New York City just approved the ssle of $23 million in bonds for a charter run by a politically powerful Bronx family.
The story begins thus:
“The city approved a politically connected charter school — whose founder went to prison and principal was once accused of fixing grades — to issue up to $23 million in tax-exempt bonds to relocate to a former Bronx strip club.”
Mercedes Schneider takes a close look at Arizona, known as the Wild West of charters.
What she finds is a state where the ethics laws are even laxer than those of her home state of Louisiana.
The charter sector in Arizona is unregulated, unsupervised, and has a firm lock on the taxpayers’ dollars.
Money rules.
As readers of this blog know, there is a healthy discussion about what to call those who now claim to be “reformers.”
In this post, Leo Casey of the Shanker Institute discusses whether there is any such thing as “corporate reform.” Larry Cuban says there is not.
Let’s review what I often refer to as “corporate reform.”
I call it “corporate reform” because the reformers want to use crude metrics to judge teachers and schools. They think that data are better measures of quality than professional judgment. On the basis of standardized test scores, they are happy to label schools as “failing” if their scores are low and happier still to close them for the same reason. The test scores are like a profit and loss statement. The corporate reformers speak about having a “portfolio” of schools, sort of like a stock portfolio, where you keep the winners and get rid of the losers.
When they manage school districts, they invent fancy corporate-sounding titles like “chief talent officer,” “chief knowledge officer,” “chief portfolio officer,” etc. to take the place of school titles like “superintendent” and “deputy superintendent.”
The face of the “reform” movement is Michelle Rhee. She works closely with such figures as Joel Klein and Jeb Bush, John Kasich in Ohio, Mitch Daniels (now ex-governor) in Indiana.
These so-called reformers advocate for private management of schools by charter organizations, whether nonprofit or for-profit.
Some (Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Tony Bennett) but not all of them advocate for vouchers .
They say that our public school system is “broken,” “failing,” and “obsolete.” So to them, it makes perfect sense to replace them with private management.
They advocate for high-stakes testing.
They want teachers and principals to be evaluated to a significant degree by the test scores of students.
They applaud the closing of schools (cf. Rahm Emanuel).
They disdain local school boards, which might slow down the process of privatization of public funds.
They want to remove any due process rights from teachers, so they can be hired and fired at will.
They seek to cut teachers’ pensions and benefits.
They think that “great” teachers need only a few weeks of training. They like to put non-educators in charge of school districts and schools. After all, if someone can market toothpaste, they can also market automobiles or schools.
If you think there is no movement to undermine public education and the education profession, I don’t agree.
If someone has a better name than “corporate reform,” I am all ears.
Jonathan Pelto asks whether the Connecticut House of Representatives will approve the nomination of a charter school executive to the State Board of Education.
Governor Dannell Malloy nominated Andrea Comer, the chief operating officer of a charter school to the state board, where she will exercise influence over issues that directly affect her organization, as well as the continued expansion of charter schools in that state.
Malloy is mad about charter schools. He chose a charter school founder, Stefan Pryor, to be his state commissioner of education.
“If Andrea Comer, the Chief Operating Officer of FUSE/Jumoke Inc., finds herself on the State Board of Education, she will certainly be in a “unique” position to directly and indirectly impact her job, her employer and the industry she has worked so hard to represent. Prior to working for FUSE/Jumoke, Inc. she worked for Achievement First, Inc., the even larger charter school management company co-founded by Stefan Pryor.”
Charters in Connecticut that have the best success are known for having very small numbers of English language learners and students with disabilities. Comer’s charter is one of them.
Connecticut has leadership that disdains public education. Privatization is all the rage in the Nutmeg State.
Larry Lee is an Alabama native who cares about public schools. He has a particular interest in rural schools and community schools. He is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education. This is his analysis of the recently passed “Alabama Accountability Act,” which enacted tax credits and is a stealth voucher plan.
Larry Lee writes:
Have you ever made a promise you knew you couldn’t keep? I sure did every time mama took a switch to me. “I promise, I promise I won’t ever do it again,” I hollered as I tried to dance out of her reach.
Unfortunately when you strip all the rhetoric away, when you cast aside all the pleadings that “this is for the children” and when you look at the starkness of the numbers, you see that this is what our legislature did when they passed the Alabama Accountability Act.
They made a promise they cannot keep. Whether this was intentional or just inept doesn’t much matter at this moment. HB 84 was passed by the Alabama House and Senate and signed into law on March 14, 2013 by Governor Bentley.
As they said, it is what it is. A promise that cannot be kept.
On page 13, line 13, the new law says:
“For tax years beginning on and after January 1, 2013, an Alabama income tax credit is made available to the parent of a student enrolled in or assigned to attend a failing school to help offset the coast of transferring the student to a non-failing public school or nonpublic school of the parent’s choice.”
It further states in the same paragraph:
“If income taxes owed by the parent are less than the total credit allowed under this subsection, the taxpayer shall be entitled to a refund or rebate, as the case may be, equal to the balance of the unused credit with respect to that taxable year.”
My math says there are 89,087 students in “failing schools” in Alabama. This means we have promised to give a tax credit or rebate check of about $3,500 to each of these students. That’s a liability of more than $311 million.
While some guesstimate that only 10 percent of these kids will apply for the money, they may need to take off their rose-colored glasses. A close look at Montgomery County shows what I mean.
There are 21 schools on the “failing” list in Montgomery with 14,511 students. Of these, 86 percent receive free and reduced lunches, a substantially higher rate than those in non-failing schools.
But here’s the rub. There is no way for the existing non-failing public schools to accommodate even a small portion of these kids. However, the law says the rebate, “is made available”. It does not say “may be available under certain circumstances.”
There are seven public high schools in Montgomery. Three, with a total of 4,848 students, are failing. Three are magnet schools that have stiff entrance exams. So the failing high school students have only one public school option, Carver High with 1,385 students. They’re going to add nearly 200 classrooms and 200 new teachers to take all these students? Highly unlikely.
What about these kids going to private schools? For one thing, how many poverty families can send their kids to a private school, even with a $3,500 rebate since tuition is far more than $3,500? And can private schools in Montgomery absorb 14,511 additional students?
Or do we just hold a lottery to see who gets into a school where there is some space and who gets the $3,500 rebate? Surely since we’re dead set against gambling we would never do this. (Even though the truth is that in some places in Alabama we already hold lotteries to see which kids get to go to pre-kindergarten.)
Of course there are plans for a scholarship fund to help students get into private schools. Let’s say 10 percent of the Montgomery students can get into private schools (1,451 students); at $5,000 per scholarship, that’s more than $7 million for just this one school system.
But forget all this guessing on numbers and go back to the law and the promise that each child in a failing school in Alabama is worth approximately $3,500. Common sense tells me that a single mother who takes advantage of free lunches for her school age kids is also going to apply to get $3,500 for each of them. And she’ll find plenty of tax preparers who will be glad to help her–for a cut of the rebate.
But wait, if her kids don’t move to a non-failing school is this then tax fraud? Is it her fault the local school can’t find space for her children in qualified schools? Is it her fault some lawmakers made a promise they could not keep?
One might even ask: is it the mother perpetrating the fraud, or is it the state of Alabama?
Larry Lee led the study, Lessons Learned from Rural Schools, and is a long-time advocate for public education who frequently writes about education issues. larrylee33@knology.net
A reader offers this comment about the education marketplace:
Better and cheaper aren’t even issues in the disruptive Educational marketing game. Only profit matters. Especially if you capture regulatory control, you can degrade quality to reduce cost, then mandate public funding to maximize profits. There’s no public sector, and no free market, to stop you.
I’ll quote again from Farrell:
“Christensen’s theory of innovation showed how “true revolutions occur, creating new markets and wreaking havoc within industries. Think: the PC, the MP3, the transistor radio.”
The wheel is still spinning on applications of internet and satellite “technology” in education. I’m a visionary and innovator myself, but in our classrooms, profit seekers are trying to freeze out wondrous real advances for their own advantage. Don’t confuse innovation with mean-minded little schemes to curtail and monetize other people’s inventions. The emperor is naked, and has no actual innovations to offer.
If you want to think more deeply than opportunistic market manipulation, here’s Anil Dash’s magnificent rumination on the internet, The Web We Lost:
http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html
He also understands the wheels are still spinning, and proposes ways to bring the internet back into the commons, where (like public education) it belongs.
Believe it or not, the Chicago Tribune published one of the best articles I have read about the disaster that is called education “reform,” but in fact is education destruction.
I say, believe it or not, because the Tribune has been one of the nation’s loudest cheerleaders for the policies that this column decries.
Robert C. Koehler is a syndicated columnist, not an education specialist, but he sees clearly the damage that the education destruction movement–NCLB and Race to the Top–is doing to students and our society.
His column is titled “The Warping of Public Education.”
He writes:
“…high-stakes testing, in tandem with “zero tolerance,” militarized security and sadistic underfunding, has succeeded in warping public education beyond recognition, especially in low-income, zero-political-clout neighborhoods. And the result is kids in prison, kids on the streets, kids with no future.”
And he concludes:
“The time has come to declare an end to this entire era — of militarized racism, violent solutions to everything, the ever-widening schism between “us” and “them.” Any politician who kowtows to this simplistic agenda, or “bargains” with it, has made himself or herself irrelevant to a sustainable and healthy future, and should be declared thus.
“We have to undo the damage that has turned public education into a crisis. That means dumping the pretend science of high-stakes testing and valuing rather than criminalizing students of color; it also means moving from punishment- to healing-based systems of maintaining order, taking police and armed security guards out of the hallways and learning to value and respect young people more than we value metal detectors and surveillance cameras.
“Before we can do anything else, we have to get our future out of the pipeline.”
A reader sent these late-night reflections to me:
“I drifted off to sleep last night, the phrase “No Child Left Behind” kept ringing in my ears. It sounds so noble… No – Child – Left – Behind – surely that is good for our country. Yet, at the same time my eyes were closing, the disturbing aparthied maps that Jersey Jazzman posted were flashing before my eyes.
In the corners of my mind, memories of 1984, by George Orwell churn. Newspeak (the removal of negative terms from language) reappears today. “Newspeak is engineered to remove even the possibility of rebellious thoughts—the words by which such thoughts might be articulated have been eliminated from the language.”
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/section11.rhtml
Samples: Newspeak Reform Dictionary and Guide to Phraseology:
“No Child Left Behind”
Phrase meaning: self-explanatory
Reality: Yes, there are many children left behind. Can we find them in these maps?
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/03/school-closings-new-apartheid.html
“AchieveNJ”
Word meaning: Achieve – attain; realize; accomplish
Reality: “AchieveNJ doesn’t even make the attempt to correct SGPs for poverty!”
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/03/nj-ed-commish-cerf-wrong-on-poverty.html
“Community Engagement”
Word meaning: Oh… forget about the real word meaning… what difference does this section make?
Reality: “DONT allow the opposition to frame the standards or the new tests negatively: In particular, get in front of any opposition that seeks to characterize the new standards and assessments as a “one-size-fits-all” approach…”
http://www.achieve.org/
“Education Reform Toolkit”
Reality: School Closure Guide by the Broad Foundation
“Privacy”
Reality: “States must collect, coordinate, and use K-12 and postsecondary data to track and improve the readiness of graduates to succeed in college and the workplace…follow students through K–12 into postsecondary AND THE WORKFORCE and establish feedback loops to the relevant stakeholders…” (emphasis mine)
http://www.achieve.org/P-20-data-systems
What would George Orwell have to say about this today?”
Recently, the Foundation for Educational Excellence (FEE), created by Jeb Bush, has come under fire for mixing its programming with the financial interests of its backers while serving as a vehicle for Bush’s 2016 presidential ambitions.
The Tampa Tribune ran a scathing article that pointed out problematic practices:
“Lobbyists are not allowed to finance perks like trips for state officials, but those at the Foundation for Excellence in Education get around that ban by being registered to another foundation run by Jeb Bush.
The foundation sponsors conferences where the top stars of the corporate reform movement appear to praise the virtues of vouchers, charters, and online learning. For example, last years’ summit in Washington, D.C.”
“….included “strategy sessions” on such topics as “Reaching more students with vouchers and tax-credit scholarships” and banquets with speeches by Bush, Condoleeza Rice and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Yesterday, Patrick Wolf published a vitriolic attack on me and on the National Education Policy Center.
This was in response to a post I had published saying that vouchers had failed in Milwaukee. They are supposed to “save minority students from failing schools,” but they do no better and sometimes worse than public schools. I cited Wolf’s evaluation, state test scores (which showed no edge for voucher students), and the fact that 75% of the voucher students in his study did not remain in the voucher schools to graduate. The 75% attrition rate appears in Wolf’s report. I did not know that he subsequently lowered the attrition rate to 56%, although that too is a pretty staggering attrition rate. I also noted that Wolf recently wrote an editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune chastising his home state of Minnesota for not requiring more school choice. This caused me to question his “independence” as an evaluator of school choice, since his article advocated for more school choice. And this is why he is so angry at me.
Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, wrote this response to Wolf:
PATRICK WOLF SHOULD APOLOGIZE
The Education Next website yesterday posted Patrick Wolf’s very personal and misguided attack on Diane Ravitch (http://educationnext.org/ravitch-blow-up-on-school-choice/). He also made inaccurate statements aimed at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), which I direct. I will, below, extensively quote some of the vitriol, because I don’t want any of Patrick Wolf’s injudicious wrath to be lost in paraphrase. Then, after those quotes and a description of how they are false and misleading, I ask the piece’s author as well as the publishers of Education Next, to publicly apologize for the inaccurate statements about NEPC and about Dr. Ravitch.
The Education Next piece is written by Prof. Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas. He heads up the School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP), and has been paid millions of dollars by several jurisdictions with voucher policies to “independently” evaluate those policies. The NEPC has, in turn, reviewed several of the publications that Wolf and his team produced. Those expert reviews show the evaluations to be reasonably well executed, but the reviewers have also consistently pointed to a pattern of presenting evaluation findings in ways that are misleadingly positive – as well as a pattern of minimizing clear limitations in the data.
This brings us to a review in 2012 of Wolf’s “Report #30” of the Milwaukee voucher program (see http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-Milwaukee-Choice-Year-5). For the expert review, NEPC turned to Casey Cobb, who is Department Head and Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of Connecticut. He is also Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at UConn.
Prof. Cobb’s summary included the following:
[The report’s conclusions about improved graduation rates] should be considered alongside at least two important caveats, however. The first is a methodological concern. Roughly 75% of the original sample of 801 [Milwaukee Parental Choice (voucher) Program (MPCP)] 9th graders were not still enrolled in a MPCP high school in 12th grade. The inferences drawn about the effects of the MPCP on graduation rates compared with those in the [Milwaukee Public School (MPS)] are severely clouded by substantial sample attrition. A second concern lies in the report’s interpretation of the data. Among the most careful statistically controlled analyses, only one finding was statistically significant at conventional levels. These two limitations prevent broad conclusions being drawn about the relative effectiveness of the MPCP and the MPS on graduation and higher education continuation rates. (Emphasis added.)
This week, Diane Ravitch cited Cobb’s NEPC review, noting in particular the point about the 75% attrition. Wolf was none too pleased.
He first points to his stature as the go-to guy for people wanting their voucher programs evaluated: “I keep winning the competitions to perform the most important private school choice evaluations around the country, and regularly publish my results in the very best scientific peer-reviewed policy journals (see here, here, and here), Ravitch’s ad hominem attacks notwithstanding.”
(Regarding the ad hominem allegation here, Wolf seems to be responding to Ravitch pointing out that Wolf has publicly and vociferously advocated for vouchers, so she suggested that he might not be considered an “independent evaluator.” This doesn’t strike me as ad hominem any more than if were to suggest that his Education Next piece reads to me as smug. Readers can draw their own conclusions.)
Wolf then launches into an attack on Ravitch and NEPC, claiming that the 75% figure is incorrect. He even mocks Ravitch as innumerate and NEPC (and/or our expert reviewer) as unreliable or incompetent. Ravitch, he says, “claims that the similar Milwaukee finding of higher educational attainment from vouchers is questionable because ‘75% of the students who started in a voucher school left before graduation.’ For support, she cites a review of our study performed by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC).” He continues:
Now, professional historians cite original sources to make their claims, but, remember, we are talking about Diane Ravitch here. Is the NEPC claim credible? Let’s examine the original sources. From page 16 of our report, “the majority of students (approximately 56 percent) who were enrolled in 9th grade in MPCP were not enrolled there by the time they reached 12th grade.” Also, from page 163 of our article published in the prestigious scientific Journal of Policy Studies, “less than half (44 percent) of the original MPCP panelists examined were enrolled in a voucher school by the time they reached 12th grade.” I realize that Ravitch is no statistician but even she should know that 56 percent is not 75 percent and 44 percent is not 25 percent. It doesn’t excuse Ravitch that the factual error was first promulgated by NEPC. She should know better than to trust the accuracy of their “reviews” when primary source material clearly contradicts them.
Yesterday, after this was posted, I received an email from one of the EdNext readers, pointing me to Wolf’s critique. I immediately went to page 16 of Wolf’s report. Could we have made such a mistake?! Actually … we didn’t. Here’s what it said on page 16: “A second caveat is that the majority of students (approximately 75 percent) who were enrolled in 9th grade in MPCP were not enrolled there by the time they reached 12th grade.”
So I followed the link in the Education Next piece and downloaded the same report. Here’s what it says on page 16: “A second caveat is that the majority of students (approximately 56 percent) who were enrolled in 9th grade in MPCP were not enrolled there by the time they reached 12th grade.”
That was certainly odd. Then on third page of the pdf I’d just downloaded, I found the following: “Updated and Corrected March 8, 2012.” It doesn’t say what specifically was updated or corrected, but clearly one change was on page 16.
So here’s the timeline:
1. February 2012: Wolf and his colleagues publishes the SCDP report, stating that “approximately 75 percent” of the voucher students enrolled in 9th grade “were not enrolled there by the time they reached 12th grade.” (On February 24th, NEPC sent the report to Prof. Cobb for a review.)
2. March 8, 2012: The SCDP changes that sentence, substituting “56” for “75”.
3. April 19, 2012: NEPC publishes the Cobb review, pointing to (among other things) the 75% figure as evidence of the study’s limitations. Nobody had thought to go back and see whether Wolf or his colleagues had changed important numbers in the SCDP report.
4. April 1, 2013: Wolf attacks Diane Ravitch and NEPC for CORRECTLY quoting Wolf’s own report.
I will generously assume that, in writing this attack, Wolf had simply forgotten that he changed the 75 to a 56. In truth, every one of us makes mistakes, and our memories aren’t what they once were. Also, Wolf wasn’t first author of the SCDP report, so maybe he wasn’t privy to the change. But what makes this mistake come with such ill grace is that Wolf didn’t simply contend that NEPC or Ravitch made an error. Instead, he unloaded with an angry and self-righteous attack. His piece ends with this: “It takes a lot of doing for a person to mislead so many about so much, but apparently Diane Ravitch is up to the job.”
Considering that Dr. Wolf has, in this Education Next piece, knowingly or unknowingly misled the public about the changes in the reporting of his results, the appropriate step for EdNext and Dr. Wolf to take would be the issuance of a public apology for the attacks based on this error. As is the collegial responsibility of academics, I also call upon Wolf to release his data. A re-analysis of the SCDP data is important in light of his critique and the circumstances and errors in the public reporting of his results.
