Archives for category: Privatization
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Washington Monthly: What Would “Populism with a Brain” Look Like?

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2016 //
32

This is a provocative, must-read article by Barry C. Lynn of the New America Foundation and Phillip Longman, a senior editor at the Washington Monthly. They review the history of Populism and import its essential ideas into the present era.

The… first Populists drew upon a political philosophy with roots back to the American Revolution. Part of this tradition is familiar—a belief that government must be run by the people. Populists called for direct election of senators and led the push for referendums and initiatives to bypass corrupt legislatures. But another part is largely forgotten—that the people are sovereign over the economy and have a responsibility to structure markets to promote the common good.

This was the “democratic republicanism” of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It holds that, just like political power, economic power must be distributed as widely as possible. Thus, the Populists focused much of their energy on combating efforts to monopolize commerce and natural resources, especially land. They also closely studied how to govern large corporations, and strongly supported unionization of workers and farmers to counter the power of concentrated capital.

Read their proposals for restoring power to the people.

This is one I like a lot, and I would add charter schools to their list:

What would a True Populist do today? Insist that the managers of any corporation receiving more than a quarter of its revenues from taxpayers—including defense contractors, universities, and hospitals—work at government wages. And require that the bosses of local public utilities earn no more than the public servants who regulate them.

They also propose breaking up the giant monopolies of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and localizing retail, banking and other services.

Since the 1970s, both Democrats and Republicans have undone almost all these laws. The result has been a concentration of power and wealth that would have horrified True Populists. In groceries, pharmacies, hardware, and office supply, control has been consolidated in as few as one or two giants. So, too, wealth—the Walton family alone is now as rich as 140 million other Americans combined. And with the rise of online goliaths like Amazon, which aims to be the “Everything Store,” control will only be yet further concentrated.

What would a True Populist do today? Besides neutralizing large online retailers, a True Populist would revive the laws Americans used to localize banking, farming, and retail through the heart of the twentieth century.

About fifteen years ago, the Bush administration dropped the guard against vertical integration. Since then Comcast, which distributes television shows, has been allowed to merge with NBC, which produces shows. Amazon, the dominant retail marketplace for books, has been allowed to go big time into publishing books. And Google, which dominates search, has been allowed to compete directly with companies like Yelp, which rely on Google’s search engine.

What would a True Populist do today? Break up Amazon, Facebook, Google, Comcast, and any other essential network monopoly by banning them from owning companies that depend on their services.

Wow! Now here is some fresh thinking.

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

Jay Greene: Do Higher Test Scores Predict Better Life Outcomes?

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2016 //
112

Jay Greene, chairman of the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas, reaches a startling conclusion: Higher test do not necessarily translate into higher graduation rates or other life outcomes that matter.

This post pretty much blows away the rationale for corporate reform. How many times did we hear from Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and other “reform” leaders that charter schools get higher test scores than public schools? How many times have we heard from the Friedman Foundation and other cheerleaders for vouchers that vouchers are the key to higher test scores? But what if the higher test scores do not translate into better outcomes for students? What if Jay Greene is right? Perhaps the goal of schooling should be to teach a well-rounded education, character, and citizenship? Test scores don’t measure that.

This is one of the most important posts I have read in a very long time. I encourage you to read it.

Greene writes:

I’ve written several times recently about how short term gains in test scores are not associated with improved later life outcomes for students. Schools and programs that increase test score quite often do not yield higher high school graduation or college attendance rates. Conversely, schools and programs that fail to produce greater gains in test scores sometimes produce impressive improvements in high school graduation and college attendance rates, college completion rates, and even higher employment and earnings. I’ve described at least 8 studies that show a disconnect between raising test scores and stronger later life outcomes.

Well, now we have a 9th. Earlier this month MDRC quietly released a long-term randomized experiment of the effects of the SEED boarding charter school in Washington, DC. Because SEED is a boarding school, there was a lot of hope among reformers that it might be able to make a more profound difference for very disadvantaged students by having significantly more time to influence students and structure their lives. Of course, boarding schools also cost significantly more — in this case roughly twice as much as traditional non-residential schools.

While the initial test score results are very encouraging, the later life outcomes are disappointing. After two years students admitted to SEED by lottery outperformed those denied admission by lottery by 33% of a standard deviation in math and 23% in reading. If we judged the quality of schools entirely based on short term changes in test scores, as many reformers would like to do, we’d say this school was doing a great job.

In fact, SEED may be doing a great job in a variety of ways, but when we look at longer term outcomes for students on a variety of measures the evidence demonstrating SEED’s success disappears or even turns negative. Of the students accepted by lottery to SEED 69.3% graduate from high school after four years compared to 74.1% for the control group, a difference that is not statistically significant. And when asked about their likelihood of attending college, there was no significant difference between the two groups. SEED students also score significantly higher on a measure of engaging in risky behavior and lower on the grit scale….

If we think we can know which schools of choice are good and ought to be expanded and which are bad and ought to be closed based primarily on annual test score gains, we are sadly mistaken. Various portfolio management and “accountability” regimes depend almost entirely on this false belief that test scores reveal which are the good and bad schools. The evidence is growing quite strong that these strategies cannot properly distinguish good from bad schools and may be inflicting great harm on students. Given the disconnect between test scores and later life outcomes we need significantly greater humility about knowing which schools are succeeding.

The last time I checked (when reviewing “Waiting for ‘Superman'” in 2010, the cost of a SEED education was $35,000 per child; it is probably more now.

Be sure to open the link to read the full post, which is very informative.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

NYC: Judge Rules that Success Academy Pre-K Must Follow City’s Regulations

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2016 //
40

In a stunning setback for Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain, a judge ruled that the charters must submit to the city’s regulations for Pre-K if it expects to receive city funding. Moskowitz had sued to reject any city authority over her charter schools, even though nearly a dozen other charter schools agreed to sign the city’s contract for Pre-K.

Moskowitz vowed to appeal, insisting that she has a right to public funds without any oversight other than her authorizer, the State University of New York, which gives her free rein.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York City, Privatization

LA Times Reports on Eli Broad’s Bold Move to Take Over Public Schools and Open More Charters

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
18

Forget about the elected L.A. School board. Eli Broad has picked his own school board, one run by his surrogates and the charter-happy privatizers of the Walton Family Foundation. Why not make the elected board irrelevant and let a billionaire from L.A. and a billionaire family from Arkansas run schools for half the children in Los Angeles?

This is one of the boldest, brashest, most outrageous attempts to destroy public education in the history of education in the U.S. What a legacy Eli Broad and the Walton family will leave behind. Destructive, anti-democratic, union-busting, a need to control whatever they can buy, a belief that everything–even public schools–are for sale. They are utterly shameless.

Here is Howard Blume’s report on the story.

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

Eli Broad Releases Plan to Take Over and Privatize Public Education in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
34

The Eli Broad-funded group “Great Public Schools Now” (sic) has released its plan for the destruction of democratically controlled public education in Los Angeles.

Despite the failure of charter schools to improve the education of low-income students unless they are free to choose the students they want and kick out the ones they don’t want, billionaire Eli Broad wants to put 160,000 children who are now in public schools into privately managed charters. The twist in this plan is that Broad and his allies have promised to take control of public schools, magnet schools, and other schools as well as their own charters. It seems that the billionaires and their minions know how to create successful schools. One wonders if this means that even the public schools will adopt “no excuses” discipline and kick out the kids who refuse to conform. To do this, the corporate reformers have to retain some public schools where they can drop the kids they don’t want.

The goal is to expand access for 160,000 students GPSN has identified as attending failing schools in 10 low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods to successful schools it wants to help replicate or expand.

The neighborhoods are in South LA, East LA and the northeast San Fernando Valley, chosen because they have “chronically underperforming schools and few high-quality school choices for struggling families,” the plan states.

GPSN says it will provide funding and support to high-performing schools no matter what type of school — charter, traditional, pilot, magnet or partnership — so they can be replicated and expanded. It will also support proposed schools with the potential to be high quality.

The widening focus is a shift from an early plan leaked last year that was developed by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to expand charter schools in LA.

“This is a different kind of initiative, very different than has been attempted in Los Angeles before,” said Myrna Castrejon, GPSN’s executive director. “I am particularly excited about the opportunity to really work across sectors to really strengthen all of public education.”

GPSN also is revealing today the makeup of its seven-person board, all of whom boast decades of experience in education. In addition to Siart and Flores, who is also a senior fellow at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, the board members are Gregory McGinity, executive director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation; Maria Casillas, founder of Families in Schools; Virgil Roberts, chairman of the board of Families in Schools; Marc Sternberg, K-12 education program director for the Walton Family Foundation, and Allison Keller, senior vice president and chief financial officer and executive director of the W.M. Keck Foundation.

All of these are corporate reformers with “decades” of privatizing public schools.

Bear in mind that in California, charter schools are not only deregulated, they operate without any supervision. There have been numerous charter scandals involving fraud and misappropriation of funds.

This is a disgrace. Eli Broad was educated in the public schools of Michigan, and he has become–along with the rightwing Walton Family Foundation–the major destroyer of public education in the nation. Naturally, the Walton Family Foundation’s education director Marc Sternberg is on the board of Eli Broad’s latest venture, bringing together the two most powerful and union-hating, public school-hating organizations in the US.

Expect a billionaire-funded drive to take control of the Los Angeles school board in the spring of 2017, to pave the way for the end of democratic public education in Los Angeles.

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

Edward F. Berger: We Must Recover from the School Choice Movement and Reclaim Our Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
27

Edward F. Berger is a retired educator who lives in Arizona and builds community support against privatization of public schools.

In this post, he explains the failure of charter schools (which he calls “partial schools”).

This is how the school choice movement went wrong:

Politicians, ideologues, so-called libertarians, and crooks attracted by profit motives, took over the charter school experiment. They decided, with no educational data to back their decisions, that charter schools, regardless of whether they worked for children or not, whether they served America’s need for an educated populous or not, would become stand-alone schools that could be run with little accountability, certification, or even democratically elected boards. Now, tax money is often used to create private Real Estate empires. Our tax dollars that we pay for children and their education are siphoned off to individuals, corporations, and companies that contract with charters to provide “services.” Is it any wonder that hedge fund operators and the self-appointed reformers see charter schools and outfits like K-12 as income generators? Is it any wonder that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies cannot keep up with the criminal activities of those milking the system? These thefts are criminal even if approved by legislatures. Are you surprised that the largest Charter School operator in America is a Turkish political movement using our tax dollars to bring their people (they call them teachers) into America to support a political agenda in a foreign land?

Groups motivated by Koch, ALEC, and those with hedge fund mentalities of fraud and greed, have gone against the clear and expressed wishes of the great majority of Americans (exceeding 85%) who support community based, public, comprehensive schools. Let’s be very clear. The great majority of Americans want children exposed to and involved in these areas of learning: Art, music, the sciences, history, civics, theater, health, languages, social studies, reading, writing, critical thinking, physical education, athletics, cooperative experiences, computer sciences, computer literacy, clubs, projects, research… and this is only a partial list of what public comprehensive schools provide. We citizens want the development of self-motivated children, children with ethics and empathy. Children with heart. Constant testing for data does not serve our children.

Parents, educators, and communities united can push back against the corruption in the charter industry.

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

Success Academy is Seeking to Hire a “Chief Scaling Officer”

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
33

A friend sent me a recruiting notice from Success Academy. It is seeking to hire a “Chief Scaling Officer.” No, this has nothing to do with fish. It is about growing the charter chain and finding a guru who knows how to expedite that growth. My friend also told me that the salary is huge, like $300,000. This is your chance to get in on the hottest business opportunity in town. Warning: staff turnover is extremely high.

Here is the offer (please note the use of “architect” as a verb, something new to me):


Success Academy Charter Schools

Managing Director and Chief Scaling Officer

The mission of Success Academy is to reimagine public education. From the classroom to the halls of government, this means finding profoundly different approaches to how we structure, implement and support schooling. To realize our radical vision, we reconceive every aspect of school design, from writing rigorous new curricula to drawing regularly on the advances in technology, business and social/civic practices that are transforming every sector except education. Over the past decade, Success has grown faster than any charter network in the nation, building a vibrant network of 34 elementary, middle and high schools. Our 11,000 children – mostly poor and minority – are out-performing students at top city and suburban schools across New York State. With our oldest students in 10th grade, we are fast approaching the irrefutable proof point that zip code does not determine destiny.

Our goals for our second decade are even more ambitious. To rectify the state of schooling in America, we urgently need to demonstrate that excellence can be achieved at scale. And with 19,000 families on our waiting lists (most of them with no other options than failing district schools), we are dedicated to opening great schools as quickly as possible. So our plan is to grow to 100 schools, with the goal of educating 50,000 children across New York City in a uniquely holistic pre-k-12 system. This will make Success Academy one of the larger school districts in the country – on a par with Atlanta or Boston – ensuring that the charter sector is large enough in New York that it cannot be turned back. At 100 schools, we will be graduating 3,000 scholars each year who are prepared to enter, persist and graduate from college and eventually to lead in business, government and civic realms.

With this rapid growth and trajectory, Success seeks to hire its first Chief Scaling Officer—a compelling leader who can spearhead the strategic planning and project execution needed to scale up in critical operational and functional areas while maintaining extraordinary quality across all schools.

The Chief Scaling Officer will report to founder and CEO, Eva Moskowitz, and will be responsible for reimagining how Success Academy structures its operations and school support, so that from school launch to school management, Success is achieving greater operational excellence and outcomes for students. The Chief Scaling Officer
will partner with the CEO and other members of senior management to establish a shared vision around scaling for the organization, will identify areas of inefficiency and unwanted redundancy, will define processes that require standardization, and will outline changes in personnel, technology, systems, and/or management that are required to take the organization to 100 schools and develop Success as a national model in public education.

Not a mere architect of such initiatives, this executive will execute on the aforementioned plans and recommendations.

The CSO should be someone who…

● Understands how to build a replicable model that is both defined and elastic and has experience implementing such a model across multiple sites;

● Can architect a clear, actionable strategic scaling plan that maps out a scope and sequence for the proposed operational changes and what is needed to accomplish them;

● Has the communication and leadership skills to drive the change management required to get all parts of the organization to scale according to plan;

● Has experience navigating political, bureaucratic, and operational hurdles to clear pathways to scaling;

● Seeks to work at a fast-paced, collaborative, compassionate, start-up organization, where entrepreneurialism, innovation, and creative disruption are valorized;

● Is an enthusiastic learner; and

● Is committed to education reform.

The winning candidate will have an opportunity to become an Executive Vice President upon demonstrating success in the role over time.

Success Academy has retained Seiden Krieger Associates, a 30 year old New York executive search firm as its exclusive partner to recruit the Chief Scaling Officer. Contact: Steven A. Seiden, President, Seiden Krieger Associates, 445 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022; 212-688-8383; steven@seidenkrieger.com.

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

Idaho Students to Albertson Foundation: “You Don’t Know What You Are Talking About!”

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
20

High school students in the West Ada school district made a 3-minute video to respond to the Albertson Foundation’s attack on public education. (Read here about the Albertson Foundation’s attacks and its plan to open enough charter schools to enroll 20,000 students.)

The Albertson Foundation is leading a mean-spirited attack on public education in Idaho. They have underwritten television ads saying that the public schools are no good and 80% of the graduates are not prepared for college or careers. Attacks like this are always the prelude to demands for privatization and for replacing public schools with charter schools, vouchers, and virtual charters.

The students got tired of hearing these stale and erroneous complaints from a handful of billionaires who don’t like public education, so they made their own video. Of course, they can’t afford to put it on television, but they can put it on social media.

Let’s hear it for the kids! They are alright in Idaho!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Idaho, Privatization

Valerie Strauss Interviews Me about National Standards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
20

Valerie Strauss conducted a written Q&A exchange with me over the weekend.

She asked good questions. She wanted to know what I had changed in the revision of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

She asked me what I would say to President Obama if I had the chance to sit down with him.

She asked what I thought Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would do.

I thought it was a good opportunity to sum up what is happening right now.

As an aside, readers of this blog might be interested to note that our old friend Virginia SGP comments and claims that he was “censored” on my blog. Happily, a reader of this blog pointed out that he was limited to only four comments a day, which is not censorship. If I posted everything he sent in, he would have had 10-12 comments a day. And then there was the problem that he often used his space to slam and slander people he disagreed with. Not me, but others. He has left us, sadly. I no longer have to read a dozen comments of his daily and decide which to post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Peter Greene on Jeb Bush’s Stale Vision to Disrupt, Privatize, and Monetize Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
21

Jeb is back, writes Peter Greene, with the same old snake oil. Having lost the GOP presidential nomination, he has returned to his favorite song: Public education is failing, and we (the reformers) need to disrupt it, monetize it, privatize it, and sell lots of technology to it.

As Peter shows, there is nothing new in what he has on offer. The same overworked and faulty statistics about massive educational failure (we would now be a fourth world nation if any of this baloney were true). The same claims about the wonders of technology. The same empty claims for privatization and profiteering. Merit pay. No unions. Test scores as the be-all and end-all of education.

Peter writes:

Jeb loves him some vouchers. In his perfect future, the money will follow the child. I always think this is a bold choice for a nominal conservative politician, since it is literally taxation without representation– taxpayers who don’t have kids get to pay for schools, but they have no voice in what kind of schools they get. And if the money follows the kid, why can’t the kid just have a big party?

But I have to take my hat off to somebody who still believes in vouchers. It’s the kind of devotion you usually find only in members of the Flat Earth Society, an adherence to a long-debunked belief that doesn’t have a speck of evidence to support it.

Float Free as a Bird

But why have a school at all, says Bush. Why not just get your AP Calculus from this on-line provider, and get your English from some other provider. Watch for the Amazon.com of homeschooling. Let students move through coursework at their own personal speed. Assess student mastery of skills through the year, and never social promote. Yes, we’ll have Competency Based Education, but we’ll call it something else.

Jeb’s answer to everything: get rid of public education.

Jeb Bush is the Ivan Illich of the right.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Online Learning, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers
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