Archives for category: Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Amanda Koonlaba: Can the People of Mississippi Save Their Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2015 //
7

Amanda Koonlaba, an art teacher in Tupelo, Mississippi, explains here that Mississippi is in a pitched battle to fund its public schools adequately. The issue is joined in a political struggle over Initiative 42, which would require the adequate funding of public education. Initiative 42 is opposed by the forces of privatization, which prefer to open privately managed charters, hand out vouchers for religious schools, and block any increase in funding for the public schools.

Koonlaba writes:

In 1997, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law promising to provide each public school district in Mississippi enough financial support to furnish an adequate education to every K-12 student. That law is called the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), and has only been followed twice since its was passed. This has resulted in a shortfall of over a billion dollars since 2009. That is a billion dollars that would have provided textbooks, technology, and certified teachers. Instead, Mississippi’s students have just had to do without.

In 2014, nearly 200,000 Mississippians from every county and both political parties took a stand and signed petitions to have Initiative 42 added to the ballot on November 3, 2015. This would amend the state constitution in a way that makes public education a priority instead of an afterthought. Initiative 42 closes a loophole that has allowed the Legislature to break the MAEP law for so long.

After citizens signed these petitions, the very first thing the Legislature did when they went back into session was to pass an alternative to Initiative 42.

The alternative was intended to confuse voters, to protect the status quo, and to prevent any increase in funding for public schools.

The leaders of the opposition to Initiative 42 have ties to the Koch Brothers and Americans for Prosperity.

And ALEC, the enemy of the public good, is involved too.

This spring, the Legislature passed a school voucher bill straight from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) playbook. ALEC helps corporations, idealogues, and their political allies pass legislation that privatizes schools. This legislation is written behind closed doors and then passed around from state to state. All a lawmaker has to do is fill in the blanks with the name of their particular state. It benefits large corporations and directs public tax dollars to private entities. ALEC is funded by the Koch Brothers. Interestingly, Jeb Bush, who is also closely connected to Americans for Prosperity, attended [Governor] Phil Bryant’s signing of this bill in Jackson.

The passage of Initiative 42 is crucial for the future of the children and public schools of Mississippi. It is a chance for the public to say NO to the 1% that rule ALEC and the other privatization advocates.

It is a chance for citizens and local communities to stand up for their public schools and stop the corporate assault on them.

Koonlaba writes:

Initiative 42 is a light in the darkness of this attack on Mississippi’s public schools. It is a chance for the citizens of Mississippi to stand up to the Legislature and remind them that they work for citizens not privatizers. Mississippians want their public schools to remain public and be fully funded.

However, Mississippians need help sorting through what the Executive Editor of the Clarion Ledger, Sam R. Hall, called “a load of horse crap” from the opposition to Initiative 42. Luckily, several groups are working to help Mississippians do this to get the initiative passed.

The Parent’s Campaign and the Mississippi Association of Educators have been working to educate the public on the initiative. 42 for Better Schools is the actual campaign to pass Initiative 42 and is a coalition of Mississippi public schools supporters and organizations. A grassroots group called Fed Up with 50th emerged to support school funding issues. They write on their Facebook page that

“We are law-abiding, tax-paying Mississippi voters—Republicans and Democrats—and we are FED UP! We are FED UP with failing schools, low graduation rates, poor teacher support, crowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, not enough textbooks or computers—all the things that make us 50th in education year after year. More than anything, we are FED UP that our legislators continue to BREAK THE LAW and underfund our schools, STEALING from our children and SELLING OUT their future to special interests.”
If Initiative 42 passes on November 3, Mississippians will have won a major battle but will have much work still left to do. If it doesn’t pass, the war will be lost.

Initiative 42 is a chance for Mississippians to tell the corporate entrepreneurs that their children and their public schools are not for sale.

If they stand together, the people of Mississippi can beat the 1%.

Categories Budget Cuts, Equity, Funding, Mississippi, Privatization

Real Estate Investors Jump Into Charter $chool Market, See Large Annual Profits

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2015 //
30

A report in the Wall Street Journal describes the gold-rush atmosphere that attracts real estate investors to charter schools. The risk in the investment is diminished because the schools have a steady stream of government funds. The charters are almost always non-union. The biggest risk is that the people running the schools are unqualified to run a school and the school may fail.

Real-estate investors are showing an increasing interest in charter school development as the demand grows for classroom seats and some state and local governments become more willing to help finance charter-school projects.

Almost all charter schools are operated by nonprofit organizations. But these groups often rent and buy their buildings from private real-estate developers, and that is creating a new niche asset for some investors.

One of the latest entrants to the charter real-estate business is Northstar Commercial Partners, a Denver-based private-equity firm that is raising a $100 million fund. It will focus on converting charter schools out of vacant office, industrial and retail properties that can be purchased for less than half of what they would cost to build, according to Northstar Chief Executive Brian Watson.

Meanwhile, investment manager Bobby Turner, who founded Turner Impact Capital LLC in 2013, is raising his second fund with tennis legend Andre Agassi for building new charter schools, this one with a goal of $400 million.

And established players in the business are seeing volume increases on chart school developments. For example, a venture of HighMark School Development and EPR Properties, a real-estate investment trust, spent more than $118 million in 2014 on acquisition, renovation and construction, compared with $34 million in 2011.

“There’s no shortage of cash,” said Patrick Beausoleil, a HighMark vice president.

The rise in investment activity partly reflects the growth of the charter school movement, which has been overcoming political opposition in many states. During the 2014-2015 school year, 500 new public charter schools opened nationwide, for a total of more than 6,700 enrolling about 2.9 million students, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Some states are beginning to make financing tools available to charter schools that had been limited to traditional public schools. For example, the states of Texas, Colorado and Utah now backstop tax exempt bond issues for some charter schools, reducing their capital costs when acquiring facilities, according to Scott Rolfs, managing director of B.C. Ziegler & Co., a niche investment-banking firm that has underwritten more than $600 million in charter school bonds.

But the growing role of for-profit real-estate developers has added a new dimension to the debate over charters, which are taxpayer funded and independently operated schools that are largely free of union rules. Critics say charter schools are in danger of cutting costly deals with developers who are more concerned with investment return than educating children. The result can lead to failed schools.

One of the biggest investment funds is the one created by Turner Impact Capital and tennis star Andre Agassi. Agassi is a high-school dropout. It seems that to start new charter schools, no education is necessary.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

A Debate About Whether the Walton Foundation and Markets Promote Equity for Students

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2015 //
22

Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly has a must-read report on a recent debate about the Walton Family Foundation. The report and the debate about it were sponsored by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

This debate and the report on which it is based represent a sad turnaround in philosophy for the NCRP. In two previous reports, noted below, the organization warned about the dangers of privatization and specifically singled out the Walton Family Foundation for using its wealth to undermine the public sector. This new report tilts towards the beneficence of the Walton privatization agenda. Has NCRP lost its independence? Or its voice?

In this instance, the roots of the debate were in an NCRP report published in May 2015, part of NCRP’s “Philamplify” series, on the Walton Family Foundation, subtitled, “How Can This Market-Oriented Grantmaker Advance Community-Led Solutions for Greater Equity?” Compared to earlier NCRP reports on the Walton Family Foundation, notably NCRP’s 2005 report, “The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy,” and its 2007 follow-up, “Strategic Grantmaking: Foundations and the School Privatization Movement, it was distinctly less critical of the ideology and agenda of the Arkansas philanthropic behemoth. Both earlier reports indicated that the foundation’s promotion of school choice, charter schools, and school vouchers in education reform had led to a pernicious, self-interested crusade to undermine public schools.

When it comes to market approaches, as Sherece West-Scantlebury, the president and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and chair of the NCRP board, noted at the beginning of the debate, NCRP is “agnostic.” In fact, for the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation itself, headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, West-Scantlebury described the Walton Family Foundation, headquartered in Bentonville 200 miles away, as a “great partner” for her foundation’s programs. Walton has a major programmatic emphasis in its “home region,” with grantmaking focused on Northwest Arkansas and Delta region of Arkansas and Mississippi totaling more than $40 million in 2014, while Winthrop Rockefeller is totally dedicated to Arkansas’s advancement, both with overlapping commitments to education programs in Arkansas, including the two foundations’ joint sponsorship in 2014 of the “ForwARd Partnership for Arkansas Education” initiative.

Cohen admits at the end of the piece that he is not a disinterested observer, because he wrote the earlier reports that were highly critical of the Walton Family Foundation’s support for school privatization. Given that the far-right Walton family (and its Walmart corporation) is opposed to unions, it is not surprising that it would support non-union charter schools and religious schools. It is hard to swallow the claim that support for privatization and union-busting is an agenda for equity, but the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation is able to do so.

You will find the account of the debate interesting. What galled me was that the lead advocate for school choice, Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, invoked the late AFT leader Albert Shanker’s name as a proponent of charter schools. I don’t blame Pondiscio for saying this, as the myth of Shanker’s charter advocacy is widely cited in rightwing circles. But I frequently point out that while Shanker was among the very first to advocate for charter schools in 1988, he renounced his support for charter schools in 1993 in his weekly New York Times paid column. He said that charter schools were an instrument for privatization, no different from vouchers. He became soured on private management because of an experiment in Baltimore that involved a private group called Education Alternatives Inc. It fired unionized paraprofessionals who earned $10 an hour and replaced them with college graduates who worked for $7 an hour. Ironically, one of those college-graduates in the experiment was Michelle Rhee. In 1994, Shanker became more outspoke in his opposition to charters when he discovered that the first charter school in Michigan in 1994 was the Noah Webster Academy, enrolling some 700 students, mostly Christian home-schoolers who were taught a creationist curriculum on computers. The “school,” the computers and the curriculum were publicly funded. I would be very happy if charter cheerleaders stopped invoking Shanker’s name as one of their founding fathers.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Unions, Walton Foundation

The New York Times: The Walton Family Has Bankrolled Charters Across the Nation

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2015 //
7

This story is a bit more than a year old, but it remains relevant as an update on the education “reforms” favored by the mammoth Walton Family Foundation.

It has spent more than a billion on its far-right, free-market vision of school reform. The foundation estimates that it has provided funding for one of every four new charters in the country.

Make no mistake. The Waltons, beneficiaries of the Walmart stores, don’t like public schools. They like privately managed schools. They like vouchers. They believe that school choice is the answer to education equality and ultimately to eliminating poverty.

Note that the Walton-funded charters rely on Teach for America for a large chunk of their staff. That explains why the Waltons are the single biggest contributor to TFA.

Since Walmart is known for paying low wages, the Walton family knows a thing or two about poverty. Instead of opening charters, it could probably accomplish more by paying its workers $10 an hour and allowing them to work full-time jobs.

But, no, taking over the public schools of the United States is so much more appealing to a family of billionaires than paying a living wage to their 1.4 million employees. And it costs less.

In 2014, the foundation spent $202 million on education, overwhelmingly in support of charters and vouchers.

In 2013, the Walton foundation spent more than $164 million across the country. According to Marc Sternberg, who was appointed director of K-12 education reform at the Walton Family Foundation last September, Walton has given grants to one in every four charter start-ups in the country, for a total of $335 million.

“The Walton Family Foundation has been deeply committed to a theory of change, which is that we have a moral obligation to provide families with high quality choices,” said Mr. Sternberg. “We believe that in providing choices we are also compelling the other schools in an ecosystem to raise their game.”

The supporters and critics of charter schools, many of them fierce, cannot be easily divided into political camps. Supporters include both Republicans and Democrats, although critics tend to come more from the left. In Washington, where the charter system has strong backing in City Hall, supporters have been more successful than in New York, where opposition from teachers unions and others has kept charter school enrollment to about 6 percent, despite growth in the past decade.

The size of the Walton foundation’s wallet allows it to exert an outsize influence on education policy as well as on which schools flourish and which are forced to fold. With its many tentacles, it has helped fuel some of the fastest growing, and most divisive, trends in public education — including teacher evaluations based on student test scores and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.

“The influence of philanthropy in terms of the bang for the buck they get is just really kind of shocking,” said Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

A separate Walton foundation that supports higher education bankrolls an academic department at the University of Arkansas in which faculty, one of whom was recruited from conservative think tank, conduct research on charter schools, voucher programs and other policies the foundation supports.

The Walton-funded Department of Education Reform regularly studies vouchers, charters, and choice. What do you think they find? The independent evaluator, chosen by the Republican leaders in Congress, of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program holds as chair in the Walton’s Department of Education Reform.

Is there another country in the world where tax-exempt foundations have decided to destroy their nation’s public education system and replace it with a privatized system?

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Peter Greene on the Democratic Debate: Not Even a Bridesmaid

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2015 //
21

Peter Greene watched the debate and became outraged, as only he can.

So this is how it’s going to be. The GOP is going to have a cartoon discussion about education, focusing on how to use charters to dismantle public ed and on how to find wacky ways to pretend that we’re not havin’ that Common Core stuff. And the Democratic line on public ed? The Clinton campaign locked in on their line months ago– stick to the safe-and-easy topics of universal pre-K and accessible, cheaper-somehow college education.

That mantra is comfortable and easy. Plain folks can listen to it and hear, “Aww, more pre-school for those precious cute little kids, and a chance for young Americans to make something of themselves,” while corporate backers, thirsty hedge funders, and ambitious reformsters can hear, “Expanding markets! Ka-ching!!”

The unions made their endorsement early. Did that take education off the table as an issue?

Really? We don’t want to hear anything about the disastrous policies of the last twelve years that have systematically broken down and dismantled American public education and the teaching profession? Dang, but I could have sworn we wanted to hear about that. But I guess now that the union is on Team Clinton, our job is not to hold her feet to the fire so much as it is to give them a little massage and carry some baggage for her so that she can save her strength for other issues. Important issues. Issues that aren’t US public education.

Sanders, with his focus on how the rich have commandeered so many parts of our democratic society, is so close to making useful statements about the education debates, but it just doesn’t happen. And I’m not sure how somebody helps it happen at this point. And those other guys? Generic Candidates #3-5? I don’t know what they think about education, but I suppose now that the education vote is supposedly locked up by Clinton, they won’t feel the need to go there.

Bottom line– US public education, despite the assorted crises associated with it (both fictional and non-fictional) is shaping up to be a non-issue once again in Presidential politics. I would say always a bridesmaid, never a bride, but it’s more like always the person hired for a couple of hours to help direct the car parking in the field back behind the reception hall. Or maybe the person who cleans up the reception hall after the bridal party has danced off happily into the night.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Journalists: Ask The Candidates These Questions

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2015 //
9

The Network for Public Education created a list of questions that journalists should ask the candidates. In this post on Salon.com, I explained NPE’s agenda to improve our public schools and to repel the corporate assault on them.

K-12 education issues, of huge importance to the future of our nation, were almost completely ignored in 2012. They should not be overlooked in 2016 because the very existence of public education is under attack. Billionaires hope to privatize urban districts, then move into the suburbs and elsewhere.

For those of us who believe that public education is a public responsibility, the time to become active is now.

We oppose the status quo of testing and privatization. We seek far better schools, equitable and well-resourced, where creativity and imagination are prized, not test scores. We seek equality of educational opportunity, not competition for scarce dollars.

Please join the Network for Public Education and help us build a new vision of education for each child.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Politics, Privatization, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Columbus Dispatch: Did Ohio Officials Lie to Win Charter Money?

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2015 //
11

Bill Bush and Catherine Candisky of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch raise important questions about whether Ohio Department of Education officials lied when preparing the state’s application for federal charter funds. For most of the previous years, the press across the state had been filled with stories about the charters’ poor performance, about financial scandals, about abrupt charter school closings, about the absence of transparency or accountability or oversight in this $1 billion sector. That $1 billion was siphoned away from public schools, and in far too many cases, went into the pocket of wealthy campaign contributors to the GOP.

Both federal and state officials failed in their duty to monitor the use of federal funds and to tell the truth. The federal government should have known, and the Ohio officials should have been honest. But the scandal-scarred charter sector of Ohio won the largest federal grant for charter schools: $71 million.

In applying for a federal grant, the Ohio Department of Education said it would close “ poor-performing” charter schools, touted an automatic-closure law that shuts them down, and promised that only the best-rated charter sponsors would create new schools.

But it also said that, in the 2012-13 school year, Ohio had no “poor-performing” charters, even though about a third of charters didn’t meet a single standard on their state report cards that year and 60 percent of them got D or F grades on the Performance Index, a measure of how students perform on state tests.

The grant application also failed to mention that the automatic-closure law is currently suspended and won’t return until at least the 2017-18 school year.

And those “best-rated” sponsors? Two days after filing the application, the man responsible for drafting it, David Hansen, resigned for having scrubbed data to make sponsors rate higher. All his sponsor ratings were subsequently rescinded. The grant application said that only sponsors “rated ‘ exemplary’ or ‘effective’ under the state’s quality evaluation criteria will be invited to participate.”

Troubling facts like these continue to place a cloud over Ohio’s successful bid for the $71 million, five-year federal grant. The Ohio Department of Education wants an aggressive expansion of charter schools across the state.

“The goal is for high-quality schools,” said Kim Norris, agency spokeswoman. “It will be a highly competitive process with schools applying for the grant dollars.”

The state will funnel almost all of the money to entities hoping to start new charters — including new for-profit online charters, which now rank as some of Ohio’s worst-performing schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization

Emily Talmage: Teach Like a Champion…Or Like a Robot

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2015 //
31

Emily Talmage recently reposted an interview she had with Jim Horn, editor of Schools Matter. Horn wanted to interview teachers who had taught in KIPP or KIPP-like schools, and Emily responded. She shared her experiences with him in 2011 and decided the interview remained relevant and worthy of reposting.

She writes:

I am re-posting the interview here for a couple reasons:

First, at Brooklyn Ascend, we relied heavily on Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion,” – a book that has been the subject of a number of posts going around the internet right now. I want people to understand what my experience was like with these teaching methods.

Second, I have become increasingly concerned by parallels between the practices used at Ascend (and schools like it) with the system of education that I have written a great deal about on this blog, known in Maine as “proficiency-based” education, but elsewhere as “competency-based” or “mastery” learning. In these systems, as at Ascend, “outcomes” reign supreme – meaning that all learning must be observable, skill-based, and measurable. Teachers have very little autonomy; instead, they are treated like technicians. Micromanagement is the norm. Children’s performance on assessments are the “bottom line.” The natural joy, humanity, and messiness of real learning are lost.

Then follows a lengthy interview, which is fascinating. Emily is referred to as “R.” It is well worth reading the whole exchange.


INT: When you went looking for an opportunity to teach in a charter school, can you talk about that a little bit? Why a charter school?

R: At the time I didn’t know a whole lot about them. I actually hadn’t seen it yet. I had seen the advertisement for Waiting for Superman. I had this idea in my head that charter schools were, and I think I even said at the time that they were, “getting the job done.” I didn’t really know what I meant by that. What I was looking for was just a different type of experience after working at the public school that I had been at for three years. I had heard that you can get paid more at a charter school. I had heard that they treat teachers more like professionals at charter schools. I don’t even know what else I heard.

I went on the web sites, and I had found a couple of schools that had really nice looking websites. Harlem Success had one. There was this school called Harlem Village Academy in Harlem that had one also. I had heard that charter schools are closing the achievement gap. There are these certain schools that are really making it work. I didn’t really do my homework before I got into it. A lot of what ended up happening, ended up really surprising and disappointing me.

INT: Let’s talk a little bit about that. I guess I could phrase it this way. How was the experience of working in a school different from your expectations?

R: I had thought that I would be treated like a professional, and that teaching would somehow be seen as a respected job. I don’t really know what I expected, looking back. I know that when I got there, they immediately changed what I had applied to do. I had applied to be, and they had hired me as a third grade pull out teacher.

A couple of months into the year, they gave the students a mock ELA test and a mock math test. They panicked, and realized that the kids weren’t really doing very well, or that they weren’t on track, just pulling threes and fours at the end of the year. They decided to completely rearrange the third grade.

INT: What kind of tests did they give them?

R: They gave them a mock ELA. You know New York State has a state exam each year, and they gave them a mock test. I think it was one from one of the previous years. These are done about once a month, all through the school year, gave them a mock test to see what their progress was. They completely changed it, and then they decided to restructure the third grade.

They had us come in over Christmas break, and told us that I was no longer going to be the pull out teacher. They were going to put all of the lowest performing kids into one class, and have it so there was the low, medium and high class. Now all of a sudden, I had a class of thirty scholars, we had to call them. I was only allowed to teach reading and math. I really wasn’t even allowed to plan my own lessons.

That was a big difference than what I had expected versus what actually happened. I had it in my head that I would be working in this place where teaching is really respected. Then I ended up having to spoon feed to the kids. They were handing everything to me, saying, “You have to teach this lesson, and this lesson.” I felt more like a robot for a while, to be honest. It was pretty miserable.

INT: What were these lessons like? Were they scripted lessons? Did you have a script?

R: What they did is we had at Brooklyn Ascend a data analyst. She’s a former Teach for America person. I think she was a PhD in Data Instruction, or something like that. Basically, she took the mock ELA and the mock math data and analyzed it, and came up with these certain concepts that the kids weren’t doing well on. Some certain percentage hadn’t done well on the main idea questions. Some certain percentage hadn’t done well on making inferences in narrative procedure type passages. Just pulled right from the test. I’m trying to get this all right. Our data analyst basically pulled out these skills from looking at the mock data. I remember another thing that really surprised me which was that I didn’t have any authority to actually assess the kids myself. Which for me was really disappointing because I had come from working with a really small group, and that was a big part of what I enjoyed about teaching. Really getting to know the kids, and figuring out on a really deep level what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, why they’re struggling in some parts of reading and not others. That was something I loved about teaching.

All of a sudden, I had no power to do that at all. We had to use documents placed in front of us that said, “This percentage needs to work on this.” Our school Director, who incidentally a Teach for America graduate, decided to take one of the second grade teachers and put her in charge of the third grade. We now had this supervisor, and it was her job to come up with these scripted lessons that we would then have to present to the kids.

INT: You had a script. You had something to say, and the children had something that they were supposed to say back to you?

R: Some of it was. The lessons were scripted in that it was all written, like say such and such to the kids. We had to do this thing where we had to snap our fingers and then the kids would repeat it back. To me it was just complete and utter nonsense. The kids aren’t learning a thing this way. It blew me away. For some reason, nobody said anything about it, either. Everybody was just going along with this way of teaching. I don’t know–It felt like we were training dogs, with all the snapping.

INT: Was their chanting also?

R: We had to do the chanting, oh yeah. Every morning we had to start out. The way it worked is the kids would come in at seven-thirty. They came in silently. They had to walk in single file. The first thing that would happen would they would stop in front of the doors to the cafeteria. There would be a teacher sitting there who would pull up their shirt, and make sure they had a belt on. Pull up their pants, pull up the bottoms and make sure they had on the right color shoes, and the right color socks. If the top three buttons weren’t buttoned, she’d button up the top button.

The kids would come in and they had to have breakfast completely silently, which I think is what they do at KIPP. I’m not positive. A completely silent breakfast, which was also fairly disappointing to me because at my old school, breakfast was a time when I’d chat with the kids about their weekend. Get a sense of where they were at in their lives. What was going on with them. Are they having good days? Are they having bad days? Did they get their homework done? Do they need any help with it? This was a time to chat with the kids. It was also a time I really liked. Now I had to be completely, completely silent.

As teachers, we were required to carry these clipboards that had a list of each child’s name. Any time we had to give a kid a “correction,” we had to mark it on the chart. If a kid whispered to another one during breakfast, we had to write down “talking.” We had what I think at some schools they call it “Slant,” but at Brooklyn Ascend we called it STAR. They had to sit up tall, track the speaker, attention forward, respect always. That’s what it stands for. At breakfast, everybody’d come in silently, eat their breakfast silently. They had a choice to either take out a book, or they had to sit with their hands folded in front of them. I wasn’t even allowed to talk to them. Sometimes I’d secretly try to walk beside them and whisper, “Did you have a good weekend? Is everything okay?”

They’re eight year olds, and they need somebody to check in with. At least that’s the way I feel. I had one little girl who I had moved into a shelter, but we had to whisper about it at breakfast. She had to whisper and tell me, “Things are okay.” (Deep sigh.) It was awful. A silent breakfast. Silent breakfast would stop when one of the head teachers — our third grade supervisor would stop and say, every morning was the same thing, it was “Good morning, scholars.” They’d say, “Good morning, Miss ….” Then we’d say, “How do you feel today?” Then they would say, “Hungry for knowledge to get us to college.”

Then we’d do some other type of cheer, “Pick up your pencils, and you will be rewarded” was another one. These all come right out of, I don’t think they come from KIPP but I know that they use them at the Uncommon Schools, and a lot of the other charter schools in the area. Every morning, right before you went upstairs, we had to say this one cheer, “What’s out destination (clap clap)? Higher education.” Have you heard that one before?

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene’s Best Post Ever

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2015 //
45

Over the weekend, I attended a board meeting of the Network for Public Education. Xian Barrett, a teacher in Chicago on the board, made a startlingly perceptive comment over lunch. He said to me, “The reformers are often right when they describe the problem, but they are always wrong when they offer a solution.”

You won’t find a better, clearer demonstration of this axiom than this post by Peter Greene.

Peter analyzes the “social justice” argument for charters and choice. Reformers are right, he says, when they charge that schools in poor communities are often grossly inadequate:

“Reformsters start here with the premise that non-wealthy non-white students must be rescued from the terrible schools that are inextricably tied to poor support, poor resources, poor staffing, poor neighborhoods, and the lousy local control that leads to all of these poor inputs.”

But their reforms save a few while making things far worse for the majority.

“This problem is even more damaging in schools that are already underfunded and under-resourced. Losing money to charter-choice systems just makes the troubled school that much more financially distressed. So to “rescue” these ten kids, we are going to make things even worse for the ones left behind.

“The charter-choice system, as currently conceived and executed, promises a possible maybe rescue for some students while making the vast majority of non-white non-wealthy students pay for it, while simultaneously lulling policy makers into thinking that the problem is actually being solved, all in a system that allows charter operators to conduct business without being answerable to anyone.

“The problem (see First Part) is real. The solution being inflicted on public education is making things worse, not better. It is making some folks rich and providing excellent ROI for hedge funders, but neither of those outcomes exactly equals a leap forward in social justice. There’s a whole argument to be had about charter booster motives; I figure that some are in it because they believe it will work better and some are in it because they believe it’s the last great untapped well-spring of tax dollars. Ultimately, their motivation isn’t as important as this: their solution will not actually solve anything.”

Blogger and retired teacher G.F. Brandenburg wrote–after reading this post–that Peter Greene “may be the best blogger in America.”

Categories Charter Schools, Failure, Poverty, Privatization, Race, Teachers, Vouchers

John Thompson: Dare Anyone Say No to Eli Broad?

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2015 //
19

John Thompson, historian and teacher, here analyzes Eli Broad’s plan to add 260 charters for Los Angeles, so that charters enroll half the students in the LAUSD. One of our regular readers, Jack Covey, commented on the blog that the “anonymous” plan was actually authored by former LAUSD superintendent John Deasy, but I can’t confirm that.

The largely pro-reform LA School Report and the Los Angeles Times have already published powerful analyses of the Broad Foundation’s once-secret plan to turn half of the Los Angeles Public School System into charters. But the 44-page anonymously authored proposal is jammed-packed with even more dubious claims. And, it provides more insight into the corporate reformers’ mindset.

The Broad Foundation did not respond to the LA School Report’s critique of its methodology and its exaggerated claims of success. The School Report’s Craig Clough parsed the actual data and concluded:

But when all factors are considered, there is little conclusive evidence in the report outlining the expansion plans that shows big investments in charters always — or evenly routinely — achieve consistent academic improvements, raising an important question: Just what can Broad and other foundations promise for an investment of nearly half a billion dollars in an expansion effort that would dramatically change the nation’s second-largest school district?

The reporting by the LA Times Howard Blume also provides a solid overview. LA charters serve student populations that are somewhere in between the ones served by LA magnet schools and traditional public schools. And, their outcomes are somewhere in between those posted by the city’s magnets and neighborhood schools. The Broad paper gives no reason to believe that LA charters could be scaled up and still perform better than the city’s high-poverty traditional public schools.

Turning to the actual Broad proposal, which it now calls a “preliminary discussion draft,” it cites the data (contradictory as it is) from three high-performing charter school chains as evidence that 260 new charters could be established by 2023, and that they would greatly increase student performance. It makes a big deal out of the 52% of charters receiving an API score of 800 and greater, but it doesn’t attempt to identify how many of them are high-poverty.

Broad brags about the average charter API of 811 and contrasts it with the 80% low-income LAUSD’s average API of 745. But, two of the featured charter chains have an average APIs of 762 and 714, respectively. And, they run 34 of the 43 charter schools that supposedly are the model that will save Los Angeles. In other words, even with the charters in the chains showcased by Broad, only about 1/5th of them produce above-average scores. (Moreover, those schools are run by KIPP, and they don’t come close to serving the “same” students as high-poverty neighborhood schools.)

The bottom line is that the Broad claim that 260 high-quality charter schools can be created in eight years is basically based on the results from nine schools in a chain known for its high attrition rate.

Broad also ignores Blume on how “many parents apply to both magnets and charters before making a choice,” and pretends that the numbers on those lists are not inflated by those multiple applications. It then assumes that waiting lists will grow by 10,000 students a year.

Using equally flimsy logic and evidence, Broad projects that charters will have 130,000 students by 2023. This claim assumes that “Great Public Schools Now” schools will grow their student population by 7% per year even though they don’t yet exist, have no students, and are merely a “preliminary discussion draft.” The report admits that it the charter teachers will be paid less, making teacher recruitment more difficult. It acknowledges that solving the problem of recruiting principals is nonnegotiable, so it warns that that issue must be addressed immediately. In other words, it seems unlikely that Broad bothered to ask whether it was physically possible to even slap that many schools together in such a time frame.

Of course, the key issue is whether charters are capable of learning how to serve their share of students with special education disabilities and English Language Learners, as well as children who have endured extreme trauma. The Broad paper is silent on that crucial question, as it changes the subject to marketing. It produces a multicolored map of clusters of low-performing schools, while pretending that it doesn’t undermine their case. The graphic supposedly shows, “These areas are especially ripe for charter expansion.” But, it doesn’t explain why today’s charters haven’t already tried to tackle those challenges, or why they would be successful if they tried. In other words, Broad doesn’t see complicated real world problems to be solved; it sees market opportunities.

Even when it gets to the political marketing at which it excels, the Broad logic falls short. Corporate reformers forget the repudiation of their client, former LA Superintendent John Deasy. Their paper asserts, “The recent Board elections also moved in a positive direction, although there is still not a pro-charter majority.” It counts one of the races as a victory, admitting that one was a defeat, but claiming that “many are hopeful that the victor in that race, Scott Schmerelson, will take a reasonable position toward charter expansion.

Or should I say the reformers pretend to forget their educational and political defeats? Perhaps they can blow off the failure of their expensive and risky school improvement experiments, but it doesn’t seem like they can shake off rejection at the polls. Why else would Broad draft a school reform plan that ignores education evidence while focusing on conquering education markets and defeating opponents?

Concluding a proposal that ignores social science research and fails to articulate a scenario where students would benefit from mass charterization, Broad instead tallies the troops on both sides of the battle it is about to launch. It argues “the number of parents with children on charter waitlists now exceeds the number of UTLA members.”

Broad thus forgets that parents who sign up for multiple waitlists can’t vote multiple times in the same election.

But, that is not the key point. It should now be clear that successful efforts to improve schools must be done with educators, not to them. Broad’s
inclusion of that insulting graphic makes it clear that it sees teachers as the enemy. The corporate reforms are obviously focused on Broad’s personal enemies – educators, unions, and public schools controlled by the patrons, and not his minions. They continue to ignore the real enemy – the poverty that undermines learning.

And that bring us back to the LA School Report’s Clough and his question of what does Broad actually promise. It promises more assaults on teachers, unions, and patrons who disagree with them. The Broad plan promises more reward and punish, but not a policy that is likely to do more good than harm to children. It certainly does not promise improved schools for entire neighborhoods with intense concentrations of generational poverty and children who have survived extreme trauma.

Instead, Broad promises a fight to the finish between the two halves of the city’s schools. It thus promises more test, sort, winners and losers, and the pushing out of children whose test scores make it more difficult for adults to defeat their opponents. It promises an ultimate battle over who controls public education.

Perhaps most importantly, it promises retribution to educators across the nation if they try to resist Eli Broad and the Billionaires Boys’ Club.

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Democracy, Los Angeles, Privatization
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »