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Steven Singer: Charters Are Gobbling Up My Public School District

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2019 //
4

 

Steven Singer doesn’t research or data to describe what is happening to his school district. He sees it. It is being gobbled up outsiders intent on turning public schools into charter schools and voucher schools. 

The state auditor of Pennsylvania said a few years ago that the Pennsylvania charter law is”the worst in the nation.”

Singer shows why.

 

Our middle school-high school complex is located at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill in our most impoverished neighborhood sits one of the Propel network of charter schools.

Our district is so poor we can’t even afford to bus our kids to school. So Propel tempts kids who don’t feel like making the long walk to our door.

Institutions like Propel are publicly funded but privately operated. That means they take our tax dollars but don’t have to be as accountable, transparent or sensible in how they spend them.

And like McDonalds, KFC or Walmart, they take in a lot of money.

Just three years ago, the Propel franchise siphoned away $3.5 million from our district annually. This year, they took $5 million, and next year they’re projected to get away with $6 million. That’s about 16% of our entire $37 million yearly budget.

Do we have a mass exodus of children from Steel Valley to the neighboring charter schools?

No.

Enrollment at Propel has stayed constant at about 260-270 students a year since 2015-16. It’s only the amount of money that we have to pay them that has increased.


The state funding formula is a mess. It gives charter schools almost the same amount per regular education student that my district spends but doesn’t require that all of that money actually be used to educate these children.

If you’re a charter school operator and you want to increase your salary, you can do that. Just make sure to cut student services an equal amount.

Want to buy a piece of property and pay yourself to lease it? Fine. Just take another slice of student funding.

Want to grab a handful of cash and put it in your briefcase, stuff it down your pants, hide it in your shoes? Go right ahead! It’s not like anyone’s actually looking over your shoulder. It’s not like your documents are routinely audited or you have to explain yourself at monthly school board meetings – all of which authentic public schools like mine have to do or else.

Furthermore, for every student we lose to charters, we do not lose any of the costs of overhead. The costs of running our buildings, electricity, water, maintenance, etc. are the same. We just have less money with which to pay them.

Read his post in full. You will understand.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Privatization, Testing

Shawgi Tell: The Untold History of Charter School Failure

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2019 //
16

 

Shawgi Tell, a Professor in upstate New York, thinks the public needs that charter school failure is widespread, commonplace, and underreported. Even now, mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal treat charter schools reverentially, as if they know how to perform education miracles.

Professor Tell assembles research showing the frequent failure of charters. 

Open the link to see a great cartoon.

He writes:

It is worth noting that both public schools and privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are victims of expensive, curriculum-narrowing, time-consuming, high-stakes standardized tests produced by large for-profit corporations that have no idea what a human-centered education looks like. Such corporations are retrogressive and harmful in many ways; they are not concerned with the growth and well-being of children, or the future of society.

The research on how damaging and unsound these expensive corporate tests are is robust, unassailable, and constantly-growing.

High-stakes standardized testing has nothing to do with learning, growth, joy, or serving a modern society and economy. Unsound assessments do not prepare young people for life. High-stakes standardized testing does not even rest on a scientific conception of measurement; it is discredited psychometric pseudo-science through and through.

Still, with these important caveats in mind, thousands of charter schools, even when they cherry-pick students with impunity, dodge tests and ratings, and massage or misreport test scores, perform worse on these flawed, top-down, widely-rejected corporate tests than public schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Testing

Stuart Egan: Graphics That Demonstrate the War on Public Schools in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2019 //
4

 

Stuart Egan has gathered some powerful graphics that demonstrate the war on public schools and their teachers in North Carolina. 

You will see, for example, that school grades are not a measure of school quality. They are quite decisively a measure of the affluence or poverty of the students who attend the school.

The schools are underfunded, teachers are underpaid, and fraudulent measures are used to assess students, teachers, and schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, North Carolina, Poverty, Testing

Pearson’s Plans for 2025: Make Sure You Are Seated When You Read This

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2019 //
31

Pearson has plans for the future. Its plans involve students, education, and profits. Pearson, of course, is the British mega-publishing corporation that has an all-encompassing vision of monetizing every aspect of education.

Two researchers, Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan, have reviewed Pearson’s plans. It is a frightening portrait of corporate privatization of teaching and of student data, all in service of private profit.

Pearson 2025: Transforming teaching and privatising education data, by Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan, discusses the potentially damaging effects of the company’s strategy for public education globally. It raises two main issues of concern in relation to the integrity and sustainability of schooling:

  1. the privatization of data infrastructure and data, which encloses innovation and new knowledge about how we learn, turning public goods into private assets; and
  2. the transformation and potential reduction of the teaching profession, diminishing the broader purposes and outcomes of public schooling.

You can also find a radio program featuring one of the researchers which discusses these issues at http://www.radiolabour.net/hogan-140519.html

 

Categories Data, Education Reform, For-Profit, Pearson, Privatization, Testing

Fred Smith: New York Is Wasting Instructional Time for Benefit of Test Publishers

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2019 //
8

UPDATE.

Fred Smith, testing expert, warns parents that New York begins using their children as guinea pigs starting tomorrow when field tests start in 869 schools in NYC and 2,490 schools across the state. More than a quarter million children will be forced to take a useless test.

The tests are meant to field-test future test questions. They don’t count. They waste students’ time for the benefit of the test publisher.

The kids could be learning something, reading something, doing something. Instead, they are working without pay for the test publisher.

This is a good time for all parents to tell their children to refuse the test.

Categories Education Industry, New York, Testing

New York: Regents’ Leader Says It is Time to Rethink Regents Exams

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2019 //
31

 

Chalkbeat’s Philissa Cramer reports that Betty Rosa, Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents, wrote that it is time to reconsider the Regents exams.  

Students must pass five Regents exams to graduate high school.

New York is one of only 11 states with high school exit exams.

Board of Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa published a column in an online newspaperaccessible to members of the New York State School Boards Association suggesting that the state could one day do away with the graduation tests it has used since the mid-1800’s.

“Regents exams have been the gold standard for over a century – and with good reason,” Rosa wrote in February. “But our systems must be continually reviewed, renewed, and occasionally revised in order to best serve our students and the people of this great state….

The column laid out no timeline for possible changes. (State education officials did not answer additional questions.) Rosa wrote that she would ask the two-year-old Regents Research Work Group, launched to identify ways to diversify New York schools, to study the state’s graduation requirements. Part of the group’s charge, she said, would be to “examine current research and practice to determine … whether state exit exams improve student achievement, graduation rates, and college readiness.”

The research on that point is clear. As Matt Barnum reported in 2016, studies have found that graduation tests do not result in better-prepared graduates and actually harm some students, especially low-income students of color.

For much of their history, the Regents exams were intended for the college-bound. Students who did not take the Regents exams could graduate by taking a competency test of basic skills. In 1996, State Commissioner Richard Mills pushed through the idea that all high school students should be required to pass the Regents exams. He and the Board of Regents assumed that setting the bar higher would raise achievement for all.

Once a mark of distinction, the Regents exams were watered down when they became a universal requirement.

A single standard for all will never be a high standard. The failure rate would be politically intolerable.

 

Categories Accountability, High School Graduation, New York, Testing

New York: Add Your Name in Support of Bill to Affirm Parents’ Right to Opt Out of State Testing!

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2019 //
26

 

The New York Legislature is considering legislation to affirm that parents have a right to opt out of state testing, and that school officials have an affirmative duty to inform them of their rights. The current testing regime is invalid and unreliable. It does not inform instruction. It has no purpose other than to demoralize students and teachers. Please add your name in support of this legislation. 

The New York State Allies for Public Education urges you to:

Write your Legislators to sign onto the OPT OUT bill

TAKE ACTION NOW by supporting Senator Jackson and Assemblyman Epstein by getting your own NYS Senator and Assembly Member to show their support by signing onto the proposed legislation as a co-sponsor. This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for years and there is no time to lose. Senate bill S5394 and Assembly bill is forthcoming.

Families HAVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE the New York State grades 3-8 ELA and math assessments. Nevertheless, and as we have seen over the past several years and throughout the state, too many schools disregard that right, fail to communicate it clearly, or worse, take punitive measures against children when their parents exercise their rights.  

Simply enter your name & address, and the form will automatically generate emails addressed to your specific elected officials. PLEASE SEND your letters TODAY and share with anyone else who wants to see our rights and our children’s rights respected!

Thank you for all of your continued advocacy to protect children and bring whole child policies to your schools!  

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, New York, Opt Out, Resistance, Testing

Sue M. Legg: The Failure of Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan in Florida

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2019 //
66

Sue M. Legg is a scholar at the University of Florida, a leader in Florida’s League of Women Voters, and a new board member of the Network for Public Education. She has written an incisive and devastating critique of Jeb Bush’s education program in Florida, which began twenty years ago. Bush called it his A+ Plan, but by her careful analysis, it rates an F. Advocates of school choice tout Florida’s fourth-grade scores on NAEP, which are artificially inflated by holding back third graders who dontpass the state test. By eighth grade, Florida’s students rank no better than the national average. Note to “Reformers”: a state that ranks “average” is NOT a national model.

Twenty Years Later, Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. 

Sue Legg explodes the myth of the Florida miracle in her well documented report:  Twenty Years Later: Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students. She has compiled the research over twenty years showing the negative impact of privatization in Florida.  The highly touted achievement gains of retained third graders are lost by eighth grade.  Top ranked fourth grade NAEP scores fall to the national average by eighth grade. One half of twelfth graders read below grade level.  The graduation rate is above only 14 states.

The A+ Plan was a great slogan, but its defects resulted in a twenty-year cycle of trial and error to fix the problems.   School grades are unreliable.  A school receiving a ‘B’ grade one year has about a thirty percent chance of retaining the grade the following year. Invalid grades occur so frequently that State Impact reports that Florida made sixteen changes to the school grade formula since 2010.  It was thrown out but the new version is no more stable.  What it means to be a failing school, moreover, is consistently redefined to make more opportunity for charter school takeovers.  

Florida touts improving academic achievement in the private sector that is not supported by research.  The CREDO Study reams Florida’s for-profit charter industry.  According to a Brookings Institution study, low quality private schools are on the rise, and the LeRoy Collins Institute’s 2017 study, Tough Choices, explains that there are twice as many severely segregated Florida schools (90% non-white students) than there were in 1994-5.  The legislature ignores the problem in part because key legislators have personal interest in charter and private schools.  “Florida suits him” said Roger Stone, recently indicted in the Mueller investigation.  The New York Times article: Stone Cold Loser: quoted Stone’s admiration for Florida when he said “…it was a sunny place for shady people”.  A Miami Herald series “Cashing in on Kids” reported a list of questionable land deals and conflicts of interest by for-profit charter school management. The federal government began an investigation in 2014.  Last year a  charter management firm faced criminal charges, and Florida charters have the nation’s highest closure rate.

WalletHub reports that Florida is 47th of 50 states in working conditions for teachers.  As a result, the Florida Education Association projects 10,000 vacancies next fall. Teacher shortages are not only related to money, they are due to a deliberate attack on the profession in order to break teacher unions and impose a political ideology.  As Steve Denning in a Forbes magazine article explains: “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and schools alike”. The thinking, he says, is embedded in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top policies.   The A+ Plan is an extension of these policies that includes increased testing and rewards and punishments related to results.

Florida’s teachers are not allowed to strike.  Parents may have to.  The legislature recently approved small raises for teachers but expanded the unconstitutional voucher program.  The governor is not concerned; he appointed three new judges to the Florida Supreme Court.  In the May 3rd 2019 Senate session, Senator Tom Lee chastised his fellow Republicans.  He has supported charter schools for years, but said ‘the industry has not been honest with us...first they wanted PECO facility funds, then local millage; now they want a portion of local discretionary referendum funds’.  He called the current supporters ‘ideologues who have drunk the kool-aid‘.

The full report is published on the NPE-Action website.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Tampa Bay Times: Legislature Imposes Death Sentence on Florida Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2019 //
22

 

The Tampa Bay Times published a powerful editorial about the Legislature’s enactment of yet another voucher program for private and religious schools. Needless to say, the Legislature does nothing for public schools other than to divert funding to nonpublic schools, enact mandates, and harass teachers.

The schools that get vouchers will not be subject to the school letter grades foisted on public schools. They will be free to take the students they want and throwout those they don’t want. They don’t have to follow the state curriculum standards or take state tests. Their teachers don’t have to be certified. They are relieved of  any accountability, while public schools are submerged in it.

The editorial begins:

They approved the death sentence for public education in Florida at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday. Then they cheered and hugged each other. The legislation approved by the Florida House and sent to the governor will steal $130 million in tax money that could be spent improving public schools next year and spend it on tuition vouchers at private schools. Never mind the Florida Constitution. Never mind the 2.8 million students left in under-funded, overwhelmed public schools.

The outcome of this year’s voucher debate in the decades-long dismantlement of traditional public education was never in doubt. It was sealed when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was narrowly elected governor in November and quickly appointed three conservatives to the Florida Supreme Court. The overhaul of the court emboldened the Republican-led Legislature to approve the creation of vouchers that clearly are unconstitutional, confident that an expected legal challenge will be rejected. Elections have consequences, and this is a devastating one.

Don’t be fooled. This legislation is not just about helping children from the state’s poorest families attend private schools. It does more than take care of 13,000 kids who are on a waiting list for the existing voucher program that is paid for with tax credits. It raises the annual income limit for eligibility from $66,950 for a family of four for the current voucher program to $77,250 for the “Family Empowerment Scholarship Program.’’ That income limit will rise in future years, and so will the state’s investment in vouchers. Welcome to a new middle class entitlement.

Florida cannot afford this free market fantasy. The state ranks near the bottom in spending per student and in average pay for teachers. Hillsborough County has hundreds of teacher vacancies, broken air conditioning systems in dozens of schools will take years to repair and voters just approved a half-cent sales tax to help make ends meet. Pinellas County would need $1,200 more per student in state funding just to cover inflation over the last decade. Yet Florida will send $130 million to private schools next year for tuition for 18,000 students.

Legislators who voted for SB 7070 talked about empowering families and school choice. Parents in most communities already have plenty of choices. Nearly 300,000 students attend more than 600 publicly funded charter schools, and more than 225,000 students attend choice or magnet schools in their districts.

State Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran was in the House chamber for the vote. He previously served as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. His wife operates a charter school. He doesn’t like public schools or unions.

Jeb Bush was also present, happy to see another big step towards the vouchers he believes in. Ironically, he is the father of both the school choice movement and Florida’s harsh accountability regime (for public schools). I wonder if any journalist ever asks him why his beloved voucher schools are exempt from all accountability.

Despite the hostility of the elected officials to public schools, I’m not yet ready to call them dead. There are nearly three million students in Florida. Ten percent go to charters (at least half of which are operated by for-profit entrepreneurs), and another five percent choose to go to religious schools, most of which are inferior by any measure to the public schools.

More Than 80% of families choose public schools. When will the public wake up and start voting for elected officials who support the public schools to which they send their children?

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Florida, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

New York: Senator Robert Jackson Introduces Bill to Protect Students and Parents Who Opt Out

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2019 //
6

 

In recent years, the New York State Education Department and many school districts have threatened and tried to intimidate parents and students who wanted to opt out of state testing. The historic U.S. Supreme Court decision Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) protects the right of parents to make decisions about their own children. This decision is apt in the current environment, where the state has decided that every child must sit for a pointless standardized test, without regard to their parent’s wishes.

That decision protected the right of Catholic schools to exist at a time when they were under threat of closure. The Court affirmed that parents could choose the school their child attended, though it did not say that the public was bound to pay for private choices. The key point in the decision was that ” The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

Now Senator Robert Jackson, himself a historic figure in the fight for fair funding for public schools, has introduced legislation to protect students and parents and to prevent school officials from bullying them if they wish to opt out of state testing. Students are not the mere creatures of the state; their parents “have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare them for additional obligations,” including the obligation to resist injustice and official stupidity. As Senator Jackson affirms, schools should inform parents of their right to opt out and should not use pressure, threats or rewards to compel them to take state tests if they choose to not take them in protest against their meaninglessness and possible harm to the student’s education.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Students, Testing
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