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Idaho Teacher: We Have a Testing Crisis

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2014 //
31

This article was sent to me by the author, Travis Manning, who teaches high school English in Idaho.

 

We have reached a testing crisis in Idaho and Common Core hasn’t helped. As a current high school English teacher, I know. We are over-testing children, including the new 8-hour Common Core test: the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).

In high school alone we give students the PSAT, SAT, IELA, PLAN, ACT, pre- and post-tests, end-of-semester exams, ASVAB, Science ISAT, AP tests, SBAC, PLATO, benchmarks, Career Information System (CIS) and sometimes the NAEP. Not all students take every test every year, but the testing process disrupts the entire school calendar, regardless. Testing burns weeks of instructional time, clogs up school computer labs, and costs millions. Special education students are given even more tests, often with accommodations to take as much time as they need, soaking up weeks more in a teacher’s curriculum calendar.

I support the Common Core standards generally, but I do not support the high-stakes test, the SBAC. Last year I wrote an op-ed in support of Common Core, but there are some ongoing concerns since then that haven’t been addressed by policymakers: fiscal strain, increased class sizes, cutting necessary programs and courses, teacher and student privacy issues, and tying teacher merit pay to SBAC.

The proposed teacher career ladder is coming down the pike, but details are sketchy. Idaho legislators want to tie as much as 50 percent of SBAC scores to teacher pay. “Our students are the most over-tested in the world,” writes education historian Dr. Diane Ravitch in a January 11, 2014 speech. “No other nation—at least no high-performing nation—judges the quality of teachers by the test scores of their students. Most researchers agree that this methodology is fundamentally flawed, that it is inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable, that the highest ratings will go to teachers with the most affluent students and the lowest ratings will go to teachers of English learners, teachers of students with disabilities, and teachers in high-poverty schools.”

We have become a nation infatuated with standardized testing and, in the process, have given private testing companies the onus for unnecessarily labeling schools, children and teachers. Groups like the Albertson Foundation and their Don’t Fail Idaho campaign continue to beat public schools about the head with statistics. Their campaign is meant to inform – but also to demoralize public schools – in order to privatize them, convert them into for-profit charters.

Ravitch notes that U.S. Department of Education website data reveals that recent U.S. test scores were “the highest they had ever been in our history for whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians; that graduation rates for all groups were the highest in our history; and that the dropout rate was the lowest ever in our history.” Unabashedly, privateers like Governor Otter and Superintendent Luna choose to ignore these facts.

New York state gave Common Core tests last spring and only 30 percent of students passed, including less than 20 percent of Hispanic students, 5 percent of students with disabilities, and 3 percent of English language learners. Could New York teachers use Common Core test results for item analysis and re-teaching? Nope. Results were reported in August. SBAC passing marks, called “cut scores,” are aligned with the federal test called NAEP, and the bar is set so high only 40 percent of students, at best, reach proficiency.

In Idaho, we are setting up 60 percent of our children to fail. My young children will not be taking the SBAC, especially in their elementary years, when their love of learning is paramount.

One answer: “opt out.” See Idahoans for Local Education website: http://bit.ly/1ac5aRZ. For the sake of Idaho’s children and teachers: “opt out.”

Travis Manning is executive director of The Common Sense Democracy Foundation of Idaho and can be reached at manning_travis@hotmail.com.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Idaho, Privatization, Testing

Researchers Reveal Funding Network for Wash. Charter Law

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2014 //
36

University of Washington scholars Wayne Au and Joseph J. Ferrare have written an excellent analysis of the big money that flooded the state of Washington to pass charter legislation in 2012. Although defeated three times before by voters, this time the proposal passed by a tiny margin. Its major funders were Bill Gates, who has no children in public school, and Walmart heiress Alice Walton,who lives in Arkansas. Substantial help was provided by other members of the Billionaire Boys Club and their claque (such as Stand for Children).

The more than $10 million they amassed was sufficient to buy what they wanted.

The moral of the story: a small number of very wealthy individuals and organizations bought a policy of their choosing. This subverts democracy. It subverts the principle of one man, one vote.

These are not reformers. They are plutocrats who use their vast wealth to buy what they want.

Here are a few choice quotes:

“Conclusions/Recommendations: This study concludes that, compared to the average voter in Washington, an elite group of wealthy individuals, either directly through individual donations or indirectly through their affiliated philanthropic organizations, wielded disproportionate influence over the outcome of the charter school initiative in the state, thereby raising serious concerns about the democratic underpinnings of an education policy that impacts all of the children in Washington State. This study also concludes that elite individuals make use of local nonprofit organizations as a mechanism to advance their education policy agenda by funding those nonprofits through the philanthropic organizations affiliated with those same wealthy elites. In light of these conclusions, the authors recommend that a mechanism for more democratic accountability be developed relative to education policy campaigns, initiatives, and legislation.

“INTRODUCTION

“To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, today’s plutocrats are not like you and I; nor do they resemble the politicians we elect. Even when they assume the authority to set public policies, they are, I fear, not sackable. (Bosworth, 2011, p. 386)

“With the backing of both major political parties, billionaire philanthropists, venture capitalists, business leaders, and a growing network of nonprofit organizations and research centers, charter school policy has evolved into a major component of the current education reform movement in the United States (Fabricant & Fine, 2012; Rawls, 2013). As of 2012, all but nine U.S. states allowed charter schools (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2013), and in one of those nine, Washington State, charter school legislation was passed by popular vote in November 2012 (Reed, 2012)…..”

And more:

In this section we present the findings of our network analysis in two phases. First, through two tables, we present data on cash and in-kind contributions to the Yes On 1240 campaign and funding relationships between campaign donors, affiliated philanthropies, and organizational campaign supporters (Tables 1 and 2). Second, we visualize these relationships through a simple directed graph that traces the flows of sponsorship (material and symbolic) among policy actors (Figure 1).

YES ON 1240 CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

Several important findings arise when we analyze the contributions to the Yes On 1240 campaign.

Table 1: Yes On I-1240 Campaign Cash and In-kind Contributions of $50k and More

Yes On 1240 Donor
Donation Amount
1.
Bill Gates Jr. – Microsoft cofounder and current chairman
$3,053,000.00
2.
Alice Walton – heiress; daughter of Walmart founder, Sam Walton
$1,700,000.00
3.
Vulcan Inc. – founded by Paul Allen, Microsoft cofounder
$1,600,000.00
4.
Nicolas Hanauer – venture capitalist
$1,000,000.00
5.
Mike Bezos – father of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
$500,000.00
6.
Jackie Bezos – mother of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
$500,000.00
7.
Connie Ballmer – wife of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
$500,000.00
8.
Anne Dinning – managing director D.E. Shaw Investments
$250,000.00
9.
Michael Wolf – Yahoo! Inc. board of directors
$250,000.00
10.
Katherine Binder – EMFCO Holdings chairwoman
$250,000.00
11.
Eli Broad – real estate mogul
$200,000.00
12.
Benjamin Slivka – formerly Microsoft; DreamBox Learning cofounder
$124,200.00
13.
Reed Hastings – Netflix cofounder and CEO
$100,000.00
14.
Microsoft Corporation
$100,000.00
15.
Gabe Newell – formerly Microsoft; Valve Corporation cofounder
$100,000.00
16.
Doris Fisher – Gap Inc. cofounder
$100,000.00
17.
Kemper Holdings LLC – local Puget Sound developer
$110,000.00
18.
CSG Channels
$60,000.00
19.
Education Reform Now
$50,000.00
20.
Bruce McCaw –McCaw Cellular founder
$50,000.00
21.
Jolene McCaw – spouse of Bruce McCaw
$50,000.00
Source: Washington State Public Disclosure Commission (2012a)

Table 1 highlights that $10.65 million in total, or almost 98% of the $10.9 million raised for the Yes On 1240 campaign, was funded by 21 individuals and organizations who each donated more than $50,000 to the campaign (Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, 2012a).

Notably, Bill Gates Jr. is the biggest contributor ($3M) to the campaign, nearly doubling the next biggest contributions coming from Walmart heiress Alice Walton ($1.7M) and Vulcan Inc. ($1.6M),2 Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s company. As a more general finding, these amounts indicate that a number of select wealthy individuals with no immediate connection to Washington State (e.g., Eli Broad and Alice Walton) demonstrated a vested interest in charter school policy in the state. Another finding that emerges from the data is that wealthy individuals who are connected to the technology sector also demonstrated a vested interest in promoting charter school policy in Washington State (12 of the top 21 contributors to Yes On 1240 are strongly connected to the technology sector). Additionally, as might be expected given the interconnectedness of any sector of industry, several of these individuals have historical and industry-related connections to Microsoft Inc. and Microsoft Inc. cofounder and chairman, Bill Gates Jr.

It is also of value to highlight the $50,000.00 donation to the Yes On 1240 campaign from Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee because it illustrates the tightly woven interconnectedness of organizations and funding structures associated with education policy reform advocacy. New York State tax records from 2006 explicitly indicate that Education Reform Now, Inc., Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee, and DFER all share officers, personnel, office space, and paymasters (Libby, 2012). Tax records from 2007 further indicate that Education Reform Now Inc. and Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee share these same resources (New York State Office of the Attorney General, 2013). Thus, it is difficult to determine where DFER, Education Reform Now Inc., and Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee begin and end individually because, in essence, they represent a financially intertwined cluster of three organizations that seem to operate as a single organization with overlapping staff and resources. Consequently, even though tax records do not allow us to fully understand the exact relationship, the $50,000.00 donation to the Yes On 1240 campaign from Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee is functionally also a donation from Education Reform Now Inc. and DFER.

YES ON 1240 CONNECTED ORGANIZATIONS

As discussed above, four organizations, LEV, DFER, Stand for Children, and Partnership for Learning, publicly claimed credit for leading and coordinating the Yes On 1240 WA Coalition for Public Charter Schools (Yes On 1240, 2012a). An analysis of the in-kind donations to the Yes On 1240 campaign (that is, donations of labor or other services that are given cash value and added to the campaign donation total) supports this claim: Those four organizations predominate the in-kind donations database and are the only organizations listing “staff time” as donated in kind to the campaign (Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, 2012c). Further, as a university-based research center, they cannot be listed as having provided in-kind donations (or any donations) directly to a political campaign in the state. Because of their active role in providing direct, nonmonetary support for the Yes On 1240 campaign vis-à-vis being highlighted prominently in a campaign video (Yes On 1240, 2012b) and authoring a research report explicitly in support of I-1240 (Lake et al., 2012), we have included the CRPE here as a “connected organization” for their symbolic contribution to the campaign through the lending of their expertise.

PHILANTHROPIC CONNECTIONS TO THE YES ON 1240 CAMPAIGN

Cross referencing information gathered from the Google search engine, philanthropy websites, and available tax records (Foundation Center, 2013) produced the following 11 foundations directly connected to major donors to the Yes On 1240 campaign (in alphabetical order): Apex Foundation (formerly the Bruce & Jolene McCaw Foundation), Bezos Family Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Corabelle Lumps Foundation (formerly the Anne Dinning and Michael Wolf Foundation), the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund (connected through the Connie and Steve Ballmer advised Biel Fund),3 Lochland Foundation (Katherine Binder, cofounder, officer, and contributor), The Walton Family Foundation, and Wissner-Slivka Foundation. Using foundation databases, foundation reports, available tax records, organizational websites, and institutional reports, we then looked for whether or not these foundations provided funding to the Yes On 1240 campaign-related organizations.

Table 2: Philanthropic Support for Yes On 1240 Connected Organizations

Organization

Amount

Foundation

Center on Reinventing Public Education
$8,578,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$701,000
The Walton Family Foundation
$512,813
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
Education Reform Now (Democrats for Education Reform)
$2,925,000
The Walton Family Foundation
$2,481,716
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
$600,000
Doris & Donald Fisher Fund
$500,000
Corabelle Lumps Foundation
$15,000
Bezos Family Foundation
League of Education Voters
$4,790,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$257,000
Lochland Foundation
$160,139
Bezos Family Foundation
$1,000
Apex Foundation
Partnership for Learning
$4,700,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Stand for Children™
$9,000,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$2,857,945
The Walton Family Foundation
$350,000
Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund
$120,304
Bezos Family Foundation
$55,000
Wissner-Slivka Foundation
$25,000
Lochland Foundation
$1,000
Apex Foundation
(Sources: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013; Foundation Center, 2013; Libby, 2012; New York State Office of the Attorney General, 2013; Stand for Children, 2013; University of Washington Bothell Office of Research, 2013; University of Washington Bothell Office of Sponsored Programs, 2013)

“As Table 2 indicates, the philanthropic foundations connected to major contributors to the Yes On 1240 campaign provided a range of support directly to three of the four campaign-coordinating organizations and the CRPE: the Apex Foundation’s $1,000.00 contributions to each LEV and Stand for Children were the smallest, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s total contribution of $9,000,000.00 to Stand for Children was the largest. Further, while DFER received no direct philanthropic support, its sister organization Education Reform Now received ample support from campaign-connected philanthropies, and, as detailed above, the overlap of resources between the cluster of Education Reform Now Inc., Education Reform Now Advocacy, and DFER, is very fluid. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the most prominent here, haven given over $27 million total to Yes On 1240 campaign-connected organizations across multiple years, grants, and contracts. The Walton Foundation is second-most prominent, having contributed $6.48 million to campaign-connected organizations, followed by the Broad Foundation at $2.99 million in support for campaign-connected organizations. There is a precipitous drop in total support after these three, potentially indicating smaller amounts of financial support originating from smaller foundations (e.g., Lochland Foundation or the Bezos Family Foundation). Regardless of the amount, foundation support of the organizations directly involved in the Yes On 1240 campaign is indicative of ideological alignment around specific education reforms (in this case, charter schools) between funders and grantees/contractors.”

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Research, Washington State

A Special Message to BATs about the PTA

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2014 //
32

This post is a continuation of the previous one.

I am addressing my many friends who are BATs.

I am asking you to work with your local PTAs to battle against privatization and to oppose attacks on teachers.

In state after state, public education is under attack. Teachers are under attack.

Build coalitions with parents, especially local PTAs.

We are natural allies.

PTAs want to strengthen their schools.

Work with them.

We must build a powerful coalition to support and improve our public schools and the teaching profession.

We are in this together, to do what’s right for children and for our society.

Alone, you lose.

Together, we win.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Parents, Privatization, Resistance

Jonathan Pelto: Connecticut Commissioner Stefan Pryor Must Go! (LINK ADDED!)

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2014 //
11

Jonathan Pelto, a close observer of politics and education in Connecticut, says that State Commissioner of Education Stefan Pryor must go.

He is the leader of the privatization movement in the state, more devoted to charters than to public schools, which most children attend.

Pryor’s management of the Connecticut Department of Education has become the personification of what happens when arrogance, elitism and corporate driven interests replace a commitment to honesty, transparency and a commitment to doing what is right for the people public officials have a sworn duty to serve.

From the moment Stefan Pryor arrived in Connecticut, the Malloy administration’s education policy has been consistently designed to destroy local control, belittle and demean teachers, reduce parental involvement, undermine our public schools and divert scarce public resources to out-of-state consultants and carpetbagging staff. Pryor’s tenure has been dedicated to a preoccupation with turning our schools into little more than standardized testing factories.

Corporate reformers in Connecticut cynically manipulate rhetoric about the achievement gap to destroy public confidence in public education, ignoring the fact that Connecticut has one of the best school systems in the nation. The issue in Connecticut is and must be equity, not the destruction of public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

Republicans Champion the Charter School Movement

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2014 //
46

Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly traces a clear pattern: The Republican party has embraced charter schools as their cause.

Republicans have always favored school choice, assuming that competition makes all schools better.

But they have never been able to persuade any electorate to endorse vouchers for private and religious schools.

So, charters are now the darlings of Republican donors and candidates.

The fact that charters have failed to demonstrate consistently superior academic performance doesn’t bother the Republicans, nor does the number of failed charters, nor are they dissuaded by the charters that have been caught up in financial scandals.

Nor do they care that the expansion of charters drains money from the public schools.

Nor are they troubled that many charters cherrypick their students and exclude students with disabilities and English learners.

Follow the money.

Cohen writes:

In politics, you have to follow the money. The editorial board of the San Antonio Express-News found it almost laughable to imagine that what it counted as more than $800,000 in campaign contributions from “charter school interests” between 2006 and 2013 didn’t play a role in convincing the Texas legislature to lift the state’s cap on charter schools. The Express-News is referring to the findings of a report from Texans for Public Justice that indicated people affiliated with the state’s top six charter school chains doubled their political contributions in recent years, comparing 2006 and 2008 to 2010 and 2012.
The bulk of the charter school contributions were linked to KIPP, particularly in the Houston area, where Doug Foshee, the former CEO of the El Paso Corporation natural gas producer, sits on the KIPP board and is treasurer for the conservative-leaning Texans for Education Reform. The biggest recipients were gubernatorial candidates Bill White, a Democrat, and the eventual winner, Rick Perry, a Republican, in 2010. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo may have scored a $10,000 campaign donation from the state’s largest teachers’ union in the past few months, but charter school advocates have given the governor much more, including $40,000 from Bruce Kovner, a billionaire among the 100 richest people in the U.S. who is a well known financial backer of Brighter Choice Charter Schools in Albany; $25,000 from StudentsFirst NY, the New York State affiliate of Michelle Rhee’s pro-charter political arm; and $14,000 from the pro-charter Democrats for Education Reform. Cuomo says he can’t be bought by campaign contributions, but like the editorial editors at the San Antonio News Express, most people would find the notion that campaign money doesn’t affect political positions as ludicrous.
Republican politicians like Rick Perry might get some money from charter school supporters, but given the large Republican soft money edge across the nation, donations from supporters of KIPP or IDEA are kind of inconsequential. In fact, strong charter school and privatization supporters like Eli and Edith Broad and John and Laura Arnold are major donors to Democratic politicians, although it is possible that those campaign contributions make the Democrats a little more charter-friendly. But around charter schools, campaign financing follows a bipartisan mold. The Arnolds’ foundation, for example, has put substantial funding into promoting charter schools in Houston and Louisiana. (The latter is where conservative Republican governor Bobby Jindal is closely allied with the expansion of charter schools and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.) Republican supporters of charter schools have also been somewhat bipartisan; the American Federation for Children, funded by Republican donor Betsy DeVos, for example, made more than one-third of its political donations to Democrats. Similarly, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst Tennessee poured dollars into both to Republican and Democratic campaign coffers trying to win favor for charter schools and school choice.
The fact that President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan support charters allow Republicans to appear bipartisan even as they embrace a strategy that undermines and weakens public schools:
This new charter school strategy by multiple Republican gubernatorial candidates isn’t just serendipitous. It is a conscious strategy—kinder, gentler, and kid-focused— for a Republican Party that generally has not supported the strengthening of public schools. Perhaps charter schools in Texas and elsewhere feel that they are not in a position to deny politicians like Abbott the opportunity to shoot TV ads in their facilities, especially if today’s denied politician turns out to be tomorrow’s governor. It might be a little bit awkward for charter schools, many of them managed by nonprofits like KIPP, to find themselves positioned by Abbott, Walker, and others as avatars for reduced public sector support of public school systems. Maybe some, however, are not all that discomfited by their use as props in Republican campaigns.
In a National School Choice Week editorial, Georgia Governor Deal lauded both private schools and charter schools as the means for parents “to ensure their child is getting an excellent education to compete in today’s world.” He made his position on charter schools clear. “These schools are given greater flexibility in return for strong accountability for student academic success,” Deal wrote. “By observing high-performing charter schools throughout Georgia, it’s clear these institutions promote competition, innovation and creativity while encouraging strong parental involvement.” He offered not a scintilla of analysis about how to make the public schools of Georgia, beyond the 310 charters already operating, also attractive choices for parents.
Deal didn’t acknowledge how the $1.51 million given to the Georgia Charter Schools Association in the past few years by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus’s foundation and the $3.99 million given to the Association by the Walton Family Foundation, much of it devoted to building charter school capacity, boosts the attractiveness of that choice over traditional public schools, whose staff are often scrounging for basic supplies and services. He didn’t mention the past several years of grants to KIPP in Georgia, including at least $21.825 million in foundation grants to the KIPP Metro Atlanta Collaborative ($2.653 million from the Marcus Foundation, $9.456 million from the Community Foundation in Atlanta, and several large seven-figure grants and PRIs from various foundations for the construction of the KIPP Strive primary school), over $2 million for the KIPP West Atlanta Young Scholars Academy, and funds specifically targeted for KIPP Strive Academy and KIPP South Fulton Academy. These and other grants hint at the private capital that Deal’s Democratic opponent Thurbert Baker pointed to in his explanation that charter schools’ complaints about facilities funding, not to mention operations, might be a little unwarranted.
The Foundation Directory Online lists over 960 grants in the past several years in support of specific charter schools or charter school networks in Texas, more than half of them between 2008 and 2011. KIPP Academy pulled in 208 of those grants, eight of them in the seven-figure range, with major support from a couple of community foundations as well as the Houston Endowment, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the Brown Foundation—plus over $40,000,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. YES Prep Southeast received 106 foundation grants or loans, including seven larger than $1 million. KIPP Aspire Academy got 40 grants, KIPP Truth Academy 35. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation made only a handful of grants, but one was for over $6 million in 2011 to the YES Prep Public Schools. Traditional public schools, which serve the bulk of students in Texas and elsewhere, can only dream about and salivate at these sources of private contributions.
Why do Republicans detest public schools? That is hard to say. It used to be that Republican businessmen served proudly on local and state school boards. Now they flock to privately managed charters, without any concern for the community public schools that serve their town or city.
Some think it is because charters are overwhelmingly non-union. But Republicans support charters just as enthusiastically in states where unions are prohibited.
Bottom line is that Republicans as well as leading Democrats are unconcerned about creating a dual school system: one sector that can pick its students and kick out the ones it doesn’t want, and the other sector that must take all students.
Some people thought that the Brown decision of 1954 foretold the end of dual publicly-funded school systems in the United States. Not so. Now we will have one sector for the strivers, another for the undesirables rejected by the charters.
Why do Democrats support the school choice movement, which was once seen as a signature policy of the far-right? That’s even more puzzling than why Republicans are ready to abandon our nation’s public schools.
Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Republicans

If Your School Fails, Open Another One, Preferably in Florida

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2014 //
31

Florida loves charter schools. It is not surprising since the charter industry has friends at the top of every key committee in the legislature. In Florida, charters open and close like the flow of waves on the lovely beaches that surround the state. Some make a huge profit, others disappear. There are now almost 600 charters in the state, so what’s another one, two, ten, or fifty? Many of the charters operate for profit, and make millions. Florida would love vouchers, if the legislature had its way, but the courts struck down a general voucher law as unconstitutional, so the only voucher schools are for students with disabilities (the McKay Scholarship program). There is little supervision of these schools, little regulation, and they have become big business in choice-loving Florida. Actually, Florida voters turned down an effort by the Jeb Bush team to change the Constitution in 2012 to permit vouchers. So, paradoxes abound. The voters don’t like vouchers, but the legislature does.

The voucher industry continues to grow and thrive because the legislature doesn’t like regulation. That has allowed fly-by-night “schools” to prosper, so long as their services are targeted to students with disabilities.

The schools spawned by the McKay Scholarships were the subject of a journalistic expose in 2011, which said the program had created a cottage industry of fraud and chaos (the author Gus Garcia-Roberts won a prestigious journalistic award for this series), but the legislative supporters of the program were undaunted.

And so, here comes another! The sponsors of a voucher school in Milwaukee that closed down decided to move to Florida. And why not?

According to the story in the “Daytona Beach News-Journal”:

DAYTONA BEACH — A couple who suddenly shut down their Milwaukee private school last month after collecting $2.3 million in state vouchers over six years is trying to get a similar program off the ground here.

Taron and Rodney Monroe opened Lifeskills Academy II in August in a former Indigo Drive conference center that now houses three churches.

Seven children in prekindergarten through fourth grade are enrolled. They include the Monroes’ son and three students who qualify for taxpayer-funded vouchers under Florida’s McKay and corporate tax credit scholarship programs that pay for disabled and low-income children, respectively, to attend private schools. Lifeskills Academy II collected $5,147 in the first half of this school year from those programs.

“It’s a basic Christian school,” Rodney Monroe said. “We’re just a real small school. … We’re just trying to help children.”

This is the Florida model: A path to a world-class education? Not likely.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Florida, Privatization

Bob Braun on Newark and the Pink Hula Hoop

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2014 //
8

Bob Braun has a fascinating blog where he writes about New Jersey politics and education, based on his 50 years of covering both as a reporter and columnist.

Here he tells the story of the current administration’s determination to sell off public buildings to KIPP and perhaps other charter operators.

Newark is under state control and has been since 1995. The state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson is a former Teach for America teacher who has been knee-deep or neck-deep in corporate reform, from TFA to New Leaders for New Schools to the Bloomberg administration, and now the Chris Christie administration. Her present assignment apparently is to turn public assets over to charter operators, in this case, a corporation named “the Pink Hula Hoop.”

The story begins like this:

Keeping public education public and out of the grasp of privatizers won’t be easy. The people behind it all make following the power and the money deliberately complicated. Consider the story of the Pink Hula Hoop, a convoluted tale of big money and insider contacts that could be the future of public education.

The front archway over the 18th Avenue School
The front archway over the 18th Avenue School

Pink Hula Hoop—more correctly “ Pinkhulahoop1, LLC”—is a profit-making company, one of four legal entities created to, among other things, raise money for the Team Academy Charter schools in Newark so it can buy and occupy public schools put on the auction block by the state-appointed school administration in New Jersey’s largest city. The Team Academy is considered a “region” of the better known KIPP charter schools.

The saddest part of the story is the inscription over the 18th Avenue School (photo):

“THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS THE BEST DEFENSE OF A DEMOCRATIC NATION.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, New Jersey, Privatization

Michigan’s “Educational Achievement Authority”: A Dismal, Frightening Failure

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2014 //
41

It is hard to choose which state has done the most to undermine public education: Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin come to mind, but Michigan is right up there as a state whose Governor Rick Snyder is working hard to crush public education. There is the fact that some 80% of the charters in Michigan are run by for-profit operators. And note too that entire low-performing districts have been given to for-profit corporations.

But the worst of Snyder’s inventions is the deceptively-named Education Achievement Authority. Here the governor has gathered the state’s low-performing schools for special treatment.

Eclectablog, a Michigan blog, decided to go behind the claims of success and manufactured data, and instead to talk to teachers who work for the EAA. The stories are harrowing, including accounts of physical abuse, drugs in the schools, and an atmosphere of fear. Some teachers are afraid of violent teachers in schools where there is no discipline.

“Over the past couple of years, Republicans and the Snyder administration has attempted to resolve the problem of urban school districts that are failing to provide even the bare basics of a good education for their students by grouping them all together into a single “school district for misfit schools” called the Education Achievement Authority or EAA. As has been well-documented (see my interview with State Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton HERE), the EAA has been a catastrophic failure. Instead of providing these disadvantaged children with the resources and environment they so sorely lack, the EAA has attempted to educate them on the cheap. They have resorted to “teaching by computer” but, rather than providing the students with the cutting edge technology that you might expect a school district like this to have, instead there are too few computers for the students, the software was nonfunctional for much of the school year, and the system crashes regularly.

“Worse yet, special needs students are woefully neglected, very possibly in violation of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Special plans for these students, called Individualized Education Plans or IEPs, are frequently not provided to the teachers which prevents them from making the accommodations needed for these students, accommodations required by law.”

Conditions for teaching and learning are abysmal:

““It’s dangerous for kids to come to school,” one teacher at an EAA elementary school told me. “We’ve found drugs in the school. We’ve found weapons in the school. We have a metal detector that doesn’t even work, nobody checks anyone on the way in.”

“The security problems are exacerbated by ridiculously large classroom sizes, something that’s only getting worse due to teachers leaving in droves. According to one teacher I spoke with, the classroom they teach in is about to go to almost 50 students. This is despite the fact that a quarter of the students have left the EAA system, a dramatic drop that reflects the dissatisfaction of the students’ parents with the education their children are receiving.

“One of the things that really has pushed me to speak out is that I learned from another teacher recently that I’m about to get another ten students in my class which will take me to almost 50 kids,” the teacher said. “Another teacher quit and, instead of hiring someone to replace them, they are just redistributing their students to all the other teachers. So, it’s just me and all these kids with no help, no paraprofessionals. It’s just dangerous. Beyond being able to educate that many kids at once all by myself, I’m not confident I can keep them safe from each other. They don’t fit in the room, there aren’t enough chairs, it’s not okay. I have this knot in my stomach and I’m worried sick and stressed out because of it.”

“Alone in a class of nearly 50 students with no student teachers, no paraprofessionals, and little support from school administrators when children act out violently. And many of these teachers are in their early twenties. The ones from Teach for America — roughly a quarter of the teachers in the EAA — had a scant five weeks of training before they were assigned to a classroom full of kids.”

Constant turnover damages morale:

““The bottom line is that the EAA is really bad for teachers and, more importantly, it’s really bad for students. The way they treat the teachers is causing them to leave. I would leave if…I’m almost there, to tell you the truth. The turnover rate is horrible for the kids. Any educator worth their salt knows that a lot of what you do every day and the success of it is dependent on the depth of the relationships that you form with your students and parents. And, for a lot of these students, school is the most stable thing in their life, especially in these high-risk, urban areas.

“So, when they constantly have instability at home and also instability at school with this revolving door of teachers…they’re in and they’re out because the district is treating them like crap. That’s horrible for kids. Not to mention the fact that class sizes are huge, the things that they feed them in the cafeteria are not nutritious, they have very minimal security.”

Governor Snyder plans to expand the EAA.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Michigan, Privatization

Governor Haslam of Tennessee: Bad Collision with Facts

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2014 //
5

This blogger has gathered the latest wave of bad news from Tennessee, showing the emptiness of the Republican Governor Bill Haslam’s efforts to outsource everything public to whoever wants to make money.

Even though President Obama praised red-state Tennessee as a prime example of the success of Race to the Top, conveniently ignoring the other Race to the Top winners where NAEP scores stagnated, things are not going well for corporate-style reform in the Volunteer State.

Haslam and his TFA Commissioner Kevin Huffman (ex-husband of Michelle Rhee) have the support of a far-right legislature, but their plans are still in disarray.

Nearly half the superintendents bravely signed a letter protesting Huffman’s heavy-handed mandates (seems to be the custom with corporate reform superintendents, brooking no dissent from the peons). Now parents have formed a new organization to fight Haslam and Huffman’s plans to outsource as many public schools to private corporations as possible. And, of course, Chris Barbic, imported from Houston to perform a miracle, promised to gather up all the state’s lowest-performing schools and move them to the top of the state’s rankings within five years (the clock is ticking–better to make your utopian promises fuzzy, not so concrete).

Now comes Tennesseans Reclaiming Education Excellence, organized by parents across the state, and they injected an unknown quantity into educational debates in Tennessee: Facts. Facts!

….on Monday, the top-down, one-size-fits-all education policies Haslam has been pushing through the legislature met a formidable roadblock — a TREE.

As has been custom the past few years, corporate education organizations have trotted out their privatization policies at the beginning of each legislative session. Their glossy, well-funded presentations always grab headlines and typically re-affirm Republican efforts that privatize public schools, divert money from our students’ classrooms and devalue educators.

This year, however, a new group, Tennesseans Reclaiming Educational Excellence, kicked off the week with some analysis that threw cold hard facts into the discussion of reforms trumpeted by Haslam’s administration.

Several points of interest:

Elaine Weiss of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, was TREE’s featured presenter. From TNEdReport.com:

“Weiss discussed recent Tennessee education policy in the context of the drivers of educational inequality. She pointed to research suggesting that poverty is a significant contributor to student outcomes and noted other research that suggests as much as 2/3 of student outcomes are predicted by factors outside of school.”

The beauty of TREE’s press conference was two fold — one; they took some media coverage away from corporate education groups, and, two; they empowered our reporters with facts that have largely been missing from the education debate in Tennessee. Hopefully this presser will pay dividends for the weeks to come.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Resistance, Tennessee

Paul Thomas Rebuts Jay Greene: No Escape Route from Testing for Choice Schools

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2014 //
11

Paul Thomas here critiques Jay Greene’s claim that schools of choice should not be subject to the same regime of standardized testing as public schools.

Thomas warns about the numerous academics and “think tanks” that are financed by interested parties and thus do not offer disinterested advice. Greene is a strong advocate of charters and vouchers; his “Department of Educational Reform” at the University of Arkansas is subsidized by the Walton Family Foundation, which promotes alternatives to public education.

Thomas concludes:

“If standardized test data are harmful for determining educational quality, student achievement, and teacher impact, let’s end the inordinate weight of standardized testing, period. And let’s acknowledge that the past thirty years of high-stakes accountability has misrepresented the quality of public schools and likely inaccurately increased public support for school choice.

“If charter schools are a compelling option because they allow schools relief from burdensome bureaucracy, just relieve all public schools from that bureaucracy and then no need for the charter school shuffle.

“Neither of the above will be embraced, however, by school choice advocates because they are not seeking education reform; they are seeking a privatized education system.”

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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