Archives for category: School Choice
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Valerie Strauss: Betsy DeVos Expresses Her Contempt for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2019 //
30

 

Valerie Strauss is not surprised yet disappointed that Betsy DeVos kicked off her “back to school tour” at a religious school in Milwaukee, flaunting her contempt for the vast majority of students who attend public schools. By doing so, she showed her agenda: privatization of public schools and transfer of public money to religious schools.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/16/where-betsy-devos-started-her-back-to-school-tour-says-it-all-about-her-agenda/

It is ironic that she chose Milwaukee to demonstrate the benefits of school choice. Milwaukee has had choice for three decades: charters, vouchers, and a shrinking public school sector.

All three sectors are faring poorly. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Milwaukee is one of the lowest performing cities in the nation.  Students in religious schools, charters, and public schools are doing poorly.

Competition raised no boats. Milwaukee demonstrates the failure of school choice.

Betsy DeVos either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Competition, Education Industry, Education Reform, Milwaukee, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Eric Blanc: Why Doesn’t Elizabeth Warren Have a K-12 Plan?

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2019 //
63

 

Eric Blanc asks in Jacobin why Elizabeth Warren does not have a plan for K-12 schooling. She has expressed various positions on education but her overall policy about testing, charter schools, and accountability are murky at best. He questions how different they are from the Bush-Obama strategies.

Blanc recently wrote a comprehensive book about the wave of teachers’ strikes of 2018-19 called Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. During the strikes, he traveled the nation to talk to strike leaders and striking teachers to understand what was at stake.

He writes:

Elizabeth Warren has a commendably progressive platform on most issues. But her past approach to public education has been closer to that of free-market reformers than most people realize.

The Massachusetts senator’s track record on education has received little scrutiny. Not only was Warren until recently a proponent of market-driven education reform and so-called teacher accountability, but her current platform silences, staff appointments, and political equivocations raise questions about her commitment to reversing the billionaire-funded onslaught against public schools…

There are good reasons to doubt that a Warren presidency would reverse the policies of privatization and education reform that have decimated American’s school system since the 1990s. For someone whose campaign motto is “Warren has a plan for that,” it’s noteworthythat she has not yet issued any plan for K-12 schools — in contrast with Bernie Sanders’ ambitious Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education.

Much of what we do know about Warren’s past and present education proposals, as well as the composition of her staff, should be a cause for concern for teachers, students, and parents.

If Warren wants the support of public school teachers and parents, she must issue a plan that clarifies her plans on testing and privatization.

She needs to be crystal clear about whether she would eliminate the federal mandate for annual testing in grades 3-8, a leftover from George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, which has been an expensive dud. The testing has enriched the testing industry but had no effect on student scores.

Warren needs to take a stand on the federal Charter Schools Program, which is Betsy DeVos’ slush fund for corporate charter chain that are already amply funded by billionaires.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Privatization, School Choice

Meet the Democrats Who Support the Betsy DeVos Agenda

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2019 //
62

 

Every year since 2014, Democrats who fervently support the privatization of public schools have gathered at a conference they pretentiously call “Camp Philos.”

https://campphilos.org/

Check the agenda of meetings present and past.

There you will see the lineup of Democrats who sneer at public schools and look on public school teachers with contempt.

These are the Democrats who support the DeVos agenda of disrupting and privatizing public schools.

They are meeting again this year, and they will slap each other on the back for supporting school closures, charter schools, high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, and hiring inexperienced teachers.

They have the chutzpah to call themselves “stakeholders,” although none of them are teachers, parents of public school students, or have any stake in the public schools that enroll 85-90% of all American students. Exactly what do they have a “stake” in?

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Democrats for Education Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hypocrisy, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change Plead for End to Backlash Against School Choice

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2019 //
33

Feeling the backlash in a big way, Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change” issued a call to end the “Toxic Rhetoric” about school choice, especially charters. 

Chiefs for Change are strong proponents of privatization. Here are the current members. Is your superintendent a “Chief for Change” who wants to divert money from public schools to the Betsy DeVos agenda of school choice?

They say:

Recent attempts to halt or severely limit school choice—including legislative debates over caps or moratoriums for charter schools—are misguided at best. Effective mechanisms of school choice—those that ensure quality, accountability, equitable access, and equitable funding—provide opportunities that our students need and deserve. 

Families with financial means in America have always been able to choose the school that is best for their child, by moving to a certain part of town or by sending their children to private schools. But most American families do not have that opportunity. The school in their neighborhood may fall short in meeting their child’s needs in any number of ways—but they’re stuck. 

Our nation’s history of redlining to separate both housing and schooling based on race and income, along with local zoning ordinances that restrict and confine affordable housing, alongside the recent wave of “school district secessions” by higher-income neighborhoods, have compounded the problem. Our nation’s children often live in neighborhoods just a short distance from each other but worlds apart in terms of school quality. This is unacceptable. Every child deserves school options where they will learn and thrive. 

That is why today we are calling on policymakers across the nation to end the destructive debates over public charter schools. Proposed caps and moratoriums allow policymakers to abdicate their responsibility to thoughtfully regulate new and innovative public school options: like banning cars rather than mandating seatbelts. They are a false solution to a solvable problem. 

The backlash against school choice, the demand to halt charter expansion, comes from an outraged public that supports their community public schools.

Only 6% of the students in the U.S. attend charter schools, most of which perform no better than or much worse than public schools. An even smaller number of students use vouchers, even when they are easily available, and the research increasingly converges on the conclusion that students who use vouchers are harmed by attending voucher schools.

The claim that poor kids should get “the same” access to elite private schools as rich kids is absurd. Rich parents pay $40,000-50,000 or more for schools like Lakeside in Seattle or Sidwell Friends in D.C. The typical voucher is worth about $5,000, maybe as much as $7,000, which gets poor kids into religious schools that lack certified teachers, not into Lakeside or Sidwell or their equivalent.

Perhaps Chiefs for Change should advocate for for housing vouchers worth $1 million or more so that poor families can afford to live in the best suburban neighborhoods where “families with financial means” live.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

What this press release really means is that the advocates of privatization know that the public is turning against them.

That’s good news.

The public wants to invest its tax dollars in strong, equitable public schools that meet the needs of all students, not in ineffective charters or vouchers that divert money from community public schools.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Speduktr: Why I Pay School Taxes

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2019 //
70

 

A reader who goes by the sobriquet “speduktr” wrote:

 

I have never really understood the choice mantra. My taxes were not tuition for my children, and they certainly are not intended for someone’s individual use now that I have no children in the system. They were and are meant to support the education of every child in my community. Parents are not entitled to a chunk of that money to be used how they see fit. That money is for the common good. For me, I don’t even have to get into the discussion of charter machinations. They are beside the point.

 

Categories Citizenship, Democracy, Education Reform, School Choice, Supporting public schools

California: Schools Tied to Massive Online Charter Scandal Are Closing

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2019 //
7

Will Huntsberry of the Voice of San Diego reports that all the online charters connected to the biggest charter fraud in U.S. history will close.

Huntsberry writes:

An online charter school empire whose leaders have been charged with enrolling fake students and misappropriating $80 million in public funds will be forced to close all of its schools across California.

In May, the San Diego district attorney’s office charged 11 people in a corruption scandal of historic proportions. Prosecutors say Sean McManus and Jason Schrock, who operated A3 Education, were the ringleaders of the operation. Several who worked with McManus and Schrock have also been charged with crimes, including the superintendent of the Dehesa School District in San Diego County.

At its peak, A3 operated 19 online schools across the state, including three in San Diego, according to investigators. One closed before the charges were filed. And two more – one in San Diego and another in Los Angeles – were slated to close. But now a court-appointed receiver has decided to shutter all of the remaining schools.

Students’ records at each of the closing schools will be transferred to their school district of residence by Sept. 30, according to a letter obtained by the Marin Independent Journal, which was sent out to districts associated with the A3 schools. Richard Kipperman, the court-appointed receiver, confirmed to Voice of San Diego that all the schools will close.

How the Scam Worked

Prosecutors painted an intricate picture of a complex organization that managed to turn student records into giant sums of cash. A3 Education enrolled many students who took actual classes, but it also enrolled many students who never did any schoolwork, prosecutors say.

Most of the fake students were participants in summer athletic programs, according to the indictment. Enrollment workers would approach a football program, for instance, and offer as little as $25 a head for each player’s records. The enrollment worker would also get a commission on however many students he or she enrolled. The rest of the money – which totaled in the thousands of dollars for each student – went to companies controlled by McManus and Schrock.

In one instance, Luiz Rigney, an enrollment worker, carried several suitcases of student paperwork, worth roughly $5 million, to one of A3’s offices. Rigney had been asked to backdate that paperwork so A3 could get maximum profit, prosecutors say.

In another instance, two workers texted each other back and forth about the large sums of cash flowing through the company: “I had the weirdest dream last night! One was about us growing all Sean’s schools. I was running all the Facebook campaigns and you were running around my office drinking champagne throwing money everywhere yelling I love bonuses,” the texts read, according to court documents.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Los Angeles, Privatization, San Diego, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools

San Diego: Judge Orders Two Charter Schools to Close

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
14

 

A judge in San Diego ordered two charter schools in the district to close in response to the school district’s complaint that they were operating without local authorization and could not be supervised. About 40,000 students attend Learn4Life centers statewide.

The Learn4Life charters are appealing the decision.

Judge David Danielsen on Monday granted a motion by San Diego Unified School District to close the two Learn4Life locations operating in the district’s boundaries: Diego Hills Central, a charter school authorized by Dehesa School District, and a resource center for San Diego Workforce Innovation High, a school authorized by Borrego Springs Unified School District. Neither of those schools have active locations in the districts that authorized them.

As Carol Burris reported in Charters and Consequences, the Learn4Life charters are storefronts where students meet a teacher once every 20 days. Their graduation rates are abysmal. Typically, they are authorized by small rural districts to operate in urban districts hundreds of miles away, where they operate without oversight. The authorizing district gets a commission for every student who enrolls.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, San Diego, School Choice

Shawgi Tell: Charter Lobbyists Are on the Defensive

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
11

 

The house of cards and propaganda that sustained the charter industry is beginning to crumble. Despite the Obama-Duncan promotion of charters through the disastrous Race to the Top program, no Democrat in the crowded presidential race will openly endorse charter schools. Not even Cory Booker will support charters, despite two decades of fighting for them.

Now, it is no longer cool for a Democrats to back charters.

Democrats support public schools, not charters, vouchers, or privatization. Thank you, Betsy DeVos, for clearing the air.

Shawgi Tell of Nazareth College in upstate New York describes what happened when Democratic Governor Tom Wolf stated the obvious: Charter Schools Are NOT public schools. 

Tell writes:

Calling a charter school public is mainly for the self-serving purpose of illegitimately funneling vast sums of public money from public schools to wealthy private interests who own-operate nonprofit and for-profit charter schools. Charter schools are essentially pay-the-rich schemes masquerading as “innovations” that “save public education” and “give parents choices.”

Charter school owners-operators would not be able to fleece public money from public schools if they were openly recognized as the privatized arrangements that they are. Most people understand that public money belongs solely to the public, not private interests. They understand that public wealth must be used only for public purposes and that private interests have no right to decide how to use public money.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Walton Foundation

Why I Do Not Support Cory Booker

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2019 //
19

Cory Booker has a long and well-documented record of disparaging public schools and enthusiastically supporting charters, even vouchers. Now, he says he will dedicate himself to public schools and stop privatization, as if he had not been one of the leading cheerleaders for both charters and vouchers for the past two decades.

Valerie Strauss wrote here about his deep ties over the years to Betsy DeVos. 

Booker began his advocacy for vouchers twenty years ago.

“In 1999, Booker was a member of the Municipal Council of Newark and worked with conservatives to form an organization that sought to create a voucher program and bring charter schools to New Jersey.”

He helped Dick and Betsy DeVos try to sell vouchers in Michigan in 2000. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. As Jennifer Berkshire pointed out in her article about Booker’s help for the DeVos voucher campaign, the DeVos family spent millions, but the people of Michigan rejected vouchers by a vote of 69-31%.

When Booker ran for mayor of Newark in 2001, the DeVos family contributed $1,000 to his campaign. Cheapskates.

Veteran journalist Dale Russakoff wrote a book called The Prize about Cory Booker’s alliance with Republican Governor Chris Christie and their determination to turn Newark into the “New Orleans of the North” by privatizing as many public schools as possible. Booker was a favorite of Wall Street and philanthrocapitalists, and he and Christie persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to put up $100 million to spur privatization in Newark.

Regular readers of this blog have read the many posts by blogger Jersey Jazzman (Mark Weber) about the statistical legerdemain that Newark charters play, the cream-skimming they do to get the students they want and exclude those that might pull down their test scores..

If you open the link at NPE Action, you will see that Booker’s campaigns have drawn the campaign funding of the usual billionaires and Wall Street hedge funders who have done their best to undermine public education.

Booker was feted by rightwing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and named a “champion of charters” by the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools in 2017.

But his support for vouchers was not long, long ago.

In 2012, he endorsed Governor Chris Christie’s voucher proposal.

In 2016, he addressed Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children to express his support for their mission of replacing public schools with charters and vouchers.

Due to his contempt for one of our most important public, democratic institutions, I cannot support Cory Booker.

If he is the Democratic candidate, which seems unlikely, I will hold my nose and vote for him, because any Democrat is better than Trump. Even Cory Booker.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Beware! Powerful Koch Network Starts New Group to Fight Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2019 //
14

Charles Koch and his network of wealthy donors have created a new Astroturf organization called “Yes Every Kid” to promote school choice and take public money away from public schools.

Yes, they are targeting “every kid” as a prime prospect for a charter school or a voucher.

Yes, they want to shrink public schools so that they are no longer the “choice” of 90% of American families.

Koch in June announced the Yes Every Kid initiative as the latest addition to his sprawling network of wealthy donors, political groups and tax-exempt advocacy organizations best known for pushing anti-regulation, small-government policies. Its political arm, Americans for Prosperity, has made waves supporting the tea party and fighting former President Barack Obama’s health care law.

The Yes Every Kid group is tasked with monitoring statehouses where it can be influential on school choice, said Stacy Hock, a Texas philanthropist who is among hundreds of donors each contributing at least $100,000 annually to the Koch network’s wide-ranging agenda.

Hock and officials with the Koch network said it’s too early to provide specifics about what policies the group is pushing.

“The priority is to go where there is a political appetite to be open to policy change and lean in there,” said Hock, who also leads the Texans for Education Opportunity advocacy group that supports charters and other education alternatives.

She cited Texas, West Virginia, Tennessee and Florida as priority states where school choice proposals have flourished.

It is hard to say that West Virginia is a place where school choice proposals have “flourished” since the legislature approved them just weeks ago for the first time, and they have not yet been implemented. So translate: Koch money has successfully bought enough legislators in rural West Virginia to foist “choice” on local communities, although it has not happened as yet.

In Tennessee, Koch money bought the new governor and the legislature to impose charters and vouchers on districts that don’t want them.

Florida is a wholly owned subsidiary of the DeVos-Jeb-Koch combine.

There is no evidence that students benefit by having school choice, although there is plenty of evidence that vouchers underwrite racism and ignorance and there is plenty of evidence that school choice promotes segregation.

This is what the billionaires actually want: ignorance, racism, and segregation. And it is worth paying for. For them. Not for us, and not for our society.

Peter Greene defined this new group of Astroturfers far better than I. 

He calls it the “Astroturducken,” with one deform idea wrapped around another, all of them guaranteed to destroy public schools, trick parents, and generate jobs for the faithful hangers-on from Reformy world.

Greene writes:

Yes, don’t wait for things to come down from above, says this website that has come down from a billionaire who wants to drive the education bus despite his complete lack of educational expertise. But this astroturfery is insistent. “Real change has to start from the ground up. We’re here as your resource to facilitate conversation.” That might be really moving if the very next sentence weren’t “We’re here to foster a culture of disruptive innovation,” which suggests that these facilitaty listeners already have some answers in mind. Also missing– an acknowledgement of where all that negativity came from. Here is yet another reformy outfit talking about negatives from the past as if they simply fell from space, instead of saying, “Yeah, that was us. Sorry.” And here comes the tell:

We want to hear new ideas, new solutions, and new voices. And it can only happen when we listen to the real stakeholders in education: you.

But who is this “we” and why should stakeholders feel any need or obligation to talk to “we” in the first place? This is the same old rich fauxlanthropist baloney– we’re not only going to vote ourselves a seat at the table, but we’re also going to go ahead and give ourselves the seat at the head because, yeah, this is our table now. It’s so big and generous of you to agree to listen to us, Sir, but I still haven’t heard a reason that we should be talking to you. This is the overarching narrative of decades of modern ed reform– actual teachers and educators were working long and hard on the problems of education, and a bunch of rich amateurs strolled up and announced, “Good news! We’re going to take over this whole conversation now!” Thirty years later we’re still all waiting to hear why these guys should be running any part of the show beyond reasons like “I’m rich” and “I want to.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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