Idaho: Vouchers Violate the State Constitution

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2021 //
6

Two prominent Idaho citizens, Jim Jones and Rod Gramer, warned that proposed voucher legislation violates the clear language of the Idaho state constitution and threatens the future of public schools.

Jim Jones is the former Chief Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court and former Idaho Attorney General and Rod Gramer is president of Idaho Business for Education.

They wrote:


Supporters of privatizing education are about to change the Idaho Constitution and 130 years of education policy without going to a vote of the people. Instead, those who want taxpayers to fund private schools should take their case to the people and let them decide as the Constitution requires.

Idaho’s founders were clear when they adopted the Constitution that the Legislature should support public schools. In Article IX, Section 1 they wrote: “The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform, and thorough system of public, free common schools.”

The Founders did not say the Legislature should fund private schools. They did not say the Legislature should fund religious schools. In fact, in two other sections of Article IX they specifically said no taxpayer monies should go to fund religious schools.

Yet on page two, line (b), House Bill 294 says that state funds can be used for “tuition or fees at private schools.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last summer that if a state spends funds on private schools it must also provide funding to religious schools, thus allowing House Bill 294 to undermine both the letter and spirit of the Idaho Constitution.

This attempt to undermine the Constitution is piggybacked on the popular Strong Families, Strong Students program Governor Little created last year to provide computers, internet service and tutoring to students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If that’s all the bill did, we would support it. But the bill’s sponsors slipped in the private school tuition provision and made it sound like the bill was a harmless continuation of the Governor’s program. Several lawmakers and veteran reporters missed the bill’s real impact.

Supporters of House Bill 294 have some powerful allies like the Idaho Freedom Foundation which advocates for the abolishment of public schools. Another backer is “Yes. Every Kid” which is funded by the Koch Network, created by the billionaire Koch brothers. It is buying time on Idaho TV stations proclaiming how the bill benefits families. Of course, they don’t mention that it threatens the future of our public schools and violates the Idaho Constitution.

Instead of listening to out-of-state billionaires, legislators should listen to our founders and generations of lawmakers who clearly believed that the state’s responsibility is to fund public schools, not private or religious schools.

There is another reason lawmakers should listen to our founders. Idaho ranks last in the nation in spending per student and is already out of compliance with the Constitution’s mandate to fund a uniform and thorough public school system.

This shortage of state funding has caused local communities to raise their own property taxes by millions of dollars to ensure that their schools can operate. If the state cannot fund our public schools adequately, it makes no sense to divert badly needed state funds to support a private education system too.

Ultimately, the people of Idaho should decide whether to change the Constitution and fund private schools. That’s what our state’s founders intended, that’s what the Constitution says, and that’s what we should do. Not have the Legislature make an end run around the Constitution – or the people of Idaho.

Categories Dark Money, Idaho, Privatization, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

An Easter Message from the Former President

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2021 //
80

Former President Donald Trump sent out a message spreading Easter joy. He enthused about the message of Easter and waxed eloquent about hope for a better future for all of us. It was heartening to see him sharing the optimism so many have about a better year ahead. Since he has been permanently banned from Twitter, others tweeted his warm-hearted message about Easter.

Categories Education Reform

Mercedes Schneider: Ed Deformers Create Another “Grassroots” Group of Moms

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2021 //
14

The latest ploy of the billionaires pushing their version of “reform schools” is to fund faux grassroots parent organizations, like the “National Parents Union.” The media refer to them as “family-led.” Like the Walton family? In Rhode Island, as Massachusetts professor Maurice Cunningham demonstrated, a parent group demanding charter schools suddenly popped up, called “Stop the Wait, Rhode Island.” These moms somehow had the money to commission a statewide poll.

In her latest post, Mercedes Schneider probes the latest “grassroots” group of parents, who somehow have the funding to intervene in litigation. It calls itself “Parents Defending Education.” She refers to this group as “prefab grassroots.”

The post is vintage Mercedes, who utilizes her considerable investigative skills to follow the money behind the facade.

Categories Billionaires, Hoax, Parent Groups, Walton Foundation

Arthur Schwartz, the Lawyer Who Beat Success Academy Charter Chain in Court

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2021 //
2
Civil rights attorney Arthur Schwartz is running for City Council in District 3, Manhattan, which includes SoHo-Hudson Square, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Theater District, and Hell’s Kitchen. Arthur has spent his career as a warrior for justice. He was the lead attorney in the successful lawsuit on behalf of parents against the powerful Success Academy charter chain. I donated to his campaign. I hope you will too.

Arthur Schwartz & His Legal Team Win Multimillion Lawsuit Against Success Academy’s Unethical “Got To Go” Policy Singling Out Students With Learning Disabilities

On March 10, 2021 District 3 City Council candidate Arthur Schwartz was part of a team of attorneys representing parents who sued and won a $2.3 million settlement against the Fort Greene Success Academy. In the long awaited decision for a 2017 filed Discriminatory Harassment suit, Judge Fredric Block approved $1.1 million in damages to the 5 families of plaintiffs.https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.htmlThis victory highlights an ethical standard for academic administration at the highest levels of education across America and helps to protect families and students from learning disability-related discrimination and prejudice. In this case it involved 5-year olds.

The source of the suit was the internally code-named “Got to Go” list. The lawsuit accused the Fort Greene Academy principal and its parent Success Academy of creating lists of 5 year old students with possible learning disabilities that they wanted to push out because they were ‘not right’ for the school. These children, most in kindergarten, got suspended 20 times or more per year. One parent was told that her 5 year old was going to be arrested for having a tantrum. The lawsuit took 4.5 years to litigate and settle — as the most successful scoring charter school system in America refused to turn over the paperwork and records requested by the plaintiffs’ legal team in an effort to protect Success Academy higher-ups.

Success Academy Fort Greene (SAFG) opened in the 2013-14 school year as an elementary school with grades K-1, with the intention of adding a grade each year until the school served grades K-4.

Known as the largest and most controversial charter multi-school chain in the country, Success Academy has been plagued by scandals from the beginning. After 2 years, it was determined that the Fort Greene school needed  “turning around,” and newly hired principal Candido Brown was tasked with doing that.

Thus began the infamous “Got to Go” list. The lawsuit alleged that the list reflected Success Academy policy.

In an October 30, 2015 press conference, Brown attempted to explain that his list of children to focus on for removal from SAFG was an effort to “fix” the school. On that same date Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz said she did not plan to fire Brown. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 by 5 parents whose kids had been tortured by Success. The legal team included Arthur Schwartz and the foundation he heads, Advocates for Justice, NY Lawyers for the Public interest, and Skadden and Arps. The parents were initially referred to Arthur by the Alliance for Quality Education.

This is the first in a series of important legal victories I will be highlighting weekly moving forward that City Council candidate and veteran civil rights attorney Arthur Schwartz has achieved in his more than four decades of leadership. This is what leadership looks like. – Bruce Poli
Categories Harlem Success Academy

Robert Kuttner: Biden’s Universal Pre-K Should Be Part of Public Schools, Nor “Public-Private” Partnerships

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2021 //
2

Robert Kuttner applauds Biden’s proposal for universal pre-kindergarten, while warning of the danger of allowing the program to be partially privatized. The same could be written for K-12 education. In state after state, private corporations are using their political influence to privatize public money and si err it to charters and vouchers.

Kuttner on TAP

Universal Pre-K: Will Biden Do It Right?


There is a great deal in Biden’s American Families Plan to be thankful for. In a stroke, his administration has expanded the bounds of what is politically mainstream. Assuming it can get through Congress, which is by no means certain, the devil will be in the details.

For instance, Biden proposes to spend $200 billion over a decade, or $20 billion a year, for what the White House fact sheet describes as free, universal pre-kindergarten for all three and four year olds, through “partnerships” with the states.

Ideally, these should be true public institutions—an expansion of public school kindergartens downward to younger kids, with teachers compensated accordingly, and the federal government paying the increased cost.

The details are not spelled out in the materials released so far. But reading between the lines, it looks like something more incremental and fragmented.

For instance, the administration says that pre-school teachers are required to be paid at least $15 an hour. That equals $30,000 a year for a full-time teacher. It’s certainly an improvement over what many pre-k teachers currently make, and it sounds good—until you appreciate that the median salary for kindergarten teachers is over $59,000 a year.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild and expand true public institutions. Too many of our human services, from the Affordable Care Act, to for-profit nursing homes, to day care chains, are public-private Frankensteins. Taxpayers pay the costs, but providers operate as proprietary institutions that profit-maximize by squeezing actual care and caregivers.

That, in turn, requires government to play whack-a-mole to enforce complex rules and limit the games entrepreneurs play—and government often gets outplayed. True public institutions are more transparent, more accountable, and fairer to both caregivers and clients.

Do we really want to spend another $200 billion to expand Kentucky Fried child care? Or shouldn’t we seize the moment to reclaim the public realm?

This plan does give progressives the chance to push to have this expansion done via public schools, but the result on the ground is likely to be a crazy quilt. The legislation itself should specify that these must be public institutions attached to local public school systems if the Feds are to pay the costs.

It feels almost churlish to raise any questions about Biden’s bold plans. But, in their efforts to expand human services, Democrats over the years have made too many fatal compromises that come back to haunt them. This time, dammit, if we are going to go big and bold, let’s also do it right.


~ ROBERT KUTTNERFollow Robert Kuttner on TwitterRobert Kuttner’s latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy.

Categories Education Reform

Happy Easter, Happy Spring!

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2021 //
14

I don’t get into religion much other than to say it should be kept separate from the state.

But let me take this opportunity to wish you a Happy Easter and a very happy spring.

It has been a difficult, stressful year for everyone.

Some of us have lost members of our families to COVID.

We should all get vaccinated to stop the spread of this disease, to protect ourselves, our families, and our community.

I had my two shots (of Moderna), had no side effects, and feel protected. But I am still wearing a mask and taking other necessary precautions. Listen to the science.

There are mixed reports about whether the virus is winding down or gearing up for another surge. The latter is facilitated by the sizable number of people who refuse to get vaccinated.

No one who was vaccinated has died. It is possible to get it again, but in a much milder version that is not life-threatening.

If ever there was a time when civic cooperation is needed, it is now.

Enjoy the day. Enjoy the daffodils, the crocuses, the hyacinths, and forsythia and other signs of the Earth’s renewal.

Get outside if the weather is beautiful, as it is here in New York, and enjoy the beginning of a fresh and hopeful new season.

Do something generous for someone who needs your help.

Tags
Categories Education Reform

Brookings Study: How D.C. School Choice Intensifies Segregation

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2021 //
88

The Brookings Institution published a study of the D.C. school system, which is almost evenly divided between public schools and charter schools. It was written by three scholars: Vanessa Williamson, Brookings Institution; Jackson Gode, Brookings Institution; and Hao Sun, Gallaudet University. The title of their study is “We All Want What’s Best for Our Kids.” Their findings are based on close reading of an online parent forum called “DC Urban Moms,” where school choice is an important topic.

What they found is not surprising. Choice intensifies and facilitates racial and socioeconomic segregation. This is the same phenomenon that has been documented in choice programs everywhere. The most advantaged parents master the system and get their children into what is perceived as the “best schools.” The “best schools” are those that have the most advantaged students.

The study begins:

Public education in the District includes a system of traditional public schools and a system of public 8
charter schools; in 2018–19, these schools served over 90,000 students at 182 schools. The city is highly diverse, as is the incoming school-age population. Among children under five, 48 percent are Black, 27 percent are white non-Hispanic, and 17 percent are Hispanic.9 54 percent of the city’s public school students are in traditional (DCPS) public schools, while 46 percent are in public charter schools (DCPCS). All students have the right to attend their local public school, or they can enter a lottery for a seat at another traditional public school or public charter school.10


In practice, parents’ school choices are limited. Housing in Washington is strongly segregated by race and class, with popular schools generally located in expensive or rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.11 Housing prices in the District are high and rising, and affordable housing is in exceptionally short supply.12 The District’s school system does not provide regular school bus transportation; children can ride public transit to school for free, but commutes can be long, and it is often impractical for working parents to accompany young children to a school that is far from home.13 Most students attend a school in their own wards, with students in poorer parts of the city facing longer commutes.14


In making decisions about where to send their children to school, parents (and especially more privileged parents) are key contributors to school segregation and inequality.


Even for parents willing or able to enroll their children far from home, there remain fewer options than might first appear. The most popular traditional public schools rarely have spaces available to students who live beyond the school’s catchment area. Popular charter schools often have waitlists of hundreds of students.15 Moreover, researching the schools available via the lottery requires time and resources; school lottery waitlists are dominated by families that are more socioeconomically privileged.16


In making decisions about where to send their children to school, parents (and especially more privileged parents) are key contributors to school segregation and inequality. As the District of Columbia Auditor’s office has stated, “there is a pattern of District families moving away from schools with more students considered at-risk17 to schools with fewer students considered at-risk. These moves are facilitated by the robust choice model in DC.”18

Categories Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Parents, School Choice, Segregation

Gayle Greene: The Country Moves Forward, the Schools Remain Mired in the Past

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2021 //
24

Gayle Green is a professor emeritus at Scripps College. In this post, she rages about the stupidity of the Biden testing mandate. In other areas of American life, we learn from our mistakes and move forward. But our policymakers are stuck in the past, so in love with failed ideas that they can’t let go of them.

She writes:

There’s hope in the air, a scent of spring, anticipation of change, democracy may pull through. Why, then, with K-12 public schools, the broken promise, the dismay?

Biden raised hopes when he promised, Dec 16, 2019, that he’d “commit to ending the use of standardized testing in public schools,” saying (rightly) that “teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know.” Yet on Feb 22, his Department of Education did an about-face, announcing, “we need to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on learning …parents need information on how their children are doing.”

How the children are doing? They’re struggling, that’s how, doing their best, and so are teachers and parents. And it’s the least advantaged who are struggling the most, who, in the transition to online teaching, are likeliest to be without access to the internet, whose families are most vulnerable to loss of jobs, health care, lives. Now this? It costs $1.7 billion to administer these tests, but the toll on kids— the tears, terrors, alienation— is incalculable.

Most people have no idea what a blight these exams are, how they’ve stripped K-12 curricula of civics, history, literature, the arts, languages, even the sciences. Since schools live or die on the basis of test scores, what does not get tested does not get taught, and education is reduced to a mindless drill of math and English skills. No wonder kids come out of school wanting never to read another book, knowing nothing about science, the past, how to read their world. No wonder teachers are leaving in droves; the teacher shortage was dire even before the pandemic. When Betsy DeVos waived these tests last spring, teachers were so relieved that some said it had been worth the move online, to have 6-8 weeks liberated for teaching.

The high-stakes standardized testing regime began with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002). The program arrived in a cloud of rhetoric about “access” and “civil rights,” describing itself as “an act to close the achievement gap… so that no child is left behind.” NCLB was, by 2009, an acknowledged failure, but the Obama administration took it over, renaming it Race to the Top, and requiring that states adopt, as a condition for federal funds, the Common Core State Standards, a set of national standards nailed into place in 2010 by the billions and boosterism of Bill Gates. Gates promised that the Core would “unleash powerful market forces,” which it did, and would level the playing field, which it did not.

And how could it? The only thing testing has ever done for the disadvantaged is to communicate a message of failure and lay waste to public schools. What test scores measure is family income; they correlate so closely that there’s a term for it—the zip code effect. When test scores have shown “low performance,” schools have been closed by the hundreds, mainly in low-income, minority neighborhoods, and replaced with privately-run, profit-generating charters.

Despite twenty years of failure, despite the waste of time and money, the standardized testing must go on. More broken promises.

Open the link and read the rest of the post.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Robert Skeels Beats Charter Industry in Court—Twice

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2021 //
12

Robert Skeels was a public education advocate in Los Angeles who decided to become a lawyer to fight the powerful corporate charter industry. After receiving his BA in classical civilizations at UCLA, Skeels spent years as an activist, inspired by Paulo Freire, then earned his law degree in 2018. This is the only instance to my knowledge where a charter critic decided that he had to get a law degree to fight the charter industry.

As a part-time associate at a law firm in Los Angeles, he has won two cases against the powerful and well-funded charter industry.

He wrote in Medium:

My first win against a corporate charter school was a year ago as third chair in a suit to overturn a wrongful expulsion of a student of color. The Partnerships to Uplift Communities (“PUC”) charter chain (of convicted felon Ref Rodriguez fame) violated that student’s due process rights. Violated isn’t a strong enough word for what they did. PUC unilaterally changed the charges at the appeals hearing and branded the child as a terrorist in his permanent record. Under the tutelage of the brilliant partners at the law firm I was a part-timer at the time (I am currently transitioning to full time there), plus sage advice from @DrPrestonGreen, we built a strong case.

Skeels’ second victory came just days ago, when he defended the blogger known as Michael Kohlhaas in his pursuit of the records of a charter chain. Kohlhaas exposes the dirty secrets of government, businesses, and other powerful forces in Los Angeles. In one of his important exposes, he revealed that Nick Melvoin, who represents the charter industry on the Los Angeles school board, had shared the board’s legal strategies with the California Charter Schools Association while in litigation with them.

Skeels writes:

This latest case was a charter trying to hide all its dirty secrets by not complying with the CPRA [the open records law]. The scandal-ridden The Accelerated Schools (“TAS”) charter chain’s leaders absconded when the community started pushing back and started asking questions about union busting.

Michael Kohlhaas dot org sent sent TAS several CPRA requests in 2018, which they ignored (unlawfully). A year later, I filed the petition for writ of mandate for them. Some ten months later TAS sent some records, but claimed “blanket exemptions” on a bunch of other ones.…

An infamous law firm that only represents lucrative, privately managed charter school corporations staked out the position that any communications with the charter school industry’s trade association — the CCSA — was subject to a range of exemptions under the CPRA.

I suppose I can’t blame them. The charter industry — long used to unaccountably spending tax dollars in total secrecy — fought tooth and nail the imposition of the CPRA and Brown Act added by Ed. Code § 47604.1(b)(2)(A). When the law took effect January 2020, charter school corporations were already looking for ways to skirt the law. At the firm I’m a junior associate at, we use the CPRA for pre-discovery work against charter corporations. Michael Kohlhaas dot org, on the other hand, has used it to expose some of the ugliest, scandalous conduct by an industry already infamous for scandal. Uncovering the vile Nick Melvoin’s sharing Los Angeles Unified School District’s (“LAUSD”) confidential legal strategies with their party-opponent in a lawsuit (the CCSA) was a blockbuster revelation enabled by the CPRA.

The judge in the case ruled that the charter chain was not entitled to the blanket exemption from disclosure for its records.

Skeels wrote: “Let the corporate charter school industry know that they aren’t going to be able to hide their dark secrets anymore.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Resistance

Illinois Restores Chicago Teachers’ Bargaining Rights

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2021 //
5

Governor Pritzker (D) of Illinois signed legislation restoring the collective bargaining rights of the Chicago Teachers Union, which had been suspended since 1995 by a Republican Governor and Legislature.

CTU President Jesse Sharkey sent out this announcement:

After a decades-long struggle, today Governor Pritzker signed HB 2275, fully restoring our bargaining rights. The repeal of the despised 1995 Amendatory Act gutting bargaining rights for CPS unions at last eliminates restrictions on our ability to advocate for our students and families.

For more than a decade, the CTU has fought to win back the right to advocate for our students in our contract negotiations, with our beloved President Emerita Karen GJ Lewis leading the charge to reverse this injustice. Karen understood that laws follow social movements. Like every great democratic leader, she nurtured rank and file organizing and the creation of legislative and political initiatives to build and sustain our movement for common good demands, grounded in the basic rights and dignity of educators and the students and families we serve.  

With his signature today, Governor Pritzker has now restored the right to bargain freely for real equity in our public schools, and advance our organizing for the common good. The restoration of our fundamental labor rights lies at the heart of Karen’s legacy as a fighter for racial and economic justice and as a fearless advocate for those disenfranchised in our City by systemic racism and multi-generational neglect. We owe our students, their families and community allies an enormous debt of gratitude in setting the stage to reverse this unjust 1995 law, passed by a Republican legislature and a Republican governor — and backed by three consecutive mayors. We’re also deeply grateful to the bill’s sponsors, Senator Bill Cunningham, former State Rep. and current Chicago Alderman Silvana Tabares, and former State Rep. and current Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Irvin for their tireless and steadfast leadership.

Those who supported this legislation understand that workers’ rights are human rights. They understand that it was critical to correct the core injustice of the 1995 Amendatory Act and instead return to Chicago educators the central right that every other school district gives its workers: the right without restrictions to bargain for what our students need and deserve.

With the passage of this law and our commitment to common good bargaining, our students and families can at last realize their right to real equity — and never has that commitment been more important than today. Families are struggling under the dual weights of a pandemic that has disproportionately hammered their families and the income inequality and economic hardship the pandemic has exacerbated. Our union is committed to their recovery.

With the signing of this bill, we now at last bargain from a level playing field — with the ability to at last reject the chronic classroom overcrowding, incompetent and wasteful third party contracting, and the desperate shortage of school nurses, social workers, counselors and other chronic staffing needs that have plagued our schools for years.

The state legislature has one more step to take this spring to bring real equity and democracy to our public schools, by giving Chicagoans the right that only we among Illinois residents lack: the right to elect our own representative school board. The families and educators of our school district deserve no less.

In solidarity,

CTU President Jesse Sharkey
Chicago Teachers Union • 1901 W. Carroll Ave. • Chicago, IL 60612 • 312-329-9100
www.ctulocal1.org


 
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Categories Education Reform
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