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Clueless: The Washington Post Editorial Board

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2017 //
33

The Washington Post has some great reporters who cover education as well as the excellent “Answer Sheet” blog of Valerie Strauss.

 

But its editorial board has been consistently, flagrantly wrong about education for years. During the disastrous tenure of Michelle Rhee as chancellor of the D.C. public schools, the editorial board defended Rhee vociferously. They cheered as she tried to fire her way to success, they ignored the national reports of cheating, they didn’t read the sharp reporting of their gifted staff.

 

And now get this: the editorial board says that one of the positive proposals from Trump is privatization of public education. 

 

What? Send federal funding to every religious school and promote the spread of corporate for-profit schooling? Will every religious school and charter school be subject to all the mandates that accompany federal funding?

 

Apparently the Washington Post editorial board thinks that all public schools in the nation are just like those in DC. And incidentally, the federal evaluations of the D.C. Voucher program have shown no gains in test scores as compared to the public schools.

 

I am willing to bet that there is not a single public school parent on the Washington Post editorial board.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, School Choice, Trump, Vouchers

Study Finds that $3.5 Billion Spent by Duncan on “School Improvement Grants” Had No Effect

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2017 //
39

A new evaluation published by Mathematica Policy Research concluded that the School Improvement Grant strategies promoted by former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were ineffective.

 

Schools that received School Improvement Grants (SIG) to implement school intervention models used more of the practices promoted by these models than schools that did not receive grants. However, the SIG-funded models had no effect on student achievement, according to a new report released by the U.S. Department of Education. Through $3.5 billion dollars in grants in 2010, the SIG program aimed to improve student achievement in the nation’s lowest-performing schools. This is the final report from the multiyear SIG evaluation led and conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, with partners American Institutes for Research and Social Policy Research Associates, for the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

 

These schools implemented one of four strategies recommended by the U.S. Department of Education:

 

  1. Transformation: replace the principal, use student test scores to evaluate teachers, use data to inform instruction, and lengthen the school day or year;
  2. Turnaround: replace the principal, replace at least 50% of the staff, use data to inform instruction, lengthen the school day or year;
  3. Restart: convert to charter school;
  4. Closure: close the school and send students to higher-achieving schools.

 

“There are several possible reasons why the SIG program had no impact on student achievement,” says Lisa Dragoset, a senior researcher at Mathematica and director of the evaluation. “One possible reason is that the program did not lead to a large increase in the number of SIG-promoted practices that schools used. It is also possible that the practices were ineffective or not well implemented.”

 

Wow! $3.5 billion down the drain. $3.5 billion that might have been used to reduce class sizes for struggling students, that might have been used to create health clinics for needy students, that might have been used to fund orchestras and teachers of the arts.

 

While we are all shaking our heads over Betsy DeVos and her evangelical agenda, we have to save a few shakes of the head for the disastrous education legacy of the Obama administration, which spent billions on testing, privatization, closing schools, invalid teacher evaluations, Common Core, and other ineffective strategies.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Peter Greene: The DeVos Gong Show

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2017 //
15

Peter Greene didn’t see the whole hearing because he was teaching. But he saw enough to know this was a play with preordained roles. A sort of political theater. Democrats stewed (although they didn’t berate Duncan for having similar ambitions). Republicans protected Mrs. Moneybags and praised her sacrifice, her willingness to mingle with us commoners.

 

She was smug, because she knew the hearing was unimportant.

 

“The closest thing the woman has to educational experience is being the political muscle behind the Detroit Experiment. The DeVos’s are perhaps the only people who are in touch with every major player in that charter revolution, and they’ve been on top of it for decades. She has served as a self-appointed official of the state of Michigan with education at the top of her portfolio. It is the one card she had to play against the “inexperienced” charge– and she totally blew it. She has learned nothing. From the destruction of a city’s school system, the gutting of educational opportunities for Detroit’s poor, she has learned nothing. She felt expert enough to call for the dissolution of Detroit Public School system, but she has learned nothing.”

 

True ideologues never ever learn anything. They know it all. Like Trump. She is ignorant but no one will tell her.

 

Best of all is her exchange with Tim Kaine, when she insists that she is in favor of accountability. Greene cites the transcript. This is the same DeVos that rewarded legislators with gifts of $1.4 million after they gutted a bill to impose accountability on charters in Michigan.

 

Stephen Henderson, the editor of the editorial page of the Detroit Free Press, wrote an article about Betsy DeVos and “the twilight of public education,” where he wrote:

 

“The DeVoses have helped private interests commandeer public money that was intended to fulfill the state’s mandate to provide compulsory education. The family started the Great Lakes Education Project, whose political action committee does the most prolific and aggressive lobbying for charter schools.

 

“Betsy DeVos and other family members have given more than $2 million to the PAC since 2001. GLEP has spent that money essentially buying policy outcomes that have helped Michigan’s charter industry grow while shielding it from accountability.

 

“This summer, the DeVos family contributed $1.45 million over two months — an astounding average of $25,000 a day — to Michigan GOP lawmakers and the state party after the Republican-led Legislature derailed a bipartisan provision that would have provided more charter school oversight in Detroit.”

 

Accountability? What a joke. Accountability is for public schools, not for charters or Betsy’s beloved religious schools.

 

 

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

What Are the “Results” that DeVos Can Point to?

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2017 //
13

During the hearings on Betsy DeVos, the Republican Senator Richard Burr (North Carolina) asked why people get all hung up on process, when they should be talking about “results.” DeVos agreed. I was hoping the committee might then discuss the results of DeVos reforms in Michigan and Detroit. Or anywhere else. How awesome is Detroit, which is overrun with charters? On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, it is the lowest performing urban district in the nation. How awesome are Milwaukee and Cleveland, which have had vouchers and charters for more than 20 years? They barely top Detroit among the lowest performing urban districts in the nation.

 

Here is what the New York Times said about charters in Detroit:

 

Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.

 

Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.

 

While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.

 

Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.

 

“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”

 

This morning I was on the NPR radio show from D.C. that used to be the Diane Rehm show but is now called 1A, with Rick Hess of the DeVos-funded American Enterprise Institute, and he said that Detroit charters were outperforming Detroit public schools. As Stephen Henderson, the editor of the Detroit Free Press wrote not long ago, the charters in Detroit vary in quality but many of them are failing and they are no better than the public schools.)

 

Henderson deconstructed the CREDO studies that Rick Hess cited, and concluded:

 

In a city like Detroit, for instance, where, on average, students perform well below statewide norms, kids in charter schools should more quickly close their gaps than kids in traditional public schools.

 

Hypothetically.

 

The problem is they really haven’t. Not for 20 years, dating to the beginning of Michigan’s charter experiment.

 

CREDO also found that, for instance, 63% of charters statewide perform no better than traditional public schools in math. And in Detroit, nearly half all charters do no better than traditional public schools in reading.

 

Overall, about 84% of charter students perform below state averages in math; the number is 80% for reading. That tracks closely with the outcomes for traditional public schools.

 

The gains for charter students are also clustered, in many instances, in high-performing outliers. But because Michigan does not require charter operators to have proven track records before they open schools or do much to hold them accountable after their schools open, the number of underperforming charter schools far outweighs the high achievers.

 

In addition, the CREDO results need to be considered in the context of other data about charter schools.

 

The Free Press investigation of charter schools, for instance, revealed that even taking poverty into account, charter schools essentially perform the same as traditional public schools, and in some cases, a little worse.

 

If Detroit, which is still the lowest-performing urban district in the nation, is the DeVos model of “success,” then our nation’s education system is doomed.

 

Similarly, Michigan’s standing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress has dropped, in some cases dramatically since 2003, about the time Betsy took control of education in the state. EdTrust wrote a report warning that the state was on its way to the bottom:

 

Among the 2015 NAEP results highlighted in the report:

 

• Michigan ranked 41st in fourth-grade reading, down from 28th in 2003.

 

• The state ranked 42nd in fourth-grade math, down from 27 in 2003.

 

• It ranked 31st in eighth-grade reading, down from 27th in 2003.

 

• It ranked 38th in eight-grade math, down from 34th.

 

Given these dismal results, why would anyone listen to Betsy DeVos on the subject of education? It must be the funding she has showered on Republicans, including 10 of the 12 Republicans on the committee that will judge her fitness to serve. It can’t be results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan, Privatization

Florida League of Women Voters Documents Charter Scams

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2017 //
14

I originally posted this story in October 2016. In light of the Trump-Pence privatization agenda, it is worth reading again.

Pat Hall and Sue Legg of the Florida League of Women Voters have performed a public service by detailing how for-profit charter companies rip off taxpayers and cheat children.

You can be sure Jeb Bush will not assign this report when he lectures at Harvard this fall about the Florida “miracle” that no one can see other than himself and his hirelings.

Here is the beginning. Please note that 40% of taxpayer funds goes to the management company, not to educating students. What a racket!

Hall and Legg write:

“ANALYSIS OF CHARTER SCHOOL USA REAL ESTATE BUSINESS PRACTICES

“Florida now educates more than 230,000 students at more than 650 publicly funded charter schools. While many of these schools are providing good educational opportunities, we have found that the fundamental structure of the for-profit management companies, specifically Charter Schools USA, must be questioned. The following outline summarizes a very detailed report given the LWVF Board this past summer.

“1. CSUSA has six non-profit school boards that operate 49 schools in 12 urban counties in Florida. Additionally, CSUSA operates 17 schools in 6 other states.

“2. The six governing school boards cover the 49 charters and are run by CSUSA; they are not independent of the management companies.

“3. Inter related affiliated businesses include Red Apple Development, Ryan Construction Company, the Florida Charter Education Foundation and Connex (curriculum software). Furthermore, we found over 300 limited liability companies (LLCs) initiated by CSUSA.

“4. Facilities financing incorporates all aspects of land acquisition, site clearing, construction, bond financing and multimillion dollar lease fees. CSUSA charges the Hillsborough County School district at one of their four schools more than $30/square foot, significantly higher than downtown Tampa skyscrapers!

“5. Tracking expenditures of taxpayer monies is impossible due to for-profit business practices which are not transparent.

“6. Long term lease agreements, after flipping (changing deeds from one related company to the next) from Ryan Construction to Red Apple Development, are charged out 40 years, and charge rent and interest amounts on top of the lease payments. Most CSUSA lease fees in Hillsborough County take 25% of all taxpayer dollars designated for educating children. Some are even higher.

“7. Another 13% to 15% is charged by CSUSA for management fees, hence 40% of public money is not spent instructing children. State auditors have questioned how these costs are reported.

“8. Evidence exists of real estate “flipping” by CSUSA in Hillsborough County. This results in new real estate appraisals to increase value. Lease and rent costs use these values to justify cost charged to charter budgets.

“INTERIM REPORT: ANALYSIS OF CSUSA REAL ESTATE BUSINESS PRACTICES

“By Pat Hall and Sue Legg, LWVF Education Team, June 2016

“Introduction. District school boards grant charter school contracts to private entities and monitor their financial balance sheets, but by legislative intent, they do not have responsibility for their management and operation. Charters have little regulation, and the result has been a continuing saga of scandals. This report goes beyond the mismanagement and corruption issues to the fundamental structure of for-profit management companies, and it questions the accountability of these companies for their use of public funds. Charters may be self-managed or operated by non-profit or for-profit companies. We focus on one for-profit charter management company, Charter Schools, USA (CSUSA). Florida has several others including, Academica which was the focus of a federal investigation, and Newpoint charters which face indictments. A detailed example of the complex facility transactions for CSUSA’s Woodmont K-8 school raises the issue of excessive profiteering. We have data that indicate these business practices are not specific to one school or one company. CSUSA organizational structure: CSUSA is owned and operated by the CEO, Jonathan Hage. It has multiple interrelated entities whose operations are difficult to track. CSUSA has created six non-profit charter school boards to operate 49 publically funded, privately managed charter schools in 12 Florida counties. Additionally CSUSA operates 17 schools in 6 other states. These non-profit boards subcontract to the CSUSA for profit educational management firm which founded them.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization

My Interview on NPR “The Takeaway” re Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
73

 

 

In case you want to listen for 10 minutes about why Betsy DeVos should not be confirmed, here is the link. 

 

Also, I will be on the Chris Hayes show tonight on MSNBC. Same topic.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, School Choice

Daniel Katz Reviews Betsy DeVos’s Testimony

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
25

The prepared remarks of Betsy DeVos were released, and Daniel Katz analyzes them here.

 

DeVos knows very little, maybe nothing, about the public schools of America. She thinks that parents long to send their children to religious schools, for-profit charter schools, cybercharters, anyplace but a local public school.

 

She never mentions the failure of the school choice policies she has inflicted on Michigan. Michigan has seen its NAEP performance drop steadily–sometimes sharply–since the spread of DeVos ideas. Since 2003, Michigan scores on NAEP have declined from the middle of the pack among states to the bottom third. Detroit is awash in charters, and it is still in desperate trouble as public dollars shift to private management. The Detroit charters are no better than the public schools.

 

But she doesn’t mention any of that. She just talks about the wonders of choice. It worked for her and her family. Why shouldn’t all children have the same choices as the DeVos family?

 

When you figure that out, I have a bridge a few blocks from where I live that I want to sell you.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Kenneth Zeichner: Why Betsy DeVos is Unfit to be Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
7

Kenneth Zeichner is Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. He writes here why Betsy DeVos should not be approved for Secretary of Education.

 

 

Betsy DeVos is thoroughly unqualified for the job of Secretary of Education. She has never attended a public school, sent her children to public schools, taught or worked in a public school district or a state education agency, overseen public education as a governor or governor’s aide, or studied the field of education. There has never been a more unqualified nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education in the history of the Department of Education.

 

The DeVos family’s has donated millions of dollars over the years to education causes through groups like the American Federation for Children and contributions to pro-“choice” political candidates to privatize public schools and turn their management over to corporations or religious groups. In Michigan, where DeVos has focused most of her efforts, about 80 % of charter schools are run by for-profit corporations as opposed to about 13% of charter schools nationally.

 

Ms. DeVos and her husband Dick who became billionaires mainly through earnings from their company, Amway, a Pyramid scheme[1] in which many people have lost a lot of money, have been very active in their home state of Michigan and elsewhere in promoting the spread of both unregulated charter schools and voucher schools.

 

Voucher schools involve the transfer of money from public schools to private and religious schools.

 

They began in the South during the civil rights era of the 1960s as a way for whites to maintain segregated schools after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision to integrate public schools. The first modern day voucher program was started in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1989 and has transferred millions of dollars from the Milwaukee Public schools (MPS) to private groups and have made it more difficult for MPS to educate the children who remain in the public schools. Today there are voucher programs in about 30 states supporting some children living in poverty to attend private or religious schools.

 

The success of voucher schools in Milwaukee and elsewhere has been meager. Many voucher schools in Milwaukee have closed (about 40%) and they have not shown any consistent improvement over the performance of public schools even though 3% of their students have a disability in comparison with the public schools where 20 % of students have a disability.

 

In the 25th anniversary report evaluating the performance of Milwaukee’s voucher schools Patrick Wolf a Professor of School Choice at the University of Arkansas concluded “ This whole philosophy and theory of parental school choice kind of falls apart.” Instead of giving families more voice in the education of their children as is promised, voucher schools erode the power of families to influence their children’s education because they are unaccountable to the public even though they use public tax money.

 

There are both good and bad charter schools in the U.S. The unregulated form of charters that Betsy DeVos and her husband have promoted has been widely criticized by education experts and the public. For example, one of the leading advocates for charter schools in the U.S. and most respected education researchers, Professor Doug Harris of Tulane University, has argued in a recent N.Y. Times op-ed “As one of the architects of Detroit’s charter school system, she is party responsible for what even charter advocates acknowledge is one of the biggest school reform disasters in the country… She is widely seen as the main driver of the entire state’s school overhaul… It is hardly a surprise that the system, which has almost no oversight, has failed.”

 

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education rejected Michigan’s application for a grant to expand its mostly privately run charter schools citing the lack of adequate oversight. Professor Harris concludes his op-ed by stating: “The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”

 

A strong public school system is a fundamental aspect of a democratic society. Public schools do not affect just the individuals who use them, but as a public good, they also influence the quality of life in the society as a whole.

 

There is not a single example of a successful education system in the world that has relied primarily on deregulation, privatization and market competition, the kind of reform that Betsy DeVos wants to promote in the U.S. Chile and Sweden are examples of countries where performance declined substantially after the growth of privatization in education…..

 

 

Ken Zeichner is Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Segregation

Sara Stevenson: Why School Choice is the Wrong Choice

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
13

Sara Stevenson is the librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Austin, Texas. She is a prolific writer and is published in the letters column of the Wall Street Journal more than anyone in the world, always refuting their free-market claims about schools. In this post, she attempts to debunk the case for choice, specifically, vouchers.

 

Stevenson writes:

 

One must ask about the motive for the school choice movement. Public education in this nation is an operation costing about $600 billion annually. Do these private, charter, cyber and home schools want to open their arms to public school students in a gesture of inclusion, or are they after the money? The amount allotted for private vouchers is almost always less than the private school tuition, so which families will be able to make up the difference? Will private schools relax admission requirements that make their schools exclusive, or will they drop them to be accessible for all? Furthermore, home schools currently run under zero accountability. What is to prevent a home-schooling parent from taking the voucher money and using it to buy a new computer for the family?

 

And then there are the repercussions. Every dollar taken from public schools and given to a charter, private, home or cyber school burdens the operational costs for public schools. In addition, with government money comes government accountability. Do all these private and religious schools, hoping for vouchers, want to submit their students to the battery of STAAR tests as well as the A-F grading scores that public schools must undergo? When the state is still spending $339 less per pupil than before the draconian budget cuts in 2011, won’t public schools suffer further from siphoned funds?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

New Orleans Activists Release Report on Need for Equity

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2017 //
2

 

 

A group of researchers, parents, and other activists released a report on the inequitable provision of education in the nearly all-charter district of New Orleans. Their focus was the highest-risk neighborhoods, where the city’s poorest children live. The group is called Equity for All Places. Its report highlights the poor choices available to the neediest students in New Orleans.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Equity, New Orleans, Privatization
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