California: ALERT! Charter Insiders Infiltrate Democratic Party Platform Committee!

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2022 //
23

Sara Roos, a blogger who writes under the name “Red Queen in LA,” reports on a dangerous development in California. Charter school insiders took charge of writing the California Democratic Party’s education platform and made changes that undercut longstanding Democratic Party opposition to charter schools. Suddenly, charter schools are referred to not as privatization but as “public charter schools,” the preferred language of the charter lobby. The new language dropped the Democratic Party’s insistence that the boards of charter schools must be elected and replaced it with the requirement only that they be authorized by local school boards. A big change, among others that put the Democratic Party platform in the pocket of the charter billionaires.

Roos wrote:

What actually happened with the CA Democratic Party’s (CADEM) platform adopted Sunday (3/6/22) at its convention?

At the eleventh hour, following an eleven-hour meeting finalizing draft proposalsfor updating the 2022 CADEM platform, it came to light that one of its 23 platform “planks”, that of Education, had been tampered with by charter school (CS) industry insiders.

As a consequence, CADEM delegate and California Federation of Teachers legislative advocate, Tristan Brown, urged from the floor that fellow delegates vote “no” on the entirety of the proposed platform changes, since the rules forbade focusing on specifics to excise.

It was argued that the new language altered the hard-won, former mandate that charter school boards must be elected, because democracy demands public, elected accountability. The platform’s new language morphed this fundamental demand, requiring instead that charter schools simply be authorized and monitored by a school board. The language of conditional support was removed altogether.

On the strength of the Union recommendation by the statewide federation of teachers, and the leadership of several key caucus chairs and leaders, the final floor vote passing the platform was far shy of consensus at 57% aye (691 votes), 43% nay (510 votes). [The absolute numbers are extracted from the meeting transcript and are a little different from the poll result percentages shown to delegates via zoom].

From a convention of 3,037 elected delegates + 80 proxies, that translates to passage by just 22% (=691/3117) of total eligible voters at the convention. But the total number of delegates voting for the platform was not presented. If quorum were just reached for the vote with its 1559 members, then a bare minimum of 358, or nearly one-quarter of delegates (23% of the eligible quorum (=358/1559)), abstained from the platform vote altogether. The sum total of those failing to vote for the platform {“nay”+abstain} far outstrips those who did.

As it happens, the reality of the platform language change is far worse than what was hastily presented on the floor. And befitting their shepherding by charter school operators (including the board chair of the charter school lobbying association), these changes do very much advantage charter school operations.

The former language of bullet 23 in the K-12 Education plank conditioned circumstances for the Party’s support of charter schools on five contingencies [emphasis mine]:

  • Support only those charter schools that are managed by public and elected boards, not-for-profit, and transparent in governance; have equitable admissions; adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality; and, supplement rather than supplant public education programs.

The draft language posted in advance of the convention eliminates rules for conditional support altogether. Instead conditions are replaced by definitions. The term “charter school” is redefined through use of the modifying adjective, “public”. A list of characteristics is simply inserted, absent any conditioning on support. And the long-standing federal exhortation acknowledging and specifying the fungibility of money to ‘supplement not supplant’ (ie, do not rob Peter to pay Paul), is lost:

  • Support public charter schools that are governed by not-for-profit, elected, public boards with transparent governance, have equitable admissions, adopt fair labor practices, respect labor neutrality, and supplement public education programs for students in historically low performing subgroups such as low income, English learners, Black, American Indian, and Alaskan Native students, foster children and students with disabilities

The real problem came from a change inserted after the posted draft platform. Support is urged for these entities now defined not by their governance but by the circumstance of their chartering: authorization and monitoring [emphasis mine]:

  • Support public charter schools that are authorized and monitored by public and elected boards, not-for-profit, and transparent in governance; have equitable admissions; adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality; and, supplement public education programs for students in historically low performing subgroups such as low income, English learners, Black or African American, American Indian, and Alaskan Native students, foster children and students with disabilities

The change amounts to saying “I exist therefore I am”. It asserts support of charter schools no matter what, and defines them as “public”, a characteristic denied by the courts. Reversing the stringent conditional acceptance terms delineated formerly, this incarnation accepts charter schools as the choice of the Democratic Party.

Another change instigated by the charter school lobbyist who volunteered their services to the platform committee, softens the field for two competing ballot initiatives to privatize our public schools through the use of vouchers.

Under cover of redundancy, bullet 14 that unequivocally and expressly “opposes voucher systems for schools,” is eliminated. Its declaration is diluted by sending it lower in the long list of bullet points, and combining it with Education Savings Accounts. The real problem comes in conditioning this opposition to their effect. Since charter schools are defined in the platform now as “public”, vouchers would not be found to “take away from public school funding”.

  • Oppose K-12 Education Savings Accounts, school vouchers, or any programs that would take away from public school funding;

This change was not a mere correction of duplication, it substantively prepares the field for a statewide fight about “school choice,” launched and led from the left. The platform now states that because we define charter schools as “public”, vouchers are a system we no longer oppose because they do not take money away from the public-charter entity. Just as this new platform accepts charter schools de facto, we also now fail to oppose voucher systems.

Trickiness gonna be tricky. Voters gotta be vigilant. Special, monied-interests are persistent and focused; the rest of us are harried volunteers.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Privatization

Angie Sullivan: Nevada Is Killing Off Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2022 //
9

Angie Sullivan teaches in a Title 1 elementary school in Las Vegas, Nevada (Clark County). She frequently sends letters to every legislator in the state about the need to fund schools like hers adequately and the dismal failure of charter schools.

She responded to a post that featured an interview with Jennifer Berkshire, who predicted that some states would phase out public schools in the next few years.

Sullivan responded:

There would have been a time I would have said this will never happen. Public Schools are such an American Insitution. They are protected by laws.

Now I know charter schools are built to go around the laws. Our Nevada Constitution states one district one county. But charters claim they are not a district. And when necessary they are not even a school. The beauty of the EMO/CMO makes them slippery too. They are often a combination for-profit/non-profit. What law can apply to all of the above: a non-profit education.business, managed by a for-profit management corporation which can then also take advantage of all public school resources and tax advantages, while also applying for all the small business grants and money.

Nevada never got the immediate overnight conversion Elaine Wynn and her reformers wanted. That was too quick and shocking. The ASD grabbing 30 schools at a time did not work. [Elaine Wynn is chair of the state Board of Education and wife of a major casino owner.]

So neoliberals have settled for a slow and steady 5 or 6 charters a year. Along with adding to charter chains by grade level every year – 100 students here and 100 students there.

Jana Wilcox-Lavin uses the $22 million in grant money to grease wheels and find favor. Rebecca Feiden is one of the most powerful women in the state. She grants charters; She refuses charters. Rebecca gives some chance after chance after chance to start their charter business. Others, she stops dead in their tracks. They both inherited a dysfunctional and failing charter business. The Charter Authority is still mired in failing charters – failing financially, failing academically, and failing to enroll diversity. Charters in Nevada are obvious segregation and white flight. There is limited appetite to serve poor students.

Mayors in Clark County seem to think running a school is easy. The pandemic allowed them to use education money to offer micro-charters. This seems to have whet some appetites to own a district of their own.

Mayor Goodman of the City of Las Vegas wants a charter. For some unknown reason she paired up with the EMO TNTP (Michelle Rhee’s Group). She signed on the who’s who of education reform. The City of Las Vegas is now in the school business. Interestingly enough Mayor Goodman was successful at running an expensive private school. She does know education. She has zero experience running a school for diverse poor students. She is about to get a wake-up call. Cedric Creer was only voice of reason when this was discussed. He has the failing Agassi, Rainbow, and 100 Academies in his area – he warned the City Council not to go into the school business. Those charters have had few successes and much more failure. Turnover is constant both teachers and students. Mayor Goodman is about to learn that loads of donations and cash from the City of Las Vegas will not be enough if you let Michelle Rhee’s teaching hating group abuse labor. Interestingly enough, Goodman will retire and the City Council will then run this charter school.

Things I did not think were possible.

Are happening.

I thought our straight forward laws would prevent the Mayors from owning a district through their City Councils.. But charters are not in “districts”. Nor are they schools. Nor are they businesses. They become whatever they need to be to skirt the rules the rest of us live by daily. They claim it is “innovation”. Grifters do it everyday. I do not find it new.

I watched Rebecca Feiden define EMO/CMO very differently to the Nevada Legislature the other day – than she has ever defined it is a Charter Authority Meeting. Perhaps she does not even know or want to know. She was certainly snippy like legislators should already know.

I think this year, The Nevada State Public Charter School Authority will become the second largest district (yes, I know they claim they are not one, but they act like one) in Nevada. It is the size of the Reno/Washoe School District almost. And it serves mainly rich white students inside the middle of Clark County. Yes I know it has a hand full of diverse charters – those are not the norm. Yes I know there are charters in other counties. The bulk of the Nevada charters are serving rich white students inside CCSD. Creating a systematic segregation in Clark County. White Flight is obvious.

Charters segregate by religion, race, and money. They are actually tracking special education, language learning, and free and reduce lunch because those categories earn businesses more pupil center funding dollars. This tracking does not help with Mormon charters, all black or all white charters, and charter locations which are obviously limiting access.

Rebecca Feiden is focused on trying to get more free and reduced lunch children into charters. The Charter Authority is sending the charters a letter, inviting them to participate in “Weighted Lotteries” to help correct their diversity issues. All the charters are getting a “Weighted Lottery” and the Charter Authority is claiming this is a tool to diversify. Weighted Lotteries do not help at all. Especially with new charter enrollment which required diversity by law. Weighted Lotteries only go into affect if charters are full. Technically if a charter has even one spot open – the lottery is not triggered.

The irony of all this is not lost on me. CCSD is one of the most diverse districts in the United States. Yet our Nevada Charters which are predominantly EMO’d For-Profit Academica – serve the rich and white. Now Nevada Charters are spending money to attract diversity to their charters – advertising, flyers, walking door-to-door, or so they claim they tried to find a diverse child to enroll. The Tax Payer has to pay these businesses to admit a few IEP, language learners or poor children. For some perspective, my public school is 100% diverse on every and all levels – we do not try at all to add diversity. In fact

Nevada never closes a failing charter. Even charters that cannot fill out the application or meet the requirements just sue until they are finally allowed to do whatever they want. There is not remedy to stop this. $950 million in Nevada Charters and not a single soul can tell you where it is or what it was spent on.

This is why I think Jennifer Berkshire is correct. Eventually, there will be no place called public schools. There will be a selection list and rich people will be able to pay to have a teacher and school. Others will accept cash and their children will not receive anything and that will be fine because it is their “choice”. And most will meet in a charter warehouse somewhere to sit in front of a device with software teaching them. The poor will be used to privatized and receive the lesser quality of the lists.

It will be slow. CCSD has a parasite. At this rate, the Charter Authority will just keep growing and making more messes which use up more education dollars. It takes from some to give to others. And folx are just fine with allowing a corporation take everything from the disadvantaged so their own children can get ahead. The so called “progressives” are leading the charge.

It is wrong and I hope we fight it. I believe in our imperfect public schools. I see nothing the charters offer that is new. I do not see them being a remedy at all. There is some limited liability advantages for businesses – is that good use of tax dollars?

I hope I am wrong.

Logically I am just afraid Jennifer Berkshire is right.

She followed up with another comment:

Sadly CCSD and Nevada “Leadership” are TFA. They are here to stay. Having catapaulted themselves above everyone.

An example is the very powerful Rebecca Feiden who control $950 million in Nevada Education Dollars which go to Nevada Charters.

Another is Jana Wilcox-Lavin in Opportunity 180 which spreads charters and gives “grants” to them.

No one wants to be a teacher – seems there will always be an appetite to make six figures and control everyone and everything for an eduphilantrophist like Elaine Wynn.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Nevada, Privatization

Ohio: The Academic Failure of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2022 //
14

Max Londberg of the Cincinnati Enquirer conducted an investigation of the academic results of vouchers in Ohio. His findings were appalling. The legislature doesn’t care about results or evidence or facts. It wants more vouchers, more students to fall behind their peers in public schools. Meanwhile, the public schools lose funding to pay for the vouchers. The story was originally published in August 2020, and I missed it. Scores of school districts in Ohio are suing to block the expansion of vouchers, which will undermine the quality of their schools.

He begins:

Since 2018, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been shifted away from Ohio’s public schools and into private, mainly religious ones in the form of vouchers, all to enhance academic success.

Yet those same private schools mostly failed to meet the academic caliber set by their neighboring public school districts, according to a Cincinnati Enquirer analysis of nearly 2.5 million test scores from schools in more than 150 Ohio cities during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years.

The analysis found that in 88% of the cities in the analysis, a public district achieved better state testing results than those private schools with an address in the same city. A majority of the eight largest urban districts — including Akron and Canton — were among those that outperformed privates.

So Ohio shifts money from successful public schools to underperforming religious and private schools. This is stupid.

Categories Education Industry, Failure, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Propaganda Techniques to Justify Putin’s War on Ukraine

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2022 //
114

Posted on Twitter by @Ve10Ve_Ghost

Categories Propaganda

Newark: Black Students Walk Out of North Star Charter to Protest Mistreatment

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2022 //
24

On Friday, a large continent of Black students walked out of North Star Academy, a high-scoring no-excuses charter school in Newark, New Jersey. The students were protesting the mistreatment of Black students and teachers.

Chalkbeat reports:

Hundreds of students walked out of a Newark charter school and rallied outside City Hall on Friday to call attention to what students said is the frequent mistreatment of Black students and faculty.

Around 9 a.m., students began streaming out of the Lincoln Park High School campus of North Star Academy, which is New Jersey’s largest charter school operator with more than 6,000 students in Newark and Camden. After marching from the Central Ward campus to nearby City Hall, student organizers and a former teacher gave speeches about a culture of anti-Blackness they said pervades the school, while scores of students cheered and waved signs.

“We’re tired and we’ve been fed up,” 12th grader Kwadjo Otoo called out from the steps of the historic building, adding that some Black teachers and students continue to feel disrespected despite efforts by the charter operator’s leadership to address complaintsabout the schools. “Now they’re trying to pretend like something changed, but we know it’s the same school we’ve been going to forever now.”

Several students said multiple Black teachers over the years have left the school, which the students said is because the teachers felt overworked and undervalued. When well-liked Black teachers depart, their absence can leave students feeling isolated, they said.

“It’s very upsetting for us to build bonds with our teachers, to build relationships and connect,” said L. Drummond, a senior at the Lincoln Park campus, “and then see them chased out by the school.”

The school went into lockdown during the protest, and students who left were not allowed back in after they returned from City Hall. Locked out of school, the students began to disperse around 10:30 a.m.; some said they planned to walk home while others set out for a different North Star campus downtown.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Disruption, Education Industry, Newark, Racism, Resistance, Students

Oklahoma: The Long Battle to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2022 //
11

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes about the legislators who are offering bills to undermine public schools, control their curriculum, even meddle with the school lunch program. Their goal is clear: the demoralization of teachers and the destruction of public schools.

Thompson writes:

Why are some Republican legislators in Oklahoma trying to “strip” school lunch programs from the State Department of Education and move them to the Agriculture Department?

The Tulsa World reports:

“The House author told us that some in the Legislature feel too much focus was put on making sure kids were fed during the pandemic and not on educating kids,” said Carolyn Thompson, chief of government affairs and deputy chief of staff at the Oklahoma State Department of Education (SDE).

The author of HB 3432, Rep. Dell Kerbs, claims he wants “to take something off of education’s plate and hopefully move more schools away from ‘heat and serve’ meal options.” But education leaders have said that that is “ridiculous,” and “a solution in search of a problem.” In fact:

The legislation would create duplication within the state’s overall bureaucracy, because their department must still obtain child nutrition data for a host of purposes including calculating state aid funding, school accountability and accreditation, and the federal E-Rate Program that provides schools with discounted telecommunications services.

This new bill should be considered in the light of numerous other anti-education bills filed this session. As The Frontier explained, they are often pushed by national conservative organizations, sometimes using “word-for-word language copied from model legislation.”

For instance, SB 1508, “would require school districts to submit to the State Department of Education detailed expenditure reports on diversity, inclusion and social justice training for teachers and administrators.” HB 3432 also brings to mind bills by Sen. Shane Jett that “would outlaw teaching of social-emotional learning in schools;” “require higher education institutions to post their budget for student and teacher diversity curriculum online;” and “ban voluntary surveys in schools from asking questions about sexuality or gender and would ban school libraries and curriculum from including books that deal with sexuality or gender.”

To understand the purpose of these restrictions, they must also be considered in the context of bills filed by Standridge that “would require teaching ‘patriotic education’” about Oklahoma history; or “impose civil penalties of at least $10,000 on school personnel who teach lessons related to critical race theory [and] require the employee to be fired and blacklisted from educational employment for at least five years.”

Similarly, these bills’ common purpose must also be understood within the context of Sen. Nathan Dahm’s attempt to “require social studies classes to teach at least 45 minutes every Nov. 7 on “Victims of Communism Day;” to “require schools to distribute historical Thanksgiving day proclamations, all of which list the importance and role of Christian faith;” to “add reading requirements for high schoolers that contain some theological themes;” and “require the Oklahoma State Department of Education to contract for curriculum for a four-year pilot project for 11th graders on U.S. history that “narrowly tailors the subject areas to align with free high school curriculum courses from Hillsdale College.”

And, of course these mandates must be seen within the context of successful and unsuccessful bills prohibiting school boards from issuing mask mandates; requiring an “opt in” system for teachers union membership, even though that is already the law; and at a “cost over $116 million” providing “state dollars to students to spend on private school tuition and other education expenses instead of attending a public school.”

To fully understand these vituperative assaults on schools, we must also consider the New York Times’ coverage of the Enid, Ok. school board battles, which concluded: From lockdowns to masks to vaccines to school curriculums, the conflicts in America keep growing and morphing, even without Donald Trump, the leader who thrived on encouraging them, in the White House.

But the fights are not simply about masks or schools or vaccines. They are, in many ways, all connected as part of a deeper rupture — one that is now about the most fundamental questions a society can ask itself: What does it mean to be an American? Who is in charge? And whose version of the country will prevail?

The Times also explained that Enid is in a county which “experienced one of the largest increases in racial diversity in the country over the past decade.” Since 1980, it dropped from 94 percent white to about 68 percent.

And this brings us back to the two, somewhat separate but intertwined agendas that drive these education bills. The corporate establishment and the leaders of the Trump wing of the Republican Party see both political threats and opportunities in demographic change. In the short-run, in order to keep their majority, they must use gerrymandering (such as moving one of the most progressive areas in Oklahoma City into the Panhandle’s congressional seat hundreds of miles away) and reverse trends that expanded the opportunities to vote. But these demographic changes give them better chances for winning in 2022 and 2024 by stoking the fears of Oklahomans who see themselves as being replaced by immigrants, other people of color, and new generations of progressives.

All of these education bills, primarily, are fact-free, fear-based campaigns to win elections at any costs. Being a Baby Boomer who saw the damage done to schools by McCarthyism, and how it persisted into my K-12 education and even into my teaching career, I worry about the long-term effects of these scorched earth campaign tactics.

The second, overarching theme is privatization. Whether it is Gov. Stitt’s undermining of public health institutions as we entered the Covid crisis, privatizing Medicaid, or disempowering the Pardon and Parole Board by preventing them from considering evidence of innocence in their deliberations, or wrecking public education, they want to dismantle governmental institutions.

Whether all of the legislators who support these bills understand it or not, the real goal is kicking vulnerable school systems that are exhausted by the Covid crisis while they are down. Then, rightwingers can ramp up their efforts to fund their cronies, while claiming that the Free Market will find replacements for what they call a rotten, socialist system that doesn’t respect their political base.

Finally, as I was about to submit this post, the New Yorker arrived, featuring Jill Lepore’s The Parent Trap. Lepore also describes the efforts of many Republicans as “whipping up a frenzy about parents’ rights” to win the mid-term and, perhaps the presidential elections. But she then goes back a century to the Scopes Trial, which also followed a global pandemic; explains the racist roots of the anti-evolution campaigns; and the Scopes aftermath, with “’purging’” libraries and “’hounding’” teachers.

Now, the campaign includes the “highhandedness, moral crusading, and snobbery” of today’s corporate reformers’ school choice movement. Lepore concludes, “It’s still going on today.” Some activist parents seem to “want to destroy public education.” So, everyone should read how this isn’t just a brutal fight in Oklahoma Red State politics, but “another long game, a hundred years war: the campaign against public education.”

Categories Education Reform, Oklahoma

BBC News: The Wounded. Children of Putin’s War

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2022 //
24

This story appears on Apple News, taken from the BBC News site. Google it on the BBC site and watch the video if you can. I couldn’t. Anyone who blames the Ukrainians for this cruel war is insane. The attack on Ukraine was completely unprovoked. The Russian forces are now engaged in reducing the city of Mariupol to rubble. 90% of its buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of women and children are buried in the rubble of a theater where they were sheltering. Hundreds more are buried under an arts school. And the world watched in horror.

In his hospital bed, little Artem stares into space. He clutches a small yellow toy tractor but says nothing as specialist nurses monitor his condition. The Russian shell that blasted shrapnel into his belly also badly wounded his parents and grandparents as they tried to flee Mariupol. A victim of Putin’s war and he’s not yet three years old.

In the next bed to Artem lies 15-year-old Masha, also from near Mariupol. Her right leg was amputated after it was torn apart by the blast from a Russian shell last Tuesday.

The very worst of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and what the relentless Russian bombardment has done to the people trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol, can be seen at the Regional Children’s Hospital in the nearby city of Zaporizhzhia.

Hundreds of people have been evacuated here. Their physical wounds are obvious and may, to an extent, heal. The psychological trauma will live with them for ever.

Doctors here and the children’s surviving relatives, asked us to tell their stories, among them Dr Yuri Borzenko, head of the Children’s Hospital. He can’t hide his contempt for what Russia has done.

“I hate Russia,” says Dr Borzenko, without a flicker of emotion on his face. “The girl who lost her leg (Masha) was so traumatised she wouldn’t eat or drink for days. She couldn’t mentally handle what had happened. We had to feed her intravenously.”

“Another boy,” says the doctor, “a six-year-old, with shrapnel in his skull described – without any tears or emotion – watching his mother burn to death in their car after it was hit. Two days later he said ‘dad buy me a new mum, I need someone to walk me to school’.”

What is happening in Mariupol is a humanitarian disaster, even – perhaps – a war crime. An estimated 90% of the city’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. After last week’s destruction of a theatre where more than 1,000 people were sheltering, reports today that an arts school, with 400 people inside, has also been attacked.

Those who’ve been able to escape Mariupol talk of unimaginable horrors. First-hand accounts of bodies lying in the streets, of homes destroyed. Carrying those memories they put as much physical distance as they can between themselves and what they went through….

At Zaporizhzhia’s Children’s Hospital, I came across one grief-stricken, inconsolable father whose family had been completely torn apart.

His daughter Natasha, who was 26, and his 4-year-old granddaughter Dominica, were killed when a Russian shell landed near the shelter where the whole family was seeking refugee from the bombardment of Mariupol.

“I looked at the ground and there lay my little granddaughter with her head completely torn to pieces,” says Vladimir. “She lay there without a single breath and right next to her was my daughter with her legs fractured, open fractures.”

Dominica – whose pictures her grandfather almost caresses on his phone – was killed instantly. Her mother died from her injuries the next day.

As broken as he is, Vladimir is trying to stay strong for his second daughter, Diana. She was also critically wounded in the blast and was about to undergo emergency surgery.

But he could not hide his pain. “God, why would you bring all this upon me? I was not supposed to bury my children, my lovely girls, I failed to protect you.”

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Fascism

USA Today: Charter Schools Collected $1 Billion in COVID Funds They Did Not Need

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2022 //
9

Craig Harris of USA Today wrote a blistering expose of the money grab by charter schools for federal COVID funds. Harris was previously a reporter for the Arizona Republic who often covered charter school scandals in that state where deregulation has enabled grifters to get rich by opening charter schools. This story is a national scandal. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, so I urge you to run out and buy the Sunday March 20 USA Today.

The story begins:

America’s charter schools received at least a $1 billion windfall during the pandemic, an unneeded cash infusion for most from a federal program intended to bail out struggling small businesses, USA TODAY has found. 

More than 1,000 of the publicly funded but privately operated schools that educate a fraction of U.S. children jumped at the chance to collect forgivable loans up to $10 million after Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program in March 2020.

The hastily launched program was designed to save small businesses during the pandemic by helping them cover employee salaries and other costs.

While more than 90% of all eligible businesses across the country took the roughly $800 billion inloan allocations, charter schools were among the first to get the money — ahead of mom-and-pop shops and minority-owned companies — during the early days of the crisis when the economy was cratering and many business owners scrambled to get a financial lifeline.

And charter schools were uniquely positioned to get the loans — even though they continually received funding from taxes, just like traditional public schools. But unlike those schools, which educate the vast majority of American children, charters qualified for what would eventually become pots of free money because they are considered a business. 

A USA TODAY investigation, based on public records,found 93%of the charter schools may not have needed the money because they were in states that continued to fund them at the same level as before the pandemic, or at even higher levels in some cases. These schools also had access to federal COVID grants. 

Records show some of the private companies that operate the charter schools used the money to pad savings accounts or, in one case, hand millions of dollars to an investor.

USA TODAY’s investigation is based on publicly available documents from 1,139 charter schools, as well as federal and state agencies, including 37 departments of education that oversee local funding for charter schools.

“It makes me furious because there was absolutely no reason for those (charter) schools to get that money and take it from small businesses,” said Carol Corbett Burris, a critic of charter schools and executive director of the Network for Public Education Foundation, an advocacy group in New York City. “They successfully double-dipped….”

Charter school advocates said operators were entitled to the loans, which ranged from $150,746 to $9.8 million,because they are technically private businesses. 

“Funding is always difficult to secure but was even more challenging during the pandemic,”  said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Rees added that charter schools typically receive less public funding than traditional school districts and Congress intended for them to get the money because of “the special nature of these unique public schools.”

Critics have a different view. 

A congresswoman who has monitored the program said that while the schools may have done nothing legally wrong, their decisions to take the money were “terrible.” And one superintendent who leads an inner-city San Diego charter operation said that despite the legality, the behavior was unethical because financially strong charter businesses took money from those truly in need. 

“At the time PPP became available, we had not suffered financially,” said David Sciarretta, superintendent of the Albert Einstein Academies, which has 1,450 students from kindergarten to eighth grade at two San Diego campuses. “I saw PPP as a way to help small businesses, especially those in the service sector…There is a fiscal way to look at it, and there’s a moral and ethical way to look at it.”

While Sciarretta declined to call out specifics schools, USA TODAY found, for example, that at least 14 affiliates of the California-based charter chainKnowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) took a collective $28.4 million in loans and had them forgiven at locations around the U.S.

Its national headquarters in San Francisco, meanwhile, saw its bottom line swell 56% to $75 million during the first year of the pandemic….

The concerns about charter schools have spurred critics to pressure the federal Small Business Administration, which is in charge of forgiving the loans if companies used them to save jobs and cover COVID-related expenses, to claw back the money.

The SBA declined repeated requests for interviews in response to questions about financially solid charter schools having their loans forgiven. 

The agency in a late December email told USA TODAY it was committed to helping businesses reopen and that it had removed hindrances for small businesses to have their loans forgiven.

SBA two months later, following additional questions from USA TODAY, blamed the Trump administration for issues of “fraud, waste and abuse” in the program. Yet, nearly all of the loan forgiveness has happened at SBA during the Biden administration.

California Congresswoman Judy Chu is a member of the House Small Business Committee, and she has sought answers about where the money went and which businesses received loan forgiveness. Shamed by media attention in the early days of the pandemic, the Los Angeles Lakers and the national chain Shake Shack returned their multi-million dollar PPP loans.

Congresswoman Chu said:

It was never the intent of Congress to forgive loans to companies, such as charter schools, that experienced no economic loss.

“It’s terrible,” Chu said about the charter schools. “But nonetheless, it is in the realm of what is permissible.”

Permissible, but not ethical. Charter schools got their ”loans” early on because of their relationships with their banks, but minority-owned businesses waited for months.

The PPP program was a boon to the charter industry, which never lost its state funding, but it was ineffective. Harris quotes a study by the National Bureau of Educational Research which found that the program “the program kept up to three million workers employed an additional year at a cost of up to $258,000 per job retained.”

This is a very powerful, well researched article that raises important questions. if charter schools are “businesses,” how can they call themselves ”public schools?” Public schools were not eligible for PPP funds because they are not businesses. Charter schools qualified for public school funding and for PPP funding. They are both fish and fowl. They did not lose money, like the mom-and -pop stores that had to close their doors. But they eagerly took the money that was supposed to save the jobs of people who lost them and save the businesses on the edge of bankruptcy.

Permissible? Perhaps. Ethical? No.


Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Hypocrisy, Privatization

Kharkiv Diary: On the Ground in Ukraine

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2022 //
66

Yakov S. is a 23-year-old art history student in Kharkiv. In this article, which appeared in American Purpose, he describes his life during the invasion.


It is 5:30 in the morning on February 24, and war has broken out in my city and country. I wake up to a phone call from my friend. His voice is convulsive; he is shouting. The war has started, he says. We’re leaving. You have to leave, too. Run.

My first thought: Where are my parents? I rush out of my house to look for them.

The war actually started around 2:00 in the morning. My parents, when I find them, believe everything will be fine. They live in the highest area of the city; you can watch almost everything from their windows. For months, I’ve been able to see the sadness, fear, and despair washing over us. But now the war has arrived. Its terror has hit our hometown of Kharkiv.

I am a Jew—by nationality, as we used to think of it under the Soviets. We still have my grandmother’s wedding veil from her marriage near Poltava at the end of the 19th century. But my great-grandmother was a Cossack who spoke Ukrainian. I was not a Ukrainian patriot; I never understood people who would shout, “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!” I thought they were just trying to sell the country to Europe and America. But I was a local patriot—of Kharkiv. And I feel that patriotism starting to wash over me.

As I read the news, I get more and more worried. The attack is coming from all sides—the separatist-controlled territory of Donbas, the pro-Putin Belarus, the previously Russian-seized Crimea. There are air strikes on all the regional centers. People are starting to rush toward Poland by car and train. Borders are closing. Some have managed to flee, but many don’t have time. Others have decided to join the fight. Some are hiding. Panic is spreading

Friends and relatives gather at our house. Around 11:00 a.m. we walk to the bomb shelter in the city center. The country is surrounded by war.

The government confidently says we are repelling the invaders. We will fight. I didn’t think such valor and will existed in the world any longer. I thought the real heroes were gone decades ago, the heroes of the Second World War posthumously awarded medals for defending the country from the Germans.

As in 1941, without a declaration of war, the fascists are attacking our country. And the most terrible thing, what breaks the heart, is that we are attacked by those who fought with us. Who have always been with us, our brothers, our people. The southeast of Ukraine has always been filled with our brothers, yes, brothers; we have always been one people with the Russians. And now they are rapidly and confidently bombing our city.

They start with strategic objects. They are getting closer to the city. Our military is giving a strong rebuff to the Russians. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are working, our tanks are coming. I’ve always been merciful. Now there is no mercy in me. They came to kill us. On Russian television they say that we attacked them! It brings tears to our children and anger to our military.

Today is February 26, day three in the bomb shelter. I have anger, hatred. They came to kill and they will be killed. To quote the classic, “Whoever comes to us with the sword, from the sword they will leave.” Because of the bombing every day, there is no way to get out. We just go outside for a cigarette break, or just to breathe outside air. And the most important thing is to watch the news, to find out from loved ones whether they are alive and healthy.

Our grandparents are old; they refuse to come to the bomb shelter. Many Kharkiv residents hide in basements. One’s heart doesn’t slow down, not for a single minute. We get out of here just to find out the news and check on loved ones. Sitting here with only thoughts, I wish I could go out and not hear the bad news.

As the war began, I called my ex-girlfriend, saying whatever had happened to us, whatever happens next, I still love you. I ask her to take care of herself.

The regional administration building is now the military headquarters. Sometimes you want to believe that it’s just a dream. My St. Petersburg relative says the same thing. He says that all the people there are terrified. They are Russian intellectuals; they have different opinions, like many Russian stars who are shocked by Putin’s war against his own people.

Tell us, modern Hitler, what wrong have we done to you? What kind of Nazis are you talking about here in Ukraine? There’s nothing like that here. We defend our country; we love every citizen of our country. Be damned. I hate you. I hate everyone who comes to us with war. I pray to God to save my family, our country. I believe in the mothers of those soldiers whom this devil sends to die in our country. I hope these mothers will have their say about these military men who fought alongside ours in Afghanistan.

I believe in those people who are ready to go to the squares of Russia to say no to war. They come out into the squares of Europe and America. And they say “no to war.” And those who now burn Russian passports.

I believe in our victory. God bless our soldiers. From the news and stories of loved ones, the war is going on throughout the border regions, as well as air strikes throughout the country. Air strikes are under way in all districts of Kharkiv. The modern Hitler says that we are saving Ukraine, we do not touch residential areas; but these creatures shoot at all residential areas. They go to our homes, to the roads. Rockets stick out of the asphalt.

Thousands of Russian soldiers are dying, more than died in the two Chechen wars. I feel sorry for these young guys who are dying. But they came to kill; in the end we will kill them.

We sit in the bomb shelter. We believe in the end of the war, in our victory. I’m waiting for the moment when I can get into private bakeries to help bake bread for our military and prepare their meals. I hope to replenish my bank account soon to transfer money to those in need. My work has stopped. I do not earn anything now.

I am twenty-three years old. Since the age of sixteen, I have been engaged with Russian art. I write about our pre-revolutionary artists. Today, I have become a little disgusted by the very word “Russian.” I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Now I think about one thing: life and health, loved ones and our soldiers.

A peaceful sky is overhead. I am reminded of Shevchenko’s words in Ukrainian: “Utni, father, gray eagle! Let me cry. Let me see my Ukraine one more time!” The troops are very close to our city, they are close to our capital—Kyiv, hold on. I believe in our president. I see that he is not running away, as Putin would have him run away. I believe in our citizens and our soldiers, true heroes. I believe in the guy who sacrificed his life; so that the Russian troops would not go further, he blew up a bridge.

I believe in God. I believe in the people who died in these first three days, who will complain to God for us. I remember a child wounded in Yugoslavia, a small wounded child with a torn stomach: “I will soon meet with God, I will complain to him about you, I will tell him everything.”

I am proud to say, “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!”

Please open the link and read the rest of this article, which transports you to Ukraine.

Categories Fascism, International

Why Are School Districts Closing Schools When Students Don’t Benefit?

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2022 //
25

The National Education Policy Center has published a thoughtful critique of the strategy of closing schools. This approach was encouraged by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and by Barack Obama’s Race to the Top. Typically, the local board (or mayor) claims that the district will save money or the students will surely move to a better school. But what if this is not the case. NEPC identifies Oakland, California, as the district planning to close several schools. But it is not alone. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 schools in a single day, the largest school shutdown in U.S. history. Studies subsequently showed that the students did not benefit. School closures typically harm students of color more than white students. The same is true in Oakland.

NEPC writes:

Like others before it, the latest round of urban school closures disproportionately impacts people of color and students from low-income families. Yet there’s limited evidence that closures achieve their stated goals of saving money or improving academic outcomes.…

It’s happening again.

Another urban school district, this time Oakland Unified in California, has voted to close schools that serve a disproportionate number of students of color from low-income families.

Two schools will close this year, and five more next year, according to the plan the school board approved last month. Black students comprise 23 percent of the Oakland school dis- trict but 43 percent of the students in the schools slated for closure.

Oakland is the latest in a growing collection of urban school districts that have decided in recent years to close schools that disproportionately enroll students of color and students from low-income families. Other examples include Chicago, which closed or radically recon- stituted roughly 200 schools between 2002 and 2018, St. Paul Minnesota, which approved six school closures in December, and Baltimore City, where board members decided in Jan- uary to shutter three schools.

“Closures tend to differentially affect low-income communities and communities of color that are politically disempowered, and closures may work against the demand of local ac- tors for more investment in their local institutions,” according to an NEPC brief authored in 2017 by Gail Sunderman of the University of Maryland along with Erin Coghlan and Rick Mintrop of UC Berkeley.

In Oakland, community members and educators reacted to the closures with protests, marches and a hunger strike.

When urban school boards close campuses, they typically cite the schools’ poor academic performance or to the need to save money by shuttering buildings that are under enrolled

Yet it’s unclear that closures serve either goal.

In their policy brief, Sunderman, Coghlan, and Mintrop find limited evidence that student achievement improves as a result of school closures designed to improve academic performance.

“[S]chool closures as a strategy for remedying student achievement in low-performing schools is a high-risk/low-gain strategy that fails to hold promise with respect to either stu- dent achievement or non-cognitive well-being,” they wrote.

It causes political conflict and incurs hidden costs for both districts and local communities, especially low-income communities of color that are differentially affected by school closings. It stands to reason that in many instances, students, parents, local communities, district and state policymakers may be better off in- vesting in persistently low-performing schools rather than closing them.

Similarly, NEPC Fellow Ben Kirshner and his CU Boulder colleagues Matt Gaertner and Kristen Pozzoboni found several harms for the high school closure they closely studied. Writing in the journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, they identified declines in the displaced students’ academic performance after transferring to their new schools, and they found that these students had difficulty adjusting to their new schools after their old relationships were disrupted.

The Oakland closures have mainly been justified as saving money by closing under enrolled schools that can’t take advantage of the economies of scale available to larger schools. Similar arguments were made in Baltimore and St. Paul…

In Oakland, a combination of factors, including gentrification and pandemic-related enroll- ment declines, caused the student population to decline 11 percent over the past five years to just over 37,000. The school closures were touted as a way to address the district’s $90 million budget shortfall.

Yet in a commentary in The Mercury News, NEPC Fellow and CU Berkeley professor Janelle Scott pointed out that even the claimed fiscal savings are minimal. A consultant’s report estimates the Oakland closures could save as little as $4.1 million.

“These estimates don’t fully account for disillusioned families and school staff who will like- ly leave OUSD for private, charter and public schools, fatigued by the constant threat of closure and consolidation,” Scott wrote.

Please open the link and read the full report. Many schools have been closed since the passage of No Child Left Behind. Arne Duncan, among others, celebrated these closings, promising to replace the closed schools with even better ones. That didn’t happen.

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Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry
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