Study: How Foundations Engage in Advocacy by Funding Ideas They Like

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2021 //
36

Sarah Reckhow of Michigan State University University and Megan Tompkins-Stange of the University of Michigan studied the ways in which foundations fund research that advances policies they believe in. They use the issue of teacher quality, specifically, to demonstrate how the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation underwrote research that provided evidence for evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students (VAM, or value-added modeling). The research supported a policy that the Obama administration wanted to implement.

VAM turned out to be highly ineffective and demoralized teachers, but the big foundations gave the Obama administration the back-up the administration needed for their demand that teachers be evaluated by their students’ test scores. The American Statistical Association warned that VAM was an invalid measure of individual teachers, as did other scholarly and professional organizations, but Obama and Duncan ignored the naysayers.

Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange write:

After the Obama Administration took office in 2009, a number of former Gates Foundation officials assumed senior roles in the Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan, and were influential in drafting Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion competitive grant program designed to induce states to comply with specific policy reforms, including the use of value-added methods in evaluation programs. The Department of Education’s call for proposals stated that Race to the Top grant winners would focus on advancing four specific reforms:

“Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy; building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction; Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and turning around our lowest-achieving schools.”

These implicit and explicit references to value-added measures and the need to evaluate and compensate teachers based on their effectiveness are evidence of the emergent debates around using student test scores to determine teacher pay—another plank of the education reformers’ theory of change. An interviewee from a foundation commented on the fact that after Race to the Top, states were required to “put together evaluation systems for teachers and states would begin to link this to hiring and firing.” The fact that this particular reform had acquired such political capital in a relatively short time was, in the words of this interviewee, “remarkable.”

Creating an evidence base

In addition to maintaining close networks with policy elites, foundations actively engaged in commissioning original research designed to provide an evidence base relevant to their policy priorities. Foundations make grants to intermediary organizations to conduct “advocacy research,” which has the explicit objective of being injected into policy discourse to be cited as empirical justification for desired reforms (Lubienski et al. 2009). Unlike traditional peer-reviewed research, which may pose uncertain conclusions regarding policy implications, advocacy research is shaped by specific policy objectives and political strategy and is typically produced by think tanks and nonprofit organizations, rather than universities (Shaker and Heilman 2004). The level of empirical rigor in advocacy research exists on a spectrum, from employing highly rigorous methods and considerations of external and internal validity, to omitting discussion of methods entirely.

While foundation-funded advocacy research is by no means the only source of policy-influential research in the teacher quality debate, it is central in Congressional hearings during our study period. Between 2000 and 2016, only nine research reports were cited three or more times by witnesses (and only one of which was peer-reviewed). The fourth-most cited report, which was consistently referenced in our interviews, was a 2009 advocacy research report by The New Teacher Project entitled The Widget Effect—a call to arms about the need for systematic teacher evaluation systems in order to distinguish between low-quality and high-quality teachers using test score-based evaluation methods. The report stated that “institutional indifference to variations in teacher performance” resulted in systems that perpetuated low-quality teaching across the country, taking aim at evaluation systems that relied predominantly on observational meth-ods as opposed to econometric approaches (Weisberg et al. 2009). Several education reform-oriented foundations including the Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Robertson Foundation, and Joyce Foundation funded the report. Within a month of its release in 2009, Secretary Duncan made the following statement about the report in a speech:

“These policies…have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets. A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that? We need to work together to change this.

The Widget Effect was praised by many interviewees as a triumph of advocacy research—a clear proposal and message, presented in a comprehensible and digestible format, that made a complicated issue more palatable. More importantly, however, the report was also a triumph for the policy networks surround-ing teacher quality discourse—within a month, the report had had such impact that Secretary Duncan was referencing it in major speeches, which was accomplished by disseminating it through policy networks among actors with shared preferences.

The widespread recognition of The Widget Effect was emblematic of the rising prominence of advocacy research in policy debates. In the last ten years, education policy scholars have observed a shift toward targeted advocacy research funded by foundations, particularly surrounding issues of market-based policy interventions (Henig 2009; Lubienski et al. 2009). Contemporary examples of advocacy research contest the traditional conceptualization of expert researchers being separate and distinct from politics. According to Kingdon (2011, p. 228):

“The policy community concentrates on matters like technical detail, cost-benefit analyses, gathering data, conducting studies, and honing proposals. The political people, by contrast, paint with a broad brush, are involved in many more issue areas than the policy people are, and concentrate on winning elections, promoting parties, and mobilizing support in the larger pol-ity.”

In current education policy networks, however, the converse is true, as researchers and advocates may overlap. One interviewee, a staff member of an education advocacy organization, described her role on a Gates Foundation-funded advocacy research project: “We saw a need to be more involved, not just from putting ideas out there but to help guide the conversation more hands-on.” Foundations, particularly those that endorse common education reform priorities, are now more likely to reject the traditional model of funding basic research in universities intended for diffusion into policy networks, but without the added leverage of a dedicated marketing structure to ensure, rather than impute, that the research reaches its intended audience.This is particularly true for foundations that identify as strategic philanthropies who are more likely to assertively use research as a tool to advance their policy goals. Strategic philanthropy is structured around the managerial concept of strategic planning, emphasizing clearly articulated goals from the outset of an initiative, the use of research to substantiate decisions, accountability from grantees in the form of benchmarks and deliverables as measured in incremental outcomes, and evaluation to assess progress toward milestones (Brest and Harvey 2008).

Strategic funders also prioritize measurable returns on investments. Applying this formulation, basic research can appear very costly, with high levels of uncertainty or ambiguous returns, while targeted advocacy research promises better yield.Interviewees described strategic foundations—most notably, the Gates and Broad Foundations—as highly influential leaders within the teacher qual-ity policy network and depicted foundations’ theory of change as based on the assumption that teacher evaluation was necessary to advance other education reform goals, such as pay for performance and alternative teacher certifications. They also focused on these foundations’ use of research evidence as political in nature, departing from the “expert-led model of change” that Clemens and Lee (2010) describe and moving toward a model wherein researchers and advo-cates pursued similar goals: to inject policy ideas into political discourse more directly than their traditional philanthropic approaches.

The authors go on to describe the Gates Foundation’s big investment in the MET program (Measures of Effective Teaching). As several interviewees comment, the research started out with a desired outcome, then sought the evidence to back it.

The research paper was published in 2018 and remains timely.

What we don’t know yet is whether the Gates Foundation learned anything from its multiple failures in the field of education.

Categories Broad Foundation, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Philanthropy, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Los Angeles: A Growing Movement for Community Schools

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2021 //
10

Jack Ross writes in California-based Capital & Main about the role of Los Angeles in developing community schools, a model that has been successful in New York City and that involves democratic cooperation among parents, teachers, students, and staff.

He begins:

In the winter of 2019, two oddities swept Los Angeles: rain and a teachers’ strike. When the storm cleared, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced a contract that capped class sizes, raised teaching salaries and dedicated funding for school staff including librarians, nurses and psychiatric social workers.

One aspect of the agreement received less attention: funding for 30 LAUSD schools to become community schools. Community schools support students and families beyond the school day by providing social services and boosting curricula with arts and academic programs.

“This approach evolves the school site into a hub for the community where families access health, socio-emotional, mental health and enrichment support for students during and following normal school hours,” LAUSD explains on its website. The idea is to bring schools into communities and communities into schools by charging a team of parents, faculty and community members with establishing local programs and resources on campus for students while also providing services from the school site for community members, like immigration counseling or fresh fruit on Sundays.

The concept of a school as a community hub goes back at least to early 20th century education theorist John Dewey, and has been revitalized with new research. A study conducted by the Rand Corporation of community schools in New York City found positive impacts on math achievement, credit accumulation, student attendance and on-time grade progression. Disciplinary incidents, meanwhile, went down. (Curiously, the study found no impact on school climate and culture.)

The model is gaining traction nationwide. This summer, UTLA’s foothold became windfall at the state level when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a budget designating $2.8 billion for community schools in California, an investment more than six times larger than the $442 million proposed by President Biden just weeks before. Previously the federal government had invested just $30 million in community schools; Biden’s plan would have increased funding by more than 14 times. The National Education Association is also giving $3 million annually in $75,000 grants to districts investing in community schools.

Last year the NEA founded a Community Schools Institute to support district and union locals transitioning to the model, with 39 states and a $10 million investment to “lead the way and provide a roadmap to the future of public education.” Under direction of the institute, the California Teachers Association (CTA) is organizing teachers’ unions across the state to demand community school transitions in their districts, according to CTA Vice President David Goldberg. (Disclosure: The NEA and CTA are financial supporters of this website.)

The CTA is also taking pains to establish what exactly defines a community school. By including those requirements in future contracts, the CTA hopes to ensure the schools are genuinely community run by coalitions of parents, teachers and staff, different than what came before and long lasting. A school merely offering social services after the final bell, he says, but not run by a community coalition should not necessarily qualify.

“We’re trying to build a model around democratic unionism, and democratic running of schools, and real deep coalition work with parents and students that is actually capable of fighting for ongoing funding,” says Goldberg. “There’s a tension in the state where they want to do this quickly: What can we pull off the shelf and use? That’s not how you transform public education.”

The article goes on to describe how the pandemic disrupted planning for expansion of community schools. Some have managed to get their planning underway, others have not.

But it is a hopeful sign for the future, because parents who are invested in their school and their community, who know that their voices matter, are unlikely to be lured away by glowing but false promises made by privatizers.

Categories Education Reform

Updates to Recent Posts

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2021 //
6

1. You read this post by Peter Greene. His twin sons tested negative for COVID.

2. You read the post yesterday about the disastrous performance by Travis Scott in Houston. A tenth person—a 9-year-old child—died, trampled at the Travis Scott show.

CNN)The 9-year-old boy who was injured at the Astroworld Festival died Sunday, according to family attorney Ben Crump.

The death toll from the chaotic concert now stands at 10. Funeral services for some of the victims began over the weekend as dozens of lawsuits have been filed over the tragedy.

The boy, identified as Ezra Blount by his family, had been in a medically induced coma in an attempt to overcome brain, liver and kidney trauma, according to a statement from Crump.

Categories Accountability, Houston

Peter Greene: What I Dont Want to Hear About the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2021 //
124

Peter Greene fills in his readers about the pandemic-related news and other topics like staff shortages, but there is one point of view, one perspective he definitely does not not want to hear right now. open the link to learn what it is and why.

Categories Health

Reader: Racism Explains the Youngkin Victory in Virginia

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2021 //
261

A reader who signs in as “Democracy” posted the following comment in response to Jennifer Berkshire’s article in The Nation. Berkshire argued that Terry McAuliffe lost the governor’s race in Virginia because he is a corporate Democrat who doesn’t understand or value public education and couldn’t defend it against Glenn Youngkin’s attacks.

Democracy wrote:

I’ll agree with Jennifer Berkshire that Terry McAuliffe didn’t exactly grasp the historical foundation(s) for public schools. But then, neither do MOST politicians. Nor do most voters. That’s NOT why McAuliffe lost the Virginia election. Racism was.

As I noted previously, prior to the election, the NY Times reported this: “Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls ‘parental rights’ issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism…Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate in Virginia, stoked the resentment and fear of white voters, alarmed by efforts to teach a more critical history of racism in America…he released an ad that was a throwback to the days of banning books, highlighting objections by a white mother and her high-school-age son to ‘Beloved,’ the canonical novel about slavery by the Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.”

The Washington Post reported this: “Youngkin surged in the late weeks of the race by tapping into a deep well of conservative parental resentment against public school systems. He promised to ban the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach to racial history that’s not on the Virginia K-12 curriculum….the conservative news media and Republican candidates stirred the stew of anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams.”

And, again, the NY Times: “the past half-century of American political history shows that racially coded attacks are how Republicans have been winning elections for decades…Youngkin dragged race into the election, making his vow to ‘ban critical race theory’ a centerpiece of his stump speech and repeating it over the closing weekend — Race is the elephant in the room.”

The Associated Press reported this, on CRT and the the Virginia governor’s race: “The issue had weight in Virginia, too. A majority of voters there — 7 in 10 — said racism is a serious problem in U.S. society, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of Tuesday’s electorate…The divide along party lines was stark: 78% of Youngkin voters considered the focus on racism in schools to be too much.”

How does Jennifer Berkshire explain all this? She doesn’t. UVA political analyst Larry Sabato described the Youngkin Critical Race Theory strategy this way: “The operative word is not critical.And it’s not theory. It’s race. What a shock, huh? Race. That is what matters. And that’s why it’s sticks. There’s a lot of, we can call it white backlash, white resistance, whatever you want to call it. It has to do with race. And so we live in a post-factual era … It doesn’t matter that [CRT] isn’t taught in Virginia schools. It’s this generalized attitude that whites are being put upon and we’ve got to do something about it. We being white voters.”

White voters — especially low-education white voters surely did listen hard and hear well. Youngkin won 76 percent of non-college graduate whites. And Youngkin got way more of the non-college white women votes (75 percent) than McAuliffe.

Check the exit polls:

WHITE WOMEN COLLEGE GRADS
VA 2020: 58% Biden, 41% Trump
VA 2021: 62% McAuliffe, 38% Youngkin

WHITE WOMEN NON-COLLEGE
VA 2020: 56% Trump, 44% Biden
VA 2021: 75% Youngkin, 25% McAuliffe

How does Jennifer Berkshire explain all this? She doesn’t. There’s a reason that KKKers, and Neo-Nazis and white supremacists — Trump’s “very fine people” — identify with the Republican Party. And that’s because it is the party of Trump, and racism, and voter suppression, and white grievance and white nationalism. The Virginia election just mirrored who and what white Republican voters are.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democrats, Race, Racism, Republicans, Virginia

Who Is Travis Scott? Why Did 9 of His Fans Die?

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2021 //
63

The tragedy at the Travis Scott performance in Houston shocked entertainers, fans, and parents. Nine young people died at the arena concert, trampled by a crowd of 50,000 fans who surged to get closer to the stage where Scott was performing.

I confess that I am completely out of touch with the music of Travis Scott and his contemporaries. I love the music of other eras, from about 1600-1975, which seems civilized compared to today’s music (I can’t even make out the words when I try).

This article in the Los Angeles Times explains Travis Scott and his enormous popularity and wealth. The article included a Scott song called “Sicko,” which shows the menace and incipient rage that Scott promotes. After reading this article, I think Scott should face criminal charges in addition to the lawsuits that have been filed against him. The article is titled “For Travis Scott, a history of chaos at concerts, followed by a night of unspeakable tragedy.”

The article was published before the death of the 9th person.

In Travis Scott’s 2019 Netflix documentary “Look Mom I Can Fly,” in the aftermath of a particularly volatile May 2017 show at the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion in Rogers, Ark., one fan beamed at a camera crew while leaning on crutches. “I survived, I survived! It’s all good!” they said.

Following the show, Scott faced three misdemeanor charges of inciting a riot, disorderly conduct and endangering the welfare of a minor after he invited fans to overpower security and rush the stage. Scott pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and had to pay more than $6,000 to two people injured at the show.

“I just hate getting arrested, man. That s— is whack,” Scott said in the documentary, upon his release from jail.

Scott’s talent for stirring up a young fanbase with the fury of an underground punk act has long been a part of his appeal. On his 2018 song “Stargazing,” the rapper reveled in his crowds’ heaving energy: ”it ain’t a mosh pit if ain’t no injuries.” Yet the 30-year-old rapper is also one of the most successful figures in contemporary hip-hop, an endorsement-friendly business mogul in the vein of Jay-Z and Puff Daddy, and one of a handful of rap artists who can headline major festivals. His reputation as an incendiary live performer arguably exceeds his recorded music as the main driver of his current popularity.

But that penchant for inspiring chaos onstage has led to troubling situations, long before Friday’s Astroworld crowd-stampede disaster that killed eight people and left numerous concert-goers injured in Houston.

Scott has twice faced criminal charges related to inciting crowds into over-heated fervors. Before the incident in Arkansas, the rapper pleaded guilty in 2015 to charges of reckless conduct, after cajoling fans at Lollapalooza to climb over barricades and onto the stage with him during his show at the Chicago festival.

“Everyone in a green shirt get the f— back,” Scott said, referencing the festival’s security staff. “Middle finger up to security right now.” He then led the crowd in a chant of “We want rage.” (Scott often refers to his fans as “ragers.”)

Scott’s set lasted barely five minutes, whereupon he fled the scene and was soon apprehended by local police. A judge ordered him under court supervision for a year following his guilty plea.

In April 2017, a man named Kyle Green sued Scott after he attended a show at Terminal 5 in New York City, where Green claims fans pushed him off an upper-deck balcony. A different fan jumped from the same balcony in a widely seen video, after Scott pointed him out and encouraged him to leap off. “I see you, but are you gonna do it?” Scott said from the stage. “They gonna catch you. Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared!”

Green was left partially paralyzed by the incident. Reached by Rolling Stone after the Astroworld incident, an attorney for Green said that he’s ”devastated and heartbroken for the families of those who were killed and for those individuals who were severely injured. He’s even more incensed by the fact that it could have been avoided had Travis learned his lesson in the past and changed his attitude about inciting people to behave in such a reckless manner.”

In 2019, Scott wrote “DA YOUTH DEM CONTROL THE FREQUENCY,” on an Instagram video of fans storming barricades at one of his shows. “EVERYONE HAVE FUN. RAGERS SET TONE WHEN I COME OUT TONIGHT. BE SAFE RAGE HARD. AHHHHHHHHHHH.” Three people were hospitalized following a crowd stampede over security barriers at the 2019 edition of the Astroworld Festival.

The 30-year-old Scott, whose real name is Jaques Webster, was born in Houston, a famed city for outlaw hip-hop that figures prominently in his work (His chart-topping 2018 album “Astroworld” was named after a now-closed local theme park). His father and grandfather were jazz and soul musicians, and he studied musical theater while growing up in the middle-class Houston suburb of Missouri City. In 2012, he signed deals as an artist (with T.I.’s Grand Hustle imprint for Epic) and as a writer/producer (with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music). His music was both visceral and melancholy, produced with the weight and ferocity of trap but glazed over with vocal processing and distended samples.

On two early mixtapes and his 2015 major-label debut “Rodeo,” singles like “Antidote” set a template for how rap would sound in the coming decade — bruising, miserable, sleekly nihilist. The LP’s swarm of guest appearances — Justin Bieber, the Weeknd and Kanye West among them — announced that a new star had arrived.

His 2016 follow-up, “Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight,” had similar firepower, with Andre 3000, Kendrick Lamar and Kid Cudi as guests. That record yielded two of his signature singles — “Goosebumps” and “Pick up the Phone” — and topped the Billboard 200 album charts.

But it was 2018’s “Astroworld” that turned him into a pop force. It not only again topped the album charts, but placed all 17 tracks into the Hot 100 singles chart. “Sicko Mode,” with Drake, topped the Hot 100 and set a template for TikTok-ready rap with its hard edits between beats and tempos.

His arena tour for that album grossed $32 million in three months in 2019, according to Pollstar. That launched Scott into the caliber of acts that could headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, for which he was booked in 2020 and, as of now, is still scheduled to headline in 2022. (He is also currently scheduled to headline next weekend’s Day N Vegas festival, alongside Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator.)

Last year, more than 27 million fans logged in to see him perform a concert in the video game “Fortnite,” where fans bought reams of real and virtual merchandise for characters in the game.

Beyond music, his endorsement deals with Nike, at a reported $10 million per year, and McDonald’s, where fans could order a Scott-themed novelty meal, have made him one of the richest acts in contemporary hip-hop. This year, he launched a hard seltzer brand, Cacti, with Anheuser-Busch. Scott has a daughter, Stormi, with the reality TV and cosmetics mogul Kylie Jenner.

Scott founded the Astroworld Festival in 2018 in partnership with Austin-based ScoreMore Shows and Live Nation, the world’s largest event-promotion company (ScoreMore sold a controlling interest to Live Nation in 2018). This year’s lineup, at NRG Park in Houston, was to feature Tame Impala and Bad Bunny on Saturday, which was canceled following the events of Friday night. SZA, Lil Baby and Roddy Ricch performed before Scott on Friday.

In the run-up to the festival, Scott opened a community school garden initiative in Houston, Cactus Jack Gardens; a new basketball court at the city’s Sunnyside Park; and a design-centric academy partnered with Parsons School of Design. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told the New York Times that “I’ve worked with the family, I’ve worked with Travis, I’ve worked with his mom…This is the last thing any of them wanted to see happen.”

The tragedy has left the rap world reeling. Ricch promised to donate his entire performance fee from the festival to the affected families. Scott’s team spent some of Saturday’s post-concert aftermath deleting social media posts that seem to encourage gate-crashing or other illicit behavior, including one May 2021 Twitter post in which he said: “We still sneaking the wild ones in. !!!!”

Judge Lina Hidalgo, the senior elected official in Harris County, where Houston is located, said at a news conference following the festival that “It may well be that this tragedy is the result of unpredictable events, of circumstances coming together that couldn’t possibly have been avoided. But until we determine that, I will ask the tough questions.”

One Astroworld attendee has already sued Scott, his guest performer Drake, Live Nation and the Harris County Sports & Convention Corp., which owns NRG Stadium. Texas attorney Thomas J. Henry filed the lawsuit Sunday on behalf of Kristian Paredes, according to the Daily Mail, accusing the defendants of prioritizing “profits over their attendees.”

“Live musical performances are meant to inspire catharsis, not tragedy,” Henry said in a statement. “Many of these concert-goers were looking forward to this event for months, and they deserved a safe environment in which to have fun and enjoy the evening. Instead, their night was one of fear, injury, and death.”

In a video posted late Saturday, a weary-looking Scott said that while he was onstage, “anytime I could make out anything that’s going on, I stopped the show and helped them get the help they need,” he said, “We’ve been working closely with everyone trying to get to the bottom of this.”

Categories Failure, For-Profit, Houston

Low-Performing For-Profit Charter Chain in Ohio Set to Launch Charter Schools in West Virginia

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2021 //
15

The following post by Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy details the outsized role that Ron Packard’s for-profit charter chain will have in starting charter schools in West Virginia. Packard was one of the founders of the low-performing but highly profitable K12 Inc. virtual charter chain (where he was paid $5 million a year). He left to start another charter chain, called Pansophic, of which Accel is a part. His background is not in education, although his online bio describes him(self) as an “educator and entrepreneur.” In fact, his work experience prior to K12 Inc. was at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Learn more about Ron Packard at Sourcewatch, which keeps tabs on rightwingers and privatizers (www.sourcewatch.org). The selection of charter chains which have demonstrated poor academic performance in other states shows that the decisions in West Virginia are driven by politics, not concern for students or their education.

Bill Phillis posted this notice:

Ron Packard’s Accel For-Profit Charter School Operation May Run Half of West Virginia’s First Charter Schools
The Ohio D-ranked Accel charter school operator is in line to run half of West Virginia’s first charter schools. Ron Packard, former CEO of the publicly traded K12 company, left K12 Inc. to start Pansophic Learning, of which Accel is a part. Accel has a huge presence in Ohio, with less than a stellar record of performance.

It is of at least passing interest that Packard’s former employer (K12 Inc.) is in line to run the West Virginia charter school Virtual Academy.

One company could run half of WV’s first charter schools. Ohio doesn’t rank it highly.

By Ryan Quinn ryan.quinn@hdmediallc.comNov 4, 2021

CHARLES TOWN — Accel Schools says it serves schools in seven states. West Virginia could be the eighth.
The fast-expanding charter school management company’s name is on half the six applications to open charters here. Lawmakers tout charters as a way to improve Mountain State education.

In neighboring Ohio, 17 of 30 Accel schools were graded D’s and five others were graded F’s in 2018-19 by the state Department of Education. Accel says it serves more than 50 schools.

Ron Packard, founder of K12 Inc., an online charter school business traded on the New York Stock Exchange, left that company in 2014 and started Pansophic Learning. Accel is part of that private, international firm. 

Since 2014, Accel has virtually expanded to the Pacific, with online charters in California and Washington state. It has become the largest school management company in Ohio, home to most of the brick-and-mortar charters Accel runs.

It has yet to go farther east. West Virginia has put out an invitation.

In this year’s regular legislative session, Republicans fast-tracked a law allowing charters to expand faster, teach almost solely online and apply for approval from a new, unelected West Virginia Professional Charter School Board.

A month after Gov. Jim Justice signed the law, Accel hired two lobbyists, according to the state Ethics Commission. One is Larry Puccio, who represents prominent businesses, including the governor’s Greenbrier resort.

Now Accel is trying to reach the tip of the Eastern Panhandle with a brick-and-mortar, 650-student maximum charter in Jefferson County. On Oct. 18, Accel’s Chad Carr spoke to a mostly receptive audience in Charles Town, the county seat.

A second Accel brick-and-mortar charter, Nitro Preparatory Academy, would be located at the edge of the state’s most populous county and enroll up to 600 students.

Accel’s Virtual Preparatory Academy would enable it to reach all of West Virginia. Or, at least, the parts in the hills and hollows that can get online. The school would provide laptops, and max out at 2,000 students.

The Professional Charter School Board could approve all three Accel schools Wednesday during an online meeting scheduled to start at 8 a.m.

The Nitro, Eastern Panhandle and Virtual Preparatory academies are overseen by separate boards, save for one shared member. The Nitro and Eastern Panhandle applications are almost identical.

The Ohio Department of Education rated Accel a “D” operator in 2018-19, the last school year before the pandemic. Ohio hasn’t graded operators or schools since.

The agency graded a half-dozen Accel schools as C’s, two as B’s and none as A’s. More than two-thirds of Accel’s schools in the Buckeye State received the lowest two letter grades. Rapidly expanding Accel’s recent takeover of some schools might have been a factor in the grades, an official said.

“With regards to the Ohio academic records,” Accel spokeswoman Courtney Harritt wrote in an email, “it is a complex analysis because Accel has a specialty in turning schools around academically and financially. The majority of the schools we manage are going through the academic turnaround process.”

The Ohio letter grades are composed of multiple measures, including students’ overall achievement on state tests and their rate of improvement.

Acceleration

Carr said he was swept up in the company’s expansion when Accel took over the charter chain for which he worked.

“Accel is made up of different, uh, organizations that have tried to do charter schools and not done ’em very well,” Carr told the Charles Town crowd. He said his own school excelled academically, but not financially.

“In Ohio, we run schools on a third of what the traditional public schools run ‘ern on,” Carr said of Accel.

Education service provider companies like Accel can’t turn a profit from per-student state funding if they don’t keep down expenses.

The Nitro and Eastern Panhandle Preparatory academies set a goal of maintaining “a grade of C or higher on the West Virginia School Report Card.”

West Virginia ditched its letter-grade system for schools in 2017. Nitro and Eastern Panhandle Preparatory set academic goals, but those don’t take into account scores on state standardized tests by which public schools are judged.

State law gives charter applicants the chance to correct “identified deficiencies” in applications before the charter board decides.

Answering questions now is “premature,” Harritt wrote in an email “because we haven’t yet received application feedback from the charter board. We are still working through the iterative process.”

The Virtual Preparatory Academy application includes a goal to meet or exceed the statewide average for student proficiency in math, English language arts and science.

“Each year, the school will strive for a 2% improvement from the prior year,” the application says.

The only non-Accel brick-and-mortar charter proposed in this state, West Virginia Academy near Morgantown, isn’t planning to use a management company like Accel to run its daily operations.

But the boards of the other two incipient charters are planning to use service providers. The online West Virginia Connections Academy plans to use Pearson, the international education company that also sells textbooks to public schools.

West Virginia Virtual Academy plans to use Stride Inc., the new name for K12 Inc.

Lawmakers allowed up to 10 charters to open, but only two statewide virtual charters. So Accel’s Virtual Preparatory Academy might not open if the Charter School Board instead approves other schools’ applications.

This means Packard’s old company is competing with his new one, which includes five other executive leaders originally from K12 Inc.

At the Charles Town public forum, Carr explained Accel’s approach, telling the more than 30 people there the strategy includes tests assessing only the past two weeks of learning.

“It’s small, six questions, but it has to cover exactly what you just taught,” said Carr, who wore boots and Dallas Cowboys cuff links with his suit.

“You give it to the students. If they know it and they do well on it, move on. But if they don’t know it, you need to go back and reteach it,” Carr said of teachers. “And that’s when somebody like me steps in and says, ‘Hey, here’s a couple of ways that you need to fix this.’ And it works.”

Joanne Curran, an attendee, was open to the pitch.

“Why wouldn’t everybody want to go?” she asked. “And — I literally can’t understand a downside, so it’s a serious question.”

“I don’t know,” Carr said. “It’s, it’s really hard, it’s really hard to answer.”

Ryan Quinn covers education. He can be reached at 304-348-1254 or ryan.quinn@hdmediallc.com. Ryan QuinnEducation Reporter

https://www.wygazettemail.com/news/education/one-company-could-run-half-of-wys-first-charter-schools-ohio-doesnt-rank-it-highly/article_7010ca95-2a1b-55b8-b16e-81af3c757c42.html

The profiteers are lining their pockets with public funds that should be used in the classrooms.

By WSAZ News StaffPublished: Nov. 10, 2021 at 8:32 AM EST|Updated: 6 hours ago

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) – The West Virginia Professional Charter School Board approved West Virginia’s first charter schools during a virtual meeting Wednesday morning.

The Board met to consider seven applications from companies looking to open new virtual and in-person education options.

Three in-person schools were approved Wednesday morning: West Virginia Academy, Eastern Panhandle Academy and Nitro Preparatory Academy.

Two of those learning proposals, the Eastern Panhandle Academy and Nitro Preparatory Academy, were submitted by the company ACCEL Schools.

ACCEL wants to open the first in-person charter school in our region.

The Nitro Prep Academy, which would be located in the former Nitro High School building, hopes to attract up to 600 students in kindergarten through eighth grade from Kanawha and Putnam counties, according to its application. That would including pulling students from Nitro Elementary School, which will share a parking lot with the new charter school, and Rock Branch Elementary School, which is one of West Virginia’s three National Blue Ribbon Schools and is located less than a 10-minute drive from the proposed charter school.

Nitro Prep said in its application to the state, “there is a need in this area for a high-quality charter school because neither county is excelling academically.” The application goes on to state it hopes to create an individualized learning environment as “an alternative to traditional public schools that have been ineffective in meeting certain family and student learning needs, or cost-prohibitive private schools.”

In addition to the in-person charter school, ACCEL wants to add a statewide virtual option. The West Virginia Professional Charter School Board is set to consider applications for virtual learning next week.

This is a developing story.

West Virginia’s first charter schools gain approval by board members (wsaz.com)

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William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Failure, For-Profit, K12 Inc., West Virginia

Do You Want to Hear Nikole Hannah-Jones Discuss “The 1619 Project”?

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2021 //
47

I just received an invitation from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to a virtual book launch of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ super-controversial book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. I will share the invitation with you because you might want to hear the story of the book and its reception. I bought a ticket to the event and the book.

To get a ticket, you must buy the book from certain booksellers mentioned on the site.

The event date is November 16 at 8 p.m.

This is the description of the event:

The Apollo Theater is proud to partner with Penguin Random House in honor of the book launch of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. This virtual event brings together Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and collaborators in conversation around the expansion of the award-winning essay series from The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project is a groundbreaking work of journalism that reframes our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative.

About The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story:
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself.

This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.

Hannah-Jones will be joined by Ibram X. Kendi for a discussion about The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, moderated by journalist Soledad O’Brien. Later in the program, to celebrate the simultaneous publication of The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a picture book adaption for young readers, Hannah-Jones will join co-author Renée Watson and illustrator Nikkolas Smith for a conversation moderated by author Derrick Barnes. The event will also feature an archival photo presentation by Kimberly Annece Henderson and a poetry reading by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

Categories Education Reform

Nancy Bailey: America Cannot Build Back Better if It Ignores Crumbling, Dangerous Schools

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2021 //
36

Nancy Bailey, expert blogger and retired teacher, was outraged that the Biden infrastructure plan omitted the $100 billion that was promised to renovate and repair school buildings.

She writes:

Our public schools should be safe, welcoming places, that support the work of teachers, cherish students, and provide a climate and atmosphere conducive for learning.

Our public schools should be the pride of our nation!

We are all to blame for not caring enough to demand great public schools for all of our children, a huge equity issue! Wake up to the fact that children, mostly poor, in this country are attending dangerous school buildings that could make them sick.

Read the rest of her plea for safe, welcoming buildings.

And consider this: In Finland, architects compete to design beautiful school buildings. When I was there, I received a coffee-table book displaying the most outstanding school buildings in the nation. Why do we neglect the spaces in which our children spend hours daily and are expected to learn?

Categories Education Reform

Jan Resseger: Biden’s “Build Back Better Program” Would Lift Millions of Children Out of Poverty

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2021 //
2

Jan Resseger, one of our best informed bloggers and social justice advocates, lauds President Biden’s Build Back Better program for its benefits for children. It would end decades of policies that punish poor children. Our nation has dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly, but neglected our children.

She writes:

The U.S. House of Representatives finally passed President Biden’s infrastructure plan last Friday. The Senate passed it a while ago, and the bill is headed to Biden’s desk for signature.  At the same time, Democrats in the U. S. House of Representatives pledged that if the Congressional Budget Office confirms cost estimates for the Build Back Better Bill, Democrats in the House will pass the current version of the plan and send it on to the Senate for consideration. For months, Congress has been debating the programs that are part of this plan, and even if Congress passes it, it won’t be perfect.

Even if imperfect, however, the Build Back Better Bill in its current form would signify a truly revolutionary investment in America’s children. That is because the United States has, for decades, utterly failed to use government to begin to eradicate a morally reprehensible level of childhood economic inequality.

Cara Baldari of the First Focus Campaign for Children explains: “For the first time in generations, we are on the precipice of making serious and long-term progress to reduce our stubbornly high rate of child poverty in the United States. Historically, the United States has had a significantly higher rate of child poverty than other developed countries because we have continually failed to sufficiently invest in our children. While the establishment of Social Security has permanently reduced poverty for seniors, children have remained the poorest group in America. This situation is not due to a lack of evidence on what works to reduce child poverty, but rather the lack of political will to act.”

Since 1997, families who earn enough income to pay federal income taxes have benefited from a tax credit for each child. Last spring’s American Rescue Plan Covid-relief bill made the full Child Tax Credit available to children in families with low earnings or without income, and it increased the credit’s maximum amount—$2,000 per-child last year— to $3,000 per child and $3,600 for children under age 6—but only through the end of 2021. Without the extension of this reform, many children will fall back into deep poverty in 2022.

Balderi presents some recent history: In 2015, advocates for children “worked with Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) and Barbara Lee (D-CA) to secure federal funding for the landmark National Academy of Sciences study, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, which was published in 2019. This study, written by a committee of experts… confirmed that… providing families with flexible cash assistance through a monthly child allowance was the most effective way to combat child poverty, reduce racial-economic inequality, and improve children’s long-term outcomes.”  In a tragic irony, until this year families without income or with income so low they payed little in federal income taxes could not receive the full tax credit, while middle class and even wealthy parents could receive the full credit, thereby reducing their federal income tax.

Last week the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities examined several provisions of the Build Back Better Bill which will, if the law is passed in its current draft form, reduce racial disparities.  The brief leads with the Bill’s provision to reduce child poverty by extending last spring’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit: “Build Back Better extends the American Rescue Plan’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit for 2022, which is expected to lift 4 million children above the poverty line and narrow the difference between poverty rates for Black and white children by 44 percent (compared to what the rates would be otherwise) and to narrow the difference between the poverty rates for Latino and white children by 41 percent.  Build Back Better also permanently ensures that the full Child Tax Credit is available to children in families with low or no earnings in a year.This is particularly important for Black and Latino children, about half of whom received a partial credit or no credit at all before the Rescue Plan expansion because their families’ incomes were too low, compared to about 20 percent of white children.”

In late October, a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Senior Research Analyst, Claire Zippel reported data collected from late July through September by the U.S. Census’s Household Pulse Survey. These data documented that, “Some 91 percent of families with low incomes (less than $35,000) are using their monthly Child Tax Credit payments for the most basic household expenses—food, clothing, shelter, and utilities—or education… Many of these households are receiving the full Child Tax Credit for the first time thanks to the American Rescue Plan’s credit expansion. The Rescue Plan temporarily increased the credit amount, provided for the credit to be paid monthly rather than once a year at tax time, and halted a policy that prevented 27 million children from receiving the full credit because their parents earned too little or lacked earnings in a given year.”

How did parents use the money?  Zippel continues: “Among households with incomes below $35,000 who received the Child Tax Credit, 88 percent spent their payments on the most basic needs: food, clothing, rent, a mortgage, or utility bills.  The Child Tax Credit payments also helped many parents and other caregivers invest in their children’s education, Pulse data suggest. Some 40 percent of families with low incomes used their Child Tax Credit payments to cover education costs such as school books and supplies, tuition, after-school programs, and transportation to and from school. (In some cases, these expenses may be for adults’ own education. About 5 percent of adults in low-income households with children are enrolled in school, other Census data show.)

The NY Times’ Claire Cain Miller adds that in its current form in the U.S. House of Representatives: “The Build Back Better Bill also includes extensive investment in pre-Kindergarten for 3 and 4-year-olds and assistance for parents to afford childcare as well as dollars to ensure that “teachers in child care classrooms be paid a livable wage, equivalent to that of elementary teachers with the same credentials… Also as part of the proposal, pre-K lead teachers must have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education or a related field, though they would be given six years to get the degree with some exemptions based on professional experience.”

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman strongly endorses these and other proposals to help families and their children: “Democrats may—may—finally be about to agree on a revenue and spending plan. It will clearly be smaller than President Biden’s original proposal, and much smaller than what progressives wanted. It will, however, be infinitely bigger than what Republicans would have done, because if the G.O.P. controlled Congress, we would be doing nothing at all to invest in America’s future. But what will the plan do?  Far too much reporting has focused mainly on the headline spending number.”

Krugman continues: “So let me propose a one-liner: Tax the rich, help America’s children.  This gets at much of what the legislation is likely to do. Reporting suggests that the final bill will include taxes on billionaires’ incomes and minimum taxes for corporations, along with a number of child-oriented programs.”

Krugman, the economist, comments on the economic arguments for Congressional passage of this bill: “(T)here is overwhelming evidence that helping children, in addition to being the right thing to do, has big economic payoffs. Children who benefited from safety-net programs like food stamps became healthier, more productive adults. Children who were enrolled in pre-K education were more likely to graduate from high school and go to college…. As I’ve argued in the past, the economic case for investing in children is even stronger than the case for investing in physical infrastructure.”

Krugman also believes that President Biden’s Build Back Better Bill, philosophically conforms to American political tradition: “Remember, we are the nation that basically invented universal education… America led the way in creating ‘common schools’ that were meant to include students from all social classes, and were justified by many of the same arguments now being made for universal pre-K and other forms of aid to children. So when Republicans denounce pro-child policies as socialist and try to promote private schools, they, not Democrats, are rejecting our nation’s traditions.”

Categories Biden, Childhood, Economy, Poverty
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