Archives for category: Privatization
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John Merrow: The Broad Prize Now Goes Only to Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2016 //
12

Today, the Broad Prize for the nation’s best charter schools will be announced in Nashville at the annual meeting of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The finalists are IDEA Public Schools, Success Academy Charter Schools and YES Prep Public Schools.

John Merrow laments here that the Broad Foundation–and its billionaire leader Eli Broad–has given up on public schools and has decided to drop some money into charter schools. There was no Broad Prize for urban districts either last year or in 2016. This is only right and just, because Eli Broad favors charter schools over public schools.

Eli Broad launched his Broad Prize for Excellence in Urban Education in 2002, when the first award of $1 million went to the Houston Independent School District. Houston must have been an unusually stellar district because it improved so much that it won the Broad Prize again in 2013. The next year, 2014, was the last year that the prize was awarded, and it went not to a big urban district but to Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia and to Orange County Public Schools in Florida. Eli Broad, mastermind of American education (a title shared with Bill Gates) decided that urban districts were no longer improving fast enough to satisfy him, and he suspended the Broad Prize for Urban Education. After all, how many times can you give the prize to Houston?

If you go to the Broad Foundation website, linked in John Merrow’s post, you may gag on some of its “beliefs.”

Like the first one: We believe public schools must remain public. Nothing about charter schools is public, except the money they get from government. Otherwise, they are managed by private boards, which do not hold open meetings, with finances that are neither transparent nor accountable, and with disciplinary rules that do not comply with state requirements for public schools. In short, they are not transparent, they are not democratically controlled, they are not accountable, and they are thus NOT public schools.

One would hope to believe that the Broad Foundation actually does believe that teachers deserve to be treated with respect as professionals, but you learn on this website that Broad is a major funder of StudentsMatter, the group promoting lawsuits to strip teachers of their right to tenure and seniority, both of which protect academic freedom.

Merrow writes that it is not surprising that Eli Broad has dropped the award for urban districts:

But that’s not really new news, as the Foundation’s own pie chart reveals. Since 1999, the Foundation has made $589,500,000 in education-related grants, and 24% of the money, $144,000,000, has gone directly to public charter schools. No doubt some of the ‘leadership’ and ‘governance’ dollars have gone to public charter schools, which at best make up 5% of all schools. Over that same time period, 3% of the money, $16,000,000, went to winners of the Urban Education Broad Prize (for college scholarships).

In other words, the Foundation’s pro-charter tilt has been evident for a long time. Now it’s getting steeper and more pronounced.

Mr. Broad hoped that urban districts could improve “if given the right models or if political roadblocks” (such as those he believes are presented by teachers unions) “could be overcome,” said Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The suspension of the prize for urban education could signal a “highly public step” toward the view that traditional districts “are incapable of reform,” Henig said. Mr. Broad seems to have already taken that step in his home city of Los Angeles, where he is backing an effort to greatly expand the charter sector.

Apparently it’s pretty simple for the folks administering the Broad Prize in Urban Education: Successful School Reform boils down to higher test scores. I see no public sign that anyone at the Foundation is questioning whether living and dying by test scores is sensible pedagogy that benefits students. And no public evidence that they’ve considered what might happen if poor urban students were exposed to a rich curriculum and veteran teachers. If poor kids got what is the birthright of students in wealthy districts!

In the mind of Eli Broad, higher test scores means great schools. Period. He doesn’t believe that public schools are capable of improving because they are hobbled by such things as teachers’ unions, and job protections for teachers.

Are you waiting with bated breath to learn which charter chain wins the Broad Prize? I’m not. He is a dilettante whose money has convinced him that he deserves to privatize the public schools of America. He has forgotten that he was educated in public schools. Like other billionaires, he doesn’t trust democracy. Privatization suits him. Like the rest of us, his days on this earth are limited. He may be remembered for his gifts to the art world, for the museum he built and named for himself, for his contributions to medical research. But in education, his name will be reviled for his contempt for a democratic institution on which tens of millions of children depend.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Mississippi: Yes for Charters, No for Funding

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2016 //
2

Last year, the people of Mississippi had a chance to increase the funding for their woefully inadequate public schools, and the legislature and governor did everything in their power to reject the proposal, even creating an alternative measure designed to confuse voters. Act 42, which would have compelled equitable funding was voted down. Act 42 failed to win approval. Here is the background.

The legislature’s answer to school improvement: charter schools. These are the schools of choice that segregationists have wanted since the Brown decision.

Some in the legislature want to take the next step and authorize vouchers, to thoroughly undermine public schools.

The first two charters in Jackson are finishing their first year: one is struggling, the other is part of a corporate chain and is off to a good start.

Categories Charter Schools, Equity, Funding, Mississippi, Privatization

Steven Singer: Pennsylvania Legislature Provides Online Courses to Compensate for Budget Cuts

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2016 //
5

Steven Singer writes here on the theme: Online courses for the poor, teachers for the rich kids. (This is familiar to me; I discussed this subject near the end of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, recalling an article by the technology editor of Forbes, who predicted this development more than 30 years ago.)

Singer writes:

Pennsylvania has a long history of under-resourcing its public schools.

State Rep. Jason Ortitay has a solution.

The Republican representing Washington and Allegheny Counties envisions a world where poor kids learn from computers and rich kids learn from flesh-and-blood teachers.
It’s all in his proposed legislation, H.B. 1915, passed by the state House on Monday. It now moves on to the Senate.

The legislation would assign the Department of Education the task of organizing a collection of online courses for use by students in grades 6-12. Some classes might be created by the state and others would be made by third parties with approval for state use. If anyone so desired, the courses could be utilized by anyone in public school, private school, homeschool and beyond. The online learning clearinghouse thus created would be called the “Supplemental Online Course Initiative.”

The purpose of the bill is to help financially stressed districts, not by funding them but by giving them a cheap alternative.

This bill provides an alternative for schools where the local tax base isn’t enough to fund traditional classes presided over by living, breathing teachers.

In the distant past, the state used to made up some of the slack to level the playing field for students born into poverty. However, for the last five years, the legislature has forced the poor to make due with almost $1 billion less in annual state education funds. This has resulted in narrowing the curriculum, the loss of extra-curriculars, increased class size, and plummeting academic achievement.

While the majority of voters are crying out for the legislature to fix this blatant inequality and disregard for students’ civil rights, Ortitay’s proposed bill lets lawmakers off the hook. It allows legislators to provide a low quality alternative for the poor without necessitating any substantial influx of funds.

Where is the curriculum coming from?

Internet-based classwork – like that which would be collected in the clearinghouse – makes up the curriculum at cyber charter schools. Moreover, these online schools have a proven track record of failure and fraud.

A recent nationwide study found that cyber charters provide 180 days less of math instruction than traditional public schools and 72 days less of reading instruction.
In addition, researchers found that 88 percent of cyber charter schools have weaker academic growth than similar brick and mortar schools.

They have an “overwhelming negative impact” on students, according to researchers.

And THAT kind of curriculum is what the state House voted to increase using public money!

Singer reminds readers that Pennsylvania cybercharters have experienced major frauds, and two cybercharter leaders are currently under indictment. Cybercharters have a sorry track record in Pennsylvania and everyone else.

That makes them just right for children who live in financially distressed districts. No one in the legislature cares about educating THEM.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Online Education, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Technology

Jack Schneider: The American Education System Is Not Broken

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2016 //
56

Jack Schneider, historian of education at the College of the Holy Cross, writes in The Atlantic that reformers have constructed a false narrative of educational failure. They say again and again that the “system is broken,” that it needs to be torn apart and built from scratch.

Schneider counters their claims one by one and shows that the system is working better today than it ever did, though it certainly needs to be better still.

Everything must be disrupted, say the reformers. Few of them have ever been teachers or even public school students or parents. But they seem certain that destruction is the right course for American public education.

Schneider marshals a good deal of evidence to show why they are wrong, but he never adequately explains how the reformers came to have these settled and wrongheaded beliefs. He suggests that they live in an echo chamber and only listen to one another.

Why the hysterical claims, he asks.

Perhaps some policy elites really believe the fake history—about a dramatic rise and tragic fall. The claim that the high school “was designed for early 20th-century workforce needs,” for instance, has been repeated so frequently that it has a kind of truth status. Never the fact that the American high school was created in 1635 to provide classical training to the sons of ministers and merchants; and never mind the fact that today’s high schools operate quite differently than those of the past. Facts, it seems, aren’t as durable as myth.

Yet there is also another possible explanation worth considering: that policy elites are working to generate political will for their pet projects. Money and influence may go a long way in setting policy agendas. But in a decentralized and relatively democratic system, it still takes significant momentum to initiate any significant change—particularly the kinds of change that certain reformers are after when they suggest starting “from scratch.” To generate that kind of energy—the energy to rip something down and rebuild it—the public needs to be convinced that it has a looming catastrophe on its hands.

This is not to suggest that educational reform is crafted by conspirators working to manufacture crisis. Policy elites are not knowingly falsifying evidence or collectively coming to secret agreement about how to terrify the public. Instead, as research has shown, self-identified school reformers inhabit a small and relatively closed network. As the policy analyst Rick Hess recently put it, “orthodoxy reigns” in reform circles, with shared values and concerns emerging “through partnerships, projects, consulting arrangements, and foundation initiatives.” The ostensible brokenness of public education, it seems, is not merely a talking point; it is also an article of faith.

I have great respect for Jack Schneider’s careful research and thoughtfulness, but here we part company. The reformers are indeed generating a “manufactured crisis” in order to create public hysteria about the quality of American education. There is a conspiracy, but it is not hidden. It is an echo chamber that includes StudentsFirst, Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, the Gates Foundation, the Emerson Collective, the Broad Foundation, ALEC, the NewSchools Venture Fund, Teach for America, and a dozen or two more organizations and outspoken individuals. They know exactly what they are doing. They promote charter schools under private management, the transfer of public schools to private hands, and vouchers.

When pundits and policymakers repeatedly state that 2/3 of American students are below grade level, even after learning that this is not true, they are “knowingly falsifying evidence.” And one only has to peer into deliberations at any of the above named organizations and see the mutual backscratching to recognize that there is a network that agrees that American public education must be destroyed and remade as an all-choice system, largely privatized.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Privatization

New York: Legislation Allows Success Academy and Other Charters to Hire More Uncertified Teachers

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2016 //
36

Kate Taylor in the New York Times describes education legislation that was rushed through in the closing days of the legislative session in Albany. Quietly slipped in was a provision allowing charter schools to switch to a different authorizer that would be enable them to evade state regulations about certified teachers. The primary beneficiary is Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain, which is expanding rapidly and can’t find enough certified teachers, in part because of the expansion but also because of high teacher turnover in the chain.

In the fraught final hours of the legislative session on Friday, the Republicans in the State Senate agreed to give Mayor Bill de Blasio control of the New York City schools for one more year, but in return they demanded two provisions related to charter schools.

One made it easier for the schools to switch between charter-granting organizations. The second gave the charter schools committee of the State University of New York’s board of trustees — one of the two entities that can currently grant charters — the power “to promulgate regulations with respect to governance, structure and operations” of the schools it oversees.

The broadness of the language at first left something of a mystery as to what the provision was intended to accomplish and who might have wanted it.

A few days later, the mystery cleared up a bit.

Families for Excellent Schools, a charter school advocacy group that is closely tied to Eva S. Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy charter school network, sent an email to the leaders of several charter networks on Tuesday calling the provisions “a massive victory.” In particular, it said in the email, the SUNY-related bit of legislation meant that SUNY would be able to waive current requirements that limit the number of uncertified teachers that charter schools can employ.

In fact, the Senate had pushed for a provision that would have done that directly, by giving teachers at charter schools three years to become certified, but the Assembly, which is controlled by the Democrats, rejected it. After that explicit provision on teacher certification was taken out, the broader language appeared.

The three-year allowance had been a top priority for Ms. Moskowitz, who faces difficulty hiring enough teachers as she rapidly expands the number of Success Academy schools. Currently, under the state’s charter school law, a charter school cannot have more than 15 uncertified teachers. Success hires mostly young teachers. Many of them are uncertified when they begin and attend a master’s program managed by Success while they are teaching.

Apparently SA likes to take uncertified teachers and mold them, rather than certified teachers who may have their own ideas.

Stefan Friedman, a spokesman for Success Academy, expressed support for the idea of giving charters flexibility on the certification rules. “To continue to deliver the strongest academic results for children, as well as exceptional chess, debate and art programs, schools must hire the most highly qualified teachers available and give them extensive training and support,” he said in a statement.

Success Academy claims it is creating a national model for inner-city education. No excuses and uncertified teachers.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, New York City, Privatization, Teachers

The NY Times on the Dangers of Privatizing Public Services

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2016 //
18

The New York Times just posted an outstanding article on the privatization of public services. Except for one. Public schools. The article includes descriptions of what happens when hedge funds and equity investors take over communication, emergency services, and more. But not public schools.

What happens when private investors need to make more money: they slash costs and services.

Please leave comments on the article and urge the reporters to turn their attention to public education.

Privatization, the hedge funders say, is “the civil rights issue of our time.”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Peter Greene: Reform Groups Ask Congress for Help in Vamming Teacher Education Programs

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2016 //
12

Peter Greene discovered that a bunch of alternative certification/charter school groups wrote a joint letter to Congress proposing that all teacher preparation programs be judged by the test scores of their students, which they call “outcome data.” He says this is one of the “Top Ten Dumbest Reform Ideas Ever.”

Yes, it’s one of the Top Ten Dumbest Reform Ideas Ever, back for another round of zombie policy debate. The same VAM-soaked high stakes test scores that has been debunked by everyone from principals to statisticians to teachers, the same sort of system that was called arbitrary and capricious by a New York judge, the same sort of system just thrown out by Houston– let’s use that not just to judge teachers, but to judge the colleges from which those teachers graduated.

Why would we do something so glaringly dumb? The signatores of the letter say that consumers need information.

Without the presence of concrete outcome measures, local education agencies and potential teacher candidates are hard-pressed to compare the quality of teacher preparation programs. Thus, it is a gamble for aspiring educators to select a teacher training program and a gamble for principals when hiring teachers for their schools

Yes, because everyone in the universe is dumb as a rock– except reformsters. Just as parents and teachers will have no idea how students are doing until they see Big Standardized Test results, nobody has any idea which teaching programs are any good. Except that, of course, virtually every program for teaching (or anything else, for that matter) has a well-developed and well-known reputation among professionals in the field….

This is just the first of a series of letters to the feds telling them what the people in charge of the nation’s shadow network of privatized faux teacher trainers. So there’s that to look forward to.

Look, it’s not just that this is a terrible terrible terrible TERRIBLE system for evaluating teacher programs, or that it’s a bald-faced attempt to grab money and power for this collection of education-flavored private businesses. These days, I suppose it’s just good business practice to lobby the feds to write the rules that help you keep raking it in. It’s that this proposal (and the other proposals like it which, sadly, often come from the USED) is about defining down what teaching even is.

It is one more back door attempt to redefine teaching as a job with just one purpose– get kids to score high on a narrow set of Big Standardized Tests. Ask a hundred people what they mean by “good teacher.” Write down the enormous list of traits you get from “knowledgeable” to “empathetic” to “uplifts children” to “creative” and on and on and on and, now that you’ve got that whole list, cross out every single item on it except “has students who get good test scores.”

It’s the fast foodifying of education. If I redefine “beautifully cooked meal” as “two pre-made patties cooked according to instructions, dressed with prescribed condiments, and slapped on the pre-made buns” then suddenly anyone can be a “great chef” (well, almost anyone– actual great chefs may have trouble adjusting). These are organizations that specialize in cranking out what non-teachers think teachers should be, and their thinking is neither deep nor complicated, because one of the things a teachers should be is easy to train and easy to replace.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teach for America, Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluations

North Carolina: The Ongoing Destruction of Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2016 //
26

Wake up, people of North Carolina! The legislators in your state are pummeling your public schools with a sledge hammer. They are turning them over to for-profit corporations! Do you want your local public school to be run by a national corporation? Do you care who “owns” your neighborhood school?

Stuart Egan, a high school teacher in North Carolina, has been writing recently about the step-by-step privatization of public schools in North Carolina.

In this post, he describes the General Assembly’s decision to create an “Achievement School District,” modeled on the one that failed in Tennessee. The basic idea is to gather up the lowest-performing schools in the state (attended by the poorest students) and turn them over to a charter operator.

He cites the comment made by Rep. Cecil Brockman, who favors outsourcing these schools to out-of-state corporations:

Perhaps the most frustrating moment of the final debate came when Rep. Brockman impulsively quipped,

“If (teachers) don’t like it, good. This is about the kids. Who cares about the teachers? We should care about the kids. If they don’t like it, maybe it’s a good thing.”

Do Republican legislators in North Carolina really have that much contempt for teachers? Apparently so. North Carolina raised entry level salaries to $35,000 but capped salaries at $50,000. Legislators work hard to remove any job protection or recognition for teachers. They even abolished the successful North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program–a five-year program at the University of North Carolina intended to prepare career teachers–and transferred the funding to Teach for America.

This is the same legislature that rolled out a budget proposal to spend $1 Billion on vouchers over the next decade. Most of the students who get vouchers will go to religious schools with uncertified teachers and no curriculum. How is this supposed to improve education?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Vouchers

Ohio Senator Writes A Letter To John King

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2016 //
18

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio is a Democrat, and he is known as a progressive. He has also been known in the past as a supporter of charter schools.

However, even Senator Brown had a wake-up call as charter scandals multiplied in his home state. He could not help but notice the multiple editorials appearing in newspapers across the state, as well as news stories in national media about the charter owners who were becoming multimillionaires by donating to Republican politicians and getting more funding and less scrutiny of their charter schools.

He wrote a letter to Secretary of Education John King expressing his concern with the U.S. Department of Education’s award of $71 million to Ohio to open more charter schools (a grant put on hold because of outrage from Ohioans), as well as the embarrassing performance of the state’s charter sector. If Senator Brown has had his eyes opened, at last, that is a big step forward.

The letter can be read here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, John King, Ohio, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Jeff Bryant: How Long Can Big Money Keep Democrats in the Charter Camp?

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2016 //
13

Jeff Bryant, a crack investigative journalist, writes on Bill Moyers’ blog about the big money that has chained many Democrats to the charter school industry, putting them in the bizarre position of defending privatization of public education.

Bryant cites evidence that the two big funders of political campaigns in California’s recent primaries were Big Oil and the Charter Industry.

The same dynamic is playing out in other states, where Big Money is buying Democratic candidates on the charter issue.


In California and beyond, charter-school advocates also team up with big finance to influence Democratic Party candidates in state and local elections.

According to a report from the Center for Media and Democracy, an organization calling itself Democrats for Education Reform has been effective in a number of states at getting Democratic candidates to team up with traditionally Republican-leaning financial interests to defeat any attempts to question rapid expansions of unregulated charter schools.

According to the CMD study, DEFR is a PAC “co-founded by hedge fund managers” to funnel “dark money” into “expenditures, like mass mailings or ads supporting particular politicians, that were ‘independent’ and not to be coordinated with the candidates’ campaigns.” The organization and its parent entity also have ties to FOX’s Rupert Murdoch and Charles and David Koch.

Colorado is another state where local elections often pit Democrat versus Democrat in campaigns where the interests of big money oppose progressive candidates who question the need to expand charter schools and exempt them from transparency laws.

In Tennessee also, the interests of right-wing organizations such as Americans for Prosperity often overlap with Democratic government officials intent on expanding charter schools.

Even in traditionally liberal states such as Massachusetts, progressive Democrats assailing the state’s conservative Republican governor for his push to “privatize” education with more charter schools are opposed by DEFR and other big money interests who declare support for charters, because these schools have had the backing of the Obama administration and, well, it’s about “kids.”

Will the public be hoaxed again by the Big Money interests?

As Matt Taibbi explains in Rolling Stone, this year’s presidential primary had the unusual turn of events where “the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.”

Taibbi sees many convincing signs that “[p]eople are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with.”

Clearly there are enough voters in the Democratic Party base who feel this way to convince some of their party’s candidates and current officials to challenge the wide leeway the charter school industry wants. So maybe more Democratic candidates who’ve tapped charter-school money will have some explaining to do.

Categories Billionaires, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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