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North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
11

This is a story so nutty that it would be hilarious if there were no children involved. Instead, it is an outrage.

When the fringe rightwingers of the Tea Party won control of the North Carolina legislature in 2010, they promptly passed laws authorizing charters and vouchers and transferring the funding from the state’s successful N.C. Teaching Fellows Program (which prepared career teachers) to the temps in Teach for America.

Then they looked wistfully to Tennessee and realized that what they were missing was a mechanism for state takeover of low-scoring public schools. Tennessee had its very own “Achievement School District,” funded by $100 million of federal Race to the Top money, and North Carolina wanted to do the same thing. The Tennessee ASD  took control of the state’s lowest-performing schools and pledged to catapult them into the top 20% of schools in the state.

By 2016, it was clear that the ASD was a total failure but that did not deter North Carolina lawmakers. Give them credit for a combination of gullibility and ignorance.

To help the state takeover pass, a very wealthy conservative entrepreneur from Oregon named John Bryan funded a campaign for the state takeover legislation. Bryan handed out about $600,000 to Legislative candidates from 2011 to 2016.

The bill passed, and now North Carolina had its very own Innovative School District. The law said the state would take over up to five low-performing schools in its first year, which would be turned into charter schools.

But now the story gets even better! Oregon entrepreneur John Bryan had his very own charter chain, called TeamCFA, which already operated 13 charters in North Carolina.

Why not give the contract for the ISD to TeamCFA?

The only problem was that no public school wanted to be part of the ISD. Each time a school was designated by the state, the parents fought back, contacted their legislator, and avoided the state takeover.

Ultimately, only one school joined the ISD: Southside Ashpole Elementary School in Robeson County. The school was turned into a charter school operated by a new company called Achievement for All Children.

Achievement For All Children is heavily connected to Oregon resident John Bryan, a generous contributor to political campaigns and school-choice causes in North Carolina. He has taken credit for passage of the law creating the Innovative School District.

The board of directors for Achievement for All Children includes former Rep. Rob Bryan, a Republican from Mecklenburg County who introduced the bill creating the new district. John Bryan contributed about $17,000 to Rob Bryan’s campaigns for the state legislature from 2013 to 2016.

Tony Helton is chief executive officer of both Achievement For All Children and TeamCFA, a charter school network founded by John Bryan.

But most of the questions this week focused on the qualifications of AAC, which was formed in February 2017.

An independent third-party evaluation by education consulting firm SchoolWorks said it’s unclear whether AAC “is legally eligible to operate and manage” Southside Ashpole because state law says the company chosen must have a record of results in improving performance for low-performing students or schools.

The company plans to partner with TeamCFA, which has 13 charter schools in North Carolina. But SchoolWorks says TeamCFA’s schools have “a mixed record of student achievement.”

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article208006534.html#storylink=cpy

The new Innovative School District had a new principal and its own Superintendent, quite a lot of leadership for one little school.

The State Board of education just got an evaluation of its takeover school.

Test scores, already low, dropped a bit. The new charter got a grade of F.

The school saw high administrative turnover:

Behind the scenes, the report says rifts developed between the principal and some faculty, which were due in part to the significant leadership changes in the district. In the past two years, the program has seen three superintendents, two principals and two different peoplerunning Achievement For All Children.

And despite the experiment’s negative evaluation, the state is supposed to throw more public schools into the “Innovative School District.”

Under state law, four more schools have to be added to the district for the 2020-21 school year. A list of 12 schools being considered for takeover (none in the Triangle) was released in September.

State board members and State Superintendent Mark Johnson met Wednesday with state lawmakers to ask them to approve a delay in selecting any new schools this year.

Expect public schools chosen to enter the failed ISD to fight back.

This is not funny. This is education malpractice.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, North Carolina, Privatization

Have You Heard? The Koch Plan to Eliminate Public Education

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
5

This is an important, can’t-miss podcast about the malign plans of one of the richest men in the world.

Business reporter Christopher Leonard has written a best-selling new book called Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.It’s an eye-opening account of how the Kochs built the private company that has made them richer than Bill Gates. Leonard spent seven years reporting the book, which gave him plenty of insight into what he describes as the Kochs’ fixation on dismantling public education. In a recent episode of the Have You Heard podcast with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, Leonard was blunt about what the Kochs are after. “The ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system. ” Leonard says don’t be fooled by the Koch’s sales pitch (like the Koch Network’s latest education venture, Yes Every Kid, headed by the VP of Communications for Koch Industries.) “There are going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, and efficiency. At its core though the Koch Network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different.”
You can listen to the entire interview here: https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/kochland
Categories Billionaires, Disruption, Education Industry, Evil, Koch Brothers, Privatization

Leonie Haimson: DeBlasio’s Hypocritical Embrace of Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
18

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, is outraged that Mayor DeBlasio is handing schools over to Laurene Powell Jobs and the charter-promoting Robin Hood Foundation.

Powell Jobs has handed out $100 million to jumpstart “innovative” schools. Four of the 10 schools to which she gave $10 million each have already failed. Her closest associate is Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top was a disaster.

Over the last decade or so, the Robin Hood Foundation has primarily supported charter schools in its education portfolio, as might be predicted considering it was founded by hedge funders and its board is still composed largely of corporate executives and financiers.  According to Wikipedia, its board chair, Larry Robbins, is also the board chair of KIPP NY charter schools, and board chair of the Relay Graduate School, that trains teachers in the charter school “no excuses” regimented style of instruction. Robbins is also a member of the NY Board of Teach for America.

DeBlasio, who claimed to be a charter critic, has invited Robin Hood to open 18 new charter schools. Astonishing!

 

Haimson writes:

Given that these two private funders will help select the winners, or as Robin Hood put it, “will partner with the Department of Education on a rigorous selection process”, that means DOE will be sacrificing control for the design of these public schools to these two organizations for a relative pittance, compared to what it will cost to operate them.

But an even greater concern, as I expressed it to the Daily News, is that every new school will likely take space and funding away from our existing public schools, which are already underfunded and in many cases squeezed for space. Every new school makes overcrowding worse by eating up classroom space with the need to carve out new, replicated administrative and cluster rooms. 

We already have seen how worse inequities have resulted from the expansion of co-located charter schools in our public school buildings, as well as how the Gates-funded small schools initiative led to many of the remaining large high schools becoming even more overcrowded with the high-needs students that the small schools refused to enroll.  Many of these disadvantaged students at the large schools ended up more likely to be discharged, enrolled in low-quality credit recovery programs, or graduating without a Regents diploma  — all of which served the purposes of the organizations running the show as their small schools graduation data appeared better in comparison.  Another piece of evidence that DOE is caught in an infinite feedback loop: the Senior adviserto the XQ Institute is Michele Cahill, who ran the small schools initiative when she was at DOE. 

It feels as though we are seeing a rerun of the Bloomberg-Klein regime.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Privatization

Rhode Island: Governor Gina Raimondo’s Plan to Demolish Public Education in Providence

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
6

 

Andrew Stewart recounts the alarming plans that Governor Gina Raimondo has in store for Providence public schools. She is a former venture capitalist who seems to have an instinctive suspicion of the public sector. What she has in mind, he says, is the planned demolition of the public schools.

He writes:

Someday, after the operatic cycle of Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s political career has reached its concluding note, it will be a masterpiece of neoliberal assault upon the public sector, the commons, and the fabric of the welfare state in America to behold. It is absolutely essential, in order for the faculty and the students of Providence to fight back and win in this contest, to form a broad-based coalition that is centered on the success of students and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline.

Right now, a multi-year media narrative, assembled by allegedly-liberal local news outlets, is being utilized in order to justify the anti-democratic takeover of public education. (I will offer a further analysis of this narrative in a future report that time and space bars me from providing here.)

Motivation stems a number of reasons, including because the Providence Teachers Union is one of the largest white collar educator unions in the state and its majority composition is white women, meaning success would have a ripple effect for female workers statewide; the PTU benefits and salary package is one of the most robust offerings in the entire state economy and serves as a useful high watermark for all female service and public sector economy workers, especially with paid maternity leave. Whereas suburban teacher unions play a peripheral role in the respective municipal political debates, Providence Teachers Union is a major force in statewide politics. Simultaneously, another front of this attack can be found in the halls of the Community College of Rhode Island, where Raimondo seeks to crush the unionized faculty owing to its large membership, the subject of a future report….

Right now, Providence Public School Department is being taken over by the state and the state’s newly-appointed (by Raimondo) Education Commissioner Angélica M. Infante-Green, an alumnus of the Jeb Bush education privatization project Chiefs for Change, which has seen in the past decade a revolving door installed into various Ed offices in RI. Interim Superintendent Fran Gallo, who has a history in the district, seems to occupy a rubber-stamp position. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has recently moved to defund all other charter schools in the city so to move the money into his own personal project, the Achievement First Mayoral Academy, not unlike several other patterns of funding we have seen locally over the years whereupon the independent charters serve the purpose of creating good PR until they are defunded to make room for the big-box corporate players. Achievement First has a national reputation for abominable student abuses and their opaque, unaccountable budgetary processes pertaining to per-pupil expenditures have a distinct and negative impact on special needs and English Language Learner students both inside their charters and outside in the remaining non-privatized schools.

He reminds us that Raimondo’s campaign was funded by the hedge fund industry, which loves charter schools.

Raimondo ascended to her political position by starting out as the first woman elected Treasurer of Rhode Island. With a heavy war chest funded by the hedge fund industry, particularly Paul Tudor Jones, as well as Enron alum John Arnold, she walked into Treasury and saw the writing on the wall.

The Rhode Island Democratic Party was influenced since World War II by the diktats of ethnic Catholicism, with attendant anti-Communism, corruption, and conservatism. Treasury for decades had been run as little more than a bail-out fund for the state and its multiple ridiculous schemes, including failed real estate deals and other pay-offs that clearly violated the responsibility of not just a fiduciary but probably every sane child with a piggy bank.

With this in mind, Raimondo invested the state pension fund (which includes public school teacher contributions) into the hedge funds that in turn finance charter schools (Paul Tudor Jones’s Robin Hood Foundation finances Achievement First) [4], meaning that Providence teachers still to this day see a payroll deduction on their pay stub that finances the literal busting of their own union!

She was aided in this by donor John Arnold, who foisted upon the public, via the Pew Charitable Trust, a phony pension crisis narrative in the media [5] that was picked up by perceived non-partisan outlets like PBS. Raimondo is a pro at manufacturing a crisis to attack organized labor and this recent stab at PTU and Providence public schools bears striking resemblance to the pension heist of 2011.

Privatized education in Providence, he predicts, will be a cash cow for the corporate entities that feed off the misery of inner-city communities and schools.

The untold story, to which Stewart alludes, is not about failing schools, but about racism, structural inequality, white flight, and unexamined white supremacy. Nothing in Governor Raimondo’s plans will address root causes.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Providence, Rhode Island

Mercedes Schneider: Billionaires Jim and Alice Walton Seek to Purchase Louisiana State Board

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
8

 

The Walton Family is collectively worth more than $150 billion, and their hobby is undermining and disrupting public schools across the nation. Since Louisiana has an election for the state board of education in a few days, you will not be surprised to learn that Jim and Alice Walton dropped $200,000 on candidates pledged to support charter schools, vouchers, and Teach for America.

Mercedes Schneider reports in this post that the Waltons waited until close to Election Day so that Louisianans would not have time to learn that out-of-State billionaires were trying to buy the state board elections.

The Waltons are determined to harm the public schools that educated their father Sam Walton and most of them.

The family belongs on the blog’s Wall of Shame for their ceaseless attacks on public schools, unions, experienced teachers, and communities.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Louisiana, Privatization, Teach for America, Vouchers, Wall of Shame, Walton Foundation

Jack Covey on Checker Finn vs. Finland

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
70

 

Reader Jack Covey, a teacher in Los Angeles, sent the following comment to me:

 

First, watch this clip from Michael Moore about
schools in Finland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-DcjwzF9yc
Now, read Education Next on the same topic, in
the context of a book review by Cherker Finn.
https://www.educationnext.org/more-play-will-save-our-schools-book-claims-review-let-the-children-play-sahlberg-doyle/
Here’s the ending of Chester Finn’s “Stick with GERM” 
review of Past Sahsberg’s new book, and his
argument that “play” hurts poor kids, but it’s fine
for middle class kids (and presumably upper class
kids as well).  
He says we’re “bizarrely and cruelly” damaging 
those poor kids when U.S. schools “model themselves 
on a charming small country in northern Europe 
(it’s Finn vs. Finns, I guess)
CHESTER FINN:
But wait. We’re living in a time when academic achievement is flat at the end of high 
school; when scads of young people emerge unready for either college or career success; 
when American employers must look overseas for skilled personnel; and when results-based  
accountability for kids, teachers, and schools alike hangs in the balance and “soft skills” are in
 the ascendancy. 
We also have ample evidence that while “playful teaching and learning” does little harm to 
middle-class kids with support and structure in the rest of their lives, for children from 
troubled circumstances it’s a recipe for failure. Many such youngsters already have plenty 
of “play” of various sorts in their lives, even a corrupted sort of “natural state,” but 
precious little formal learning—and few of the other benefits (character formation, 
self-discipline, citizenship, etc.) that also flow from purposeful adult direction.
Are we—bizarrely and cruelly—to exacerbate the achievement, economic 
and mobility gaps that already plague us as a nation, while turning a blind eye to the 
academic mediocrity that already afflicts even those on the up side of those gaps, 
all in the name of modeling America on a charming small country in northern Europe? 
The evidence the authors cite is persuasive that kids need to play but not that we 
should diminish the quest for stronger skills and knowledge or should try to organize 
U.S. schools the way they do in Vuohtomaki, the rural village where Sahlberg grew up. 
Appealing as that model is in its way, it doesn’t transplant at scale to the Bronx, nor 
would it pave a path out of poverty for children who live there (or in Memphis, Houston, etc.)
I think I’ll stick with GERM—and keep doing what I can to infect others. It 
may be too late to block America’s migration from one education sun to the other, 
but it’s a dreadful mistake to accelerate it.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., is a Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Categories Accountability, Early Childhood Education, Education Industry, Education Reform, International, Play, Privatization, Testing

New York: Charter School Executives on Long Island Misused Credit Cards

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
11

 

Unlike many other states, New York has a State Comptroller who audits both public schools and charter schools. The latest audit of a fast-growing charter in Hempstead, New York, found that executives were charging large expenses to the school’s credit card without documentation. 

The Hempstead district is about 70% free & reduced-price lunch, overwhelmingly Hispanic and African American, only 2% white. It is a segregated and low-income district.

John Hildebrand of Newsday writes:

Five senior managers at one of Long Island’s fastest-growing public charter schools charged more than $60,000 in credit-card expenses without receipts or itemizations required by their school’s own rules, state auditors reported.

The state’s review of spending practices at the Academy Charter School in Hempstead found that 17% of credit-card transactions sampled, totaling $36,329, were approved for payment without supporting receipts, auditors said. Another 12% of sampled purchases, totaling $25,342, had receipts that were not itemized.

Overall, credit-card purchases made on behalf of the academy totaled $496,970 during the 2017-18 academic year, according to the state comptroller’s office, a watchdog agency that conducted the audit. The school’s total annual budget was $18.9 million…

The Academy’s written credit-card rules require that users explain the purpose of each transaction and provide a detailed receipt, not just a summary, according to the comptroller’s report.

This often did not happen, as in the case of one school official who charged $1,476 for a meal, describing it only as a “group lunch.” Academy leaders later said the event was a luncheon for teachers attending fall training.

Card purchases, auditors said, included $5,590 for furniture that did not have an itemized invoice attached, $1,576 to a party rental vendor for what was described only as a “school event,” and five gift cards for about $550 each. School officials listed gifts as teacher appreciation awards, without naming recipients or providing proof that the school’s board of trustees had approved the awards.

School managers also failed to adequately document travel expenses for out-of-town conferences, auditors said. They checked 119 card charges for travel expenses totaling $23,920 and found that 40% lacked receipts. This included 29 charges for lodging and air travel.    

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New York, Privatization

Los Angeles: Michael Kohlhaas Explains How Charter Lobby Neutralized the LAUSD Inspector General

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2019 //
6

 

Working with his treasure trove of emails among charter operators, which he obtained via a public records request, blogger Michael Kohlhaas explains how the Charter Lobby managed to reduce the powers of the Office of Inspector General, whose investigations into corrupt charters had been a thorn in their side.

This is an important post. Read it in full. The charter lobby dedicates a lot of time and money to avoiding accountability and transparency.

He begins:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has a particularly powerful oversight office, the Office of the Inspector General, known in the trade jargon as OIG. And in 2018 the School Board failed to renew then-IG Ken Bramlett’s contract. According to LA Times education reporter Howard Blume, pro-charter board members Monica Garcia, Kelly Gonez, and Nick Melvoin voted against renewal, which was enough to deadlock the board and prevent Bramlett’s return. Blume also noted that Bramlett had aggressively investigated some charter schools, in some cases leading to criminal charges being filed, and that charter schools had been clamoring for limits on OIG’s ability to investigate them but he stopped short of saying that Bramlett’s fall from grace was due to charter school influence.

And later a bunch of overwhelmingly salacious details of a number of really appalling and quite serious hostile work environment complaints against some of Bramlett’s senior subordinates came out along with credible accusations that Bramlett had at best failed to take these complaints seriously. Regardless of the validity of the uproar, and it seems quite valid indeed to me, this had the effect of directing most of the media attention away from charter school involvement in Bramlett’s downfall. Not entirely, though. For instance, Kyle Stokes, education reporter with KPCC, did mention that charter schools had been seeking to limit OIG’s role in overseeing them, although in that same article noted that “sources who spoke to KPCC said that concern over charter oversight was not a factor in the board’s thinking”

But newly published internal documents from the Los Angeles Advocacy Council, a shadowy organization run by the California Charter School Association and about 20 local charter school leaders, paint a very different picture. In fact LAAC and the CCSA give themselves credit for taking advantage of the chaos at OIG in order to effectively remove oversight of charter schools from OIG’s purview.

Not only that but they claim to have kept quiet about the issue in order to protect their public image. In the same document they also claim that they were asked to do so by unnamed people in the District who promised CCSA and LAAC that “they would handle it, and they followed through” Given some statements in another document it’s not impossible that convicted felon and then Board member Ref Rodriguez was one of these unnamed people. The charterites were thrilled by the outcome of their work against OIG oversight, announcing that it “should be seen as a major win by and for the charter community.” Perhaps this media strategy underlay Stokes’s sources’ comment about charter involvement in Bramlett’s non-renewal.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization

Dallas: Charter School CEO Convicted of Taking Kickbacks on Contract

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2019 //
2

 

The Charter Industry has insisted that charter schools need no regulation, supervision, or oversight so they can have maximum flexibility. But where government money flows, accountability is imperative.

The importance of accountability was demonstrated again recently in Dallas, where the CEO of a charter school was convicted of steering a contract to a friend in exchange for a kickback.

Donna Houston-Woods, CEO of Nova Academy charter school, was convicted of all four counts against her: three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.

Houston-Woods, 65, the school’s longtime chief executive, approved the $337,951 federal contract for the firm by copying the bid of a competing company that was initially selected for the job, the government alleged.

ADI’s owner, Donatus Anyanwu, returned the favor by secretly paying Houston-Woods about $50,000 in kickbacks, prosecutors said.

Anyanwu, 61, pleaded guilty to his role in the scheme in July. He did not testify during the weeklong wire and mail fraud trial in downtown Dallas.

Houston-Woods and Anyanwu were indicted in December 2017. Houston-Woods was accused of using her position as head of Nova Academy to steer the federal contract to ADI in return for kickbacks. ADI botched the job and shouldn’t have gotten the contract in the first place, prosecutors said.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dallas, Education Industry, Fraud, Privatization

Nancy Flanagan: Why Are the Democratic Candidates Silent About Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2019 //
39

Nancy Flanagan is a retired teacher in Michigan with long experience in the classroom and one of our best education bloggers.

In this post, she wonders why the Democratic candidates are mostly mum about charters. At the last Democratic debate, when the question of charters was raised, Andrew Yang was the only one who openly expressed support for charters. The good news is that Andrew Yang will not be the eventual candidate. Even Cory Booker avoided the subject. Bernie Sanders, whose education policy is sharply critical of charters, did not take the opportunity to express his views. He should have.

Flanagan writes:

I believe charter schools have done untold damage to public education, and I’ve had twenty years to observe the public money/private management ideology establish itself in Michigan. First, a scattering of alternative-idea boutique schools, another ‘choice’ for picky parents. Then they go after the low-hanging fruit, the schools in deep poverty—and then the healthier districts.  There is now agreement with an idea once unthinkable in America: corporations have a “right” to advertise and sell education, using our tax dollars…So—no, I cannot be agnostic. In the end, I’d like to see charter schools go away, one at a time, forever, because mountains of evidence have proven that they’re ripe for fraud and malpractice, and because there are far better public-school options, in every city and neighborhood. I think that’s preferable to trying to extinguish or ban charter schools outright—although ending all federal financial support for charters is Step One. That will necessitate a new Secretary of Education. The rest will mean changing hearts and minds—a long, slow process.

She adds:

Education is my issue, but charters are a mere slice of a bigger pie. It was gratifying to simply hear candidates talk about education on the stage. Here’s what I would like to hear from a candidate:

Let’s invest more in fully public education—the kind that’s community-based and has elected oversight. Let’s acknowledge the places where it has crumbled and rebuild them, instead of abandoning them. Let’s work toward more economically and ethnically diverse schools, making them places where building an informed citizenry and developing individual talents—not test scores—are our highest goals.

Right on, Nancy!

Let’s keep pushing the candidates and demand them to speak out against privatization.

Real Democrats do not outsource public money to privately managed schools and religious schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democrats, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization
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