Archives for category: Privatization
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Indiana: State Testing is a Complete Mess–and Worthless, Too

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
16

Parents and teachers have been complaining about Indiana’s state testing, called ISTEP. But now David Rutter chimes in to support them in a scathing column printed in the Chicago Tribune. The state tests are worthless, he says, and Indiana is a national joke because of handing control of education over to politicians.

 

 

Public education. Sorry. We apparently can’t do that in Indiana. It’s too hard. And it’s even worse. Not only might Hoosiers parents fret if their public schools are any good, even basic student competence can’t be tested because Indiana can’t figure out a useful academic test.

 

It’s all too hard.

 

The yearlong embarrassing battle over ISTEP is not merely recreational political fisticuffs. It cost the state $65 million to produce an off-the-cuff test that measures nothing verifiable. Public school teachers who put their 400,000 students through the 12-hour torture are not even sure what the test was supposed to measure….

 

If the test were accurate, the state’s entire student body went from marginally intelligent to totally dumb in one year.

 

Don’t worry, though. The state now acknowledges this test was pointless. It’s not even apparent what the point was supposed to be.

 

The idea that any one test can measure 400,000 unique, distinct young human minds seems preposterous on its face….

 

 

Indiana misplaced the point of public education. It’s about children.

 

When schools are transformed into partisan political war zones, predictable devolution always damages the higher good.

 

The Indiana Legislature has decided its function is to punish bad schools and bad teachers by taking money and resources away from the spendthrift offenders. Of course, holding resources hostage hardly ever makes a school better.

 

As occurred this week when 2015 ISTEP results were revealed tardily, the effect is a statewide battery of badly designed tests mandated by amateurs whose only knowledge of public education is the instinct to impose “accountability…..”
Here’s a short chronology on how we reached this particular disaster:

 

1: First, Gov. Mike Pence ditches the reviled Common Core standards and orders “Indiana-specific” standards that are remarkably similar. And do it now.

 

2: Then he does not give state educators enough lead-time to write the standards and pilot-study the resulting test. ISAT is not a pop quiz. The state has constructed a test that students must study for weeks to take.

 

3: Then he fails to realize until it’s too late that changing tests on the fly blows up the testing process and create a large, ugly ripple in every state classroom. It’s the sort of misjudgment that amateurs make.

 

4: Then, finally, he grasps his favorite political excuse by blaming Superintendent of Public Education Glenda Ritz for a botch that mostly is beyond her control but clearly within Pence’s realm. She warned him. He ignored her.

 

At its intellectual heart, Statehouse denizens just played a $65 million joke on Indiana taxpayers, parents, teachers and students.

 

It seems that Indiana’s political leaders want to destroy public education and drive students into charters and voucher schools. The testing mess may have been part of that plan, or I may be crediting them with more forethought and calculation than they can muster.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Indiana, Privatization, Testing

Shocker: Los Angeles School Board Votes 7-0 for Resolution Opposing Eli Broad Takeover

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2016 //
24

Will wonders never cease!

 

The LAUSD school board voted 7-0 for a resolution that rebuffs Eli Broad’s plan to take control of half the students in the district and enroll them in privately managed charter schools. After a lively discussion, the board passed a resolution that made clear it would oppose any effort to weaken the LAUSD public schools. This is a startling development, since some of the members were elected with Eli Broad campaign funds.

 

The focus of the discussion was a resolution put forward by Scott Schmerelson, strongly in opposition to a corporate takeover of the public schools. Some of the members openly acknowledged that the expansion of charter schools put the public schools at risk by diminishing their resources and programs. The Los Angeles Times noted with surprise that the board had selected its new superintendent by unanimous vote, and now voted to support the public schools by unanimous vote. The resolution directed Superintendent Michelle King “to analyze how the outside plan, which was developed by the Broad Foundation, will “affect the district’s enrollment, fiscal viability and ability to provide an outstanding public education.”

 

The Times writes:

 

Board member Scott Schmerelson, who authored the resolution, agreed to make changes proposed by other board members to soften some of the language describing charter schools, such as removing the word strangulation from a sentence describing the plan.

 

Schmerelson said he struggled to understand why Eli Broad and others did not work to improve traditional public schools by investing in successful programs.

 

“The point is that we have thrown the glove down to big business and they know they’d better be very careful how they work with LAUSD,” he said. “We’ll accept their help in limited forms, but they will not take over our district.”

 

Sarah Angel, managing director of regional advocacy with the California Charter School Assn., told board members that the resolution was polarizing. But board discussion settled some of her concerns. (I had to laugh when I saw that she called the resolution “polarizing,” because that was the same comment that the CCSA wrote in response to an opinion piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in support of public schools. According to CCSA, if you support charter schools, you are “for the children.” But if you support public schools, you are “polarizing.”)

 

Board president Steve Zimmer deserves credit and high praise for uniting the board behind a resolution in support of the public schools. Member Scott Schmerelson deserves credit and high praise for boldly and clearly opposing privatization and for laying out the disastrous consequences if the Broad plan were allowed to move forward.

 

My observer in Los Angeles watched the school board meeting and reported:

 

There was some pontificating, but basically, not one board member would say they were against the resolution. Just before the vote, Steve Zimmer spoke eloquently and signaled what I hope is the dawn of a new day at LAUSD. I want to send you his statement. When it was declared to have passed unanimously, the audience went crazy. In fact, a rhythmic chant of extreme support for Schmerelson and the resolution followed. While the camera was focused on the whole board and not specifically on Schmerelson, you could see his reaction. His body language was unmistakable. It was as if an extreme burden had been lifted from him. There is little doubt that he must have suffered greatly from attacks by the charter industry. In fact, you will hear Zimmer complain bitterly about nasty public comment from charter advocates made during the morning session and apparently before the resolution came up for a vote in the afternoon (I wasn’t watching at that time).

 

I would say that Schmerelson provided the board with a jump start to take the battle against privatizing education to a higher level.

 

When the video is available, I will post it.

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

Charter Cheerleader Reed Hastings Sets Up $100 Million Fund for More “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2016 //
34

Billionaire Reed Hasting, founder of Netflix, announced that he will create a fund with $100 million for the “reforms” he favors. He is a huge supporter of charter schools. Reed Hastings doesn’t like public schools. The CEO of the new fund will be Neerav Kingsland, who formerly ran New Schools for New Orleans, the charter-promotion agency in that city. In the past, Hastings has expressed his hope that one day almost every school in the nation will be a charter school and that local school boards will disappear. This is the culmination of the reform dream of abolishing local democracy and supplanting it with consumer choice.

 

This is why I canceled my subscription to Netflix.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Emily Kaplan: Are “No-Excuses” Charter Schools Harming Children’s Future Success?

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2016 //
167

Emily Kaplan taught second-grade in a “no-excuses” charter school, and now teaches in a public school. EduShyster offered her space on her blog to explain a very serious concern about the future of children who are pushed too hard and too early to master academic skills.

 

Every day in the charter school began with the recitation of a creed. Every child was required to “track” the teacher (with their eyes) and to dress precisely as the rule book decreed. Behavioral expectations were ironclad.

 

Kaplan writes:

 

This school is obsessed with success. Its students chant about it daily; its walls are plastered with banner-sized recipes in bold fonts and bright colors. And its proponents claim that, because it has the highest test scores in the state, it has achieved it.

 

These test scores don’t tell the whole story, of course, but they are also not meaningless. The school’s youngest students— children of color from
predominantly low-income families— can do a lot. These five-, six-, and seven-year-olds who start each day by pumping their fists into the air while chanting about success are articulate in person and on the page; they are perspicacious readers and creative, rational mathematicians. The nine hours a day they spend in classrooms named after four-year colleges— where every lesson is aligned to a standard and cut-out caterpillars with their names on them publicly climb the Reading Level Mountain—enable them to attain academic milestones earlier than their peers in more traditional school environments, where children spend six-hour school days engaged in less direct instruction and more play-based, child-driven exploration.*

 

If the early attainment of academic skills—coupled with constant, explicit messaging about the necessity of pursuing long-term goals—were a primary determinant of long-term success, it stands to reason that the young children at this “no-excuses” school would continue, unobstructed and ahead of the curve, on their “path to success.” But they don’t.

 

Once children at this school reach adolescence, they struggle. Their high school entrance exam percentiles are far lower than those of their state standardized tests, and they are not admitted in large numbers to the most selective high schools. At the high schools they do attend, they struggle: in their first semester, 81% of last year’s ninth graders earned below a 3.0 grade point average. Existing evidence indicates that these students— who have spent their entire educational careers, from kindergarten onward, in classrooms named after four-year colleges, striving toward big long-term goals like Excellence and Success— aren’t graduating from college in large numbers. They aren’t Excelling, and the extent to which they are even Succeeding is debatable.

 

So why is this? Why do children who learn to read earlier than their peers do so poorly in ways that matter later on? Why do children for whom every aspect of their education, from kindergarten onward, is tailored toward graduating from college so often struggle to graduate from college?

 

Reflecting on my experiences teaching both at this school and at more traditional public schools, I find myself wondering if the methodology that enables young children to achieve so much so early actually hinders their long-term prospects. What if the struggles of graduates of “no excuses” schools reveal deficits that are not academic, but rather socioemotional? What would happen if, instead of spending nine hours a day engaged in academic tasks determined by a teacher, children were to spend a large portion of their day developing “soft skills” that would enable them to overcome the hurdles they will encounter when they’re older? What if, like their suburban counterparts, they spent large portions of their day in rigorous, developmentally appropriate activities: learning to make friends, make art, and make believe, exploring and creating their interests and their identities?

 

That is, what if a necessary component of improving the long-term prospects of small children from disadvantaged backgrounds is not accelerating through childhood, but purposefully lingering in it?…

 

Pushing children to attain academic skills they will attain regardless— while depriving them of other, more developmentally appropriate activities that would enable them to succeed independently when they are older— is short-sighted at best. Implementing a more developmentally appropriate curriculum for young children might result in lower test scores in the short term, but I suspect that its long-term effects— both in terms of test scores and more relevant measures of success— would compensate. (This solution, however, is admittedly incomplete; I suspect that in order to set children living in poverty on a true “path to success,” communities require resources and support that no school on its own is capable of providing.)

 

We really have very little information about the long-term effects of pushing children to behave like little soldiers and requiring them to master academic skills instead of playing and socializing.

 

I recall a conversation with the president of a liberal arts college a few years ago who told me that it had accepted a number of charter school graduates from one of the best charter chains. Few of them could read complex texts or interpret material that required critical thinking. That’s an anecdote, not research. But it raises questions about the value of militaristic education and whether it helps children or improves education.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Gary Sasso: Why Don’t the Billionaires Support Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
42

In an article in Salon, Gary Sasso asks why the billionaires are so intent on funding privately-managed alternatives to public schools. Sasso is the Dean of the College of Education at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. After all, if they want to improve education, the vast majority of students in this nation attend public schools. Why aren’t they helping public schools? The reality is that charter schools drain funding from public schools, and they usually don’t get better results (if one considers only test scores). Many of them have a stern disciplinary regime that may raise test scores but does not improve education or the spirit of learning.

 

Sasso says that the huge disparities in income today and the erosion of the middle class explain more about educational outcomes than anything that happens in schools. Why are the 1% focused solely on the schools?

 

Sasso speculates:

 

Charter schools will never be the answer to improving education for all. It is simply not scaleable. And yet titans of industry such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton family, and billionaires such as John Paulson who earlier this year gave $8.5 million to New York’s Success Academy charter school system, are pouring their millions into support for charter schools—millions that will not, incidentally, be invested in improving the schools that the vast majority of U.S. students attend: traditional public schools.

 

Can it be a coincidence that those who have benefited most from the last 50 years of steadily increasing income inequality—the top 10 percent–support an education solution that hinges on denigrating public school teachers, dismantling unions and denying that income inequality is the underlying condition at the root of the problem?

 

The most generous explanation for this phenomenon says that the wealthiest among us are motivated to support charter schools purely out of ideology. They are operating under deeply held beliefs that a school system run by the government smothers innovation and that teachers unions inhibit a free market system that, if allowed to operate, would result in better teachers and child outcomes. In addition, these philanthropists believe that public education has become so hidebound that meaningful change within the system is no longer possible, and that fresh ideas and programs not beholden to a system that resists change will provide programs and ideas that are more effective.

 

Another explanation that has been posited is that good, old-fashioned greed is at the root. After all, the wealthy did not achieve their wealth through an indifference to achieving a return on their investments—and our public school system is a $621 billion per year endeavor. For example, a recent investigation by the Arizona Republic found that the state’s charter schools purchased a variety of goods and services from the companies of its own board members or administrators. In fact, the paper found at least 17 such contracts or arrangements totaling more than $70 million over five years.

 

In addition, there are specific tax loopholes that make it especially attractive to donate to charter schools. Banks and equity and hedge funds that invest in charter schools in underserved areas can take advantage of a tax credit. They are permitted to combine this tax credit with other tax breaks while they also collect interest on any money they lend out. According to analysts, the credit allows them to double the money they invested in seven years.

 

However, applying the principle of Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is usually the best), the super-rich may support charter schools to weaken unions. That strategy increases inequality of wealth and income, especially for the poorest kids whom the charter promoters claim to be “saving.”

 

Sasso suggests that the best path forward for the 1% would be to focus on rebuilding the middle class, which is currently being squashed.

 

Rebuilding the middle class—not expanding charter schools—is the most effective path to increasing access to quality education and to giving more students the opportunity to achieve their dreams.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Jobs, Privatization

Here is the Report On N.C. Charters That State Leaders Don’t Want You to Read

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
14

This report on charter schools in North Carolina was written in 2015 by three members of the Duke faculty. It was cited in a summary written for the Legislature by the Department of Public Instruction. The DPI summary is being withheld by the Lt. Governor Dan Forest because it is too “negative.”

 

The original report on charters was written by Professors Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein of Duke University. It will be published in the Journal of Education Policy and Finance.

 

What it shows, among other things, is that charter schools are less diverse than public schools as a sector and are more segregated than public schools. Charter schools are facilitating the resegregation of the schools in North Carolina.

 

 

You can download the report here.

 

Sorry, Governor McCrory and Lt. Governor Forest: You may bully the DPI, but you can’t suppress the work of distinguished academics. They don’t work for you. They have tenure.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization

Walton Family Foundation Will Spend $1 Billion to Start New Charters Across the Nation

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
29

The Walton Family Foundation announced that it plans to spend $1 billion over the next five years to increase the number of privately managed charter schools. If experience is any guide, almost all of these will be non-union. This was reported by politico pro, which is behind a paywall (I inquired, and it costs $3,500 to gain access). The emphasis in this massive spending will be startups.

 

“Just as we were in 1997 with our first charter grants, we are inspired by the ideas and passion of our startup grantees, and we’re determined to do all we can to help them succeed. I’d like to wish you, your teams and all of the students and communities we serve a 2016 of progress and accomplishment,” Marc Sternberg, director of the foundation’s K12 program, wrote in a letter to stakeholders obtained by POLITICO.

 

The Bentonville, Arkansas,-based foundation is run by the family of Walmart founders Sam and Helen Walton and is a frequent target of teachers unions for its promotion of school choice efforts, including research. Since 1997, it has poured more than $385 million in 2,110 new public charter schools – or about a quarter of all charters nationally, the foundation said.

 

Imagine that! The Walton Family Foundation, which was created by the billions earned by Walmart, is anti-union. Walmart does not have unions. It has fought unionization and had to be pushed kicking and screaming to agree to pay minimum wages, eventually. Every member of the Walton family is a billionaire. Now, why would unions not like the Walton family? Anyone? This is a family that enjoys the wealth created by the sweat of others who are not paid a living wage. Do the Waltons sleep well at night?

 

The Walton family represents the face of rapacious avarice in modern America. Having made their billions, they now use them to destroy the one basic democratic institution on which generations of Americans have relied for the education of their children: The American public schools. They will use their billions to divide communities and to turn citizens into consumers. That’s the Walmart way.

 

 

To view online:
https://www.politicopro.com/education/whiteboard/2016/01/walton-foundation-to-donate-1-billion-to-promote-school-choice-065681

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

David Kirp: How to Fix “Failing Schools”–and How Not to

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2016 //
28

 

David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has a smashing article in the New York Times comparing the failure of corporate reform in Newark and the success of incremental, collaborative reform in Union City, New Jersey.

 

Newark is a paradigm of all the bad reform ideas: Schools closed against the will of parents and students. Charter schools opened, some of which skimmed the students they wanted. Mark Zuckerberg, egged on by then-Mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie, put $100 million into the reformer dream that every student in Newark would achieve proficiency if every school were turned into a charter school. Zuckerberg’s $100 million disappeared down the rabbit hole, and Newark continues to struggle.

 

 

Meanwhile, Union City made real progress, without the help of Zuckerberg’s millions.

 

 

 

 

Kirp writes:

 

No one expected a national model out of Union City. Without the resources given to Newark, the school district there, led by a middle-level bureaucrat named Fred Carrigg, was confronted with two huge challenges: How could English learners, three-quarters of the students, become fluent in English? And how could youngsters, many of whom came from homes where books were rarities, be turned into adept readers?

 

Today Union City, which opted for homegrown gradualism, is regarded as a poster child for good urban education. Newark, despite huge infusions of money and outside talent, has struggled by comparison. In 2014, Union City’s graduation rate was 81 percent, exceeding the national average; Newark’s was 69 percent.

 

What explains this difference? The experience of Union City, as well as other districts, like Montgomery County, Md., and Long Beach, Calif., that have beaten the demographic odds, show that there’s no miracle cure for what ails public education. What business gurus label “continuous improvement,” and the rest of us call slow-and-steady, wins the race.

 

 

Two points to be made based on this article:

 

  1. Why does anyone expect politicians to know how to fix schools that struggle?
  2. Does anyone still believe that charters and vouchers and high-stakes testing will improve education for the nation’s poorest children?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Privatization

Here is a Shocker: The CTU Supports Groups That Support Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2016 //
9

The Chicago Sun-Times published an article with astonishing news. The Chicago Teachers Union gives money to groups that support public education, including the Network for Public Education.

 

NPE has used the contribution from CTU to give scholarships to parents, students, and educators to attend our annual national conferences, as well as to fund the development of a state-by-state report card that will be released on February 10, evaluating the states by their support for their public schools.

 

I pointed out to the reporter that CTU’s support for allies of public education must be seen in the context of billionaires who allot hundreds of millions of dollars every single year to privatize public education. It is not a fair fight, to be sure.

 

I wish the teachers’ unions and other civic-minded groups had many millions more to invest in pushing back against privatization, union busting, and high-stakes testing and fighting for early childhood education, equitable funding, smaller classes, and well-prepared teachers.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Unions

The Cruel Charter School Addiction in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2016 //
23

Eileen DiFranco, a retired school nurse in Philadelphia, describes an episode from “The Twilight Zone” in which a sober family man encounters slot machines in Las Vegas and becomes an addict. He can’t help himself. He gambles everything and can’t stop.

 

She compares this gambling fever to the charter school addiction of districts like Philadelphia. No matter how many charter schools fail, the district leaders want more of them. They are in love with the lure and promise of magic and they can’t stop. Meanwhile, the public schools suffer as do the children who attend public schools, while millions are squandered on charter schools that are no better–and often worse–than the public schools.

 

She writes:

 

With their “no excuses” mantra, highly paid charter school CEOs promise school administrators that they will bring students up to grade level in no time at all. It all sounds so attractive. And believable. School districts all over the country have been sucked in by this big, brash idea that sounds wonderful on paper, but has largely failed to deliver on its promises. This has not stopped the charter school operators from repeating their claim of educational superiority over and over again until it takes on the ring of truth.

 

But the reality is that the charter schools’ claims contain more “truthiness” than actual truth. According to Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a national study by CREDO that many cited to tout the superior performance of charters actually found that “less than one hundredth of one percent (<0.01 percent) of the variation in test performance in reading is explainable by charter school enrollment.”

 

Let’s put that alleged 0.01 percent success rate into a Philadelphia perspective. The SRC has approved charter school establishment and expansion even while the traditional public schools languish. As children are injured, or even die, as did Laporshia Massey at Bryant Elementary, or as violence occurs, as it did at George Washington High School, the fault somehow lies with the resource-starved schools and not the SRC’s addiction to the lure of charter schools.

 

The underwhelming performance of charter schools for an overwhelming amount of money should set off alarms. Their quick solutions to educational woes follow the logic of past failures: Just hand over the money and we’ll do it all for you. In the end, however, there is only one certainty: If something is too good to be true, it is not the truth.

 

Several questions need to be asked about this scenario. The first is, why would the SRC allow the majority of Philadelphia’s children to attend dirty, unsafe schools without counselors, nurses, and assistant principals while other children clearly do not? Why is there hardly any discussion about this glaring disparity?

 

I have a couple of answers. The first is that there is a plan afoot to break public schools deliberately so that they can be handed over to charters. Thus, the SRC and Hite are wreaking havoc by deliberately deferring maintenance and cutting staff to dangerous levels in traditional schools. This practice effectively insures the failure that is necessary to hand over the now low-performing, intentionally broken “seats” over to more “successful” charter operators who feel justified in cutting into the resources available to District schools. This is being done in a calculated way in order to break the teachers’ union, the whipping boy of modern school reform.

 

The second is that District leaders and politicians are trying to appease elected officials in rural areas who perceive city schools and urban children as great leeches feeding off public dollars who divert resources away from more deserving populations. For them, giving more money to ”those” children in urban areas is like throwing money into a pit. The idea in the Pennsylvania House and Senate is that throwing money at schools doesn’t fix them, although they believe that having enough money fixes just about everything else.

 

The third is that the SRC has become the ball carrier for hedge fund managers for whom education is a place where they can make money. The fact that school reform is being led by MBAs rather than by educators is telling.

 

Philadelphia public schools are dying. Who will be held accountable? The legislature? Former Governor Tom Corbett? Superintendent William Hite?

 

The leaders are chasing a rainbow, bright promises that have never come through for the children. They are killing a democratic institution that society depends on and needs. Can they sleep at night?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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