The Georgia Department of Education issued a scathing report about the Georgia Cyber Academy for its handling of students with disabilities.
The state DOE warned that the online charter school might lose its charter.
The Georgia Cyber Academy is owned by for-profit K12.
K12’s stock price dropped recently after news of the poor performance of its Colorado Virtual Academy, whose graduation rate is 22%.
K12 is planning to expand into the lucrative Washington, DC, market.
Washington, D.C. Is about to get a bunch of additional charters.
Nexus Academy, part of Pearson’s Connections Academy, wants to open a school.
So does K12, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Its stock price dropped this week after news broke about the abysmal performance of the Colorado Virtual Academy.
Rocketship is on its way, with its heavy emphasis on learning in front of a computer.
And also there will be a new Hebrew immersion charter school.
If ever evidence was needed about the bizarre mind meld between the Obama administration and the far-right of the Republican party, here it is.
Secretary Arne Duncan is giving the keynote to Jeb Bush’s Excellence in Education summit in Washington, D.C. on November 28. Another keynote will be delivered to the same gathering of the leaders of the privatization movement by John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, who headed the Obama transition team in 2008. This is sickening.
Jeb Bush’s organization supports vouchers, charters, online virtual charters, and for-profit organizations that run schools. It also supports evaluating teachers by student test scores and eliminating collective bargaining. Jeb Bush believes in grading schools, grading teachers, grading students, closing schools, and letting everyone “escape” from public schools to privately-run establishments. The free market is his ideal of excellence, not public responsibility, not the public school as the anchor of the community, but privatization.
Here is the press release (Podesta’s keynote was announced earlier):
Arne Duncan to Give Keynote at the
2012 National Summit on Education Reform
WASHINGTON – The Foundation for Excellence in Education today announced U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will deliver a breakfast keynote address for the fifth annual Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform. This keynote will take place at the JW Marriott in Washington, DC, Nov. 28.
Prior to becoming the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan served as the chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the longest-serving big-city education superintendent in the country. Among his most significant accomplishments during his tenure as CEO, an all-time high of the district’s elementary school students met or exceeded state reading standards, and their math scores also reached a record high. At high schools, Chicago Public Schools students posted gains on the ACT at three times the rate of national gains and nearly twice that of the state’s. Also, the number of CPS high school students taking Advanced Placement courses tripled, and the number of students passing AP classes more than doubled.
Unfortunately, we have reached maximum capacity for the Summit, and registration is closed. However, you can enjoy this exciting event from the comfort of your own computer. All keynote speeches and general sessions will be streamed live at www.ExcelinEd.org/Everywhere, and all strategy sessions will be filmed and available after the event. Click here to view this year’s agenda.
Members of the press are welcome to cover the conference, including keynote and strategy sessions, however, participation in Q & A times are reserved for attendees. For more details and to apply for credentials for this event, please click here.
The Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform annually immerses lawmakers and policymakers in two days of in-depth discussions on proven policies and innovative strategies to improve student achievement. For all things related to the Summit, check out the #EIA12 app at http://bit.ly/W6wubM. This mobile app puts the event agenda and information about speakers, strategy sessions and our partners at your fingertips.
Governor Rick Snyder must hate public education. Certainly his advisors do.
He has some group of rightwing operatives who have pretentiously named themselves the “Oxford Foundation,” although they are not a foundation and they have nothing to do with Oxford University or Oxford Healthcare or Oxford anything.
This GOP group issues reports on how to disestablish any public responsibility for public education.
The only thing public will be the money. The providers will not be.
Here is the latest scheme from these advocates of privatization.
It is a voucher plan that allows students to take their public money to any private vendor.
It also allows charter schools to have selective enrollment–only those with high test scores, or only those who meet whatever criterion the school chooses–and to charge tuition.
The proposal says nothing about accountability–that, apparently, is only for public schools.
Are the people of Michigan ready to abandon public education?
Are they ready to accept Jeb Bush’s plan to make choosing a school akin to selecting a carton of milk?
Joy Resmovits has a good article at Huffington Post describing the growth of charter school enrollments and the absence of adequate oversight.
Currently, about 5 percent of all American students are enrolled in these privately managed schools. In some urban districts, the proportion is much larger. The districts with the greatest number of students in charters are New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, and Flint, Michigan. In 25 districts, at least 20 percent of students attend charters.
With the support of a bipartisan combination of President Obama, Congress, conservative governors, and rightwing groups like ALEC, these numbers are sure to grow. And the privatization of one of the nation’s most essential public services will continue.
The article mentions that local school boards “argue” that charters reduce their funding. That’s not an argument, that’s a fact. When students leave to attend charters, the public schools must lay off teachers, increase class sizes, cut programs. The more charters open, the more the public schools decline, especially when they lose their most motivated families and students. This is not simply a matter of transferring money from Peter to Paul, but crippling Peter to enrich Paul.
If charters had a stellar reputation, the logic might be on their side. But there are few studies that show charters outperforming public schools even on the crude measure of test scores. With only a few outliers, most studies show that charters do not get different results when they have the same kinds of students.
Chester-Upland, Pensylvania, schools may be an example of what happens when well-funded charters (funded by the district’s own revenues) grow as the host dies. The CU schools have been under state control for nearly 20 years. The local charter is not only thriving but providing handsome profits for its founder. Meanwhile the public schools, having lost half their enrollment to the charter, are dying. A state emergency manager just issued a lengthy report with high benchmarks for future success.
The plan calls for school closings and sets goals for academic gains. The bottom line in this plan for recovery is that the public schools will be extinguished if they can’t meet ambitious targets:
““If the district fails to meet certain scholastic performance goals, such as federal annual progress targets, by the end for the 2014-15 school year, the plan calls for the schools to be run by external management operations such as charter schools, cyber charters, and education management companies.”
Is this the future of urban education in the United States? Will this be the legacy of the Bush-Obama education program?
Soon after the elections, the mega-corporation K12 convened a conference call with investors to boast about the opening of new markets for virtual charters in Georgia and Washington State.
K12 is the company founded by the Milken brothers to sell online schooling for-profit.
It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its CEO, Ron Packard, has a background at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Last year, he was paid $5 million.
The academic results of its schools are poor. The National Education Policy Center reviewed K12 and found that its students fare poorly in relation to test scores and graduation rates. The NCAA won’t accept credits from one of its online schools. The New York Times wrote a blistering critique of K12.
But K12, like some other charter operators, makes campaign contributions (as it did in Georgia), and the politicians care more about those contributions than about the children of their state.
Despite the miserable results that cyber charters get in study after study, the state has authorized more of them than any other state. It has 12 up and running, four more just approved, and more in line to be approved.
I mistakenly reported in an earlier post that only one cyber charter had ever made “adequate yearly progress,” but I was mistaken. NO cyber charter has ever made AYP in Pennsylvania. It was only because the State Education Commissioner dummies down the scoring that one crossed the bar. When held to the same standards as public schools, no cyber charter meets the NCLB requirement for academic progress.
Florida law requires schools to offer online courses to children in every grade, even as young as kindergarten.
There is no evidence or research to support this mandate.
None.
Wonder if this has anything to do with the political power of Jeb Bush, now the nation’s leading enthusiast for online learning? Wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that his Foundation for Excellence in Education is heavily funded by technology corporations?
Remember how he and his lobbyist facilitated the introduction of virtual schooling into Maine? If you forgot, please read the link. It was a heckuva job.
Voters in Idaho gave Mitt Romney a landslide but simultaneously voted overwhelmingly to repeal the “Luna Laws,” the brainchild of state superintendent Tom Luna.
This stunning victory for public education demonstrates that not even red-state Republicans are prepared to privatize public education and dismantle the teaching profession.
The Luna Laws imposed a mandate for online courses for high school graduates (a favorite of candidates funded by technology companies), made test scores the measure of teacher quality, provided bonuses for teachers whose students got higher scores, removed all teacher rights, eliminated anything resembling tenure or seniority, turned teachers into at-will employees, and squashed the teachers’ unions.
The campaign to support the Luna laws was heavily funded by technology entrepreneurs and out-of-state supporters of high-stakes testing and restrictions on the teaching profession, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The voters in this reddest of red states overturned all three of the Luna laws (which he called “Students Come First”; anything in which children or students or kids come “first” is a clear tip-off to the divisive intent of the program).
As the story in the Idaho Statesman reported:
In a stunning rebuke to Gov. Butch Otter and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna, Idahoans on Tuesday repealed the laws that dominated the pair’s agenda the past two years.
Idahoans agreed with teachers unions — which spent more than $3 million to defeat Propositions 1, 2 and 3 — that the reforms Luna called “Students Come First” and detractors called “The Luna Laws” went too far.
As GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney won a 65 percent Idaho landslide, Otter and Luna — both touted as possible Cabinet secretaries in a Romney administration — lost their signature issue by large margins.
With 99 percent of all Idaho precincts reporting:
— 57 percent opposed to restrictions on teachers unions in Prop 1.
— 58 percent voted no on Prop 2, which paid teacher bonuses based on student test scores and other measures.
— 67 percent rejected a mandate for laptops and online credits for every Idaho high school student.
The scale of the defeat reached across Idaho.
Voters in 37 of 44 counties rejected all three measures. The seven outliers — Adams, Boise, Fremont, Jefferson, Lemhi, Madison and Owyhee — are largely rural. Not one of Idaho’s most populous counties voted for even one of the laws.
Motoko Rich of the New York Times has written a good article about the Georgia charter referendum.
We already knew that big donors from out of state funded the pro-charter vote. What I learned from this article was that charter corporations also funded the Yes vote.
She writes:
“The roster of contributors in Georgia includes several companies that manage charter schools, including K12 Inc., Charter Schools USA and National Heritage Academies. In all, committees supporting the ballot measure have collected 15 times as much as groups opposing the measure, according to public filings.”
The charter corporations listed here operate for profit.
Somehow this seems unethical. Isn’t it like a payoff or a sort of legal graft to buy support for a measure that benefits the corporation?
Yes, I understand that it happens all the time. I understand that tobacco companies and oil companies spend money to win public support and contracts. I’m not naive.
But I never imagined that for-profit charter corporations would give money to candidates and ballot questions to get contracts. If the referendum passes, they make money.
It just smells bad. It stinks.
It’s not about education. It’s about greed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 