Archives for category: Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Pennsylvania State Rep. Compares School Boards to Hitler

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2016 //
3

Peter Greene, who teaches in Pennsylvania tells us about the educationally-challenged state representative who compared democratically elected school boards to Hitler. Hitler’s blamed everything on the Jews, and local school boards blame everything on charter schoools. Got that?

Greene writes:

“Brad Roae’s district is just up the road from me and just down the road from Erie, where the schools have made some headlines with their economic issues, to the point that their board was seriously considering closing all of its high schools. Erie is one of several school districts that highlight the economic troubles of school districts in Pennsylvania. It’s a complex mess, but the basic problems boil down to this.

“First, Pennsylvania ranks 45th in the country for level of state support for local districts. That means the bulk of school district funding comes from local taxpayers, and that means that as cities like Erie with a previously-industrial tax base have lost those big employers, local revenue has gone into freefall, opening up some of the largest gaps between rich and poor districts in the country.

“Second, Pennsylvania’s legislature (the largest full-time legislature in the country, one of the most highly paid, and one of the most impressively gerrymandered) decided in the early 2000s that they would let local districts skimp on payments to the pension fund because, hey, those investments will grow the fund like wildfire anyway. Then Wall Street tanked the economy, and now local districts are looking at spectacularly ballooning pension payments on the order of payments equal to as much as one third of their total budget.

“Oh, and a side note– the legislature also periodically goes into spectacular failure mode about the budget. Back in 2015 districts across the state had to borrow huge chunks of money just to function, because Harrisburg couldn’t get their job done.

“Third, Pennsylvania is home to what our own Auditor General calls the worst charter laws in the country. There are many reasons for that judgment, but for local districts the most difficult part is that charter school students take 100% of their per-capita cost with them.

“So Erie City Schools, despite some emergency funding from the state, will run up as much as a $10 million deficit this year, with a full quarter of their spending going to charter and pension costs. Meanwhile, the legislature is trying to phase in a new funding formula (or, one might say, its first actual funding formula). This is going to be a painful process because, to even things out, it will have to involve giving some cities a far bigger injection of state tax dollars than richer communities will get. Politicians face the choice of either explaining this process and making a case for fairness and justice, or they can just play to the crowd and decry Harrisburg “stealing our tax dollars to send to Those People.” Place your bets now on which way that wind will blow.

“Oh, and that formula is supposed to get straightened out over the next twenty years!!

“Meanwhile, guys like Roae want to blame teachers and school districts. You can’t give teachers raises and benefits. If Erie (and school districts like it) want state aid, then they should cut costs and stop blaming charter schools. Meanwhile, Roae has been lauded by the PA cyber industry as a “champion of school choice.”

Roae, who graduated from Gannon in 1990 with a business degree and worked in the insurance biz until starting his legislative career, ought to know better.

“When hospitals throughout Northwest PA wanted to cut costs, they didn’t open more hospitals. If you are having trouble meeting your household budget, you do not open a second home and move part of your family into it.

“Education seems to be the only field in which people suggest that when you don’t have enough money to fund one facility, you should open more facilities. Charters are in fact a huge drain on public schools in the state. If my district serves 1,000 students and 100 leave for a charter school, my operating costs do not decrease by 10% even if my student population does. In fact, depending on which 100 students leave, my costs may not decrease at all. On top of that, I have to maintain capacity to handle those students because if some or all come back (and many of them do) I have to be able to accommodate them.”

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Pennsylvania, Pensions, Privatization

New York: Parent Opt-Out Leaders Target Legislators Who Oppose Public Education in their Own Districts

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2016 //
10

The parent leaders of New York state’s powerful Opt Out movement are taking the next step in their campaign to protect their children and their schools: they are supporting challengers to their own state legislators.

The stronghold of the Opt Out movement is Long Island, the counties of Nassau and Suffolk, where about 50% of all children in grades 3-8 refused to take the state tests. As it happens, Long Island is represented by Republicans who strongly support charter schools (but not in their own districts!), high-stakes testing, Common Core, and test-based teacher evaluations.

The parents have had enough!

Test refusal forces have taken an interest in the race for the state’s 5th Senate District, and they’re using the organizing tools that have been effective in driving New York’s test opt-out movement to try to oust longtime incumbent Republican Sen. Carl Marcellino.

“We’re using all of our skills that we’ve learned over the last four years and we’re applying that to helping candidates who are going to advocate for us,” Jeanette Deutermann, administrator of Long Island Opt Out and co-founder of New York State Allies for Public Education, told POLITICO New York.

With the help of NYSAPE, an anti-Common Core coalition of parent groups from across the state, last spring more than 21 percent of the state’s approximately 1.1 million eligible third- through eighth-grade students refused to take the state standardized, Common Core-aligned math and English language arts exams.

The 5th Senate District, which includes portions of Nassau and Suffolk County, falls in the heart of the test refusal movement.

About 55 percent of public school students in Suffolk County opted out of exams in spring 2016, making the state’s eastern most corner a test refusal hot spot. About 43 percent of students opted out in Nassau County during that period.

Marcellino, who first won his seat in 1995, is the current head of the Senate Education Committee. His opponent, Democrat Jim Gaughran, has turned that position against Marcellino, running a campaign largely focused on education, setting it apart from most other races in the state.

Gaughran, the Suffolk County Water Authority chairman, has hosted listening tours on community education concerns throughout the district. Gaughran is announcing the end of his tour Wednesday, which included 25 events, at least one in each of the 17 public school districts in the Senate district, according to a news release provided to POLITICO New York.

Parents have no money to give, but they are supporting Gaughran with door-to-door campaigning and a social media campaign. They understand now after four years of organizing that they must fight for better leadership in Albany, where decisions affecting their children and their schools are made with no parent input, no evidence, no expertise, no knowledge. Petitions and rallies can be easily ignored. Real change requires better representation.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/11/opt-out-leaders-home-in-on-marcellino-senate-district-106975#ixzz4OrtQlovN

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Politics, Privatization, Resistance, Testing

Three Billionaires Are Trying to Buy the School Board in Oakland, California

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2016 //
7

We keep reading this story in district after district, state after state, but we should not stop being outraged. There ought to be a law that prevents fabulously wealthy people from buying state and local school board elections. We know that their goal is not to improve the schools but to privatizatize them.

In Oakland, California, the privatizing organization is called Great Oakland public schools, and it has the chutzpah to call itself a “grassroots campaign.” It has raised half a million or so for pro-charter candidates. $300,000 came from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City. Most of the rest came from two other billionaires, who have no interest in Oakland other than to support privatization and subvert democratic control of the schools.

Here is the story:

“If it were just a matter of raising money from parents, teachers, and community members, then school-board candidates James Harris, Huber Trenado, and Jumoke Hinton Hodge’s financial advantage over their opponents would be minimal. For example, the incumbent board chairman Harris has raised $11,836 from individual contributors for his re-election this year. That’s not much more than Chris Jackson, his challenger, who has scraped together $9,622.

“But Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge benefit from two independent-expenditure committees funded by super-wealthy charter-school advocates, which have raised millions since 2014.

“These committees are on track to spend about half-a-million dollars to help Harris and Hinton Hodge keep their seats on the board, and to help Trenado unseat Roseann Torres.

“Critics worry, however, that this “outside money” distorts Oakland’s school-board races.

“It’s shocking to me how much they’re spending to get these specific candidates elected,” said Kim Davis, a parent whose kids attend Oakland public schools. “This is not a level playing field. More money means more mailers, more people knocking on doors, and more people making phone calls.”

“Gonzales, who was elected to the school board in 2014 to represent District Six, noted that a “typical school board race in years past was one where a candidate wouldn’t have to raise more than twenty-thousand, max.”

“But in 2012, Gonzales says the nonprofit organization Great Oakland Public Schools began raising and spending tens of thousands of dollars to support candidates who will advance its goals of growing the number of charters and providing them with greater access to publicly-funded resources. As a result, GO Public Schools changed the calculus of school-board elections and unleashed an avalanche of money, which other groups haven’t matched, and that dwarfs the sums that candidates can raise by themselves.

“They have relationships with corporate titans all over the country,” Gonzales said of GO Public Schools. “That’s why the school board has become a much more high-dollar affair.”

“According to campaign-finance records, the two committees supporting Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge received most of their funding from a few billionaires, who have played key roles backing the charter-school industry.

“So far, the two committees — Families and Educators for Public Education, which was set up by GO Public Schools, and the Parent Teacher Alliance, run by the California Charter Schools Association — have spent $421,906 to support Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge.

“The result is that, for every dollar spent to support Jackson, $17 have been spent to support Harris.”

Will the people of Oakland allow the billionaires to buy their school board? Or will they fight to keep their public schools public?

A loss for Bloomberg won’t hurt him. A donation of $300,000 from him is equivalent to one of us dropping a dollar in a Salvation Army bucket. But if he loses again and again, whether in Oakland or in Massachusetts, he might lose interest.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Bernie Sanders Opposes Mass. Question 2

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2016 //
25

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont just posted a letter, now circulating on Twitter, stating his opposition to Question 2 in Massachusetts, which would add 12 privately-managed charter schools a year forever.

He wrote “Wall Street must not be allowed to hijack public education in Massachusetts. We must defeat Massachusetts Ballot Question 2. This is Wall Street’s attempt to line their own pockets while draining resources away from public education at the expense of low-income, special education students, and English-language learners.”

He writes that charter schools already siphon away $450 million from public schools. If Question 2 passes, the hedge fund managers and corporations will take away another $1 billion from public schools.

The statement by Bernie Sanders and the earlier statement by Senator Elizabeth Warren will certainly put an obstacle in the path of the billionaires supporting privatization and pretending to be progressives.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization

Peter Greene on the Rocketship to Nowhere

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2016 //
6

Peter Greene wants to warn readers about a new study of Rocketship charter schools that he finds not credible. Maybe it is because the Rocketship corporation always relies on the same evaluators to do their studies, and he suspects they have become too interdependent over the years. Maybe it is because they measure what is not easily quantified. Maybe it’s because the study will soon appear as part of a sales pitch. Whatever. He finds it bizarre to speak of “months of learning gained,” a metric that is of dubious merit. From his perspective, this is just so much edubizness hype.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Research

Los Angeles: Why Won’t the California Charter School Association Debate the UTLA about Charters and Privatization?

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2016 //
33

The United Teachers of Los Angeles invited the powerful California Charter School Association to debate the issues surrounding the explosive growth of charter schools and their lack of accountability. The CCSA refused.

Here are the issues that CCSA doesn’t want to talk about:

Lack of financial accountability; lack of transparency; cream-skimming the students they want; bias against students with special needs and English language learners; the loss of funding for public schools that enroll all students; fraud, self-dealing, profiteering.

Why is CCSA afraid to debate?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization

Troy LaRaviere Warns Boston Teachers About Charters

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2016 //
4

Troy LaRaviere, award-winning principal in Chicago who was dismissed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel for what was probably political reasons (he supported Senator Sanders in the primaries and he is an outspoken critic of Rahm) recently spoke to the Boston Teachers Union. He came to warn them to fight hard against Question 2, which would expand charters. He explained the havoc that charters have wreaked in Chicago, the damage they have done to public schools, even though public schools outperform the charters.

His talk was “Why Public Schools Are Far Better than Charter Schools.”

Although Rahm fired him, LaRaviere was elected by his colleagues as president of the Chicago Principals’ and Administrators’ Association.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Massachusetts, Privatization

Rebecca Mead of The New Yorker: Did the Candidates Forget about K-12 Education?

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2016 //
29

Rebecca Mead writes in The New Yorker that the presidential campaign has almost entirely overlooked K-12 education. The subject never came up in the presidential debates (nor did climate change).

She writes:

Unsurprisingly, the candidates differ as much on their approach to education as they do on virtually every other issue, as the Washington Post outlined in a helpful analysis earlier this month. In September, Donald Trump delivered a speech at the Cleveland Arts and Sciences Academy, a charter school in Cleveland, Ohio, in which he offered his vision, though not before delivering an extended peroration about the perfidies of his Democratic opponent—e-mail, Iraq, the Clinton Foundation—unrelated to educational concerns. When he did get around to his own proposals, he spoke of expanding existing school-choice programs, promising that in a Trump Administration twenty billion dollars of federal education funds would be reassigned to provide a block grant enabling the eleven million students living in poverty to attend the private or public school of their parents’ choice. “Competition always does it,” he said. “The weak fall out and the strong get better. It is an amazing thing.” He advocated merit pay for teachers, stated his opposition to Common Core, and spoke in favor of charter schools and against teachers’ unions. “It’s time for our country to start thinking big and correct once again,” he declared, thereby failing to meet the second-grade Common Core standard 2.1.E. (“Use adjectives and adverbs, and choose between them depending on what is to be modified.”)

Clinton has a long-standing commitment to educational issues; as First Lady of Arkansas, in 1983, she headed a committee to improve academic achievement among the state’s public-school students. She has declared the intention of “preparing, supporting, and paying every child’s teacher as if the future of our country is in their hands,” and has given some suggestions as to how that estimable goal would be accomplished. She has said that she will provide funding to increase the teaching of computer science; she has also pledged to fund the rebuilding of school infrastructure, and to address the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, whereby African-American and minority students are disproportionately subject to overly punitive disciplinary policies, often involving law enforcement, within the schools they attend; she would fund interventions in social and emotional learning, to the tune of two billion dollars.

Clinton has left us all guessing about charter schools, but she has a balancing act: She needs money to run her campaign (think DFER), and she needs to satisfy the her strong supporters, the teachers’ unions, whose very existence is put at risk by the growth of the non-union charter industry (more than 90% of charter schools are non-union).

But of this we can be sure: Trump is 100% aligned with the far-right that hates public schools and unions. He loves charter schools and vouchers. He thinks he will “get rid” of the Common Core, but he doesn’t know that the president does not have the power to do so. His surrogate Carl Paladino of Buffalo, New York, said that Trump would not put an educator in charge of the Department of Education. The Trump campaign seems to look at public education as a cancerous growth on American society.

A vote for Trump is a vote to cripple and perhaps abandon public education.

A vote for Clinton is a vote for a candidate who has some good ideas and who knows that Obama’s education policies have been unsuccessful. Many think she will continue the status quo, but count me as one who expects that she will look for ways to improve public schools, not destroy them.

Categories Charter Schools, Clinton, Privatization, Trump, U.S. education, Unions, Vouchers

What Kind of a School Fines a Departing Teacher $6,087 for “Liquidated Damages”?

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2016 //
25

EduShyster knows the answer: A popular suburban charter school in Massachusetts called the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School. This is a school that was created by a group of friends and families that wanted the equivalent of a private school at public school prices. It makes up its own rules. It has very high test scores. And the state has received scores of complaints about the school.

She writes:

So what were parents complaining about?

Special education services, denial of;

English Language Learners, complete lack of;

Teachers, high turnover of;

Property all over Malden, snapping up of (in cash, which seems, um, kind of strange);

Open meeting laws, ignoring of;

Friends and family of founders, hiring of/preferential treatment of;

Admissions lottery, odds-defying nature of, especially when concerning founders, friends and family of;

Communication with board, difficulty of;

Spending priorities, nature of (see $12 million athletic facility, building of)

Student club and athletic team fees, high cost of;

Day-to-day management of the school, interference in

Parents and students who complained, repercussions against, nudging towards door of

In which we pause briefly to consider one downside of the charter model

Let’s pause here briefly to consider why these parents have been deluging state officials with their complaints. You see, because charter schools are autonomous, overseen by their hand-picked boards, parents who have issues with the school and its management have no choice but to bring their complaints to the friends-and-family-esque Board of Directors. Which can be *awkward,* not to mention difficult, because of the board’s penchant for conducting much of its business out of view of the public. The state, meanwhile, doesn’t have much leverage either. While it can step in when the law is being broken or non-complied with, there is no statutory penalty for what might best be described as *dick-ish-ness.* Add in the fact that Mystic Valley is awash in the very treasure that the state most treasures these days—high MCAS scores and a long wait list—and, well, you see where this is not going. As for those unhappy parents, they have a choice: suck it up or *vote with their feet.*

The founders treat the school as their private school, funded by taxpayers. No one cares about the complaints of parents or teachers. The state provides no supervision. What will happen if the charter cap is lifted and more such publically funded, unaccountable, elite charters pop up?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Funding, Massachusetts, Privatization

“Backpack Full of Cash,” a Film That Exposes Corporate Reform, Needs YOUR Help

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2016 //
2

Tonight is the second showing of Backful of Cash in Philadelphia.

The producers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the continued showing of the film in other cities and for post-production work.

Backpack Full of Cash is a highly professional film whose producers’ previous four-part series called “School” was shown on PBS a decade ago. As you can understand, it is much harder to raise money for a film that exposes the corporate reform movement than to raise money for a series called “School.”

Please give whatever you can. The Stone Lantern team has raised 25% of their goal. They need our help.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Philadelphia, Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »