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John Thompson: Corporate Reformers Descend on Oklahoma City to Inflict the “Edu-Politics of Destruction”

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2016 //
12

John Thompson, historian and teacher, thought that corporate reform was happening elsewhere, but not in Oklahoma City. But now they have arrived in full force, with all their failed and demoralizing strategies. It is such a good post that I am quoting a lot of it, but not all of it. I urge you to read the whole thing.

 

He writes:

 

It wasn’t until I left the fulltime classroom in 2010 that I saw out-of-state corporate reformers, ranging from the Walton Foundation and the Parent Revolution to ALEC, try to bring their competition-driven, edu-politics to Oklahoma City. I saw plenty of examples of Sooner state Reaganism, and the gutting of the social safety net. After all, we expect businessmen to play political hardball, as well as take risks and leverage capital in order to increase their profits. That is why we need the checks and balances of our democratic system to counter the “creative destruction” of capitalism. Some free market experiments will fail, but “its only money.” When schools gamble on market-driven policies, however, the losers are children.

 

 

Actually, even the economic game involves more than money, as we in Oklahoma have learned after our state adopted so much of the ALEC agenda of shrinking the size of government. Even as we cut funding by about 1/4th since 2008, national corporate reformers have imposed incredibly expensive and untested policies (such as Common Core testing and test-driven teacher evaluations), while encouraging the creaming of the easiest-to-educate (and the least-expensive-to-educate) students from neighborhood schools and into charter schools.

 

 

Before 2010, I only read about national conservative and neo-liberal school reformers who adopted a strategy of “convergence” or “flooding the zone” to drive rapid, “transformational change” in selected districts and schools. I didn’t personally witness the way that they used mass charterization, now called the “portfolio strategy,” to avoid the messiness of constitutional democracy. Freed of local governance, corporate reformers promoted a school culture of risk-taking, and urgent experimentation to produce “disruptive innovation.”

 

 

Now, it looks like local edu-philanthropists have joined with the Billionaires Boys Club and they may be ready to pull the plug on the OKCPS. Before embracing the policies pushed by national reformers, Oklahoma City and other urban areas should consider Sarah Reckhow’s and Megan Tompkins-Stange’s “‘Singing from the Same Hymnbook’: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad.” It begins in the glory days of test-driven, market-driven reform, from 2008 to 2010, when the Broad Foundation proclaimed,

 

 

“We feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.”

 
Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange explain how this dramatic change was conducted in the “absence of a robust public debate.” An alphabet soup of think tanks, funded by “venture philanthropists, produced the best public relations campaign that money could buy, and they did so while playing fast and loose with the evidence. As a Gates insider explained:

 

“It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.”

 
It should now be clear that corporate reform failed. The ostensible leader of the campaign, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gone, as are the highest-profile leaders of transformational reforms in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, Houston, Memphis, Washington D.C. and other districts. The quantitative portions of teacher evaluations are all but dead, and Common Core has replaced NCLB as the most toxic brand in education. After the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB, and after Hillary Clinton distanced herself from charter schools, it is likely that federal support for this top-down social engineering experiment is history.

 

 

The prospect of the eminent demise of test-driven, competition-driven reform seems to have prompted the most fervent reformers in the Broad and Walton Foundations to double down on mass charterization, i.e. the “portfolio” model, in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Newark, D.C. and, apparently, Oklahoma City. I believe it is also obvious why top-down, corporate reform failed. It came with the sword, dismissing educators as the enemy. The “Billionaires Boys Club” hatched their secret plans without submitting them to the clash of ideas. These non-educators ignored both social science and the hard-earned wisdom of practitioners. The “astroturf” think tank, the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), has gained a foothold in Tulsa and they seem to have the ears of competition-driven reformers in Oklahoma City. The CRPE may best illustrate the way that reformers are doubling down on the edu-politics of destruction, even while they belatedly try to cultivate a kinder, gentler image.

 

 

I hope that Thompson is right about the demise of corporate reform. It is so lucrative that I don’t expect the hedge-fund-manager-driven demand for privatization to go away quietly, nor do I expect Broad and Gates to abandon their obsession with privatizing the nation’s public schools. I think that once they realize that the public rejects their malignant beneficence and that their reputation is endangered, and that history may view them as scoundrels for the damage they have inflicted on a democratic institution, then they might desist and pick some other sector to micro-manage.

 

By the way, it was Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education who invented the idea of the portfolio strategy about a dozen years ago. His theory was that the school board should look on their schools as akin to a stock portfolio: get rid of the weak ones, hold on to the top performers. Open and close schools to balance the portfolio. This is already a failed strategy because it ignores the reasons for low academic performance.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization, Standardized Testing

News! Michelle Rhee is Merging StudentsFirst with 50CAN

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2016 //
31

The world of rightwing corporate reform is ever-changing. It seems like only yesterday that Michelle Rhee announced her intention to challenge teachers’ unions, destroy tenure, and take away due process from teachers across the nation. She said she would raise $1 billion in a year and gather 1 million members for her new organization, which she called StudentsFirst, because (she said) teachers don’t care about students, only billionaires really care. She did raise some money–only $7 million or so, far from $1 billion–and she spent it trying to elect Tea Party Republicans and others who support charters and vouchers. Her organization turned into the public voice of anti-teacher, anti-public school activism. But in 2014, she stepped back from the national stage to help her husband Kevin Johnson, the Mayor of Sacramento (whom she married in 2011), and joined the board of Scott’s Miracle-Gro. She also assumed the chairmanship of her husband’s charter chain, St. Hope.

 

And now we learn that Michelle Rhee is folding the tents of StudentsFirst and merging it with 50CAN. The latter organization is funded by hedge fund managers and the Sackler family of Connecticut, whose fortune was made from pharmaceuticals, specifically the opiod drug Oxycontin, that is now causing so much addiction and death across the nation. Forbes says they are the 16th richest family in America. Jonathan Sackler’s daughter Madeleine made a documentary about Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain called “The Lottery.” It gave viewers the impression that these were the world’s most magical schools, and any child lucky enough to win the lottery would have a blessed life. Never having attended a public school, she bought into the myth that they are horrid places that one must escape from, and that charter schools are sort of like the private school she attended in Greenwich.

 

The leader of StudentsFirst is Jim Blew, who most recently worked for the Walton Family Foundation (e.g., Walmart money), which funds StudentsFirst, Teach for America, KIPP, and every organization that promotes the privatization of public education. Now Blew will head the California branch of StudentsFirst, whatever is left of it after the merger.

 

What a close and tight knit world the corporate reformers live in!

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Testing

Education in Crisis: The Threat of Privatization Around the World

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2016 //
53

It has become conventional wisdom that “education is in crisis.” I have been asked about this question by many interviewers. They say something like: “Do you think American education is in crisis? What is the cause of the crisis?” And I answer, “Yes, there is a crisis, but it is not the one you have read about. The crisis in education today is an existential threat to the survival of public education. The threat comes from those who unfairly blame the school for social conditions, and then create a false narrative of failure. The real threat is privatization and the loss of a fundamental democratic institution.”

 

I thank Laura Chapman for pointing me to an excellent online resource sponsored by Education International, which advocates for teachers and free public education around the world. The online site gathers together news from around the world about the crisis I described, the corporate assault on public education, both in developed countries like our own and in nations where the public education system is rudimentary and severely underfunded.

 

As we have seen again and again, the corporate education industry is eager to break into the U.S. public education and turn it into a free marketplace, where they can monetize the schools and be assured of government subsidization. On the whole, these privatized institutions do not produce higher test scores than regular public schools, except for those that cherrypick their students and exclude the neediest and lowest performing students. The promotion of privatization by philanthropies, by the U.S. Department of Education, by rightwing governors (and a few Democratic governors like Cuomo of New York and Malloy of Connecticut), by the hedge fund industry, and by a burgeoning education equity industry poses a danger to our democracy. In some communities, public schools verge on bankruptcy as charters drain their resources and their best students. Nationwide, charter schools have paved the way for vouchers by making “school choice” non-controversial.

 

Yes, education is in crisis. The profession of teaching is threatened by the financial powerhouse Teach for America, which sells the bizarre idea that amateurs are more successful than experienced teachers. TFA–and the belief in amateurism–has also facilitated the passage of legislation to strip teachers of basic rights to due process and of salaries tied to experience and credentials.

 

Education is in crisis because of the explosion of testing and the embrace by government of test scores as both the means and the end of education. The scores are treated as a measure of teacher effectiveness and school effectiveness, when they are in fact a measure of the family income of the students enrolled in the school. The worst consequence of the romance with standardized testing is that children are ranked, sorted, and assigned a value based on scores that are not necessarily scientific or objective. Children thus become instruments, tools, objects, rather than unique human beings, each with his or her own potential.

 

Education is in crisis because of the calculated effort to turn it into a business with a bottom line. Schools are closed and opened as though they were chain stores, not community institutions. Teachers are fired based on flawed measures. Disruption is considered a strategy rather than misguided and inhumane policy. Children and educators alike are simply data points, to be manipulated by economists, statisticians, entrepreneurs, and dabblers in policy.

 

Education has lost its way, lost its purpose, lost its definition. Where once it was about enlightening and empowering young minds with knowledge, exploring new worlds, learning about science and history, and unleashing the imagination of each child, it has become a scripted process of producing test scores that can supply data.

 

Education is in crisis. And we must organize to resist, to push back, to fight the mechanization of learning, and the standardization of children.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, International, Privatization

Shocking Report: Kevin Johnson’s Self-Aggrandizing and Profitable Control of Sacramento

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2016 //
25

Last night I posted a story about new allegations of sexual molestation of minors by Kevin Johnson, mayor of Sacramento, husband of Michelle Rhee, and former basketball superstar.

 

This story by an investigative reporter for an alternative weekly in Sacramento may be even more shocking, because the sexual allegations are not new. Why does this appear in a small alternative newspaper? The Sacramento Bee has been a reliable cheerleader for Mayor Johnson.

 

Cosmo Garvin of The Baffler describes in elaborate detail the way Johnson governed, with patronage, cronyism, a private email system that kept most governmental decisions secluded from public scrutiny, and money–lots of money–for those on the Johnson team.

 

Garvin writes:

 

He and his wife, Michelle Rhee—once the brightest star in the corporate-backed “education reform” movement—showed up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. An adviser told Johnson’s hometown newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, that the couple was a “modern-day version of Bill and Hillary Clinton.” There was talk about a run for California governor or U.S. Senate.

 

 
At his peak, KJ was a figure to behold, an urban policy entrepreneur and brander-in-chief selling #Sacramento 3.0, a “world-class” city where kids would take Uber vehicles instead of buses to their charter schools, “never check out a library book,” and have “more smart devices than toothbrushes.”

 

 
In July 2014, Johnson rented the Sacramento Convention Center and threw himself a big party—a twenty-fifth-anniversary fundraising gala for St. Hope Academy. He raised $1.2 million at the event, largely from real estate developers and others with business before City Hall.

 

 
St. Hope is Mayor KJ’s charter school and development company. More than that, it’s his brand—the foundation of his own career in educational reform and politics. The keynote speaker at St. Hope’s silver jubilee was the NBA’s biggest-ever star, Michael Jordan, whom Johnson interviewed on stage, fittingly enough, about “developing your brand….”

 

By the fall of 2015, Johnson’s political career was effectively over. He was under scrutiny, again, for allegedly molesting a sixteen-year-old girl two decades before. And he was facing a new allegation of sexual misconduct; a city employee had filed a sexual harassment complaint. The City of Sacramento’s legal advisers warned Johnson not to hug or touch anyone at city events. So Johnson, deciding two terms in office were enough, announced that he will not seek reelection this November. His exit will coincide with the opening of the new arena, easily his most significant mayoral achievement.

 

 
Meanwhile, debt service on the bond-financed arena will reach about $18 million a year, draining money from the city treasury. Sacramento’s city finance department is warning that the city’s spending is already “unsustainable” and budget deficits are imminent. For now, however, Johnson is being credited with a dramatic makeover of the new arena district—where a decaying shopping mall had been before.

 

 
Aside from the arena, Johnson’s other legacy is something I call KJ Inc. It’s a particular way of doing public business, and it’s also a political machine: a blended network of nonprofit auxiliary organizations, political cronies, and paid city staff, powered by unlimited donations from downtown developers and corporate benefactors.

 

Last year, Johnson sued me for filing public records requests for city emails, part of an ongoing project to better understand KJ’s mingling of public resources with his private nonprofits. The suit appears intended to economically damage the small alternative weekly I write for—the only media outlet in town to write critically about Johnson’s arena deal, or his educational reform campaign, or his use of city resources for his private agenda. We’re still in court.

 

 
The lawsuit, the arena, KJ’s talent for diverting public resources for private gain, even the sex-creep stuff: to me, these facts seem to hang together under a common theme. The guy has boundary issues.

 

The mayor’s charitable vehicle is St. Hope, which runs charter schools. Johnson took over Sacramento High School and turned it into a charter. What had once been a comprehensive high school for 2,000 students became a school of 900, which required students to apply. Of course, test scores went up when the school was no longer open enrollment.

 

Garvin writes:

 

The flagship nonprofit of KJ Inc. is, of course, St. Hope. As mayor, Johnson has been able to leverage, from real estate and other local interests, about $3 million in donations to support the family business. The biggest donors include Sacramento’s biggest sprawl developer, Angelo Tsakopoulos; arena developer Mark Friedman and his family; and Kevin Nagle, part owner of the Sacramento Kings and majority owner of the Sacramento Republic soccer team. Nagle is also on the St. Hope board of directors. All these men have been big donors to Johnson’s election campaigns and to his strong-mayor ballot measure. But while they are limited by strict political campaign contribution limits, they can give unlimited amounts to Johnson’s nonprofits.

 

 
They, along with other business interests, also give heavily to Johnson’s Sacramento Public Policy Foundation (SPPF), which is more closely associated with Johnson’s job as mayor. SPPF collects donations from interested parties who want to curry favor with the mayor, and then distributes the cash to various policy initiatives under Johnson’s direction. For a time, these initiatives included an environmental brand called Greenwise Sacramento and an arts program called For Arts’ Sake. Neither of these groups ever did much, and both are now dead links on Johnson’s website.

 

 
The real project of SPPF is Johnson’s “Think Big” initiative, which the mayor advertises as a way to “promote transformative projects that catalyze job creation and economic development.” But Think Big would be more accurately described as a public relations shop for stadium subsidies, coordinated out of City Hall, with the labor of city employees.

 

The entanglement of public and private interests are by no means limited to Johnson. Other mayors have done the same, though so few adroitly.

 

This promiscuous mingling of public and private interests is now business as usual in Sacramento. Only rarely does it get Johnson in any trouble. In 2012 the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission fined Johnson $37,500 after learning that $3.5 million in behests to Johnson’s nonprofits from the Sacramento Kings and other donors had not been properly reported. Johnson called the nondisclosure a clerical error.

 

 
More typically, the operations of KJ Inc. go on with no public scrutiny at all. That’s especially true of Johnson’s use of City Hall to advance his brand of education reform, which seeks to roll back teacher protections and turn many more public schools into charters.

 

 
Johnson served on the board of the California Charter Schools Association. As president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Johnson pushed through pro-charter resolutions to speed the school privatization agenda on a national scale.

 

 
As it happens, the charter hustle is a Johnson family business. His (then future) wife and former St. Hope board member, Michelle Rhee, was hired by D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty as the first Chancellor of D.C. public schools in 2007. That year, the city passed reforms that took power away from D.C.’s elected school board and put control of the schools in the mayor’s office. This “mayoralization” of schools is a favorite KJ policy reform.

 

Mayor Johnson’s education reform organization is called Stand Up for Sacramento Schools, located in the same building as Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst offices.

 

Garvin says that “Stand Up for Sacramento Schools” does “next to nothing” for the public schools. It is funded by the Waltons and Eli Broad, to promote the corporate education reform agenda. It has showcased Teach for America, City Year, and multiple showings of “Waiting for ‘Superman.'” Last summer, it received $400,000 from the Walton Family Foundation.

 

It is mostly a political organization, leveraging the mayor’s office to promote Johnson’s ideological brand of educational reform, and to promote Johnson himself.

 

 
This prime directive is spelled out in a 2011 email from Johnson to a potential Stand Up recruit—cc’d to Johnson’s executive assistant, a city employee. KJ says a large part of Stand Up’s function is to support his efforts to “advocate for much-needed legislation around policies such as Race to the Top, ESEA [No Child Left Behind], and LIFO (‘last in, first out’).” LIFO is the practice of laying off teachers with less seniority, a policy much in vogue among educational reformers. Johnson also mentions Stand Up’s support for “parent trigger” laws in California, which enable parents to vote to turn neighborhood schools into charters.

 

Garvin goes on to describe how Johnson and his buddies managed to take over the troubled National Conference of Black Mayors, bankrupt it, and create a new organization led by–who else?–Kevin Johnson.

 

Mayor Johnson made a fine art of pay-to-play, as this paragraph shows:

 

In June 2014, Uber gave a $50,000 check to the AAMA. In August, Mayor Johnson penned an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle praising Uber as an exciting part of “Cities 3.0” and arguing against new regulations for such ride-share companies. In September, at the USCM fall meeting in Sacramento, Johnson held an entire session on the “sharing economy,” featuring Uber CEO Travis Kalanick as a speaker. Days before, the Sacramento Kings had announced that Uber was the official ride-sharing service of the Sacramento Kings.

 

There is more, much more.

 

One wonders, on reading this long and alarming story, where was law enforcement? Does California have ethics laws for public officials? Does no one care about the use of taxpayer dollars? Why was the Sacramento Bee quiescent? Were there no civic watchdogs?

 

In 2012, the University of Hawaii invited Michelle Rhee and Kevin Johnson to lecture on the subject of “Ethics in Education.” The video is posted here, if you are a glutton for more. 

 

Ironic that what finally ended Kevin Johnson’s ascent was not his public-private deals, not his financial transgressions, not his political machinations, but allegations of sexual abuse of children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle

British Teachers Fight Privatization Plan

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2016 //
16

The Minister of Education Nicky Morgan has proposed turning all British schools into “academies,” akin to our charter schools. She has decided that removing all schools from local control will improve them.

 

The British National Union of Teachers has threatened a one-day strike to protest this step towards mass privatization. Morgan, however, says she won’t change course.

 

 

“The Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has told teachers she has no intention of backing down, warning another teachers’ union, the NASUWT, that there is no “reverse gear” on the proposed reforms.

 
“Mrs Morgan was heckled and faced shouts of “rubbish” from delegates during her speech arguing that the compulsory academy policy would raise standards.

 
“The National Union of Teachers is no stranger to challenging government education policies – and a call for strike action might also have been as predictable as bad weather over a bank holiday weekend.

 
“But on the issue of the government forcing all schools to become academies, regardless of the views of parents, the NUT clearly feels it is tapping into a much wider sense of unease.
The union’s leadership thinks the government has wrong-footed itself over this, antagonising grassroots Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, as well as its more traditional left-wing supporters.

 
“Town hall Tories are a much trickier target for the government than what they would see as conference hall Trots [Trotskyites]. And there are murmurings of concern about what academy chains would mean for village schools and faith schools.

 
“The element of compulsion could aggravate parents and there might be difficult questions about the merits of successful local schools being handed over to an unfamiliar academy chain….

 
“The NUT annual conference in Brighton has supported calls for a sustained campaign against compelling schools to be academies, including a ballot for a one-day strike.

 
“The union’s treasurer Ian Murch said it would see schools being “stolen” from local communities by “arrogant ministers”.

“He challenged the handing over of schools to academy chains, saying that it would be a step towards privatisation.

 

“Mr Murch said schools should be seen as a “public service and not a business opportunity”

 
“Hazel Danson from the union’s executive said the policy of making all schools academies would cause “absolute chaos” at a time when there were more pressing priorities such as teacher shortages.

 
“She said the plans would “remove parental voice as well as parental choice”.

 
“The NUT wants to build a wider coalition of opposition to the academy policy.

 
“A number of Conservative party representatives in local government have spoken out against the plans which would remove the role of local councils.”

 

Indeed, the plan faces opposition from more than the teachers’ union.

A group of officials from all three national parties–Conservative, Labor, and Liberal–spoke out against the plan in a letter to The a Observer.

 

“The Observer letter, signed by Conservative councillors as well as those from opposition parties, says:

 

“There is no evidence that academies perform better than council maintained schools.

 

“Where a school is failing, there is no question that action must be taken – but converting every school, regardless of performance, to an academy will not tackle those issues.”

 

It goes on: “Schools value the option to become academies – and the support they receive from their local councils to do so – where they believe this is in the best interests of their students and communities.

 

“Forcing the change upon every school goes against, in many cases, what parents and teachers want, and there will be a large financial implication for local authorities at a time when communities are already suffering the impact of significant budget cuts.”

 

 

Categories Education Reform, International, Privatization

Liberians Oppose Privatization of Their Schools

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2016 //
13

As previously reported here, the Liberian government is considering a plan to privatize and outsource control of its schools. The good news is that Liberians are fighting back against this proposal.

 

“Local and international experts have planned to fight tooth and nails to ensure that a plan by the Government of Liberia to outsource all primary education here to a private company do not push through.

 
“Liberia’s plan is to privatise all primary and pre-primary schools over the next five years. Public funding will support services subcontracted to a private company – the Bridge International Academies, a company incorporated in the United States under the name New Globe School Inc.

 
“Already the Liberian Government through Education Minister George Werner has signed a Memorandum of Understanding or MOU with the Bridge International Academies to kick start the process-a pilot project is said to be ongoing with 70 schools.

 
“The cash scrap government of Liberia is expected to spend around US430 million over the five years period. There is also a question as to whether the PPCC rules were followed in awarding such contract to Bridge International Academies.

 
“International and local experts say such arrangement is not only a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution, but will also deny indigents and poor access to quality education.
Mrs. Hester Williams Katakaw is the Proprietress of the Levi Williams School System and a former deputy education minister for instruction under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s first term. She says education stakeholders here will not allow such arrangement to push through.

 
“We will resist it and make sure that it does not go through at the National Legislature”, Mrs. Williams Katakaw told this paper Wednesday. She says government has a responsibility to ensure that all children here are educated and that pushing such responsibility on a foreign firm is not in the best interest of Liberian children.

 
“Mrs. Katakaw questions the performance of Bridge International in other countries saying, “they have failed miserably in other countries and we are not going to allow them to come do the same here”. She says Liberian children at those tender ages should be educated by Liberian teachers and not foreigners.

 
“Education Minister Werner appears very defensive on this arrangement. In his letter dated March 3, 2016 addressed to the Secretary General of the National Teachers’ Association of Liberia or NTAL, Mr. Samuel Y. Johnson, Sr. following the launched of a pilot project involving 70 schools, he said the pilot project is a private partnership and not privatization.

 
“…I must correct your characterization of the pilot as privatization, and somehow threatening the provision of free education. As we have communicated to your members including at the January meeting, the pilot will not involve any privatization of education…”

 
“However, following this communication an agreement was entered into with Bridge International. When this paper contacted officials at the Ministry of Information Wednesday, its Communications Director Maxim Bleteen handed copies of the minister’s letter to the NTAL saying the minister had requested him to give a copy to any reporter seeking information on the privatization deal.

 
“He claimed that the letter addressed the issue of the Public Procurement Concession Commission rules but nothing of such was mentioned. “It is completely unacceptable for Liberia to outsource its primary education system to a private company”, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Kishore Singh said Tuesday in Geneva.

 
“This is unprecedented at the scale currently being proposed and violates Liberia’s legal and moral obligations,” he said. “Such arrangements are a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution,” the Special Rapporteur stated.

 
“This also contradicts political commitments made by Liberia and the international community to the fourth UN Sustainable Development Goal which is on education and related targets.” He cautions that public schools and their teachers, and the concept of education as a public good, are under attack with such arrangements.

 
“Provision of public education of good quality is a core function of the State. Abandoning this to the commercial benefit of a private company constitutes a gross violation of the right to education,” Mr. Singh emphasized.

 
The human rights expert noted that “it is ironic that Liberia does not have resources to meet its core obligations to provide a free primary education to every child, but it can find huge sums of money to subcontract a private company to do so on its behalf.”

 
“These sums could be much better spent on improving the existing system of public education and supporting the educational needs of the poor and marginalized,” the Special Rapporteur suggested. Mr. Singh called on the Government of Liberia to approach the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for technical assistance and capacity building, instead of entering into such partnerships with for-profit providers in education, “devoid of any legal or moral justification.”

 
“Before any partnership is entered into, the Government of Liberia must first put into place legislation and policies on public private partnerships in education, which among other things, protect every child’s right to education,” Mr. Singh said.

 
“There also needs to be an independent body or institution established to receive complaints of potential violations of the right to education that might result from this development,” he added. The Special Rapporteur emphasized that “education is an essential public service and instead of supporting business in education, governments should increase the money they spend on public educational services to make them better.”

 
“In a letter addressed to President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf dated March 21, 2016, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa) called on president Sirleaf to halt the planned outsourcing of primary education here.

 
“…this policy will seriously undermine the right to educate and eclipse opportunities for indigent and poor individuals, families and communities to use education to claw out of poverty and hardship,” the letter signed by Kwasi Adu -Amankwah, ITUC-Africa General Secretary said .

 
“The ITUC-Africa (www.ituc-africa.org) is a Pan African trade union organisation representing over 17 million workers in 49 African countries, including Liberia. In its letter ITUC-Africa further stated “ITUC-Africa is supporting and strongly reiterating the calls by the National Teachers’ Association of Liberia (NTAL) and the Educational International (EI) urging your government to halt the proposed measure to outsource Liberia’s primary education system to private for-profit actors.”

 
“ITUC-Africa therefore urges Madam President to use her good offices and goodwill to stay action on the implementation of this policy,” the union added. The PPCC Director of Communications Nathan Bangu promised to return a call requesting information on as to whether Minister Werner got the PPCC barking before signing an MOU with Bridge International Academies.”

 

 

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, International, Privatization

Parents Call on Governor Cuomo to Increase Oversight of Success Academy Charters

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2016 //
11

The Gotham Gazette reports that five former and present parents of students in the Success Academy charter schools called on Governor Cuomo to cut funding and increase accountability of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain.

 

The story reads, in part:

 

In an open letter to the governor, four parents of former Success Academy students, and one whose child is still enrolled in the network, criticize Success Academy’s disciplinary policies and say its practices are “discriminatory against students with special needs.”

 

The letter is being hand-delivered Friday morning to the governor’s office in Albany, it was shared with Gotham Gazette in advance. It is the latest in an ongoing, intense public debate over the practices of the controversial charter network, which has seen a series of troubling incidents come to light amid longtime concerns over its strict approach to discipline, suspension rates, and focus on test preparations.

 

Success Academy was founded by former City Council Member Eva Moskowitz in 2006. It is the largest charter school network in the city, with approximately 11,000 students in 34 schools across the city, in each borough except Staten Island. It also has seven new schools opening in August. Success students, or scholars as they are known in the network’s parlance, perform remarkably well on standardized tests, leading to many accolades and repeated questions about Moskowitz’s “secret sauce.”

 

But, the network has also faced much criticism for its harsh discipline policies and heavy emphasis on testing. Last year, the New York Times reported that a Success Principal had created a ‘Got to Go’ list to push out underperforming students. Then, last month, the Times released a video that showed a Success teacher scolding and publicly humiliating a first-grade student in front of the rest of her class. The network is also the focus of at least two federal lawsuits that were filed recently.

 

In face of this criticism, Moskowitz has time and again cited the network’s high performance on standardized tests compared to traditional district schools. While apologizing she has said reported incidents are isolated and not indicative of network-wide problems. She has worn the lawsuits as a badge of honor and said she is tired of apologizing.

 

The parents who wrote the letter disagree about whether there are systemic problems at Success Academy. “Despite what CEO Eva Moskowitz says, the targeting and pushing out of students, specifically our own, is not an anomaly within this organization,” their letter states.

 

The parents cite instances where their children were routinely suspended, singled out, and shamed or excluded from field trips. They say Success often called them midday to pick up their children without reporting these events as suspensions. And, they claim Success Academy retaliated by calling the Administration for Children’s Services on them when they spoke out against these practices.

 

“Because of this ongoing mistreatment of our children, several of us have lost our jobs or had to drop out of school,” they write in the letter. The missive and its demands to Gov. Cuomo come amid budget negotiations when funding for charter schools is being debated. Recent state budgets have been good to the charter school sector, which Cuomo has been allied with for years. Cuomo has appeared to distance himself a bit from charters, but is still seen as an ally.

 

 

Poor Andrew Cuomo: He will have to choose between the parents and the hedge-fund managers who underwrite political campaigns. Will it be a tough choice?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Parents, Privatization, Resistance

John Thompson on the Reign of the Broadie Superintendents

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2016 //
13

John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma City, read Motoko Rich’s report in the New York Times on the travails of Antwan Wilson, the Broad-trained superintendent in Oakland, California, and thought of the negative reputation that these “Broadies” have acquired. What is a Broadie? It is someone, with or without an education background, who attended a series of weekend seminars sponsored by the Eli Broad Superintendents Academy. This “academy” has no accreditation. It focuses on management style, not education. The Broad Foundation picks people to learn its autocratic management style and places them in a district where Broad has influence and might even supplement the leader’s salary. Once placed, you may surround yourself with other Broadies to push decisions on unwilling teachers and principals who know more than you do about the local schools and students. The list of failed Broadies is long, including Mike Miles in Dallas, General Anthony Tata in Wake County, N.C., John Covington in Kansas City and Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority.

 

Thompson was reminded of the Broadie who took charge of the Oklahoma City public schools and sowed racial antagonism and division when he read Rich’s article about Wilson and his problems.

 

He writes:

 

It would be easier to sympathize with Wilson’s feelings if Broad and the rest of the Billionaires Boys Club’s public relations teams didn’t have such a long and disgusting record of using racial taunts against those (regardless of our race) who disagree with them. More importantly, the Broadie’s pain is dwarfed by that of poor children of color who increasingly find themselves in “apartheid schools” after competition-driven reformers (illogically) try to use resegregation of schools as a method for undoing the damage done by Jim Crow.
As explained in my book, A Teacher’s Tale, I first encountered the Broad mentality in 2007 when Oklahoma City hired a Broad Academy graduate as superintendent. Hoping to get off to a good, collaborative start, I introduced myself to the mentor that the academy assigned to him. She was sitting with several of my old friends and civil rights allies, African-American women with decades of administrative experience that they also would have gladly shared with the rookie superintendent. The Broad Academy mentor wiped the smiles off our faces when her first words to me were, “Why don’t you in Oklahoma City teach our African-American boys to read?”
At first, I thought we could have better luck communicating with the new superintendent. He was a good enough sport to compete in my school’s “Buffalo Chip Throwing Championship.” (Dressed in a fine business suit, the superintendent finished second, behind me, but unlike the champion buffalo feces thrower, he wore a plastic glove.) The superintendent enjoyed talking with my students, but he never seemed comfortable listening to teenagers when they disagreed with his policies. In one such meeting, the superintendent explained that he wanted an aligned and paced curriculum where every class covered the same material at the same time, and where he could supervise classroom instruction by video, throughout the district, from his office. Afterwards, my students were blunt, saying that the superintendent had no idea of what he was rushing into….

 

Across the nation, Broad and other market-driven reformers are stepping up the use of mass school closures to defeat teachers, unions, and parents who oppose them. Even as the Billionaires Boys Club proclaims that their goal is a 21st century civil rights crusade, they impose a brutal policy where the highest-challenge students are crammed into the schools that were already the most segregated, under-resourced and low-performing. In other words, they sabotage the highest-challenge neighborhood schools in order to discredit educators in them who seek win-win school improvement policies.
The Broad Academy and their allies are thus willing to sacrifice the welfare of the most vulnerable children and to inflame racial tensions in order to defeat educators who disagree with them. Whether they do so in Oakland or Oklahoma City – in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver, Washington D.C. or New Orleans – they are playing with fire. Whether we are talking about race, poverty, or special education, we must recognize the complexity of these issues and the need for nuanced conversations. As long as corporate reformers continue to vilify educators, complicated and interconnected problems will get worse. If Broad-trained superintendents had the knowledge about education that is necessary to improve schools, they would also understand why inflaming racial tensions is so dangerous.

 

 

 

 

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Privatization

“Killing Ed” Will Be Shown in NYC for One Week, Starting Today

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2016 //
4

Mark Hall’s important new film about corporate reform and the assault on public education will be shown starting today in New York City at the Cinema Village, 22 East 12 street, at 7 pm.

 

The show will run for one week.

 

Mark will be there tonight, along with Sharon Higgins, an Oakland, California, parent who has written extensively about charter school scandals (she has a website called “charterschoolscandals”), especially the Gulen charter schools. I will be in the audience.

 

Hall is touring the country with his film. Check the schedule to see if he is coming to your city or state. If not, contact him to arrange a showing.  @KillingEdFilm

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Carol Burris: The Coming Collapse of Corporate Reform in New York

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2016 //
27

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has been active in the resistance to New York’s state’s reliance on high-stakes testing for several years. As a high school principal, she helped to organize other principals across the state in opposition to test-based evaluation of both principals and teachers. About 40 percent of the state’s principals signed the petition opposing the so-called Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) based on test scores.

 

In this article, she describes the recent dramatic turn of events in New York. This state led the way in corporate-style reform. For many years, the Board of Regents–the state’s governing body for education–has strongly supported standards, testing, and accountability as the key to statewide success. Since the passage of charter legislation in 1998, the charter sector has grown, especially in the state’s urban districts. The leader of the Regents, Merryl Tisch, is a member of one of the city’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families. Tisch was a member of the Regents for the past 20 years, and chancellor since 2009. She pushed hard to win a Race to the Top grant of $700 million. She pushed hard for Common Core and rigorous testing. She selected David Steiner of Hunter College as Commissioner of Education, then pushed him aside and selected John King. She said it was all about the kids, particularly the poor kids. She thought that high standards and rigorous tests would be good for them.

 

But then came the parent opt out rebellion, and state officials went into a frenzy trying to figure out how to placate the angry parents. As it happened, Tisch lost her most powerful political ally in the legislature, and suddenly the landscape began to change. There are 17 members of the Board of Regents. Less than a year ago, six of them signed a letter protesting Governor Cuomo’s demand for tougher testing, accountability, and teacher evaluation policies. (A seventh member gave conditional support to the dissidents.) At the time, the dissidents seemed to be fighting a steep uphill battle, with the governor and the board majority opposed to their ideas. A month after the issuance of their letter, the board hired MaryEllen Elia as state commissioner to replace the unpopular John King. Elia was well known as an ardent advocate for high-stakes testing, the Common Core, and test-based accountability.

 

Burris explains in her article the miraculous revolution that occurred in less than a year.

 

Tisch announced that she would not run for reappointment by the Legislature. One of the dissidents, Dr. Betty Rosa, announced that she wanted to succeed Tisch. The possibility of Rosa winning seemed far-fetched. But incredibly, she was elected in a secret ballotmby the Regents on a vote of 15-0, with two abstentions.

 

As Burris writes, Rosa has been critical of the Common Core, high-stakes testing, and test-based evaluation. She was supported by the parents in the opt out movement.

 

The dissidents have taken charge.

 

Burris writes about her personal interactions with Betty Rosa, who is a career educator:

 

Rosa was one of three Regents who voted against the teacher evaluation system known as APPR. In 2011 she met with principals and actively listened to our concerns. As a former administrator, she understood why the practice was bad for kids, and never waivered in her opposition, referring to the inclusion of scores as “poison.”
In 2013, she publicly spoke out against the Common Core, accusing the State Education Department of manipulating data and ignoring successful schools in order to create a myth of massive failure to support their reforms. And last year she led a group of seven Regents (all women and nearly all career educators), in opposition to Cuomo’s revision of teacher evaluations. The seven created a position paper of dissent regarding the Governor’s law that increased the proportion of test scores in teacher evaluations, and six of the seven voted against the New York State Education Department’s revisions.

 

Burris predicts what she expects from Rosa. She calls it a “sea change.” I call it a miracle.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, New York, Privatization, Testing
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