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Ohio: Chairman of the House Education Committee: Why I Support Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2016 //
13

Ah! The truth is out! The chairman of the Education Committee in the Ohio House of Representatives said that the reason he supports charter schools in urban districts is because it saves money!

Bill Phillis, former deputy commissioner of education in Ohio, now retired, writes:

Chairman of the Education Committee in the Ohio House of Representatives: “…reducing the cost of educating urban kids is the reason I support charter schools.”

The above statement was made during a workshop session at the State Auditor’s August 11 & 12 Charter School Summit.

So charter schooling is cheaper, says Mr. Legislator. He is saying the investment required to deal with the problems of urban education can be averted by merely promoting charters.

The promoters of the charter private business enterprise promised better educational opportunities and results on less funds. This pledge was appealing to policymakers who were blind to the need for additional resources to educate children in poverty zip codes.

The charter industry is preying on and using the most vulnerable children and parents. Charter school opportunities and results, in general, are grossly inferior to those inherent in the common schools. The higher cost of educating children living in poverty zip codes has been recognized for many decades. Several state and federal compensatory programs have been implemented to help address the poverty issue. But policymakers have adopted choice, a tactic to allow some students to escape the traditional school system, instead of addressing the actual additional cost of educating children of poverty.

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://www.ohiocoalition.org

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Funding, Ohio, Privatization

Peter Greene: Arne Duncan Stops Pretending

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2016 //
22

Peter Greene says that when Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education, he had to once in a while notice a public school, maybe even visit one.

But in his foreword to a new book praising charters, Duncan makes clear that charters have the secret sauce. No need to pretend anymore.

Apparently the only schools that ever “close the gap” or produce awesome results are charter schools.

Funny that Duncan’s piece came out just days after a charter founder in Pennsylvania admitted that he stole $8 million from the school’s accounts.

Greene writes:

Notice that he doesn’t even go as far as admitting there are come bad actors and fraudsters in the charter sector, nor does he see a role for government in protecting students, families, and taxpayers from fraudsters. Nope– just let the charter sector police itself.

There was never any doubt that Duncan was a charter fan, but this piece puts him in line with some of the most pie-eyed charter lovers. All pretense is gone, and in a way, it’s impressive that Duncan could pretend to be even semi-supportive of public education for as long as he did. But now he can stop pretending, and be the charter-loving, public school dismissing PR flack he always wanted to be.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Andrea Gabor: The Fiasco of the Brockton Charter School Continues

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2016 //
5

The top officials in Massachusetts are gaga for charter schools and eager to see Question 2 passed in November. Question 2 would allow 12 new charters to open every year forever. Dark money is pouring in from hedge fund managers to push the spurious idea that expanding charters will help public schools, when we know from experience across the nation that more money for charters means less money for public schools.

Andrea Gabor has been following the drama of the Brockton Charter School, which was passed by state officials despite the strong opposition of people who live in Brockton. The charter was supposed to open this fall but has encountered delay after delay. Now it has been authorized to open 22 miles away. As Gabor explains, that is only one of many problems.

After multiple construction snafus that kept a controversial charter school from opening in Brockton, MA, the commissioner of Massachusetts public schools granted conditional approval yesterday for the school to temporarily move to a site in Norwood, 22 miles away from Brockton.

The decision to allow New Heights Charter School its last-minute move to Norwood is “political,” wrote Sue Szachowicz, the recently retired long-time principal of Brockton High, in an email. It shows how badly the Massachusetts department of education “wants to be sure that this school gets its opportunity.”

Adds Szachowicz:

“This will be interesting to see what happens. Norwood is a pretty affluent town, and not particularly easy to get to. Parents who thought they would be sending their kids to school in downtown Brockton will get their kids to school over twenty miles away in Norwood??? I do not understand this one! Politics, politics…”

Mitchell Chester along with Jim Peyser, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education and Gov. Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, are all major proponents of an upcoming ballot initiative, known as Question 2, which would raise the Bay State’s cap on charter schools.

Chester did impose a number of conditions on New Heights, according to The Enterprise, the local newspaper: The school must offer two days of childcare to make up for pushing back the start of school. It must also establish occupancy in Brockton by January 3 or face charter probation or revocation. The school also must issue daily reports on student attendance on each of the first seven days of school, followed by weekly updates on enrollment counts, staffing and monthly financial statements.

“While it is not unusual for a new school to have challenges with a single site, it is rare to have it happen at two places,”said Jacqueline Reis, a spokesperson for Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “Nonetheless, this is not the first charter school to open temporarily outside its region. … While a temporary site is not ideal, families appear willing to try to make it work.”

The Enterprise writes:

There will not be any additional taxpayer cost from the move, Reis said. Based on the maximum first-year enrollment of 315 students from the sixth to eighth grade, New Heights is receiving $3.96 million in combined state and local funds for its first year, which it supplements with grants and privately raised money.

Here is more background on Brockton-now-Norwood charter fiasco from an earlier post:

Amid an escalating battle over a statewide ballot initiative, this November, that would lift the cap on charter schools in Massachussetts, the Brockton charter mess highlights the greatest fears of charter skeptics, including:

–A sloppy approval process, and this in a state that prides itself on having the most rigorous charter approval process in the nation.

–A political establishment that ran rough-shod over the wishes of the local community.

–As families give up on the charter, which has enrolled about 200 students so far, well below its expected first-year enrollment of 315 students, for grades six through eight, they have already begun to return back to the public school system, wreaking havoc with enrollments.

Read the rest of this valuable post.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization

Gary Rubinstein: Does Arne Duncan Ever Learn?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2016 //
38

Gary Rubinstein has begun reading the first book to be published by Campbell Brown’s The 74, the website that regularly celebrates charter schools and assails unions and tenure. The book is Richard Whitmire’s “The Founders,” about the men and women who launched the most successful charter schools. Whitmire has previously written admiring accounts of Michelle Rhee and the Rocketship charter chain. This book was underwritten by foundations that support the proliferation of privately managed schools.

When Rubinstein read the foreword by Arne Duncan, he realized that it was almost the same as the excerpt that appeared recently in The Atlantic. There were two missing paragraphs.

Duncan was again praising the all black, all male Urban Prep Charter Academy in Chicago for its 100% graduation rate, 100% college acceptance rate. And again, as in the past, Duncan didn’t mention the attrition rate nor the fact that the school has lower test scores than the average for Chicago’s public schools.

This was especially interesting, because Duncan first told this story in 2011 at the Teach for America anniversary celebration. Gary was there, and he later said that this claim turned him into a critic of the reform movement because Duncan said, “same kids, same poverty, totally different outcomes,” the implication being that a new set of teachers made all the difference. Duncan, of course, proceeded to hail “turnarounds” where the entire staff was replaced. And he hailed the public revelation of teacher ratings based on student test scores in Los Angeles. Even as the value-added measurements have failed to produce any positive results,Duncan continues to believe in firing teachers based on their students’ scores.

Gary contacted me after he heard Duncan, and with his help and that of independent researcher Noel Hammatt in Louisiana, I wrote an op-Ed for the New York Times called “Waiting For A School Miracle.” Duncan still wants to refute what I wrote then. But he and President Obama never, to my knowledge, ever went to a big-city school to praise it unless it had fired the entire staff.

I will leave it to others to explain why the Obama administration had such contempt for regular public schools and their teachers. I don’t understand it.

Duncan’s Convenient Edit

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Tom Ultican: A Wonderful Book That Shows the Madness of Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2016 //
15

Tom Ultican teaches in San Diego. He recently read Ciedie Aech’s new book about teaching in Hyper-Reformy Denver and highly recommends it.

Denver is a trifecta of reformers. Non-educator Michael Bennett was tapped to be superintendent. He has a law degree from Yale. He then was appointed to fill an empty Senate seat, so he is now Senator Bennett. He was replaced by Tom Boasberg, another non-educator. He too is a lawyer with no education background. And Colorado has wonder boy Michael Johnston, the TFA-Broadie in the state senate who wrote the nation’s most punitive teacher evaluation bill. It passed in 2010. Colorado was supposed to have great schools, great principals, and great teachers by now. Results don’t matter.

Tom loved the book and thinks you will too.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Denver, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Massachusetts: If Your Child Has Special Needs, Do Not Send Him or Her to a Charter School

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2016 //
6

The NEA recounts the story told by Amanda Ciede, a mother of a child with special-needs in Malden, Massachusetts. She signed up her five-year-old son for a charter school. His experience was a disaster. He was repeatedly suspended. When his mother realized the harm inflicted on him by constant negative reinforcement, she withdrew him and enrolled him in the neighborhood public school where he is getting the services he needs as well as regular consultations between family and teachers. She is now working to defeat Question 2, which would increase the number of charters in Massachusetts.

The mother said:

“He never felt like he could succeed. He was always being told no and you have to stay in your seat,” said Ceide. “When you’re constantly being told no, as a five-year-old, you’re not getting the positive reinforcement you need to feel successful and that you’re a good person.”

In Massachusetts, charter schools are not legally required to hire licensed teachers or anyone formally trained in early, secondary, or special education. Ceide believes the school was not equipped to adequately educate and nurture her son.

“It went from him not staying in his seat to him screaming at the top of his lungs because he doesn’t know what else to do,” said Ceide. “He was being put into a small room, the ‘time-out room’, and he’d be screaming and clawing the space. Then he’d get suspended.”

Certain charter schools in Massachusetts are notorious for their high suspension rates:

The average suspension rate for schools is Massachusetts is 2.9 percent. However, at several charter schools within the state, the rate is much higher, and suspensions are disproportionately directed at disabled and minority students.

For example, the Roxbury Preparatory Charter suspended 40 percent of its students last year, including 57.8 percent of students with disabilities and 43.5 percent of black students. The City on a Hill Charter School in New Bedford suspended 35.4 percent of its students, including 50 percent of students with disabilities and 52.9 percent of black students.

(Secretary of Education John King was one of the founders of Roxbury Preparatory Charter, where he was co-director for five years and developed its curriculum and rules of behavior. He subsequently joined Uncommon Schools, one of the nation’s “no excuses” charter chains, which is noted for its strict discipline.)

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Massachusetts, Privatization

California: Meet the Billionaires Who Are Financing the Spread of School Privatization

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2016 //
58

The California Teachers Association created a useful graphic of the billionaires who are supporting charter schools and privatization of public schools. (There are many more billionaires supporting privatization, but this is a good start.)

Here are a few things you should know about the people on this site.

The Waltons are probably the richest family in America. Forbes estimates their family fortune at $130 billion. Privatizing public education is a family hobby or passion. Wherever there is a critical election, whether in Washington State or Georgia, you are likely to find that a Walton has put in big money to help those who want to replace public schools with private management. They don’t like unions. They boast that they have funded one of every four charters in the nation. I don’t know if any of them have a union, but I doubt it. Walmart is non-union, and it has thrived–for the Waltons, if not for its workers. Workers at Walmart had to fight to get minimum wages. Many qualify for food stamps. If the Waltons wanted to reduce poverty, they could do it by raising the wages of their workers to $15 an hour. They have 1 million low-wage workers. Imagine the good the Waltons could do if they gave their workers a living wage.

Arthur Rock not only gives generously to charters, he is a major contributor to Teach for America. He personally pays for its Washington, D.C., interns who work as Congressional staff and diligently protect TFA’s financial and political interests.

Reed Hastings owns Netflix. He told a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association that he looks forward to the day when there are no local school boards. Think of it. You would get to pick your charter but have no voice whatever in its decision making. Democracy is such a nuisance. Hastings contributed to a fund to oust the chief judge of Washington State this fall because she wrote the opinion saying that charter schools are not public schools. He established a $100 million fund to promote charter schools headed by the guy who ran New Schools for New Orleans.

Doris Fisher is the matriarch of the Fisher Family that owns the Gap and Old Navy. The family has heavily supported KIPP and TFA. The three Fisher children went to Phillips Exeter Academy.

Eli Broad pushes to eliminate public schools everywhere. His Broad superintendents have been strategically placed in key positions in school districts across the country after being carefully indoctrinated in his view that the best way to improve public schools is to replace them with charters. He likes to work with school districts where there is minimal public participation, preferably where the mayor has total control. He wants to put half the children in Los Angeles in privately managed charter schools. He is another reformer who doesn’t like democracy. The more autocratic control, the better the environment for his top-down management plans.

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston has made its mark beyond supporting charter schools in California. John Arnold tried, but failed, to turn Dallas into an all-charter district. He has a passion for eliminating defined-benefit public pensions and replacing them with 401Ks, which fluctuate with the market. When investigative reporter David Sirota discovered that Arnold was financing a PBS program on the “crisis” in public pensions, PBS was shamed into returning Arnold’s donation of $3.5 million.

Know your reformers!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

California: CTA Launches “Kids, Not Profits” Campaign

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2016 //
3

CTA represents charter school teachers in addition to public school teachers. But it is standing up to the billionaires who are promoting charters in hopes of killing unions.


California Teachers Association
1705 Murchison Drive
Burlingame, CA 94010
http://www.cta.org

Contacts: Claudia Briggs at 916-325-1550 or Mike Myslinski at 650-552-5324

Educators Launch ‘Kids Not Profits’ Campaign

Radio Ads and Website Support Legislation for More Charter School Accountability

and Expose Billionaires’ Agenda to Divert Money from Neighborhood Public Schools

BURLINGAME – California’s educators launched the “Kids Not Profits” campaign today, calling for more accountability and transparency of California charter schools and exposing the coordinated agenda by a group of billionaires to divert money from California’s neighborhood public schools to privately-managed charter schools. These billionaires are spending record amounts of money to influence local legislative and school board elections across the state.

The campaign is launching with a series of radio ads and an informative website – www.KidsNotProfits.com – where parents and the public can get more information about privately-managed charter schools, their impact on students, the billionaires behind them and take action to demand accountability, transparency and equal access for all students. A coalition of education, civil rights and community organizations is supporting legislation that is now headed to Governor Brown for his signature. The first radio spots are running in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. Listen to the English and Spanish radio ads here.

“Public schools should be about students and inspiring young minds – not profits,” said Eric Heins, president of the 325,000-member California Teachers Association. “Educators, parents and civil rights advocates have been talking about the need for accountability and transparency of these privately-run charter schools for some time. We can’t let a group of billionaires with no classroom experience push their profit-driven agenda on our public schools.”

The radio ad lays out the billionaires’ coordinated agenda to:

Divert money out of California’s neighborhood public schools to fund privately-run charter schools, without accountability or transparency to parents and taxpayers.
Cherry-pick the students who get to attend charter schools – weeding out and turning down students with special needs.

Spend millions trying to influence local legislative and school board elections across California.

In the June primary election, this small group of billionaires spent more than $11 million in several state legislative and county office of education races. This network of billionaire donors mirrors the dark money networks used by the Koch brothers. In fact, many of the same donors were directly implicated in an illegal dark money scheme in 2012. This group promised to spend even more in the November election and have already begun writing big checks.

Recent news headlines and academic studies have documented the waste, fraud and abuse by privately-managed charter schools that have cost taxpayers millions while hurting students. An ACLU report, “Unequal Access,” found that more than 20 percent of California’s charter schools deny access to students with disabilities, English learners, or students who have lower grades and test scores. The NAACP recently called for a ban on privately managed charters. State regulators have found more than $81 million in fraudulent and wasteful spending at charter schools in California, while another report shows that an expansion of privately-run charter schools would cost the Los Angeles Unified School District more than $500 million this year alone.

The coalition is calling on Governor Brown to sign AB 709. This bill requires all charter schools to be transparent and accountable to parents and to disclose how they spend taxpayer money, including budgets and contracts. It prohibits charter school board members and their families from profiting from their schools, and requires charter schools to comply with California’s open meetings, open records and conflict of interest laws.

The coalition also supported SB 322, which prohibits charter schools from having discriminatory admission requirements to prevent them from cherry-picking the students they want and turning away students that need extra help, such as special education students, students learning English or students with low academic performance. It also ensures uniform disciplinary actions for all students by requiring charter schools to identify a list of acts for which students can be suspended or expelled, as well as setting a maximum length for suspensions. This bill failed on the Assembly floor late yesterday.

“CTA proudly represents more than 5,000 charter school educators and is working with many others who want to join with us in standing up for students and accountability,” said Heins. “When the charter law was passed in California, no one ever intended it to be a playground for billionaires who want to profit off students and push their agenda on the rest of us. It’s time to hold charter schools and their private operators accountable to some of the same standards as traditional public schools.”

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

Leonie Haimson: The New York Times’ Conflict of Interest Reporting on Bill Gates’ Investments

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2016 //
14

Leonie Haimson has written a stunning article about stories in the New York Times that promote investments of Bill Gates without acknowledging that the writer’s outside organization is funded by the Gates Foundation.

She refers in amazing detail to two laudatory articles about Bridge International Academies, the corporation that is providing for-profit schools in poor countries in Africa and elsewhere. Gates is an investor in BIA. The Gates Foundation supports the organization that supports the journalist. BIA is encouraging countries like Kenya and Liberia to outsource their responsibility for primary school education to the corporation, which charges the families about $6 a month. Haimson points out that when the cost of uniforms and supplies and food are included, the total is far higher, and represents about a quarter of the family income. If there is more than one child, the cost may be 2/3 of the family income. You can be sure that the business is highly profitable, and it relieves the country of the necessity of building universal free public education.

The article goes into detail about the research on both sides of the issue, which is not reflected in the Times’ coverage.

Other articles in the New York Times have praised the “flipped classroom,” a favorite of Bill Gates, and edTech schools that Gates endorses.

I hope the Public Editor of the New York Times reads this timely and important critique of their coverage.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, International, Media, Privatization

Peter Greene: Reformers Offer $100,000 to Prove John Oliver Was Wrong

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2016 //
48

Peter Greene received a notice from the Center for Education Reform, which has led the fight against public schools for almost 25 years, promising a reward to the charter school that created a video showing how great charter schools are. This was in response to John Oliver’s devastating critique of the charlatans who have profited off the deregulation of public money for nonpublic schools.

Right after the John Oliver piece appeared, the CER asked its followers to write Oliver and tweet him to tell him he was wrong. Apparently this didn’t do the job, so now it is offering a prize of $100,000 for a video showing the awesomeness of privately managed schools.

Greene writes:

I, too, would be interested to see what opportunities charters offer that wouldn’t exist without charters. Perhaps some videos will highlight charter-only perks like “getting away from Those Children” or “enjoying a constantly churning staff of underpaid unretained teachers” or “the delightful mystery of what exactly is being done with our tax dollars” or “the warm glow of knowing that we’ve helped some investors make a buck or ten” or even “the suspense of never knowing when my school might suddenly close.” Please, somebody, make that video…The “Our School Is Great” video is a common genre. Public schools all across the country make them– for free– all the time. But it’s completely in keeping with the charter school industry that, having failed to raise a groundswell of grass roots anger over the Oliver piece (which is now over a week old and yet the righteous indignation over it seems largely confined to people who make their living shilling for charters), the charter cheerleading squad must now pay somebody to stand up for them and help them fight back against this PR disaster.

When I read the CER announcement (I am on the CER mailing list), I was aghast that a school-related organization had that kind of spare money to hold a contest. The Network for Public Education certainly doesn’t. That kind of money represents a large percentage of our annual budget. It must be nice to have that kind of money. But I feel far better having the right principles, even though it doesn’t enhance our bank account. It is good to wake up every day knowing that you are on the right side of history, fighting to create better schools for all. I feel sorry for people fighting for better schools for a few kids, while sucking resources out of the schools that enroll the majority o kids. This is akin to providing 50 life vests for a ship that holds 1,500 passengers. The donor can feel proud of saving 50 lives, while ignoring the other 1,450 passengers. I want a safer ship, a well-trained pilot and crew, and life vests for all.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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