Archives for category: Privatization
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Trump’s Budget for Education Eliminates the Scandal-Ridden Federal Charter School Program

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
12

To the shock and consternation of charter school advocates, the Trump budget proposal abandons the controversial federal Charter Schools Program, turning it into a state bloc program that turns the money over to the states. 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools issued a scathing denunciation of the axing of the federal charter school programs, which has enriched the big corporate charter chains.

The Network for Public Education issued two reports on waste, fraud, and abuse in this program, showing that nearly 40% of the federal money was spent on charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening, with waste of nearly $1 billion. See the reports here and here.

Trump and DeVos are backing their chief priority: vouchers, which they prefer to call “education freedom scholarships,” at a proposed cost of $5 billion. They want America’s children to be “rescued” from public schools that hat have been burdened by harmful federal policies like high-stakes testing, and punishments attached to testing. They want them to attend religious schools that are low-cost and have no standards or accountability, and are free to discriminate against students, families, and staff they don’t like.

The erstwhile Center for American Progress lamented the proposal to cut federal spending on charter schools, even though Democratic support for them has substantially declined. Apparently, CAP is the last to know that school choice is a Republican Policy.

Chalkbeat reports:

The Trump administration wants to create a new stream of funding for disadvantaged students that would consolidate current spending on Title I — which gives money to schools serving low-income students — and 28 other programs.

This school year, the department spent $16.3 billion on Title I grants to states and districts and $7.8 billion on the other programs. Under the proposed budget, it would all become a $19.4 billion pot that would be distributed through the Title I formulas — a $4.7 billion cut, if the budget were enacted.

The individual programs on the chopping block include:

  • 21st Century Learning Centers, which supports after-school programs in places like Detroit and New York City ($1.25 billion)
  • Arts in Education ($30 million)
  • English Language Acquisition ($787 million)
  • Homeless Education ($102 million)
  • Neglected and Delinquent, which offers grants to states to educate incarcerated students ($48 million)
  • Magnet Schools, which offers grants some districts use for desegregation ($107 million)
  • Migrant Education ($375 million)
  • Rural Education ($186 million)
  • Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants, which is also known as Title II, Part A, which districts can use for teacher training and to reduce class sizes ($2.1 billion)

This move, the budget documents say, would reduce the federal government’s role in education and pave the way for less spending on department staff.

But the proposed elimination of these streams of funding raised alarms among civil rights advocates, who said this would enable states to spend less money on vulnerable groups like students who are English learners, homeless students, students involved in the juvenile justice system, or migrant students.

“History has shown us that … unless the federal government says you must serve migrant children, and here are funds to help you do that, migrant children are lost and forgotten,” said Liz King, the education equity program director at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The purpose of the dedicated pots of money … is to make sure that the most powerless people in our country are not lost.”

Advocates for other programs expressed concern, too. During a question and answer session with education department officials, a member of the National Association for Gifted Children asked why the administration had proposed eliminating a $13 million program that supports gifted education.

Jim Blew, one of DeVos’s assistant secretaries, and a former official at the Walton Family Foundation, said that advocates for these programs should lobby the states to fund their favorite programs.

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Betsy DeVos, Bias, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

New York City Parent: How “Reformers” Rig the Game So They Always Win

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2020 //
30

One of the regular commenters on the blog signs in as NYC Public School Parent.

She wrote the following:

The ed reformers have set up a game with rules in which they always win.

If 100% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the standards are too low.

If 50% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the schools are terrible.

If a charter comes in and cherry picks from the 50% of students who meet standards, then the charter is performing miracles because 100% of their students meet standards.

If a public magnet comes in and cherry picks from the 50% of students who meet standards, then the public school is wrongly cherry picking students and look, the 50% who are left are still not meeting standards.

If a charter has 100 students in 9th grade and 4 years later only 60 of them make it to 12th grade, the charter has a 100% graduation rate because all 60 seniors graduate.

If a public school has 100 students in 9th grade and 4 years later has 90 students and “only” 70 of them graduate, the public school is a failure.

The ed reformers could not get away with this if the education reporters at major newspapers did not demonstrate their incompetence every single day when they accept every press release and study put out by ed reformers as the gospel truth. Too many overprivileged education reporters are so terrified of numbers that they cannot even envision that a charter that starts with 100 students in 9th grade and graduates 60 is not performing the miracles in which 100% of their students are high performing scholars. It is beyond their very limited ability to take a deep dive into numbers. These reporters write as if they were simply acting as stenographers for the PR groups. Their stories are as ridiculous as if a medical/science reporter kept reporting: “This brand name cough medicine cures 100% of the children with serious coughs, as proven by this never peer reviewed study which started with 100 children taking this brand name cough medicine in which 50 children disappeared from the study. We know that the number of kids who disappeared from this brand name cough medicine study is irrelevant because the people at the brand name cough medicine company explained to us that all those children who disappeared had parents who – once they saw that their child would be miracle-cured – decided that they would rather see their children suffer.”

Would science reporters simply report that the cough medicine had 100% cure rates because they accepted as gospel that there were large numbers of parents who had enrolled their kids in that study and then decided they’d prefer their child suffer and stop taking this miracle medicine? Would science reporters say “it doesn’t matter if 25% of the kids disappeared, if 50% of the kids disappeared, or if 80% of the kids disappeared from this study because the people running it told me these missing kids’ parents wanted them to suffer with coughs once their kid started experience the miracle of our cure.”

Would science reporters ignore all the parents publicly explaining how their kids were pushed out of these studies? Would science reporters say “we already know from the cough medicine maker that you just wanted your child to suffer from the cough so we are still going to report that this medicine miraculous cures 100% of the kids who take it.” Or would they listen to parents and say “hey, it’s clear something very fishy and corrupt is going on”.

Would a science reporter make that judgement based on the race and class of the children who leave the study, and if their parents are white and middle class, then reporters are skeptical of the cough medicine company’s claims that they want their children to suffer more instead of being cured. But if those parents are African-American, do those science reporters simply accept as gospel what the cough medicine company tells them is true, that those parents prefer to see their children suffer than be cured and that’s the only reason their kids disappeared from the study?

It seems like education reporters don’t feel the need to ask any questions when the kids who disappear are African-American and Latinx with few other resources. They accept as gospel that their parents prefer to see them suffer, and it never occurs to those white education reporters that perhaps their parents are pulling them BECAUSE the charters are making their kids suffer. I have no doubt that those white education reporters would ask a whole lot more questions if all the missing students were white.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Last Book Tour Date in California: The Best!!!

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2020 //
11

Tonight (before the Oscars) I spoke at the Mark Taper Auditorium in the Los Angeles Central Library. It was a magnificent event, led by Alex Caputo-Pearl of the United Teachers of Los Angeles.

The library is an elegant building that has been renovated. The auditorium is gorgeous. The audience was wonderful.  The event was videotaped so I hope to post it here. I noticed that many big contributors to the privatization movement (Richard Riordan, Bill Gates) also contributed to the Public Library. Do you think they see a contradiction between supporting a great public library, free and accessible to all, while undermining public schools?

It was thrilling to be sponsored by UTLA. This is a union that is fully woke and fighting to save public education and make it far, far better.

First comes the March 3 election, where four seats on the LAUSD board are up for grabs. UTLA is vigorously supporting Jackie Goldberg, George McKenna, Scott Schmerelson and Patty Castellanos.

Then comes a major funding referendum next November where UTLA and other educators are asking voters of California to tax major corporations whose tax rates have not changed since 1978. The tax for the Communities and Schools defending would raise $12 Billion a year, half for social services for children, and half for schools.

UTLA boldly went on strike in January 2019. They have now purchased highway billboards to shame the corporate Privatizers. They are a brave and militant union.

I was thrilled to see so many LA friends and meet new ones, especially the East Side Hispanic parents who have created a neighborhood organization to fight privatization. I also enjoyed seeing our own commenter Left Coast Teacher, who is tall and very handsome. And it was great to see blogger Sara Roos (Red Queen in LA) and many more LA allies.

I love this union! They are truly leaders of the Resistance!

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization, Resistance, Union

MIchael Mulgrew: The “Inconvenient Truth” Behind “Successful” Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2020 //
21

Michael Mulgrew is president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, the largest local in the nation and in the American Federation of Teachers.

He published this article in the New York Daily News, which is strongly pro-charter and often writes about the “success” of the city’s charter schools compared to its public schools. Mulgrew explains here the secrets of charter “success.”

The research behind his article is here. 

Careful selection, exclusion, and attrition are keys to charter success.

Mulgrew writes:

Cheerleaders for New York City’s charter school sector typically trumpet the academic achievements of charter school students.

But there is an inconvenient truth about these schools that charter supporters rarely discuss, or even admit. The schools’ “success” is due not to any superior instructional strategy but rather to segregation — segregation based on students’ academic and social needs.

Though charters are open to all by lottery, as a group they enroll a significantly smaller percentage than public schools of our neediest children, such as English language learners, special education students or those from the poorest families. Children like these typically have the largest learning challenges.

For the 2018-19 school year, for example, the latest for which data is available, charters as a group enrolled half the citywide average of ELLs (6.9% vs. a citywide average of 14.6%) and a third of the special education students with the highest level of need (1.7% vs. a citywide average of 5.4%).

But the charter sector average turns out to be only half the story. An analysis of individual charter schools clearly shows that the schools most successful at excluding these kinds of students turn out to be — no surprise — the charters with the highest test scores.

As measured by the most recent state English language exam, the most academically successful charters (those with a pass rate of 67% or higher) had even fewer English Language Learners and special ed students.

That’s not a bug in the charter world; it’s a feature. Throughout the charter sector, as the number of children with academic and other needs grows, the average proficiency rate on the state test declines, to the point that the nearly 50 charters with the highest percentages of needy children don’t even reach the citywide average on the state reading exam.

How do many charters — particularly those most successful on standardized tests — find ways to minimize the number of pupils unlikely to contribute to that success?

They start with highly committed families, those with a knowledge of the system and the motivation to enter their children in the charter lottery.

Robert Pondiscio, who has many sympathies for charters, wrote most recently that the idea that essentially the same kinds of students attend both public schools and charters, while “deeply satisfying to charter school advocates…is also misleading and even false” because of the critical nature of this parental motivation.

The next step in the charter success strategy is to find ways to ease out kids less likely to be successful. A key tactic is using suspensions to persuade students who do not fit well to find other schools.

Our analysis shows that less academically successful charters actually gained students over time. However, the most academically successful charters also showed significant attrition — a loss of more than one-quarter of the pupils who started in the cohort that began in 2010.

Were all those pupils who left the top charters academic stars? Or, as is much more likely, are the top charters consciously shedding weaker students and reaping the benefits in terms of higher test scores?

State data shows that charters as a group suspended students far more frequently than public schools did, and that the top charters — with a suspension rate of more than 8% — led the way.

Public school students in more than 100 schools have given up labs, libraries, music rooms and other facilities to charters that have been co-located in their buildings.

The bill for charters continues to grow. Some $2.4 billion in city Department of Education funds will be diverted in the coming fiscal year to charter operations, and current charters, even with no further regulatory or legislative action, are scheduled to expand their grades in future years.

Enormous public investments are going to too many schools that fail to educate the neediest students, and then rely on such exclusion to fuel their claims of success.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, New York City, Privatization, Special Education

Trump Lied About Philly Student in “Failing Government School”

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2020 //
41

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Trump singled out a child from Philadelphia who, he said, was “trapped in a failing government school.” In fact, the child attends one of the city’s most elite charter schools. Didn’t Betsy DeVos realize she had given $1.3 million to the self-same charter school in 2019?

President Donald Trump turned a Philadelphia fourth grader into a poster child for the school-choice movement Tuesday when he told the nation that thousands of students were “trapped in failing government schools” and announced that the girl was at last getting a scholarship to attend the school of her choice.

But Janiyah Davis already attends one of the city’s most sought-after charter schools, The Inquirer has learned. In September, months before she was an honored guest at Trump’s State of the Union address, she entered Math, Science and Technology Community Charter School III.

MaST III opened in the fall in a gleaming facility on the site of the former Crown Cork & Seal headquarters in Northeast Philadelphia, part of a charter network so popular that the school received 6,500 applications for 100 seats next year. Like all charters, it’s independently run but funded by taxpayers — meaning that Janiyah and the other 900 students at the school do not pay tuition.

How she landed in the audience during Trump’s prime-time speech Tuesday remains a bit of a mystery even to Janiyah’s mother, Stephanie Davis.

In an interview Friday, Davis, a teacher’s assistant who lives in Northeast Philadelphia, said she received a call several weeks ago from the principal at Janiyah’s former school, Olney Christian School at 425 E. Roosevelt Blvd.

After attending public kindergarten, Janiyah moved to Olney Christian for first through third grades. Tuition there is $5,200 for elementary students. She received a partial scholarship, Davis said, but it was still a struggle to afford. So Janiyah transferred to MaST III after she was accepted there last summer.

So the student was NOT attending what Trump and DeVos call a “failing government school.” She attended a private Christian academy, then transferred to a highly selective charter school. But she was singled out as Trump’s example of a student “trapped in a failing government school.”  Was she trapped in a a failing public kindergarten four years ago?

WHAT LIARS!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Lies, Philadelphia, Privatization, Trump

Jan Resseger: Ohio Politicians Struggle to Clean Up the Mess They Made

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2020 //
5

Jan Resseger describes the chaos and disruption caused by Ohio’s choice-made Legislature.  

The Ohio House is trying to curb the overreach of the expanded voucher program, which unexpectedly swooped up some white, affluent schools. The hardline Senate, lobbied by generous campaign donor Betsy DeVos, will hang tough to give out as many vouchers as possible, even if it bankrupts entire school districts.

I wonder why no one has put a referendum on the state ballot about whether the public wants vouchers to pay the tuition of religious school students.

At the end of Jan’s excellent article, there is a nugget of good news.

The failed state takeovers are under fire:

On Wednesday, the Ohio House passed another very welcome emergency amendment to Senate Bill 89: to end Ohio’s state school district takeovers established without adequate public hearings in the summer of 2015. The House amendment would end the state takeovers and the top-down, appointed Academic Distress Commissions in Youngstown, Lorain and East Cleveland. Elected representatives from Lorain and Youngstown spoke passionately for the need to restore local control and community engagement in their school districts, which were thrust into chaos in recent years by their Academic Distress Commissions and their appointed CEOs.

 

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider to Betsy DeVos: How the Federal Government Failed America’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2020 //
16

Mercedes Schneider listened to Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos deride what they call “America’s failing government schools.”

She writes that these two deep thinkers put the hyphen in the wrong place. To understand what has happened over the past two decades, you must realize that the schools have been victimized by failing-government policies, by policies based on flawed theories and uninformed hunches, starting with a “Texas miracle” that never happened and followed by federal mandates that were unrealistic and just plain dumb.

Who failed? Not the schools. The politicians.

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

Alabama: Woodland Prep Charter School Flounders, Flops

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2020 //
10

The controversial Woodlands Prep Charter School, led by Gulenist Sonar Tarim, is in deep trouble.

Larry Lee reports that the proposed school is seeking yet another extension, and the charter commission is running out of patience.

For some reason, the charter operator decided that a small rural community was the ideal place for a new charter, but the local community was outraged.

Tarim may have to find a state that is more hospitable to charter schools or a different district where the local residents have no voice.

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, Privatization

Tom Ultican: Harvard’s School Privatization Machine and the Indianapolis Takeover

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2020 //
15

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, has been accumulating case studies of what he calls “the Destroy Public Education Movement.” His latest case study centers on Indianapolis, but he observed that the nexus of so much advocacy for school privatization is the Harvard University Program on Educational Governance and Policy at the Kennedy School. This program was founded by tenured Professor Paul Peterson, one of the nation’s leading advocates for every kind of choice except public schools. Peterson trained many of the nation’s academic proponents of school choice (including vouchers), such as Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas “Department of Education Reform.” In addition to churning out “studies” that tout the glories of privatization, PEPG also sponsors the rightwing journal Education Next, whose editorial board is firmly in the privatization camp. (When I was a fellow at the rightwing Hoover Institution, I was on the editorial board of EdNext, which is a sounding board for rightwing academics and would-be academics who have no scholarly credentials but do have the “right” views).

Ultican writes:

It is not the kind of objective journal expected from an academic institution. Influenced by super-wealthy people like Bill Gates and the Walton family, Education Next’s reform ideology undermines democratic control of public schools. It promotes public school privatization with charter schools and vouchers. The contributors to their blog include Chester E. Finn, Jay P. Greene, Eric Hanushek, Paul Hill, Michael Horn, Robin J. Lake and Michael Petrilli. Robin Lake’s new article “The Hoosier Way; Good choices for all in Indianapolis” is an all too common example of Education Next’s biased publishing.

Ultican draws the ties among the EdNext gang, the portfolio model, Paul Hill, Robin Lake, and Lake’s celebratory treatment of the expansion of privatization in Indianapolis.

He writes:

The portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school board’s portfolio. It is a plan that guarantees school churn in poor neighborhoods, venerates disruption and dismisses the value of stability and community history.

Robin Lake was one of Hill’s first hires at CRPE. She became his closest confederate and when he decided to reduce his work load in 2012, Lake took his place as the Director of CRPE. Lake and Hill co-wrote dozens of papers almost all of which deal with improving and promoting charter schools. Since the mid-1990s Lake has been publishing non-stop to promote the portfolio model of school management and charter schools. Lake’s new article up on Education Next is her latest in praise of the portfolio agenda for wresting school control from local voters.

Like a large number of the contributors to Education Next, neither Robin Lake nor her mentor Paul Hill have practiced or formally studied education. None-the-less, they have been successful at selling their brand of education reform; which is privatization. They describe their organization, CRPE, as engaging in “independent research and policy analysis.” However, Media and Democracy’s Source Watch tagged the group an “industry-funded research center that . . . receives funding from corporate and billionaire philanthropists as well as the U.S. Department of Education.”

Ultican traces the bipartisan nature of the privatization movement in Indianapolis, which centered on a neoliberal group called The Mind Trust:

Today, charter schools which are not accountable to local residents of Indianapolis are serving nearly 50% of the city’s students. Plus, 10,000 of the 32,000 Indianapolis Public School (IPS) students are in Innovation schools which are also not accountable to local voters. The organization most responsible for the loss of democratic control over publicly financed schools in Indianapolis is The Mind Trust….

Tony Bennett served as Superintendent of public schools in Indiana during the administration of Republican Governor Mitch Daniels. Bennett was“widely known as a hard-charging Republican reformer associated with Jeb Bush’s prescriptions for fixing public schools: charter schools, private school vouchers, tying teacher pay to student test scores and grading schools on a A through F scale.” He left Indiana to become Florida’s Education Commissioner in 2013, but soon resigned over an Indiana scandal involving fixing the ratings of the Crystal House charter schoolwhich was owned by a republican donor.

In 2011 before leaving, Bennett was threatening to take action against Indianapolis schools. The Mind Trust responded to Bennett with a paper called “Creating Opportunity Schools.” Lake writes,

“In response to a request from Bennett, The Mind Trust put out a report in December 2011 calling for the elimination of elected school boards and the empowerment of educators at the local level. … At the same time, Stand for Children, an education advocacy nonprofit, was raising money to get reform-friendly school-board members elected, and much of the public debate centered on The Mind Trust’s proposal. … A new board was elected in 2012 (the same year Mike Pence became governor) and the board quickly recruited a young new superintendent, Lewis Ferebee, to start in September 2013.” (Emphasis added)

Lewis Ferebee was a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change. He was selected to continue the Jeb Bush theory of education reform. It is the theory Bush developed while serving on the board of the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s.

The dark-money group Stand for Children soon joined the fray and helped to direct philanthropic money to the privatization program, which was premised on removing democratic control of the schools.

Lewis Ferebee, a key figure in the anti-democratic private takeover of the public schools of Indianapolis, is now chancellor of the schools of the District of Columbia.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Indianapolis, Portfolio District, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

TIME: How “Education Reform” Has Failed America

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2020 //
19

This article in TIME summarizes my new book SLAYING GOLIATH.

Read the book to learn the stories of the brave heroes who have stood up to billionaires, financiers, and profiteers intent on harming the democratic institution of public education.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers
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