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Eva Moskowitz Accused of Violating Student Rights, Wins $10 Million from DeVos, Will Receive an Honorary Degree from Tufts

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2019 //
26

 

As Leonie Haimson explains in this post, it has been a busy few weeks for Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of NYC’s controversial Success Academy charter chain.

Once again, her chain has been accused of violating the rights of students; Betsy DeVos awarded $9.8 million to her schools, added to the $43.4 million  Eva previously received from the federal Charter Schools Program; she will receive an honorary degree from Tufts University; and the President of Harvard University is giving the commencement speech to her graduating class.

How does it happen that the president of the nation’s most prestigious university is speaking to what may be a graduating class of a few dozen students at a charter school? .

“The former president of Tufts, Lawrence Bacow, who is the current president of Harvard is scheduled to speak at the Success high school’s graduation, which last year only graduated 16 out of the 73 students who entered the school in Kindergarten  or first grade.  No doubt both occurrences were influenced by the fact that the head of the Success board, hedge funder Steve Galbreath, is also on the Tufts board of trustees and heads its investment committee.”

Follow the money.

Don’t be surprised if next year Moskowitz land DeVos herself, America’s leading charter school champion.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York City, Privatization

Tennessee: Legal Challenge Expected if Senate Passes Voucher Bill

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2019 //
10

 

Chalkbeat reports the likelihood of a legal challenge to any voucher bill in Tennessee if State Senate passes one as House did yesterday in a contentious proceeding.

Read the details here.

Categories Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Tennessee, Vouchers

Chicago: Teachers at Unionized Charter Schools Plan to Strike

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2019 //
15

When the Waltons and Gates and Bloomberg read this, they will be very disappointed. Chagrined. The point of charters is to bust unions, they thought.

NEWS RELEASE:
For Immediate Release| ctulocal1.org

CONTACT: Chris Geovanis, 312-329-6250, 312-446-4939 (m), ChrisGeovanis@ctulocal1.org

CTU charter members to announce strike date against operators

Teachers, support staff will walk out if demands for living wages, adequate student supports, pension rights, protections for immigrant and diverse learners are not met.

CHICAGO—Chicago could be on the cusp of a third strike against charter operators in the current school year, as negotiations drag on with operators of five schools, and four additional schools consider striking this spring. This would be the first multi-employer charter strike in U.S. history.

CTU educators will join City Colleges clerks and technical workers in AFT/IFT Local 1708 at 4:30 PM on Thursday, April 25 at the Arturo Velazquez Westside Technical Institute at 2800 S. Western Ave., where both groups will announce strike dates. Then workers will head two blocks north to Instituto Progresso del Latino’s IHSCA charter campus at 2520 S. Western Ave. to rally.

CTU charter members at two schools run by Instituto Progresso del Latino share a common target with City College clerks. City Colleges chancellor Juan Salgado ran Instituto before he was appointed as top brass at City Colleges. Under his leadership, workers at both shops have gotten the shaft, charge teachers. City Colleges clerks have been without a contract for almost three years, while Instituto under both Salgado and his heirs has steered public dollars away from classroom needs into a bloated bureaucracy and non-educational spending.

The five schools considering striking employ 134 CTU members who educate almost 1,800 students. All five schools voted overwhelmingly to strike earlier this month, with 94 percent of union members voting, and 97 percent voting to strike if there is no progress at the bargaining table.

CTU members are demanding protections built into the contract to provide special education students with the services they both need and are entitled to under federal law. They’re demanding more support for English language learners and immigrant students—including sanctuary protections enshrined in contract language. And union members are demanding adequate staffing and resources for schools that confront serious shortages of both, along with equal pay for equal work with their colleagues in CPS, who teach the same student population for better wages and working conditions.

At ChiArts, which was cofounded by wealthy investment banker Jim Mabie, teachers are also fighting to force the operator to contribute to their pension fund—a move opposed by the board at the same time that Mabie is trying to gut the pensions of striking Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians. Mabie sits on both boards.

High turnover is a chronic issue at the schools, driven by systemic under-resourcing and poor wages and working conditions. Staff churn, which can be upwards of 20% per year or more at some schools, undermines students’ learning conditions and the stability of school communities.

Union charter workers want to reform these practices with these operators as part of an effort to reform the entire charter industry, which chronically undercuts investment in academic programs and student supports while expanding bloated bureaucracies, inflating executive salaries and shunting education dollars into high management fees.

While this number could grow, the schools announcing a strike date include:

  • IHSCA, the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy, which serves more than 700 high school students. City Colleges chancellor Juan Salgado had oversight of IHSCA and Instituto’s other school programs and civic projects, yet failed to ensure that public dollars went into classrooms instead of Instituto’s management expansion and fee structure for ‘managing’ its school portfolio.
  • IHSCA is bargaining a joint contract with another small Instituto-controlled school, IJLA, the Instituto Justice Leadership Academy. The school serves just under 100 students aged 17-21 who previously left school and are seeking a high school diploma.  Both schools are ovewhelmingly low-income and Latinx, with high percentages of limited English-speaking students.
  • ChiArts, where more than 40 teachers are fighting for more classroom resources, and contributions to their pension fund. Management at the publicly funded selective enrollment school of 600 students has refused. Wealthy investment banker and ChiArts’ co-founder Jim Mabie is also treasurer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s board, where he and his fellow board members are fighting to cancel the pensions of the orchestra’s striking world class musicians, even though moving musicians into a ‘defined contributions’ style plan would be more expensive than the current pension plan.
  • Latino Youth High School, or LYHS, run by CMO—charter management organization—Pilsen Wellness Center (PWC), which has demanded a longer school day and school year plus reductions in contractual benefits, while rejecting the union’s demand for equal pay for equal work. The school’s 220 students, who suffer from high rates of trauma, are almost 90% Latinx and 10% Black.
  • YCLA—Youth Connection Leadership Academy—where CTU members are bargaining with charter operator YCCS, which, like many operators, has inflated executives positions while shortchanging spending on students’ academic needs. YCLA’s CEO earns almost $180,000 per year and the top deputy makes almost $160,000 per year, while some educators make barely a fifth of that. Management has drawn complaints that range from body-shaming to shortchanging special education students at the overwhelmingly Black, low-income school on Chicago’s South Side.

###

The Chicago Teachers Union represents nearly 25,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, the nearly 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information please visit the CTU website at www.ctulocal1.org.
Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from CTU Press, please click here.

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

Kentucky: Heroes of Public Education, the Student Journalists from the PLD Lamplighter

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2019 //
9

Betsy DeVos held a “roundtable” with Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin at a public community college in Lexington, Kentucky.

When student journalists at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School heard that they were meeting, they went to the event, presented their press credentials, and were barred from covering it.

The only student invited to speak at the roundtable attends a religious school. The other participants represented Kentucky organizations that support privatization of public funds. That is, supporters of Betsy DeVos’s anti-public school agenda.

The students were on deadline, and they were on a mission.

They piled into a car last Wednesday and pulled away from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, their public school in Lexington, Ky. With permission, they drove across town to a community college where their Republican governor, Matt Bevin, was hosting a roundtable discussion on education featuring Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The high schoolers — writers and editors for their school paper, the PLD Lamplighter — believed they were following the advice offered by DeVos last fall when she counseled, “It is easy to be nasty hiding behind screens and Twitter handles. It’s not so easy face to face.”

So the student journalists turned away from their screens and social media apps. They went in pursuit, they would later say, of “that face-to-face opportunity.”

But DeVos had no intention of admitting anyone who did not agree with her “freedom” agenda. In her view, “freedom” means her freedom only to hear what she already believes and freedom from anyone who disagrees with her. She was there to promote her agenda of defunding public schools, the schools that 90% of children in Kentucky attend. Why would she want students to hear her explain why she wants to force budget cuts on their schools?

The students discovered that the open roundtable was only open to those who were invited, and they were not invited.

So they wrote this editorial.

“No Seat at the Roundtable.”

The students were trapped in a Catch 22. They couldn’t attend the event because they were not invited. They presented their press credentials but they were still denied entry to what was billed as a public discussion.

We presented our school identification badges and showed him our press credentials. He nodded as if that would be enough, but then asked us if we had an invitation. We looked at each other, eyes wide with surprise. Invitation? For a roundtable discussion on education?

“Yes, this event is invitation only,” he said and then waved us away.

Carson Sweeney
Unable to even leave our car, we settled for a picture of the campus taken through the window.

At that point, we pulled over and contacted our adviser, Mrs. Wendy Turner. She instructed us to try again and to explain that we were there as press to cover the event for our school newspaper. We at least needed to understand why we were not allowed in, and why it was never publicized as “invitation only.”

We watched as the same man waved other drivers through without stopping them, but he stopped us again. Instead of listening to our questions, he just repeated “Sorry. It’s invitation only.”

Disappointed, we called Mrs. Turner again and explained the situation. We were missing school for this event which had been reported as a “public” event on a public college campus. Unable to ask questions, we settled for a picture from our car.

It was then that our story turned from news coverage to editorial.

After leaving campus, we started looking through social media, seeking information from other journalists’ accounts, and trying to find a live stream.

We scrambled to get ourselves together because we were caught off guard, and we were in a hurry to produce anything we could to cover the event and to meet our deadline. We called our newsroom to get assistance from our other editors. Since we were out on location, we had little to work with.

After more research, we found mentioned on the government website that the meeting needed an RSVP, but there was no mention of an invitation. How do you RSVP when there is no invitation?

On the web site, it also stated that the roundtable was an “open press event.” Doesn’t open press imply open to ALL press including students?

We are student journalists who wanted to cover an event in our community featuring the Secretary of Education, but ironically, we couldn’t get in without an invitation.

The students checked and discovered that: Of the 173 school districts in Kentucky that deal directly with students, none were represented at the table. Zero. This is interesting because the supposed intention of the event was to include stakeholders–educators, students, and parents.

They didn’t understand that DeVos does not care about the educators, students or parents at public schools. She cares only about her radical agenda of charters and vouchers.

When the meeting was over, Governor Bevin said, with no hint of irony, that the discussion was all about “the children.”

But the children were not invited nor were they allowed to watch the event or even to cover it as journalists.

What hypocrites those leaders are!

How heroic the students are!

I am putting them on the blog’s honor roll, which is reserved for heroes of public education.

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Kentucky, Privatization, Students

Rhode Island: Governor Raimondo Takes First Steps Towards State Takeover of Providence Schools

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2019 //
11

 

Governor Gina Raimondo, formerly a hedge fund manager, is unhappy with the public schools of Providence. Their test scores are low. They are definitely lower than the schools of Massachusetts.

She is thinking of a state takeover.

Whatever might she have in mind?

One assumes privatization by charter schools.

Hedge funders have a bad habit of believing that privatization fixes low test scores.

All they lack is evidence.

If they ran their hedge funds like they try to run schools, they would be bankrupt.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Privatization, Providence, Rhode Island

Capitalism Is in Crisis, and Billionaires Know It

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2019 //
52

 

 

This article in the Washington Post examines the alarming increase in inequality as a small number of billionaires take control of the economy and the future. The article does not mention the billionaires’ political efforts to gain control of state and local school boards so as to destroy the public schools by replacing them with privately managed charter schools.

The article mentions the deep concern of Seth Klarman, a hedge funder in Boston, but fails to note that he was a Dark Money contributor to the 2016 referendum in Massachusetts that was intended to add 12 charter schools every year wherever they wanted to open. Teachers,  parents, unions, and civil rights groups combined to defeat the billionaires—not only Klarman, but Bloomberg, the Waltons, and others.

My comments are in BOLD.

”PALO ALTO, Calif. —A perfect California day. The sun was shining, a gentle breeze was blowing and, at a Silicon Valley coffee shop, Rep. Ro Khanna was sitting across from one of his many billionaire constituents discussing an uncomfortable subject: the growing unpopularity of billionaires and their giant tech companies.

“There’s some more humility out here,” Khanna (D-Calif.) said.

The billionaire on the other side of the table let out a nervous laugh. Chris Larsen was on his third start-up and well on his way to being one of the wealthiest people in the valley, if not the world.

“Realizing people hate your guts has some value,” he joked.

“For decades, Democrats and Republicans have hailed America’s business elite, especially in Silicon Valley, as the country’s salvation. The government might be gridlocked, the electorate angry and divided, but America’s innovators seemed to promise a relatively pain-free way out of the mess. Their companies produced an endless series of products that kept the U.S. economy churning and its gross domestic product climbing. Their philanthropic efforts were aimed at fixing some of the country’s most vexing problems. Government’s role was to stay out of the way.

“Now that consensus is shattering. For the first time in decades, capitalism’s future is a subject of debate among presidential hopefuls and a source of growing angst for America’s business elite. In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.”

Something is terribly wrong, and even the billionaires know it. Some might want change, but they want to control the change. 

“The 2008 financial crisis may have revealed the weaknesses of American capitalism. But it was Donald Trump’s election and the pent-up anger it exposed that left America’s billionaire class fearful for capitalism’s future.

“Khanna was elected in 2016, just as the anxiety started to spread. In Europe, far-right nationalist parties were gaining ground. Closer to home, socialists and Trump-inspired nationalists were winning state and congressional elections.

“Conversations of the sort that Khanna was having with Larsen were now taking place in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.

”The setting was the opening of Klarman Hall, a new $120 million conference center, built with his family’s donation. “It’s a choice to pay people as little as you can or work them as hard as you can,” he told the audience gathered in the 1,000-seat auditorium. “It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.”

No, no, we don’t want anyone making reckless changes to the system!

“Six months after that speech, Klarman was struck by how quickly his dire prediction was coming to pass. Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

“Klarman wasn’t opposed to more progressive taxation or regulation. But he worried that these new proposals went much too far. “I think we’re in the middle of a revolution — not a guns revolution — but a revolution where people on both extremes want to blow it up, and good things don’t happen to the vast majority of the population in a revolution,” he said.

Too bold no one asked Klarman why he wants to undermine public schools, one of the few institutions that billionaires don’t own. 

“He wasn’t the only one who felt a sense of alarm. One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it. During that period the students had grown increasingly cynical about corporations and the government, said Rebecca Henderson, the Harvard economist who teaches the course.

“What the trust surveys say is what I see,” she said. “They are really worried about the direction in which the U.S. and the world is heading.”

As Giriharadas says, the billionaires want to drive any changes in the economy, proclaiming their deep concern for the millions left behind by their success. Never forget that any changes they control will protect them and their billions.

”The billionaires in Khanna’s district, meanwhile, were consumed by a different worry. Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

“As technology advanced, some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.

“What happens if you can actually automate all human intellectual labor?” said Greg Brockman, chairman of OpenAI, a company backed by several Silicon Valley billionaires. Such thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live. Only Andrew Yang, a long-shot presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur, supported the idea of government paying citizens a regular income. But the idea of a “universal basic income” was discussed regularly in the valley.

“The prospect was both energizing and terrifying. OpenAI had recently added an ethicist — Brockman sometimes referred to her as a “philosopher” — to its staff of about 100 employees to help sort through the implications of its innovations.

“To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,” he said. The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said.”

What kind of future are the billionaires imagining for the other 99.9%?

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Technology

Bernie Sanders Has a Better Statement on Education than Before

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2019 //
64

 

 

Bernie Sanders’ website has a better statement on the importance of investing public education and teachers than any other Democratic candidate so far:

 

Today, more than 60 years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision ending legal segregation in our public schools, and 50 years after President Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law, poor and minority students are still not afforded the same education as their wealthier, and often whiter counterparts. This is not only unjust and immoral, it endangers our democracy.

I’m running for president to restore the promise that every child, regardless of his or her background, has a right to a high-quality public education.

Growing inequality is both the cause and the effect of our nation’s desperately underfunded public school system. Many public schools are severely racially segregated—in some parts of the country, worse than before the Brown decision. With funding for public schools in steep decline, students in low-income areas are forced to learn in decrepit buildings and endure high rates of teacher turnover. Public school teachers are severely underpaid and lack critical resources, and their professional experience is being undermined by high stakes testing requirements that drain resources and destroy the joy of learning.

Meanwhile, resource-rich private schools spend tens of thousands of dollars more per child than public schools do. They are predominantly white or intentionally diversified, and enjoy the best that money can buy—from state of the art facilities to well-paid, highly skilled teachers.

With the vast challenges facing our education system, billionaire philanthropists, Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers are attempting to privatize our education system under the banner of “school choice.” We must act to transform our education system into a high-quality public good.

  • We must make sure that charter schools are accountable, transparent and truly serve the needs of disadvantaged children, not Wall Street, billionaire investors, and other private interests.
  • We must ensure that a handful of billionaires don’t determine education policy for our nation’s children.
  • We will oppose the DeVos-style privatization of our nation’s schools and will not allow public resources to be drained from public schools. 
  • We must guarantee childcare and universal pre-Kindergarten for every child in America to help level the playing field, create new and good jobs, and enable parents more easily balance the demands of work and home.
  • We must increase pay for public school teachers so that their salary is commensurate with their importance to society. And we must invest in high-quality, ongoing professional development, and cancel teachers’ student debt.
  • We must protect the tenure system for public school teachers and combat attacks on collective bargaining by corporate profiteers.
  • We must put an end to high-stakes testing and “teaching to the test” so that our students have a more fulfilling educational life and our teachers are afforded professional respect.

We must guarantee children with disabilities an equal right to high-quality education, and increase funding for programs that combat racial segregation and unfair disciplinary practices that disproportionately affect students of color.

I am still waiting for a Democratic candidate who will explain why we as a nation should have two different publicly funded systems of education–one that chooses the students it wants, and the other required to accept all students. One, under private management, and the other controlled by an elected school board, or a board appointed by an elected official.

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

Newark: Privatizers Shelling Out Money to Buy Control of Newark Schools

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2019 //
6

Patrick Wall of Chalkbeat reports here that the forces of privatization are spending big in Newark to squelch local independent candidates.

Mayor Ras Baraka, who once railed against charter schools, has now joined forces with their funders, which gives him access to their money and power.

Wall writes:

The top spender in Newark’s school board race is a special-interest group with ties to New Jersey charter schools, according to campaign filings reported ahead of Tuesday’s election.

The group, Great Schools for All PAC, has already spent about $46,000 supporting a team of three candidates backed by Newark’s political establishment. By contrast, a rival team has reported spending less than $3,300 so far.

Last year, the group spent nearly $147,000 on the board race — more than three times the amount shelled out by the next-biggest spender.

Great Schools for All is an independent group that can raise and spend unlimited amounts in elections, but cannot coordinate with the candidates it supports. It has paid for online ads, direct mailings, phone banks, and canvassers to promote its chosen candidates, according to the filings.

The group’s chairman is Kyle Rosenkrans, the former CEO of the Northeast Charter Schools Network who was recently an official at KIPP New Jersey, one of the state’s largest charter school networks. The group’s donors include the political arm of a group that wants to expand charter schools across the country and another group co-founded by a KIPP board member.

Great Schools for All is just the latest charter-affiliated entity to spend heavily on Newark school board races. In 2016 and 2017, a pro-charter advocacy group called the Parent Coalition for Excellent Education, or PC2E, spent a combined $380,000 supporting candidates, according to campaign filings.

The spending is part of a trend across the country where national funders pushing a vision of education change that usually involves more charter schools are playing an ever-greater role in local school board elections.

In Newark, both PC2E and Great Schools for All have backed teams of candidates endorsed by Mayor Ras Baraka and North Ward Councilman Anibal Ramos. The teams — originally called Unity, and now dubbed Moving Newark Schools Forward — have swept each election since the once-rival politicians and charter school advocates joined forces in 2016.

Defenders of the coalition say it has eliminated the divisive political battles and clashes between supporters of traditional and charter schools that once defined the city’s school board elections. But critics argue that the alliance and the outside money flowing into the election have made it nearly impossible for independent candidates to win seats on the board.

Denise Cole, a Newark parent and education activist who is running on a grassroots team called Children Over Politics, said the special-interest group has “smothered” the voices of Newark residents vying for seats on the board.

“School board elections are for the people and the people’s voice — not for outsiders to come in here and take over our schools,” said Cole, whose teammates include Saafir Jenkins and Leah Owens…

Rosenkrans’ new nonprofit is bankrolled by The City Fund, a national group planning to spend nearly $200 million to push cities to expand charter schools and give district-run schools more autonomy. An offshoot of The City Fund dedicated to politics and lobbying gave Great Schools for All $25,000 to spend on the Newark board race, according to campaign filings.

Great Schools for All received another $15,000 from Better Education for New Jersey Kids Inc., which grew out of a group established in 2011 to support education policies favored by then-Gov. Chris Christie and opposed by the state teachers union. The co-founders were New Jersey hedge fund managers David Tepper and Alan Fournier, a KIPP New Jersey board member whose foundation donated $1 million to KIPP schools in Newark.

To cut to the chase, a national organization–The City Fund–is bankrolling the slate of pro-charter candidates in Newark. The eight non-funded candidates have raised a total of $5,900. The point of this operation is indeed to “smother” the voices of local residents, unless they want to give their public schools to a corporate charter chain like KIPP.

 

 

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

DeVos Funnels $116 Million to Open 20 Charter Schools in El Paso, Which Will Devastate Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
84

 

 

Should Amy O’Rourke, Beto’s wife, send a thank-you note to Betsy DeVos?

Betsy DeVos has awarded a huge grant of $116,755,848 to the IDEA charter chain to open 20 new schools in El Paso. IDEA opened its first El Paso charter last fall.

In 2017,  DeVos gave $67 million to IDEA.

IDEA has received a grand total of $225 million from the federal Charter Schools Program.

The size of this grant is unprecedented, so far as I know.

Congress should ask DeVos why she gave such a staggering amount of money to the IDEA charter chain.

This rapid charter expansion is likely to swamp the underfunded El Paso public schools, if not eliminate them.

The grant will be funneled through CREED, where Amy O’Rourke plays a leading role. Amy is Beto O’Rourke’s wife.

CREED’s charter program, which is part of a larger gentrification project, has previously been supported by the Dell Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Hunt foundation, and the Gates Foundation.

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/education/2018/09/10/idea-opens-its-first-two-el-paso-charter-schools-plans-more-2023/1157132002/

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/education/2017/10/09/creeed-has-raised-20-m-least-half-go-charters/710557001/

https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/opinion/2018/09/22/charter-schools-offer-choice-but-public-must-know-impact-column/1385283002/

The superintendent of a neighboring district, Jose Espinosa, warned parents to be wary of charter schools like IDEA that boast of a 100% college acceptance rate; what they don’t tell parents is that you can’t graduate until you have been accepted by a four-year college, some of which are open admissions colleges that accept all applicants.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Texas

Betsy DeVos Gives Multi-Millions to KIPP and IDEA Corporate Charter Chains

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2019 //
9

 

In the latest round of awards from the federal slush fund for charter schools, Betsy DeVos handed out plums to the corporate chains KIPP and IDEA. 

KIPP, the largest nonprofit charter network in the country, is slated to receive $86 million over five years to create 52 new schools across 20 states and D.C.
IDEA, a Texas-based charter network, won an expected $116 million over five years. The network’s application says it will use the money to add grades at 56 schools and create 38 new schools across Texas; in New Orleans and East Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and in Tampa Bay, Florida.
The grants, announced last week, underscore the substantial role the federal government plays in helping charter schools expand. But they come at a perilous time politically for the charter school movement, which has seen its growth and popularity ebb in recent years. These networks’ plans for rapid growth might both run into — and fuel — political opposition, particularly in places where that growth will strain school districts’ finances.
As Chalkbeat notes, DeVos is trying to pump new life into the flagging charter movement, as exposes of charter scandals escalate and as some states see a decline in the number of charters as more close than open.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization
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