Archives for category: Privatization
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The Curious Case of The Century Foundation and Its Charter Advocacy

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
10

The Century Foundation is supposed to be a liberal foundation. I had numerous contacts with it when it was previously known as The Twentieth Century Fund. My most memorable experience involved my membership on a task force in 1983 or so, which prepared a critique of American education and the need for reform. For that era, our task force report was fairly run-of-the-mill. What was remarkable was that our staff director disagreed with the task force. He wrote a ringing defense of our public schools and took issue with the conclusions of the report. His name was Paul Petersen. He is now one of the leading critics of public schools, now one of the most widely published advocates for vouchers and charters. Well, we switched sides.

Fast forward to the present.

The Twentieth Century Fund is now the Century Fund. My ex-husband served on its board for many years. It has a reputation for its careful research and sober findings.

But last year, the Century Fund released a report about how charter schools can promote “diversity by design,” identifying 125 charter schools that promote diversity.

This raised eyebrows because charters have frequently been criticized for promoting segregation, most notably by the UCLA Center on Civil Rights.

The report was remarkable because it was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the anti-union, pro-privatization foundation of the billionaires who own Walmart. The Waltons say they have funded one-fourth of all charters in the nation. Since when does a liberal think tank take funding from a rightwing foundation and deliver a product that supports their charter crusade?

Last year, a parent activist complained about the bias of the report. She wrote her commentary on Leonie Haimson’s parent blog. Haimson, introducing her comments, pointed out a big flaw in the study. She wrote: This list of 125 schools was selected from 5,692 charter schools – only a tiny number.  The methodology is also questionable.  The authors identify these schools by analyzing their enrollment, websites and survey responses from school leaders.  Though the Century Foundation sent their survey about diversity to 971 charter schools, only 86 responded – which means that nearly 40 schools were put on the list even though the school leaders couldn’t be bothered to answer their survey.

This year, the Century Foundation recently accepted a grant of $407,053 from the Gates Foundation “to support the Century Foundation in addressing misconceptions that charter schools exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.”

Read the wording again. TCF is not being funded to inquire whether charter schools exacerbate segregation but to “address misconceptions” that they do. This is not research. It is a contract to provide support for an opinion that challenges the scholarship of people like Gary Orfield at UCLA and Helen Ladd at Duke.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Segregation

California Democratic Party: Charters Should Have Elected Boards

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
6

Here is an excellent idea from the California Democratic Party: Charter schools should be governed by elected boards, just like real public schools.

California is a bellwether for the nation. This strong stance shows that teachers are reclaiming their profession from billionaires and hedge fund managers.

Edsource reports:

Taking aim at the majority of charter schools in the state, the California Democratic Party has included language in its platform declaring that these schools should be overseen by publicly elected boards, in contrast to the self-appointed boards that run most of them.

The new language, adopted at the state party’s annual convention in Long Beach over the weekend, was promoted by the 120,000-member California Federation of Teachers and strengthens an already strongly worded section of the California Democratic Party’s platform on charter schools.

It is especially significant because it comes from a state with by far the largest number of charter schools in the nation, enrolling just over 10 percent of all the state’s public school students. It also underscored the ongoing divisions within the party over charter schools, which have become about one of the most contentious issues on the nation’s education reform agenda.

“We need to keep certain services public, and education is one of them,” said California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas.

The party platform includes this new language:

CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY PLATFORM

Urges “support for those charter schools that are managed by public and elected boards, not for profit, transparent in governance, have equitable admissions, adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality, and supplement rather than supplant existing public education program.” — Adopted by California Democratic Party, November 2019

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: After Multiple Failures, Why Doesn’t the Gates Foundation Leave K-12 Schools Alone?

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
31

Mercedes Schneider reviews the Gates Foundation’s long and costly list of failed interventions into K-12 schools and points out, quoting the words of the Foundation, that it has never admitted any failure and never apologized.

Gates paid for the interventions but the real cost was borne by teachers and public schools.

He tried breaking up big schools into small schools, convinced as he was that big schools are ineffective, but when the small schools didn’t produce higher test scores, he abandoned that idea.

He prodded Arne Duncan to include the untested of evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, and he launched his own experiments in seven districts and charter chains. That too was a flop.

He poured uncounted millions into boosting the charter industry, despite the fact that charters do not get different results from public schools when they enroll the same students.

He spent millions promoting a charter law in his home state of Washington, which passed on the fourth state referendum only after he overwhelmed the opposition by spending 16 times as much as they did; the charters he fought so hard for have struggled to get enough enrollment to stay open (four of the original dozen have already folded), and a CREDO evaluation concluded that they don’t get different results than public schools in the state.

Gates provided almost all the funding necessary for the Common Core State Standards, which required districts and states to spend billions of dollars on new tests, new textbooks, new software, new teacher training, new everything.

When the backlash grew against the Common Core, Gates simply didn’t understand it, since he compares education to an electric plug with standard current into which all possible appliances can be plugged in and get power.

This year, the Gates Foundation awarded 476 grants, but only seven went to K-12, mostly to promote charter schools, a passion he shares with the rightwing Walton Foundation and Betsy DeVos and her foundations.

Read the Gates Foundation’s statement that Mercedes includes in her post. You will see that the foundation acknowledges no failures, no errors, no miscalculations. It doesn’t even own its almost total responsibility for CC, nor for its disastrous reception by teachers and the public.

The legacy of Bill Gates: Teachers and principals who were fired based on a phony measure of their “effectiveness.” Schools in black and brown communities closed because of their test scores. A demoralization of teachers, and a dramatic decline in the number of people entering the profession. A national teacher shortage. The elevation of standardized testing as both the means and the ends of all education (tests that were never used in the schools he and his own children attended).

Here are a few things that Bill Gates NEVER funded or fought for: class size reduction; higher salaries for teachers; a nurse and social worker and librarian in every school; higher taxes to support public schools.

Mercedes concludes:

It may be too much to expect Bill Gates to completely exit K12 education. After all, we have been his hobby for years.

But the fewer Gates dollars, the smaller the petri dish.

Unfortunately the lingering effects of his failed experiments continue to ruin schools, such as the value-added measurement of teachers by test scores, still written into law in many states; the Common Core persists, often under a different name to disguise it; and of course charter schools continue to drain students and resources from underfunded public schools.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

New Orleans: Nearly Half of the District’s Charter Schools Receive a D or F from State

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
17

Ouch!

New Orleans is the nation’s first all-charter district.

New Orleans is supposed to be the shining star of the charter movement, proving the value of school choice and market-based reforms, closing schools and replacing them with new schools, then closing failing schools, ad infinitum.

But newly released state grades reveal that nearly half of the district’s charter schools (49%) received a grade of D or F, meaning failing or near failing.

Della Hasselle writes in the New Orleans Advocate:

The release of the state’s closely watched school performance scores earlier this month offered an overall update on New Orleans schools that seemed benign enough: A slight increase in overall student performance meant another C grade for the district.

But a closer look reveals a startling fact. A whopping 35 of the 72 schools in the all-charter district scored a D or F, meaning nearly half of local public schools were considered failing, or close to it, in the school year ending in 2019. Since then, six of the 35 have closed.

While New Orleans has long been home to struggling schools, the data released this month are concerning. There was an increase of nearly 11% percentage points in the number of schools that received the state’s lowest grades from the 2017-18 school year to 2018-19.

Someone, please let Betsy DeVos know.

Let Cory Booker and Democrats for Education Reform know.

Let Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad know.

Let the Mind Trust and City Fund know.

Tell the Walton Foundation, which has poured over $1 billion into charter school proliferation.

Wow. Some model for the nation to follow!

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Kentucky: Bevin Lost, But His State Commissioner Vows to Stay On

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
4

Defeated Republican Governor Matt Bevin was a huge fan of charter schools. The legislature passed a charter law but never funded it. Bevin appointed a new state board of education, and they appointed Wayne Lewis as state commissioner. Lewis loves charters.

A few weeks ago, Bevin was defeated by Democrat Andy Beshear, who ran on a strong pro-public education program. He chose an educator as his Lieutenant Governor. He said he would pick a new state board on day one and a new state commissioner on day two. Beshear made clear that  public education was a major priority for his administration.

Beshear has said he and Lt. Gov.-elect Jacqueline Coleman, an educator, will have no higher priority than Kentucky’s public education system and its teachers. Teacher Allison Slone, founder of a popular Facebook page called Kentucky Teachers in the Know, said she and her colleagues “are ready to move on and up from the negativity, lack of trust, and partisan politics” that they experienced under Bevin.

Not so fast, said Wayne Lewis. Beshear can’t replace the board members until their terms expire in 2020 and 2022. And Lewis has no plans to leave until the board changes.

Stay tuned.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Kentucky, Privatization

Will Pinkston: Time for School Districts To Set Standards for Charter Applications, not the Charter Industry’s Lobbyists

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
27

Will Pinkston, who served on the elected school board of the Metro Nashville school district, writes here that school districts should not outsource their charter application process to the charter industry’s lobbyists.

The timing is right because the Koch Network has targeted four states for unlimited charter school proliferation: Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.

Up until now, many school districts are using the guidelines and standards developed by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which wants minimal oversight of charter schools.

But NACSA, Pinkston notes, is not a neutral arbiter, but an organization dedicated to the growth and expansion of the charter industry.

Asking NACSA for advice about how to grant charters is akin to asking the Tobacco Industry Association whether cigarettes are good or bad for your health.

Many districts, Pinkston notes, are having budget problems because of the expansion of charters.

He advises:

Strengthening public school districts’ charter application reviews is a logical first step toward disrupting the school privatization movement…

Charter application review practices vary greatly between states and local school districts — and charter operators over the years have capitalized on this confusion in the field to push into existence scores of unneeded and unwanted charters.

Many districts have fallen into the trap of letting the charter sector exert undue influence on their review process. The most egregious example: For more than a decade, an innocuously named Chicago-based nonprofit organization — the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) — has led the national charter sector’s campaign to set ground rules for how K-12 public school districts should review charter applications…

In fact, NACSA is a thinly veiled charter advocacy group largely funded by the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — the two biggest pro-charter philanthropies in the U.S. Moreover, NACSA’s board and staff is exclusively populated with charter school advocates. According to an Internal Revenue Service filing, NACSA’s mission is simple: “Promote establishment” of charter schools.

With a multi-million-dollar annual budget, NACSA carries out its mission through a range of activities, including: Hosting conferences and workshops to train public school district employees on implementing pro-charter review standards; awarding grants to sway districts’ opinions on charters; and lobbying state policymakers to advance a pro-charter agenda in legislatures and statehouses…

The carefully branded name of NACSA’s standards assumes that charter school “authorizing” will happen. But districts’ default position should be that authorizing may happen — or not.

NACSA describes its standards as “a rich base of knowledge built on deep experience, study, deliberation, and refinement that reflects collective insights on best practices among authorizers of all types and portfolio sizes across the country.” But a closer examination reveals that NACSA’s standards are just a finely manicured PR product devised by the charter sector, for the charter sector.

Pinkston urges districts to take control of the charter authorizing process and consider such factors as:

Audits (they should be conducted by independent auditors, not self-audits);

Class size (NACSA is silent on this but district authorizers should not be);

Facilities and transportation (Districts should require charter applicants to submit detailed transportation plans that mirror best practices among districts. Moreover, districts should require charter applicants to submit robust facility plans — including the address of the proposed charter location, development or redevelopment plans, letters of commitment by funders or financial institutions, and other documentation that would be expected before any district opens a new school);

Licensed teachers (NACSA is silent, but districts should not be);

Salaries and benefits (NACSA is silent, but districts should not be).

As Pinkston says, it is up to districts to decide whether to award charters and to set conditions. They should not ask the charter lobbyists how to do it.

 

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

Jan Resseger: Why I Will Not Vote for Michael Bloomberg for President

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2019 //
7

When Jan Resseger writes, she does so with authority and clarity.

In this essay, she explains why she will not vote for Michael Bloomberg, based on his record of disrespecting educators in New York City when he was mayor. Bloomberg as mayor employed all the same principles as No Child Left Behind: testing, accountability, school closings, charter schools, school choice, all based on “the business model.”

She writes:

Michael Bloomberg does have a long education record. Bloomberg served as New York City’s mayor from January of 2002 until December of 2013. In 2002, to accommodate his education agenda, Bloomberg got the state legislature to create mayoral governance of NYC’s public schools. In this role, Michael Bloomberg and his appointed schools chancellor, Joel Klein were among the fathers of what has become a national wave of corporate, accountability-based school reform. Bloomberg is a businessman, and Joel Klein was a very successful attorney. Neither had any experience as an educator. They took aggressive steps to run the NYC school district, with 1.1 million students, like a business. Their innovations included district-wide school choice, rapid expansion of charter schools, co-location of a bunch of small charter and traditional schools into what used to be comprehensive high schools, the phase out and closure of low-scoring schools, evaluation of schools by high stakes standardized test scores, the assignment of letter grades to schools based on their test scores, and a sort of merit pay bonus plan for teachers.

In her 2018 book, After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor, the New York business journalist and journalism professor, comments on Bloomberg’s educational experiment: “The Bloomberg administration embraced the full panoply of education-reform remedies. It worshiped at the altar of standardized tests and all manner of quantitative analysis. The Bloomberg administration also had a penchant for reorganizations that seemed to create more disruption than continuous improvement among its 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools.” ( After the Education Wars, p. 75)

Gabor describes Bloomberg’s expansion of charter schools: “Harlem, in particular, has become the center of an unintentional educational experiment—one that has been replicated in neighborhoods and cities around the country.  During the Bloomberg years, when close to a quarter of students in the area were enrolled in charter schools, segregation increased, as did sizable across-the-board demographic disparities among the students who attended each type of school. An analysis of Bloomberg-era education department data revealed that public open-enrollment elementary and middle schools have double—and several have triple—the proportion of special needs kids of nearby charter schools. The children in New York’s traditional public schools are much poorer than their counterparts in charter schools. And public schools have far higher numbers of English language learners… In backing charter schools Bloomberg and other advocates pointed to one clear benefit: charters, it was widely accepted, would increase standardized test scores. However, years of studies showed little difference between the test-score performance of students in charter schools and those in public schools.” After the Education Wars, p. 95)

And there is more. Open the link and read it to understand why the “business model” did not work.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Testing

Jeff Bryant: Why Teachers Are Striking for More Than Wages, as per Oakland

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2019 //
2

Jeff Bryant reports here about the recent strike in Oakland. Teachers won concessions from the school board but they were fighting for much more than higher pay. Like their peers in Chicago and other districts, they were striking to fend off the Modern Disruption/Corporate Reform Narrative of failing schools, closing schools, and privatization.

Even after the strike ends, the struggle continues.

He writes:

Teachers and public school advocates in Oakland and elsewhere are showing that strikes don’t end systemic forces undermining public education as much as they signal the next phase in the struggle.

When their recent strike concluded, Oakland teachers had won a salary increase and bonus, more school support staff, a pause on school closures and consolidations, and a resolution from the board president to call on the state to stop the growth of charter schools in the city.

While those were significant accomplishments, the core problem remaining is that policy leaders in the city continue to take actions that “hurt students,” Oakland Education Association president Keith Brown told me in a phone conversation.

“Students continue to experience pain and trauma in our schools due to lack of resources, over-policing, and continuing threats of school closures,” Brown said.

Despite gains from the recent strike, teachers and public education advocates have continued to show up at school board meetings to press their cause.

The coalition recently formed the group Oakland Is Not for Sale, which seeks to extend the moratorium on school closures and consolidations to summer 2022, institute financial transparency in the district, end the district’s policy of expanding charter schools, and redirect money for school police and planned construction of a probation camp for juveniles to pay for a rollout of restorative discipline practices in schools.

The board’s recent announcement to close higher-performing Kaiser Elementary and merge the students and teachers into an under-enrolled and struggling Sankofa Academy raised yet more agitation in the community, especially when news emerged that students from Kaiser would receive an “opportunity ticket” giving them priority to attend schools ahead of neighborhood students not already enrolled in those schools. In other words, the district’s rationale for merging the two campuses for the sake of fiscal efficiency was being undermined by its own proposal to make transferring to Sankofa optional and, thus—as Zach Norris, a parent leader of Kaiser parents resisting the move, told California-based news outlet EdSource—keep Sankofa under-enrolled and thereby also an eventual target for closure.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Oakland, Privatization

Maurice Cunningham: Waltons Target Warren Because of Her Proposed Wealth Tax

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2019 //
11

Maurice Cunningham, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, is a specialist in “follow the money.”

He writes in his latest post that the Waltons are targeting Elizabeth Warren not so much because of her stance on charter schools but because of her proposed wealth tax.

He writes:

If the Waltons hate anything so much as unions, it would be taxes. The family and WalMart are huge into tax dodging. And guess who has a plan for that? Elizabeth Warren. So yes the Waltons are big into charter schools but they are bigger into their own wealth. Disrupting Warren on any grounds is a good thing to them. Remember, dark money is never what it seems.

Here in Massachusetts the Waltons have their own political operation as I showed in The Walton Family’s Massachusetts Political Team, 2019.

And the beauty of these political operations the Walton Family Foundation backs in Massachusetts and around the country? They are mostly tax deductible at the top rate of thirty-seven percent. The Waltons pick up about sixty-three percent of this and you, the grateful taxpayer, pick up thirty-seven percent.

When the Waltons push charter schools, what they really mean is lower state and local taxes on Wal-Mart. When the Waltons try to shout down Elizabeth Warren, it’s about the wealth tax. The Waltons do all this with tax deductible political fronts. Taxes, taxes, taxes.

What happened in Georgia is that a taxpayer subsidized unit of the political front of one of America’s richest families attempted to shut down a political candidate. Expect more of this.

Money never sleeps. Follow the money.

At this very moment, Walmart is suing various states (even Arkansas) to lower their property taxes! That means less money available to support public schools and other public services! This is a family whose collective wealth is more than $160 billion, and they think their property taxes are too high!

Maurice Cunningham played an important role in the referendum about charter school expansion in Massachusetts in 2016 by revealing Dark Money and its sources; I write about him in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH. And the first page of the book quotes his memorable line: “Money never sleeps. Follow the money.”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Dark Money, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Walton Billionaires Fund Disruption of Warren Rally

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2019 //
20

Twitter lit up this morning with news of a disruption of an Elizabeth Warren rally by charter school “parents” in matching T-shirts. Hovering in the background was Howard Fuller, whose Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) received millions during its lifetime of advocating for vouchers from billionaire foundations such as Bradley, Walton, and Gates.

Peter Greene has gathered the story of the funders of the “parent” disruption of the Warren rally. 

The usual billionaire-funded suspects. The disrupters came from Walton-funded organizations, representatives of DFER, and other pro-charter groups, whose purpose was to embarrass Warren for having the audacity to propose a massive increase in funding for poor kids and kids with disabilities and a cutoff of Betsy DeVos’s slush fund for corporate charters known as the federal Charter Schools Program (which currently spends $440 million annually).

He writes:

As [Ryan] Grim [of The Intercept] tweeted, “A group funded by some of the richest people in the world, the Waltons, just disrupted an @ewarren speech on the 1881 Atlanta washerwoman strike. Can’t make this stuff up.” It’s not a new game; charter advocates have often loaded up parents and students, made them some t-shirts, and deployed them as citizen lobbyists.

There’s a lot of money and power behind the charter school movement. Expect more of these shenanigans if Warren continues to lead the Democratic pack. The charter industry is not gong to let her go without a fight.

 

Categories Accountability, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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