Archives for category: Privatization
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Maurice Cunningham, part 2: The Curious Incident of Millions Arriving to Fund the Plutocrats’ Favorite Project

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2018 //
5

 

Maurice Cunningham is a treasure. He follows the money involved in efforts to privatize public schools in Massachusetts. In this post, he takes issue with the Boston Globe writer Scott Lehigh, who has a sentimental attachment to privately run charter schools.

Leigh mocks the idea that “corporate reformers” are hell-bent on privatization. Such were the “fevered imagines” of charter opponents, he writes.

Cunningham responds:

“As someone who accurately identitied that raging fever I’ll concede that “corporate” reformers may not be the best description. Rather it was the hedge fund plutocrats of the Financial Privatization Cabal who were most responsible for seeking the privatization of public education.”

He then posts the list of campaign contributions—all staggeringly large—made by Families for Excellent Schools to the Massachusetts referendum about charter expansion in 2016 that caused that organization to be fined nearly half a million dollars by state campaign finance officials, banned from the state for five years, and shuttered.

Cunningham writes:

“Why deem the “corporate” reformers the Financial Privatization Cabal? Because most of the money came from hedge fund and other financial services titans. They ardently seek privatization. And as they knew transparency would be the death of their plot, their strategy depended on a secret cabal.”

Before he finished writing, he noticed that the former director of the disgraced FES is now leading the “Massachusetts Parents Union” and has been invited by the state board to represent parents. That’s a good one!

“Just as I was picking up Mr. Lehigh’s column off my twitter feed came tweets that Keri Rodrigues, former state director of now Banned-in-Boston Families for Excellent Schools and present state director of Massachusetts Parents United is invited to represent parents at DESE. I confess I know little of this and won’t say anything about DESE because … read the disclaimer below.

“But as I wrote in Why Massachusetts Parents United?, MPU is a front for the Walton heirs and other plutocrats tied up in the 2016 privatization campaign.

“DESE’s promotion of the MPU state director is consistent with my argument in Why Massachusetts Parents United? in that the invitation confers legitimacy on the organization that may help it attract attention from the press and add members – all useful when it comes time for the Financial Privatization Cabal to offer up a “parents group” to call for more privatization, including charters.”

As readers here know, I usually refer to the Privatization moment as “corporate reformers,” but Cunningham says it is more accurate to call them the “Financial Privatization Cabal.”

What do you think?

His last bit of advice: Follow the money. Dark Money never sleeps. When a parent group pops up and suddenly has a million-dollar budget, look for the source of the funding.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Dark Money, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization

Maurice Cunningham: Dark Money Returns to Massachusetts to Promote Charters (Again)

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2018 //
9

 

Maurice Cunningham is a political scientist in Massachusetts who follows the trail of Dark Money. “Dark Money” refers to groups that conceal their donors and that use phony front groups that pretend to be grassroots families and parents.

In 2016, the Bay State held a referendum on whether to expand charter schools, and the Dark Money flowed through a NYC group called Families for Excellent Schools. FES was a front for hedge fund managers, mostly from out-of-State. The pro-charter forces vastly outspent the teachers’ unions but the proposal was overwhelmingly defeated. It lost in every part of the state, e crept for a few affluent communities that never expected to see a charter school in their neighborhood. Most towns, especially those that already had charters, knew that the arrival of a charter meant budget cuts for their public schools, and they voted no.

After the election, state campaign finance officials punished Families for Excellent Schools for its lack of transparency. It fined the group nearly $500,000 and banned from Massachusetts for five years. Shortly afterwards, FES closed its doors.

But, Cunningham reports, the Dark Money has returned. 

First, it created a from group called Massachusetts Parents United, only three months after the 2016 election. This was supposed to be regular parents, right? But the money rolled in, more than any group of concerned parents could muster.

“Soon the plucky parents had a website, services of two political communications firms, several thousand members (so-claimed), and projected income of $1,500,000 and expenses of $800,000 for 2017. MPU operated under a sponsorship agreement with Education Reform Now, which bankrolls the millions that enables Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts to fertilize state politics with dark money. MPU’s state director, who also served in that capacity for Banned-in-Boston Families for Excellent Schools, is on the Advisory Council of DFER Massachusetts.”

Does your local parents’ group have that kind of money? I didn’t think so.

“In the Empty Bottle I spelled out some of the contributions made by MPU’s funders to the 2016 charters campaign. Let’s update that first with contributions from WalMart heirs. Jim Walton gave $1,125,000 into the Campaign for Fair Access to Quality Schools. Alice Walton provided $710,000 to the Yes on 2 Ballot Committee and slipped another $750,000 of dark money into the coffers of the now Banned-in-Boston Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy. Thus the Waltons spent down the inheritance by $2,585,000 for Question 2.

“But the Walton Family Foundation, a tax deductible organ of the Walton family, had been putting upstream money into the Massachusetts charters effort for years. From 2010 through 2016, WFF gave over $12,000,000 to Education Reform Now (the Walton family sustaining the funder of a Democratic front is, uh, what?). WFF gave nearly $14,000,000 to the collapsed-in-corruption Families for Excellent Schools, almost half of that in the 2015 run up to the ballot question. Across those years WFF slid over $900,000 to the Pioneer Institute.

“Then there is the Longfield Family Foundation and its benefactor Chuck Longfield. In Empty Bottle I noted that Chuck Longfield had contributed $125,000 to two pro-charter ballot committees. When OCPF forced the disbanded-in-disgrace Families for Excellent Schools to disclose its donors, it revealed that Longfield had given another $600,000 in dark money. He also contributed to the weird Mekka Smith situation, which was also bound up in charters.

“The Barr Foundation is the charitable foundation of Amos Hostetter, who funneled $2,000,000 in 2016 dark dollars through the invested-in-iniquity Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy.

“The largest giver of dark money to formed-in-fraudulence Families for Excellent Schools Advocacy was its office mate engorged-in-effluvia Families for Excellent Schools Inc., which laundered $3,700,000 through FESA to Great Schools Massachusetts. On May 26, 2016 the Davis Foundation sent $100,000 to FESI and on November 2, 2016 another $10,000, and also invested $20,000 in Pioneer for “Project to Expand Educational Opportunity in MA.”

“Charters were killed off in 2016, you say? In Washington state charters failed at the ballot box in 1996, 2000, and 2004 before squeaking by on a fourth try in 2012, and that was with the help of the Gates family. Privatizers play the long game. Money never sleeps.”

What do they want? Why spend so many millions?

The Dark Money club wants privatization. They want to undermine public schools in the most successful state in the nation.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Dark Money, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Ohio: Charter Schools Spend the Same as Public Schools, Get Worse Results

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2018 //
15

Stephen Dyer, former legislator and currently a senior policy fellow at Innovation Ohio, writes here that Ohio charter schools spend about the same as public schools but get far worse results.

It doesn’t matter whether one looks at the median or the mean, charters are faring poorly in the state.

Just look at the state’s own school grades, which he display on this post. There are far more failing charters than F-rated public schools.

Now the law should be changed to say that if a charter is failing, its charter is revoked and the students are able to flee to a public school.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Pennsylvania: Sentencing Date Set for Prison Term for Founder of Nation’s First CyberCharter

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2018 //
10

Nick Trombetta, founder of the nation’s first cybercharter, will be sentenced on July 10.

He admitted stealing $8 million in public funds intended for his school.

The long-delayed sentencing hearing of former Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School CEO Nick Trombetta on charges of tax fraud and conspiracy is set for July, according to information filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

The July 10 sentencing will come nearly five years after Trombetta, 62, was indicted by a grand jury on 11 counts of tax fraud and conspiracy in August 2013. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the IRS in August 2016.

He faces up to five years in federal prison.

Trombetta siphoned $8 million from the Midland-based public school and used the money to stockpile retirement money and buy personal luxury goods for himself, his girlfriend and his family — including multiple homes and a twin-engine airplane.

The conspiracy involved Trombetta and several others – including his accountant, Neal Prence – moving the money to other companies created or controlled by Trombetta and filing false tax returns.

He had this great idea. Give a computer and distance instruction to students who enrolled. Collect full state tuition. He collected $10,000 per student and had 10,000 students. He was rolling in dough. $100 million. It is easy to let that kind of money go to your head or your bank account.

There are virtual charter schools operating across the country that are raking in lots of money that they don’t need or deserve. What should they do with it?

If every charter operator who used his school’s credit card as his personal piggy bank were put into jail, the jails would be overcrowded. If they happened to be privatized prisons, the charter industry would turn against privatization and demand decent public prisons.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Fraud, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Will Seattle Risk Another Broadie as Superintendent?

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
2

 

Dora Taylor, parent activist, wonders why the Seattle school board would consider another Broadie, in light of the city’s horrible experience with another Broadie.

“Many of us painfully recall our last Broad Superintendent, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson and the pain she brought with her through school closings, successful programs being decimated, an increase in bureaucracy, nonsensical rifing of teachers and a regime of fear.

“This kind of disruption has been felt by other districts who hired superintendents trained by the billionaire Eli Broad who thinks all schools should be privatized.”

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Seattle

Peter Greene on Arne Duncan’s April Fools Day Joke

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
13

Peter Greene does his very best close reading of Arne Duncan’s bizarre article in The Washington Post in which he insists that his policies have NOT failed, contrary to the evidence and public opinion.

He begins:

Lately, a wave of apostasy has swept through Reformsylvania, and reformsters have stepped up to say that ed reform kind of, well, failed. Yesterday, just in time for April Fools Day, former secretary of education Arne Duncan (and current thinky tank fixture) took to the pages of the Washington Postto try his hand at some non-reality-based history and argue that ed reform has been a resounding success.

How has he managed this feat? Well, there are several tricks.

This damn guy

First, move the goalposts. All the way back to 1971. Fourth grade math and reading scores on the NAEP are up since then!! Why focus on fourth grade scores? Maybe because 17-year-old scores haven’t really moved much at all. And of course, reform hasn’t been in place since 1971– and most of that growth happened before modern ed reform ever took hold– you know, prior to those days when Secretary Duncan was explaining that American schools actually sucked? And all of this assumes that a single standardized math a reading score is a good proxy for the quality of the entire educational system.

Duncan has an explanation for those flat 12th grade scores– because the graduation rate is up, more weak students are taking the NAEP, and so keeping the scores flat is a win. Yay? Anyway, graduation rates are up, so that’s more proof of ed reform success, except that, of course, whether those diplomas actually mean anything other than districts have learned how to game the system with credit recovery and other baloney– well, never mind. There’s probably some real gain there, and that’s not a bad thing. The numbers are up, so woohoo…

[His] notion that test-based accountability “revealed” achievement gaps is baloney. Educators knew where the gaps were. We’ve4 always known where the gaps were. We’ve screamed about the gaps. I don’t believe any teacher in this country picked up test results and said, “I’ll be damned! I had no idea these non-white, non-wealthy students were having trouble keeping up!” At best, test-based accountability was a tool to convince policy makers who would listen to data spreadsheets before they would listen to teachers. And even then, policy makers didn’t look at the data and say, “Well, we’d better help these schools out.” Instead, all the way up to Duncan’s office, they responded with, “Well, let’s target this school for closure or conversion or a growth opportunity for some charter operators.”

This, it turns out, is another thing Arne “Katrina’s Destruction of NOLA Public Ed Is a Great Thing” Duncan counts as success- three million students in charter school. He cites Boston as a win (again, debateable) but ignores the widespread fraud, corruption and failure that charters have been prone to nationally…

Duncan has tried a variety of history rewrites for his administration (only politicians hated Common Core! charter school magic unleashed! ESSA was not a reaction against his work! CCSS should have been rolled out faster!) But all of his reflections stumble over the same problem– Duncan simply refuses to acknowledge the damage that his policies have done to public education. Here he is acting puzzled again–

[Duncan wrote:] Some have taken the original idea of school choice — as laboratories of innovation that would help all schools improve — and used it to defund education, weaken unions and allow public dollars to fund private schools without accountability.

No, Arne! Not “some.” Not some faceless mysterious group of folks. You. You and the people that you empowered and encouraged and cheered on and backed with your policies. You did that.

Well, as we have come to expect, Peter is right on target.

Charter schools are the gateway to vouchers. It is now widely understood that Arne Duncan and his friends paved the way for Betsy DeVos and her all-out war on  public schools. That is now widely recognized, even if Duncan doesn’t admit it.

Reform is failing, failing, failing. The public is wise to the reformers’ real goal, which is to privatize public schools and disparage teachers instead of confronting the real issues of poverty and segregation.

And nothing that Arne writes here changes that fact.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Arne Duncan: American Schools Are the Worst–No, the Best–Ever

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
11

 

For his entire seven years as Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan repeated the mantra that American public schools were the worst ever. They were falling behind the global competition, they needed radical change, they needed privatization, they needed radical transformation. He thought that the remedies were testing, more testing, high-stakes testing, charter schools, and technology. Now he works for Laurene Powell Jobs at the Emerson Collective, where he is supposedly re-imagining the American high school, or something like that.

Having listened to his daily rants about failure for so long, it is startling to see his opinion piece in the Washington Post declaring that American schools are definitely on the right track because they have followed the advice of “reformers” like himself. He claims credit for every gain in test scores and graduation rate since 1971! Even though he was only 7 years old in 1971.

The funny thing is that I used many of the same data in my book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, to refute the claims of Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and the rest of the corporate reform wrecking crew, who insisted that America’s public schools were failing and obsolete. Their favorite word was failing.

Now, Arne doesn’t admit that he was wrong, but instead he claims credit for everything good.

No mention of the D.C. graduation rate scandal or the spread of credit recovery, which enables students to take an online course for a week and get credit for a semester that they failed. No mention of cheating scandals. No mention of the 2015 flatlining of NAEP scores.

But, you see what is really happening is that all the reforms he championed have made no difference at all. They are failing. There is not a single district controlled by reformers that is a shining example of success. The shine is off New Orleans, where most of the charters are rated C, D, or F. The District of Columbia has been firmly in the grip of “reformers” and we now know that most of its claims are illusory. Rick Hess, one of the chief reformers, chastised his fellow “reformers” that they had refused to recognize the D.C. realities and spun a tale of success out of their own fantasies.

Teachers and parents hate the high-stakes testing, and school officials are bullying them into taking the mandated tests.

But go back to 1971, and it is clear that we have made great progress. It is just clear that Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad had nothing to do with it.

Let’s credit the successes of our teachers and principals, our democratically controlled public schools.

The real struggle is not to double down on failed strategies but to protect our public schools from the rapacious grasp of privateers and profiteers.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance, Testing

Detroit: Unexplained Firings at Charter School Rattle Teachers, Students

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
11

 

Old Redford Academy high school, a charter school in Detroit, suddenly fired several staff members, some of whom were “veterans” (i.e., more than one year of experience), without explanation.

The orders came from corporate management, Advanced Educational Staffing. Students wondered how they would earn enough credits to graduate.

Advanced Educational Staffing is a for-profit charter operator. Many of those who have worked there give negative reviews to the corporation and say that the main focus is computer-based standardized testing.

 

The school, part of a chain, is a low-performing charter. Charters in Michigan do not have to meet accountability standards.

Turmoil, chaos, disruption. It is Michigan, after all, the wholly owned state of Betsy DeVos and her family.

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

Florida: Legislators’ Wives Are Opening Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
13

 

Florida is a state that apparently does not prohibit nepotism or conflicts of interest when it comes to charter schools.

The League of Women Voters in Florida studied charters and documented financial links between charter schools and legislators. 

The Miami Herald recognized years ago that Florida was creating a dual school system, and that the charters were fleecing taxpayers with little oversight or accountability.

The Miami Herald wrote about the most recent examples of family members of legislators cashing in.

”Though far removed geographically from each other, two new Florida charter schools share an uncommon feature: They both have a board member who is married to a state lawmaker heavily involved in crafting state policy on charter schools.

“Anne Corcoran, the founder of a charter school in Pasco County, is assisting with a new Tallahassee school. She’s married to Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’Lakes.

“Erika Donalds, the founder of a charter school in Collier County, is leading the effort to open a new Martin County school. Her husband is Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, who shepherded Speaker Corcoran’s bill on vouchers for bullied students in the House.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article207320264.html#storylink=cpy

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Florida, Fraud, Privatization

Julia Sass Rubin: The Newark Charter School Wait-List is a Myth

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2018 //
3

I posted earlier today about Chris Christie’s poison pill for Newark, having approved in advance of his retirement an additional 7,000 charter spaces on the basis of a long waiting list.

Rutgers Professor Julia Sass Rubin explains that the current charter schools have openings, and the wait list is a myth:

If current patterns hold, many of the Newark charter school seats approved by Governor Christie are unlikely to be filled by Newark residents because there appears to be an oversupply of charter seats for the level of demand in Newark.

Over the last four years, Newark residents have filled only about 80% of the approved seats in Newark charter schools. This may have been a factor in the Christie Administration’s decision to close several Newark charter schools last year, as doing so would create more demand for the remaining charter schools.

This pattern of weak demand for charter schools is also seen in other New Jersey cities with large charter enrollments.

The data showing a gap between supply and demand throws into question the claims of a 35,000 student waitlist that the NJ charter industry has used to push back against any slow down in approvals. The 35,000 figure is self-reported and unverified. It is created by the charter school trade association. If a student’s family applies to 10 charter schools, the waitlist would count her as ten students. Analysis of specific individual charter waitlists also confirms that they may include students who have moved away or who applied in prior years and are no longer interested.

Mark Weber and I will be releasing a second charter school research report next month that goes into greater detail on these and related issues.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization
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