California: “Inspire” Charter Chain Grows While Floundering

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
9

 

The San Diego Union-Tribune featured a front-page top-of-the-fold story by Kristin Taketa about the deepening troubles of the “Inspire” charter chain, which is growing across the state despite academic and financial woes.

The headline: “Inspire Charter Schools Grow As Results Lag.”

The Inspire network of 12 home charter schools is quickly spreading its reach across California as some are calling into question its educational, organizational and financial practices.

At the heart of the Inspire network is a corporation whose CEO makes about $380,000 a year and who helped create the Inspire schools, which now pay his corporation 15 percent of the taxpayer funds they collect.

Inspire has grown in part by advertising that parents can decide how to spend$2,600 or more a year toward their child’s education, with a teacher’s approval. Inspire operates on the idea that parents should have freedom to decide how their children are educated.

Inspire parents have been able to spend state-provided money on expenses they say are educational, from Disneyland annual passes to private ice skating coaching. The list of places where Inspire parents could spend school funds has included Costco, Amazon, Big Air Trampoline Park, Medieval Times, Guitar Center and the DNA testing company 23 and Me, according to Inspire’s list of approved vendors.

Meanwhile, Inspire students are required to meet with teachers and turn in assignments once a month.

The charter network is based in Duarte and enrolled 23,400 students last year.

State data show that Inspire schools underperformed academically. Last year, all Inspire schools performed below the state average in English and math test scores, with some schools showing as few as 16 percent of their students passing math and as few as 25 percent passing English. The state average is 39 percent for math and 50 percent for English.

Put together, Inspire schools had an average graduation rate of 69 percent last year and produced seven graduates — out of 209— who met California state college or university admission requirements.

Why does the State Education Department tolerate this waste of children’s lives and taxpayers’ money?

When will the Legislature crack down on these sham schools?

The good news is that a major newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, is assigning excellent reporters to cover these scandals, which are especially flagrant in California due to the state’s weak charter law, which assures that charters will be unregulated and unaccountable. In the past, the Union-Tribune was considered a conservative paper. It may still be. Conservatives should be outraged by this fraudulent education and blatant misuse of public funds.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hoax, Privatization

Mercedes Schneider: Does This Member of the Louisiana State Board of Education Live in Louisiana?

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
6

 

Mercedes Schneider has followed the fortunes of Kira Orange-Jones, executive director of Teach for America in Louisiana, who was elected to the State Board with a large infusion of campaign funds from out-of-state Reformers In 2011 and 2015. Schneider continues her scrutiny here. Schneider notes that Orange-Jones has failed to file required financial disclosures and that her actual physical residence is in doubt, especially since she married another TFA alum who served for a time as Acting Secretary of Education in New Me O’Connell. In addition, Orange-Jones has missed about one-third of school board meetings.

In both 2011 and 2015, corporate-reform-promoting millionaires and billionaires purchased the majority of seats on the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

One of their purchases is Teach for America (TFA) executive director, Kira Orange-Jones.

Even though Orange-Jones has been BESE District 2 representative for almost eight years, she has yet to file her annual disclosure reports for 2017 and 2018.

One critical bit of information on the annual disclosure is the representative’s physical address. On this point, Orange-Jones’ actual address becomes a bit cloudy.

On the last annual disclosure that Orange-Jones filed– for 2016— Orange-Jones identifies her address as on Laurel Street in New Orleans. On the same disclosure report, Orange-Jones also acknowledges her marriage to Christopher Ruszkowski, who was at the time deputy secretary of education in New Mexico. In 2018, Ruszkowski became “secretary designee” at the NM Department of Ed when he replaced Hanna Skandera. It seems that Ruszkowski exited by 2019.

On Ruszkowski’s 2017 and 2018 financial disclosure reports, he lists a NM address. Orange-Jones’ residence remains unclear. (One can search those forms here by looking up “ruszkowski” and selecting “2017” and “2018.”)

Since Orange-Jones has not filed the required financial disclosures for 2017 and 2018, the public does not know if Orange-Jones maintained a residence in her district, one of the qualifications for serving on BESE.

But there’s more.

Orange-Jones plans to run for re-election in October 2019. The Louisiana Secretary of State has her address as being on Philip Street in New Orleans. (One can view this info here by searching “parish candidates” on the side bar; selecting “BESE District 2,” and then clicking “view candidates for selected race(s).”)

Examination of property tax records for the Philip Street address shows that the owner is NJS Properties; according to details of the search, “NJS” stands for Norma J. Sabiston.

On Orange-Jones’ July 2019 campaign finance report for the upcoming, October 2019, BESE election, one of Orange-Jones’ expenditures is $15,000 to Sabaston Consultants, whose president is Norma Jane Sabiston.

Does Orange-Jones live at the Philip Street address, or has her consultant provided the address in an attempt to legitimize Orange-Jones as a District 2 resident? Has Orange-Jones forfeited a New Orleans address at any point since her last, 2016, annual filing?

There is more. Open the link and read on.

Reformers have a lot of gall.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Louisiana, Privatization, Teach for America

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

Peter Greene: Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania Says Charter Schools Are NOT Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
17

The times they are a’changing.

PeterGreene reports what happened when Governor Tom Wolf really hurt the feelings of the charter lobby. He said that charter schools are NOT public schools. 

“When Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf trotted out his budget last month, he made it a point to note that he was raising money for public schools– and that he had some definite ideas about which schools are public and which schools are not.

“He wants to see more of those basic education dollars to school districts get distributed through the state’s fair funding formula. He also wants to address concerns related to cyber charter schools, which he referred to as “the growing cost of privatization of education in our public schools.”

“And just in case that wasn’t clear enough, a press release from the governor’s office was even more direct:

“Pennsylvania must help school districts struggling with the problem of increasing amounts of school funding siphoned by private cyber and charter schools. Funding reform would increase transparency so all schools that receive state dollars are accountable to the taxpayers.

“This made Ana Meyers sad.”

Awww.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Laurene Powell Jobs: Another $10 Million XQ School Fails

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2019 //
31

You may recall that Laurene Powell Jobs decided to reinvent the American high school by creating a design competition for new models. In 2026, she offered prizes of $10 million each to the ten best plans. Over 700 proposals came in. She called it the XQ competition. She hired leading lights from the Obama administration, including Arne Duncan and Russlyn Ali, to advise her. She bought airtime on all three major networks to bring together celebrities to proclaim the failure of U.S. education and the need for Mrs. Jobs’ XQ Initiative.

The awards were announced. Earlier this year, an XQ school in Delaware closed. It was called the Design Thinking Academy.

About 5he same time, an XQ project in Somerville, Massachusetts, was killed by the School Committee, the Mayor, and the superintendent, who were once enthusiastic about it. 

The Boston Globe tells the story, which is behind a pay wall. I will try to summarize it briefly and hope to do it justice.

It begins like this:

ALEC RESNICK AND SHAUNALYNN DUFFY stood in Somerville City Hall at about 6:30 on March 18, a night they hoped would launch the next chapter of their lives. The two had spent nearly seven years designing a new kind of high school meant to address the needs of students who didn’t thrive in a traditional setting. They’d developed a projects-driven curriculum that would give students nearly unprecedented control over what they would learn in a small, supportive environment. Resnick and Duffy had spent countless hours shepherding this school through the political thickets that all new public schools face. Approval by the teachers union, which became the most time-consuming obstacle, had finally come through in early January. Tonight, the School Committee members would cast their votes.

Resnick had reason to be optimistic. Mayor Joseph Curtatone sat on the School Committee, and he had been the one to suggest Resnick and Duffy consider designing a new public school in the first place, back in 2012. Mary Skipper, Somerville schools superintendent, had been instrumental in keeping the approval process moving forward when prospects looked bleak. She wouldn’t be voting, but she planned to offer a recommendation to elected officials. And then there was the $10 million. Resnick and Duffy had won the money in a national competition to finish designing and ultimately open and run their high school, and the pair knew it had helped maintain interest in their idea. Voting against them would mean walking away from a lot of outside funding.

The two had met as students at MIT. THey became interested in how children learn. They began making plans and trying them on a small scale in 2012. They called their school Powderhouse Studios. At full capacity, it would enroll 160 students. They intended to match the diversity of the district. The heart of their plan was “ambitious, self-directed, interdisciplinary projects focused on computation, narrative, and design — unheard of in a typical high school. Their work would be driven by goals laid out in individualized learning plans geared toward real-world concepts and would be supported by faculty serving more as mentors than as teachers. The school day would last from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the academic calendar would stretch year-round.”

In 2016, the pair had worked with middle-schoolers, trying out their project-based ideas. That year they applied to the XQ Project and had the support of the mayor and the superintendent. And they won. What could go wrong?

Finances. That’s what went wrong. Despite the initial enthusiasm of the school officials, they realized that the Somerville High School would lose $3.2 million each year to the new school when it had 160 students. The budget for the entire district is $73 million. The district’s comprehensive high school has 1,250 students. The new school planned to enroll about 13% of the existing high school’s students.

On the night of the decisive vote last March, the superintendent told the School Committee that “opening the new school would force the district to cut at least 20 teacher or counselor positions and to eliminate most before- and after-school programs districtwide. “As someone who believes in and has championed the power of new ideas my whole career, it pains me deeply to not be able to solve this problem,” she said. “In this case, the investment to create something that may only add an unknown amount of benefit to 2 to 3 percent of students, at the expense of the remaining 97 to 98 percent, is one I cannot recommend making at this time.”

The School Committee voted unanimously not to open the school. The Jobs grant of $10 million was alluring, but when the startup money ran out, the district would have to absorb the ongoing costs.

And a second XQ project died.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Innovation, Massachusetts

Bernie Sanders’ Thurgood Marshall Plan for K-12 Education

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
67

 

When I introduced Senator Sanders (virtually) at the UTLA Leadership Conference, I said that his K-12 education plan was the best one that any candidate had put forward.

Here is his Thurgood Marshall Plan.

Senator Sanders focuses on federal action to:

1. Reduce segregation.

2. Dramatically improve federal funding for the schools that enroll the neediest students.

3. Endorsed the NAACP call to ban for-profit charters and to implement a moratorium on public funding of private charter schools until charters become fully accountable and do no fiscal harm to public schools.

I have not endorsed any candidate. However, I would like to see every candidate spell out their K-12 education plan, as Senator Sanders has done.

To my knowledge, neither Senator Warren nor Senator Harris has released a plan for K-12 education. I will review them when and if they do.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Segregation, Supporting public schools

When I Introduced Senator Sanders At UTLA Leadership Conference

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
10

 

Senator Bernie Sanders addressed the United Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference recently. I was invited to introduce him by video. I recorded a two-minute introduction on my iPhone, while in my home office.

I talked about his Thurgood Marshall plan for education. To date, it is the most far-reaching proposal that any candidate has offered. It should be a template for all Democratic candidates.

Here is Senator Sanders’ speech that day. It is worth watching to see what should be the true Democratic Party agenda for K-12 Education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization, Testing

Tom Ultican: Beware of TNTP, a Core Element in the Destroy Public Education Movement

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
17

Tom Ultican has written a series of posts about the Destroy Public Education Movement.

His latest post analyzes the nefarious role of TNTP in that movement.

This movement exists solely to disrupt public education and the teaching profession.

TNTP is one of several organizations that only exist because billionaires have financed them. Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Project) in 1997. She assigned Michelle Rhee, who had recently finished a two year Teach For America (TFA) tour, to run TNTP. Along with TNTP and TFA there are also the uncertified Broad Superintendents Academy, the fake schoolfor professional educators, Relay Graduate School and others forming a significant part of the infrastructure instilling a privatization mindset into the education community.

TNTP says it mission is to partner with educational entities to:

  • “Increase the numbers of outstanding individuals who become public school teachers; and
  • “Create environments for all educators that maximize their impact on student achievement”

These are laudable goals but why would any school district or state education department turn to an organization with minimal academic background and experience to train teachers and school leaders? Michelle Rhee earned a B.A. in Government from Cornell and a master’s in public policy from Harvard with no education studies. In the Book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider observes that “Wendy Kopp was a child of privilege”. She left her exclusive Highland Park neighborhood in Dallas to study International Affairs at Princeton. Kopp had no education experience or training and Rhee had five weeks of training to go along with two years experience teaching elementary school in Baltimore…

Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they were unqualified. If policy makers in New York wanted to create and alternative teacher certification path, they would have turned to an established institution like Columbia University’s Teachers College to create and manage the program. If Washington DC schools wanted to develop a teacher professional development program, they would have likely looked to the University of Maryland. These are places with more than a century of experience studying education and training its leaders…

Working for these want-to-be oligarchs is lucrative. The last tax return from TNTP (Sep. 2017) listed the top 12 paid employees and all of them made more than $200,000 per year. “Thirty pieces of silver” is not worth undermining democratic rights and free universal public education.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, Teach for America

Jamie Gass: Is Moby Dick the Greatest American Novel?

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
108

Jamie Gass writes often about classic literature and what it says to us today. In this post, he writes about the relevance of Moby Dick, which he thinks may be the greatest American novel ever written.

The nature of a classic is that it is always timely. It speaks to us at different times in our life, and we understand it in relation to who we are. As we change, our perceptions of the classic change.

I have read Moby Dick three times: once in high school, and it bored me. Once in college, and I began to understand it. And about three years ago, on a flight from New York to California. The last time was the first time I really understood it.

I had the same reaction to Silas Marner; in high school, it was dull (to me). When I read it as a mature adult, I was deeply moved.

Same book, different reaction.

Jamie writes:

American students should appreciate Melville’s magnificence. A full decade before the Civil War’s carnage, only a highly unconventional writer of profound depth could craft a poetic novel using an enlightened cannibal to devour America’s racial, nativist, and religious stereotypes. Truth-telling and genre-shattering to a fault, Melville never really earned a living as an author and died a forgotten customs house clerk in New York City.

“Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?” remarked an 1851 London book review of “Moby-Dick.”

As America’s cultural ship of state seems awash in crazy sea captains, ignoble savagery, and uncivilized oddities who offer more whale lard than illumination, maybe Herman Melville and his friendly cannibal Queequeg can help keep students intellectually buoyant in the rough seas ahead.

Jamie and I don’t agree on anything having to do with school reform, but I always enjoy his efforts to restore classic literature to its exalted station in our schools and our lives.

Categories Literature

Trump’s War Against Latinos

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2019 //
37

Jack Hassard writes about the excitement of the first day of school. The children in their best clothes, looking forward to meeting their new teacher. But when school is over, their parents are nowhere to be found. They were arrested by ICE.

The mass arrest of 680 workers in Mississippi occurred only days after the slaughter in El Paso, where the killer targeted what he thought were Mexicans.

The targeting of Latino families by the Trump administration is tantamount to the targeting that was no different than the Sturmabteilung, a paramilitary storm troop detachment dressed in brown shirts.  These were Hitler’s thugs who violently intimidated Germany’s leftists and Jewish population. Hitler used them as security forces at rallies, used violence and threats to purge and assault.

Are the ICE arrests any different than the action of the brownshirts against the perceived enemies of Nazism?

From the Washington Post:

The owners of the chicken processing plants are wealthy. They have had labor problems and fought efforts by their workers to unionize. They have been fined millions of dollars for violating the civil rights of their workers.

Raids spanning seven cities, six work sites and five companies ended in arrests for 680 people — and underscored an industry’s reliance on foreign-born workers at a time when federal immigration policy is the focus of intense debate.

On Aug. 7, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers swept through agricultural processing plants in Mississippi, capping a year-long investigation. Officials said it was the largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history.

Mississippi is the fifth-largest chicken-producing state in the United States, and two of the raided companies, Koch Foods and Peco Foods, are among the nation’s biggest chicken producers.

The state’s poultry industry has a complex history with labor, race and immigration, academic research shows. The civil rights and worker rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s led to not only integration but also an exodus of white workers. By the 1990s, businesses began aggressively recruiting Latin American immigrants to fill their labor needs, luring them to rural Mississippi from places such as El Paso and Miami…

Privately held Koch Foods makes chicken products under its own brand and through private labels for buyers such as Walmart. The company is headquartered near Chicago and has no relation to the multinational Koch Industries. It employs nearly 13,000 people in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Illinois and Ohio. Its Morton, Miss., plant produces more than 700,000 tons of poultry feed each year.

Its owner, Joseph Grendys, is worth $3.3 billion, Forbes estimates.

Did he welcome the raid to intimidate his uppity workers?

Democracy Now reported:

The mass arrests also came on the first day of the school year, and some children walked home from school only to find their doors locked and their family members missing. Wednesday’s raids targeted chicken processing plants operated by Koch Foods, one of the largest poultry producers in the U.S. Last year, the company paid out $3.75 million to settle an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission class-action suit charging the company with sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latino workers at one of its Mississippi plants. Labor activists say it’s the latest raid to target factories where immigrant workers have organized unions, fought back against discrimination or challenged unsafe and unsanitary conditions. 

Where do you stand?

 

Categories Bigotry
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