. They also ignore economic status and weight racial groups as equal factors in a way that is “specious at best,” and produced findings that “would only mislead policymakers.”

https://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2018/11/rankings

Student performance is determined more by the kids’ zip code than by the classroom. So why didn’t Reason and its paper attempt to control for economic disadvantage?

https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-life-outside-of-a-school-affects-student-performance-in-school/

Reason uses race as a substitute for economic advantage and disadvantage in a manner that is not only methodologically indefensible; it is likely a tactic which predetermines the ideology-driven conclusion that Florida and other border states (that oppose unions and support choice) are more efficient. I will just cite Hispanic student data as one example why their analysis is invalid.

The term “Hispanic” includes a wide range of subgroups, longterm citizens who are more likely to be affluent than the recent immigrants to places like Oklahoma City; Cubans who came to Florida a half century ago, as well as new arrivals from Mexico and Central America; and high-performing “bilingual” students as well as more costly to educate English Language Learners.

Before trusting the use of racial categories as a proxy for economic status, We should remember that Hispanics in Florida earn a median income which is $1,200 per person more than their counterparts in Oklahoma. The poverty rate for Oklahoma Hispanics who are17 years and younger is about 20 percent higher than Florida’s. Oklahoma Hispanic families are more likely to lack health insurance, with the big difference being that the majority of foreign-born Oklahoma Hispanics lack coverage.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/states/state/fl/

http://www.pewhispanic.org/states/state/ok/

Similarly, the percentage of black Oklahoma children who live in poor households is about 17 percent higher than black children in Florida. Oklahoma youth also are first in the nation in surviving four Adverse Childhood Experiences, and they are growing up in a state that is near the bottom of most child welfare metrics. In other words, the use of race as a substitute for economic advantage and disadvantage is one example why the Reason methodology gives a misleading picture of what it would cost to educate all children.

I must emphasize – contrary to the Reason ideology – that the additional costs to achieve equity are worth it. Education is so important that advocates, conservative, moderate or liberal, should also invest in research that meets high scholarly standards.

New Oklahoma decision-makers should expect plenty of cheap and easy, evidence-free proposals by noneducators. For instance, the legislative interim session was briefed by the Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce’s Oklahoma Achieves. It said that high-challenge schools should learn from systems that have lower per student spending but higher student outcomes. So, the inner city OKCPS schools merely need to emulate the best practices of Deer Creek, Oakdale, and other small, rich, exurban systems!?!?

https://public.tableau.com/profile/okachieves#!/vizhome/OklahomaSchoolDistrictSpendingComparedtoStudentOutcomes/SDSpendingComparedtoStudentOutcomes
I would also urge our new legislators and governor to look deeply into the Rutgers Education Law Center’s estimates of what it would take to bring our students to the national average in student performance. Like Florida almost does, Oklahoma spends enough to bring our most affluent quintile of students to the national average, but we would need to invest an additional $6,600 per student to provide equity for our poorest kids. (Florida would only need an additional $4,489 to do so.)

https://public.tableau.com/views/NCMWebsite/NECM?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes&:showVizHome=no

https://public.tableau.com/views/NCMWebsite/NECM?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes&:showVizHome=no

I also hope they will read Bruce Baker’s new book, Educational Inequity and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students. The renowned scholar, Helen Ladd, writes that Baker “draws on his many years of research to destroy the myth that money in education doesn’t matter, and convincingly argues that equitable and adequate funding are prerequisites for an effective education system.”

http://hepg.org/hep-home/books/educational-inequality-and-school-finance

The new legislators and governor will face a steep learning curve, and the effort necessary to craft policies based on real science will be intimidating. But as new educators used to be taught, for every complex problem, there is a solution that is quick, simple, and wrong.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Florida, Funding, Oklahoma

Oklahoma: Republican County Chair Recommends That State Stop Paying for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2018 //
48

The Republican Party chair of Canadian County in Oklahoma wrote a letter proposing that the state stop financing public education.

Andrew Lopez, Republican Party chair for suburban Oklahoma City’s Canadian County, signed the letter sent last week. It requested that the state no longer manage the public school system, or at least consider consolidating school districts. Public schools should seek operational money from sponsorships, advertising, endowments and tuition fees instead of taxes, the letter says.

Other Republicans rebuked him and said that they planned to raise education funding.

Rep. Rhonda Baker, a former teacher and current chair of the House common education committee, tells The Oklahoman in an article published Thursday that increasing education funding remains one of her priorities for next year.

“I have always been and will continue to be a supporter of public education,” Baker said.

Oklahoma Republican Party Chair Pam Pollard said Lopez’s letter doesn’t reflect the party’s position.

But Lopez said the GOP lawmakers are betraying party principles, including through increasing the size of government. His letter also called for abolishing abortion and eliminating unnecessary business-licensing agencies.

“In government we have a system that says we believe it’s a good idea to take (money) from you by force to educate other people’s children,” Lopez said. “That doesn’t appear to be a fair deal to me.”

In the recent elections, 16 educators won seats in the Oklahoma Legislature. The education caucus grew to 25 lawmakers in office that come from an education background, whether that be a teacher or school administrator position. Sixteen are Republicans, nine are Democrats. Eight are in the Senate and 17 in the House.

Lopez’s letter demonstrates the importance of building strong support for public education.

The Founding Fathers, acting as the Continental Congress, passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established the template for new states. It prohited slavery in the new states, and it set aside one of sixteen plots in each township for schooling. The ordinance began: “”Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

John Adams wrote in 1785:

the social science will never be much improved untill the People unanimously know and Consider themselvs as the fountain of Power and untill they Shall know how to manage it Wisely and honestly. reformation must begin with the Body of the People which can be done only, to affect, in their Educations. the Whole People must take upon themselvs the Education of the Whole People and must be willing to bear the expences of it. there should not be a district of one Mile Square without a school in it, not founded by a Charitable individual but maintained at the expence of the People themselvs they must be taught to reverence themselvs instead of adoreing their servants their Generals Admirals Bishops and Statesmen.

It seems that Mr. Lopez is unfamiliar with American history.

Categories Funding, History, Oklahoma
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