Kentucky Governor Vetoes Voucher Bill and Pension Bill

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2021 //
7

Democrat Andy Beshear vetoed school bills passed by the Republican-dominated legislature of Kentucky. Beshear campaigned as a friend of public schools, and he came through for students, parents, teachers, and communities in Kentucky.

Blogger Fred Klonsky has the story from the Louisville Courier Journal by Olivia Krauth:

Calling them a “direct attack” on Kentucky’s public schools, Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed a set of controversial education bills Wednesday. 

Chief among the vetoed bills is House Bill 563, which would allow state funding to follow students who attend a public school outside of their home district and create a form of scholarship tax credits that would siphon millions from Kentucky’s general fund.

“Can we expect more from public education? Absolutely,” Beshear said Wednesday. “But the way to do that is not to defund it.”

The measure is “unconstitutional” on multiple fronts, Beshear said, and he expects it to face a legal challenge should his veto be overriden. 

The legislation landed on his desk after passing through the House on the slimmest of margins — 48-47 — raising questions if the Republican-led House will get the 51 votes needed to override Beshear’s veto when they reconvene Monday for the final two days of the 2021 legislative session.

Beshear, a Democrat who made public education a cornerstone of his administration, also rejected legislation placing new teachers on “hybrid” pension plans.

In an education-focused press conference, Beshear signed a bill allowing Kentucky students a “do-over” year after the pandemic disrupted classes and milestones for thousands of kids. 

VETO OVERRIDE OF SCHOOL CHOICE BILL QUESTIONABLE

A provision to create tax credits to rally donations that would go to private school tuition in Kentucky’s largest areas was the main sticking point in HB 563.

Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman, a former educator, said the piece of legislation is “unconstitutional” and “unethical.”

A piece of the bill requiring districts to create open enrollment policies with each other was less controversial, with Beshear acknowledging the struggles some leaders of small, independent school districts face and offering to help find a solution outside of this bill.

“Governor Beshear is wrong to veto House Bill 563,” EdChoice KY President Charles Leis said in a statement. “By doing so, he chose to listen to special interests like the KEA (Kentucky Education Association) over the voice of Kentucky parents who are begging for help.”

Leis, whose group backs school choice measures, asked lawmakers to “put students first” and override Beshear’s veto next week. 

Beshear expects the legislation to be challenged in court if his veto is overriden, but clarified that he is not threatening legal action himself.

He believes the bill could be challenged on the grounds of sending public money to private schools, he said Wednesday.

It also could be challenged due to Kentucky’s larger public school funding system, which has increasingly placed the funding burden on local school districts. 

Kentucky’s Constitution requires the legislature to run an “efficient system of common schools throughout the state,” which several in public education contend lawmakers are not doing due to underfunding...

Beshear also vetoed legislation that previously sparked “sickouts” and the creation of large teacher activism groups in Kentucky. 

House Bill 258 would place new teachers on a “hybrid” pension plan that combines aspects of defined contribution and defined benefit plans, rather than the defined benefit plan teachers have currently.

Beshear said previously the “hybrid” plan could push away prospective teachers when states face a shortage of educators. 

Categories Accountability, Kentucky, Pensions, Privatization, Vouchers

Pennsylvania: Why Charter Schools Get Less Funding Than Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2021 //
1

The Keystone Center for Charter Change reports on issues involving charter schools in Pennsylvania. The site is managed by Lawrence Feinberg, who is a school board member.

In some states like Texas, charter schools get more funding than public schools. In Pennsylvania, they get less, and Feinberg says this is the way it should be because public schools have more expenses than charter schools.

Do charter schools receive less funding per student than school districts? Yes, and rightfully so.

Keystone Center for Charter Change

The tuition payments received by charter schools, which make up nearly 90% of charter school funding, are based on a school district’s expenses. School districts are subject to numerous mandates requiring the expenditure of monies which charter schools are not. For example, school districts:

  • Provide transportation to students, including those attending charter schools and nonpublic schools;
  • Provide health services to nonpublic schools;
  • Identify students who are gifted and provide them with an appropriate educational program;
  • Levy, assess and collect taxes;
  • Pay tuition to charter schools; and
  • Provide access to career and technical education programs.

School districts also provide a variety of educational and extracurricular programs for students that go well beyond those offered or provided by charter schools. This includes interscholastic athletics, clubs, band, theater, and other activities. Charter schools may also provide these activities, but school districts are required to allow charter school students to participate in school district activities in most instances. These expenses alone accounted for more than 15% of school district spending in 2018-19.

Categories Education Reform

Maurice Cunningham: The Marketing of the “National Parents Union”

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2021 //
13

Maurice Cunningham watches the flow of “Dark Money” into the privatization of public funding for schools. A professor of political science, he has recently followed the money trail of the “National Parents Union,” which he points out is neither “national,” nor “parents,” nor a “union.”

NPU markets itself as if it were a “grassroots” group, but it is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch and enjoys the high-priced assistance of Mercury Communications LLP to get its anti-public school, anti-union message into the national media. Mercury currently represents Teach for America and at one time represented Eva Moskowitz (who fired them).

With this expensive marketing, NPU presents itself as an authentic voice of parents.

Cunningham writes:

Here’s an example of the coverage from the New York Times: “National Parents Union, a collection of 200 advocacy organizations across 50 states representing parents from communities of color.” But there is no publicly available evidence that NPU represents parent groups. My research shows that it is mostly comprised of charter school and associated organizations.

Nor am I aware that any of these media outlets has reported on the funding of National Parents Union, which includes not only the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch, but a billionaire boys club of astonishing levels of wealth. (The one outlet that consistently reports on the funders is The74.org, which also receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation. So compliments to them.)

These media outlets accept the story offered up by Mercury LLC and the NPU Comms team, that there is a battle between teachers and parents. But as I said, NPU does not represent parents. If journalists need conflict there is a big one going on: teachers unions against the corporate behemoths of the Waltons, Koch, Gates, Dell, Arnold, and on and on. It’s a good story, just not the one NPU and Mercury are peddling.

You get what you pay for; NPU’s marketing is going great.

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money

Texas: Legislature Debates Whether to Make It Easier to Open Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2021 //
11

The charter industry is turning its lobbyists loose in Texas. Despite the large number of charters in the state (more than 800), the lobbyists want more. More. More. $$$. The Legislature is now debating changes in state law to remove obstacles to charter entrepreneurs and corporations that want more locations. Texas doesn’t need more charters: Charters in Texas are regularly outperformed by public schools.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Companion bills filed in the Texas House and Senate, seeking to do away with hurdles facing charter schools that try to open or expand, have bipartisan support but will move the sharp debate over their rapid growth into the legislative arena.

Supporters of Senate Bill 28, called the Charter School Equity Act, say it would level the playing field for new and existing charter schools across the state by preventing local governments from treating them differently from traditional public schools and by relaxing state controls.Advocates for traditional public school districts say the playing field is tilted in favor of charter schools and the way to level it would require more state oversight and local input, not less.

Among other changes, Senate Bill 28 and its accompanying House Bill 3279 would require open-enrollment charter schools to be considered public school districts for the purposes of “zoning, permitting, (subdivision) plat approvals, fees or other assessments, construction or site development work, code compliance, development” and any other type of local government approval.

This would reduce the “red tape” that charter schools face from local authorities after being approved to operate by state officials, the bills’ sponsors say.

It also would make it impossible for cities to act in ways that were advocated by the superintendents of the two largest school districts in Bexar County in 2018, when they suggested San Antonio could use its zoning authority to geographically restrict charter expansion to prevent financial damage to traditional public schools.

“We think charter schools, and open-enrollment charter schools, are good for the state of Texas. That’s the bottom line here,” said the Senate bill’s sponsor, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, in a recent online news conference. “We are simply putting charter schools on the equity they should have. No city should treat charter schools differently than how they treat somebody else…”

“Right now communities have almost no say on whether a charter school comes in or not,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators.

Brown, who led Alamo Heights ISD as superintendent for 10 years, said leveling the playing field should include requiring charter schools to seek voter approval for funding their expansion and to elect their boards.“Anytime a charter school is being considered in a local community, that local community should have a large amount of input,” Brown said. “And right now they just don’t have that. So I think there should be much more transparency at the local level.”If anything, the SBOE should have more input, not less, on any expansion that would result in public school districts sharing taxpayer funds to educate students, Brown added.

Woods, the Northside ISD superintendent, said the bills, in their current form, ignore the public process that all public school districts must go through to fund and build a new campus. Planning takes years, and voters decide if they want to fund it, Woods said. School districts then have to work with cities and counties to assess the impact of construction in certain areas and get the project approved.

“We elect school board members, city council members and county judges to make decisions locally because they know the community,” Woods said. “And this (legislation) is just another example, in a long line of examples, where local control seems not to be prioritized in the Texas Legislature.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Deregulation, Education Industry, Texas

Peter Greene: How a Non-Profit Charter School Can be Run for Profit

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2021 //
12

Peter Greene reviewed the Network for Public Education’s report on for-profit charter schools in Forbes, where he is a regular columnist.

He writes:

It has become cliche for politicians and policy makers to oppose “for profit” charter schools. It’s also a safe stance, because most people agree they’re a bad idea; for-profit charter schools are not legal in almost all states. 

But charter school profiteers have found many loopholes, so that while they may not be able to set up for-profit charters, they can absolutely run charter schools for a profit. That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but the difference is that one is illegal in almost all states, and the other, as outlined in a new report, can be found from coast to coast. The new report, “Chartered for Profit,” from the Network for Public Education examines the size and reach of “the hidden world of charter schools operated for financial gain.” (Full disclosure: I am a member of NPE.)

The most common workaround for operating a charter school for profit is a management corporation. In this arrangement, I set up East Egg Charter School as a non-profit; I then hire East Egg Charter Management Organization to run the school, and that is a for-profit operation (known as an EMO).

An EMO is an educational management operator.

In some cases, the school and EMO are enmeshed with each other, sometimes with family ties. In Arizona, Reginald Barr runs a non-profit EMO that manages four charter schools; he also, with his wife Sandra, runs for-profit Edventure, which collects $125 per student for managing the schools. The schools lease property from a company owned by the Barrs and hire another Barr company to handle payroll. The four charter schools are controlled by a single board; Sandra Barr and her mother hold two of the three seats.

Some of these management operations are large scale; the report finds that just seven corporations manage 555 charter schools across the country. But chartering for profit can work on a small scale as well; of the 138 for-profit management companies NPE studied, 73 ran only one or two schools. In other words, the EMO is created specifically to run one particular school, not as a stand-alone business venture...

No matter the scale, “sweeps” contracts are a common tool. The management company provides virtually all of the school’s services (building, maintenance, curriculum, payroll, etc) and may even contract not for a set fee, but, as one EMO contract states, it receives “as renumeration for its services an amount equal to the total revenue received” by the school “from all revenue sources.”

There are other ways to pull profits from these operations. Many charter schools are part of lucrative real estate deals. One audit in New York found that the Diocese of New York was renting a facility to NHA for $264,000 per year; National Heritage Academy (NHA) sublet that space to its charter school $2.76 million. Jon Hage, CEO of Charter Schools USA, also owns Red Apple Development, whose website displays 66 CSUSA schools that Red Apple developed and, in most cases, owns and leases.

Cyber-charters are particularly profitable, with one recent report suggesting that Californians are overpaying cyber charters by $600 million.

Please open the link and read about the vultures feeding on public school money.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Michigan

Montana: Charter Industry Targets Rural State

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2021 //
30

The charter industry has set its sights on Montana. This is an odd decision, since the state has no big cities and is almost 90% white. The African American population is less than 1%. The biggest city is Billings, with about 110,000 residents; the second largest is Missoula, which has about 75,000 residents. Montana ranks above the national averages on NAEP.

Montana has two existing charter schools, but the industry wants to make it easier to grow.

Alex Sakariassan of the Montana Free Press reported:

The Montana Legislature once more took up the issue of school choice during a lengthy hearing on a bill that would open the door to public charter schools in Montana.

Speaking before the House Education Committee Wednesday, Rep. Ed Hill, R-Havre, informed fellow lawmakers that Montana is one of only five states in the nation that has not yet embraced charter schools, which are funded by taxpayers but operate independently of the public school system. Hill said he hopes to change that with House Bill 633. The measure would authorize the establishment of such schools in Montana, grant them autonomy over their finances, their curriculum and their staff, and create a new commission and approval framework to oversee those schools.

“This public charter school bill will provide an option for innovation outside our current traditional public school,” Hill said. 

Hill and other speakers noted that legislation similar to HB 633 has been introduced numerous times in the past, specifically during the 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 sessions. None of those efforts cleared the Legislature.

“Montanans like choice, and we’re told we have choice in everything we do except when it comes to publicly educating our kids. Somehow when it comes to public education, we’re told, ‘No, that square peg is going to fit in that round hole or we’re going to make it.’”

ATTORNEY GENERAL AUSTIN KNUDSEN

Throughout the more than two-hour discussion, supporters framed charter schools as giving Montana parents and students more choices in K-12 education…

Public school supporters opposed the bill.

Opponents countered that HB 633 would stretch education funding in Montana and build a parallel and duplicative school system to the one currently overseen by the Board of Public Education. Amanda Curtis, president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees, said that would equate to “growing government.” The issue was also addressed in a legal review note compiled by the Legislative Services Division, which said HB 633 could raise constitutional questions related to the BPE’s authority over public schools. Curtis also highlighted concerns about how the bill would ensure adequate oversight of newly established charter schools...

Curtis’ opposition was echoed by several other major public education associations, including the Montana School Boards Association and the School Administrators of Montana. BPE Executive Director McCall Flynn testified that charter schools established under HB 633 would be exempt from the licensing and accreditation standards required of public schools. Flynn added that an administrative rule adopted by the board in 2012 already allows for the formation of charter schools, citing the presence of the Bridger Charter Academy in Bozeman.…

“This bill is unnecessary,” Flynn said. “The Board of Public Education already has a process in place to establish public charter schools.”

As the discussion turned to members of the committee, several lawmakers tried to gain a better grasp of the scope of HB 633’s impacts. MTSBA Executive Director Lance Melton fielded numerous questions about the financial implications a charter school system would carry. He noted that, as written, the bill would grant a separate basic entitlement to new charter schools, meaning those schools would draw money directly from Montana’s education budget. Depending on the number and size of such schools that crop up, Melton said, the added funding obligation to the state could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Keila Szpaller wrote in the Daily Montanan about the legislative debate.

Its leading opponent is Rep. Wendy McKamey, a Republican legislator, who insisted that families have plenty of choices already.

Opponents…said the bill is riddled with shortcomings and saddles taxpayers with higher costs.

For example, it could add $321,000 in public cost for each new high school in the state, according to the Montana School Boards Association. At the same time, it would take away a requirement that schools teach students with special needs or pay employees prevailing wages, according to the Montana Federation of Public Employees. And it would remove minimum teacher licensing standards, according to the Montana Board of Public Education.

“It’s my understanding that we wouldn’t want anyone off the street coming into our homes to do plumbing,” said McCall Flynn, executive director of the Board of Public Education. “Nor should we expect someone without any kind of educator preparation to teach our children in our public schools, even if that is a public charter school…”

Several representatives from Montana’s education associations argued against the bill, but they weren’t the only opponents. Kim Mangold, with the Montana Farmers Union, said students who attend rural schools in Montana are a vulnerable population.

Rural schools are critical to the largest farming and ranch organization in the state, Mangold said: “These schools are the lifeblood of rural Montana.”

“This act has the potential to remove resources from public schools, especially rural public schools, that are important to farm and ranching today,” Mangold said.

Lance Melton, with the Montana School Boards Association, explained the potential costs to both state coffers and local property taxpayers given the “technically flawed way” the bill was written. In short, he said it would require an elementary charter school with even just one pupil to receive $53,000, or a high school with just one student to receive $321,000.

If every Class I and II district in the state was converted into a series of public charter schools of 200 students each, the bill would end up costing the state of Montana $350 million — an estimated 25 percent on top of the money already going to fund all K12 public education, he said.

“You’d have a nice little gift-wrapped surprise when you arrived in the next legislative session if and when this was to occur,” Melton said of the extra costs.

A very bad bill for Montana that could blow a hole in the state budget and break up communities while enriching charter operators and corporate charter chains. If Montanans are conservative, they will reject this bill.

Thanks to reader “Montana Teacher” for sending these links.


Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Montana

Florida Voucher School Hires Unqualified Teachers, Ex-Con, State Doesn’t Care

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2021 //

The Orlando Sentinel has been covering scandal after scandal in the voucher schools of Florida, but the Legislature doesn’t care about their scandals and is planning to take even more money from public schools to fund more private voucher schools. The Sentinel published a story about one troubled voucher school that has received over $5 million from the state since 2015 despite the fact that it hires teachers without college degrees.

Leslie Postal and Annie Martin wrote about Winners Primary School in Orange County, which recently changed its name to Providence Christian Preparatory School:

The job applicant hoped to teach fourth grade at Winners Primary School, a small private school in west Orange County. She didn’t have a college degree and her last job was at a child care center, which fired her.

“Terminated would not rehire,” read the reference check form from the daycare.

Since 2018, the school, dependent on state scholarships for most of its income, has hired at least three other teachers with red flags in their employment backgrounds and at least 10 other instructors who lacked college degrees, an Orlando Sentinel investigation found.

One Winners teacher — whose only academic credential was his high school diploma — was arrested in November, accused of soliciting sexually explicit videos from a boy in his class. Others have criminal backgrounds or histories of being fired for incompetence in other jobs, the records show. Despite that, the Florida Department of Education recently opened and closed an investigation into the school without taking any action.

The school is constantly hiring because many teachers work there only briefly. With about a dozen teachers on staff, Winners had a teacher turnover rate of 83% between 2019 and 2020. The turnover and the questionable teaching credentials raise doubts about the quality of education offered to the school’s 250 students in pre-K through eighth grade.

“The kids should’ve been in public schools,” said Evan McKelvey, who taught math at Winners for six months, leaving in January after getting hired at Bishop Moore Catholic High School. “All of the public schools around here are leagues better than that place.”

Almost all the students attend because Florida’s scholarships, often called school vouchers, cover their tuition. Since 2015, Winners, a for-profit school run by a married couple with a history of financial problems, has received more than $5.1 million in state scholarship money.

The school’s students use the state scholarships — Family Empowerment and Florida Tax Credit — that aim to help children from low-income families attend private schools...

Typically, the nearly 2,000 private schools that take state scholarships do not need to make public information on their operations or their employees. Despite state support, taxpayers have no right to see who is hired or what is taught at these schools.

Because of the teacher’s arrest at Winners, however, the department opened an investigation, telling the principal it was worried the school could be in violation of state scholarship laws because “proper vetting during the hiring process is not occurring,” according to a letter sent to the school Nov. 19.

“When we’re made aware of situations like this, our team thoroughly investigates,” said Eric Hall, senior chancellor at the education department, when asked about Winners at a January meeting of the Florida Senate’s education committee. ”We take these things very seriously. We would make sure that we hold those institutions or those individuals accountable.”

Less than two months later, however, the department closed its investigation without taking any action against the school, despite a file depicting a shoddy employee vetting process and a history of questionable teacher hires. The school faced similar state inquiries in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and was cleared to remain a scholarship school then, too.

That is because the Republican-led Legislature has written the scholarship program laws to give the state only limited power to oversee participating private schools. As the Sentinel reported in its 2017 “Schools Without Rules” series, some of the schools have hired teachers with criminal backgrounds, been evicted, set up in rundown facilities and falsified fire and health reports but still remained in the voucher programs.

This year, the Florida Senate is considering a bill to expand the scholarship programs that already serve more than 181,000 students and cost nearly $1 billion, so that more children could use them and more state money would be spent.

The Legislature also has turned down requests to stiffen the rules that govern participating private schools. In 2018, for example, a proposal to require private schools’ teachers to have bachelor’s degrees — as the state demands of its public school teachers — was rejected. Advocates say the scholarships, some of which go to children with disabilities, give parents options outside public schools, and if parents aren’t happy with the private school they pick, they can move their child to another campus...

The education department investigated the school previously after a complaint from a parent who wrote the state to say the campus was dirty and “children of all ages are running out of the classroom screaming and hitting each other,” as well as after a report from the Florida Department of Children and Families that a teacher had hurt a student and the Sentinel’s report in 2018 that the school had hired a felon as a teacher.

A custodian at the school served time in prison for a firearms violation.

The story goes on with more details about the checkered past and present of a “school without rules” and a legislature that happily hands out millions to anyone who asks for them, all in the name of “school choice.” Even bad choices are fine in Florida.

Subscribe to the Orlando Sentinel to read the full story.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Disruption, Failure, Florida, Teachers, Vouchers

Valerie Strauss on the NPE Report on For-Profit Charters

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2021 //
7

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post reviews the Network for Public Education report on for-profit charters, which explains how such money-grabbers function in states where they are supposedly illegal. Arizona is the only state where for-profit charters are legal, yet the report says they operate in 26 states and D.C. In Florida and Michigan, the majority of charters are run by for-profit companies.

Strauss points out that Joe Biden promised to cut off federal funding to for-profit charters. Here is a road map he can use to keep his promise.

She writes:

Now a new report, titled “Chartered For Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain,” details how many for-profit management companies (referred to as EMOs) evade state laws banning for-profit charters.


They set up nonprofit schools and then direct the schools’ business operations to related corporations. For example, it says, one of the largest EMOs, National Heritage Academies, “locks schools in with a ‘sweeps contract’ where virtually all revenue is passed to the for-profit management corporation, NHA, that runs the school.”


“In other cases, the EMO recommends their own related companies for services that include leasing, personnel services, and curriculum,” it says.


The report was produced by the Network for Public Education, an education advocacy group that opposes charter schools. It was written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning New York principal, and Darcie Cimarusti, the network’s communications director.


The authors wrote that despite “strict regulations against the disbursement of funds from the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) to charter schools operated by for-profit entities,” they identified more than 440 charter schools operated for profit that received grants totaling approximately $158 million between 2006 and 2017.


They also found that fewer disadvantaged students, proportionally, attend charters run for profit than at traditional public schools.


“Comparing the five cities with the most for-profit charter schools (by the proportion of students attending these schools) revealed that in all but one city — Detroit — for-profit run charters served far fewer students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch,” the report says. “In all cities, for-profit-run schools serve fewer students who receive services” under the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.


Charters schools are publicly financed but privately operated. About 6 percent of U.S. schoolchildren attend charter schools, with 44 states plus the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico having laws permitting them.


Charter advocates say that these schools offer choices to families who want alternatives to troubled schools in traditional public school districts. Critics say that charter schools take money from public districts that educate most American children and are part of a movement to privatize public education.
This report is the third on federal funding of charter schools that the Network for Public Education has published since 2019. The earlier reports chronicle the waste of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on charter schools that did not open or were shut down — and revealed that the U.S. Education Department failed to adequately monitor federal grants to these schools. You can learn about the first two reports here and here.


For years, charter schools enjoyed bipartisan support — and were backed by the administrations of presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But more recently, many Democrats have become skeptical of the charter movement, especially those schools that are operated or managed by for-profit entities — and Biden has vowed to stop federal funding for-profit charters.


But what is a for-profit charter?
“The term ‘for-profit charter school,’ while commonly used, does not accurately describe the vast majority of charters designed to create private profit,” the new report says.


While only one state — Arizona — legally allows for-profit entities to be licensed to operate charter schools, for-profit entities find ways to set up schools in states that only allow nonprofits to operate, it says.
The new report explains that typically, an EMO would find individuals interested in operating a charter school and then help “them create a nonprofit organization and apply for a charter license.”


Then, the board of the nonprofit group “enters into a contract with the for-profit EMO to run the school,” the report says. For-profit owners “maximize their revenue through self-dealing, excessive fees, real estate transactions, and under-serving students who need the most expensive services,” the Network for Public Education says.


Between September 2020 and February 2021, the authors said they identified more than 1,100 charter schools that have contracts with one of 138 for-profit organizations to control the schools’ key — or total — operations, including management, personnel and curriculum...

The report’s authors make recommendations to the U.S. Education Department and states regarding charters that are operated for profit, including:


• The Education Department “should conduct an extensive audit of present and former grantees to ascertain compliance with all regulations that define the for-profit relationship.”

• The federal government “should define a for-profit charter school as a school in which more than 30 percent of all revenue flows directly or indirectly to for-profit vendors.”

• All states should “follow the lead of Ohio by listing the management providers and posting their contracts with charter schools. To that information, the profit status of the EMO should be added.”

• Sweeps contracts should “be outlawed in every state.”• Related corporations of for-profit and nonprofit management companies should “be prohibited from doing business with their managed charter schools.”

• All charters should “be held by the school or campus itself, and not by a nonprofit subsidiary.”• A national database should “be developed that lists all charter EMOs and their corporate status (for-profit or nonprofit), along with their address and the name(s) of the private corporation’s owner(s).”

Categories Biden, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Network for Public Education

NEPC: Another Useless Report from NCTQ

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2021 //
8

The National Education Policy Center frequently engages independent scholars to review think tank reports, which are often advocacy reports.

In this report, the NEPC scholars review the latest report from the National Center on Teacher Quality, which was formed about 20 years ago to take down teachers’ colleges. See this post.

NEPC Review: 2020 Teacher Prep Review: Clinical Practice and Classroom Management (October 2020)

Reviewers: Jamy Stillman and  Katherine Schultz March 16, 2021

NCTQ’s 2020 Teacher Prep Review focuses on two areas of teacher preparation: clinical practice and classroom management. The report uses an approach that is now familiar to readers of NCTQ publications: asserting a set of preferred practices and then applying those criteria to teacher education programs. Although NCTQ reports have been critiqued for their limited use of research and highly questionable research methodology, this report employs the same approaches as earlier NCTQ reports. Rather than analyzing the characteristics of successful programs preparing teachers for a wide range of contexts, the report is based exclusively on adherence to or compliance with NCTQ internal standards that are neither widely accepted nor evidence-based. Thus, the report’s value is diminished and is unlikely to transform teacher preparation

Categories Education Reform, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teacher Education

Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle: In Finland, Education is a Basic Civil Right

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2021 //
26

In this post, Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle respond to a recent article that pitted civil rights groups against advocates for the Finnish model of education. They found the dichotomy puzzling. They wrote this article for this blog.

They write:

Two decades ago, Finland made big news in international education circles. Against all odds it became a top-performer in OECD’s first PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) study that compared 15-year-olds’ knowledge and skills in reading, mathematical and scientific literacies. Since about 2010 education experts and pundits in the United States have debated whether there is anything at all that American school systems could learn from that small Nordic nation’s school system. Ten years on and these debates still go on.


In their March 15, 2021 essay “Finland Meets Civil Rights”, Professor Jal Mehta and co-author Krista Galleberg make good points, including “we can draw on Finnish lessons while making them more relevant to our complex, multi-racial, and systemically inequitable context”, and “build shared responsibility instead of finger pointing, policies based in trust instead of distrust, and schools where Black and Brown students thrive instead of merely survive.”


But in framing their argument, Mehta and Gallebergmake the curious claim that “Since the beginning of the No Child Left Behind era, there has been a schism between what you might think of as the ‘Finland folks’ and much of the civil rights community, particularly its policy and legal advocates.”


We are aware of no such schism. We are curious to know which civil rights advocates would oppose the key foundations of the Finnish education system that are adaptable to the American context – such as comprehensive healthservices for every child and mother from birth, teachers trained and respected as professionals, free healthy school lunches for all, regular play and physical activity as part of every schools’ workplan, smaller class sizes, early indidualized special education support throughout schooling, equitable funding of schools, universal early childhood education and care as a basic right of every child, and highly collaborative schools that strive to integrate students of different capabilities and backgrounds.


According to Mehta and Galleberg, “accountability in the U.S. has historically been promoted by civil rights advocates and bemoaned by the Finland folks.” In fact, the opposite is true in Finland, which places the highest national emphasis on accountability– based on trust and constant productive dialogue between highly professional teachers, children, parents and policymakers. Moreover, Mehta and Galleberg also fail to explain to their readers that in Finland all schools and teachers operate under professional responsibility that expands far beyond the typical punitive,vertical accountability mechanisms that are typical in U.S. education administration.


What Finland does not is waste time or money on so-called “test-based accountability,” or basing its school system on the low-quality, expensive and ineffective governing metric of the universal standardized testing of children, as the United States has done under Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump, and seems to be continuing under President Biden, despite his clear campaign promise to stop it. Instead, the performance of Finland’s education system is monitored by multiple measures that include state-led sample-based standardized student assessments and locally managed school self-evaluations and peer reviews.


 The verdict is in on test-based accountability – it doesn’t work. Twenty years of it has achieved little to no sustained improvement in reading and math outcomes or in reducing achievement gaps in the United States, which were its main objectives. Today, the main driving forces behind “doubling down” on this failure are not civil rights organizations but under-informed philanthropists, politicians and business leaders.

We also find claims by Mehta and Galleberg that “Even today, educational reforms in Finland are framed as part of the country’s national defense plan” and “Excellent education for all is part of the nation’s response to Russian aggression” strange and without factual basis. It is a mistake to believe that Finland’s education policies are designed primarily to serve economic or national security interests. Furthermore, arguing that “Educational equity is therefore not treated as a national security imperative in the United States as it is in Finland” is simply not true. Promoting equity and social justice through education in all Nordic countries is based on human rights imperatives before anything else, certainly something that any civil rights advocate in the United States would wholeheartedly support.


The main lesson of Finland for any nation is that it is possible – and indeed necessary – to strive for both excellence and equity for all students. According to recent data from the OECD, Finland achieves both the highest efficiency of all the developed world’s education systems as measured by hours of study and learning outcomes, and the least performance variation between schools. “The neighborhood school is the best school” is a mantra often heard in Finland, and it is a reality that is widely achieved.


 Finland has deliberately designed its education system, from primary school to higher education, on the values and principles of equal rights to education. Finland upgraded the teaching profession in the 1980s to serve that purpose, so that each and every child would have a great public school in their neighborhood.

In the context of civil rights, Finland is the ultimate American school system.

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case of 1954 declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, but it also stipulated in its order that public education “is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” That simple, beautiful phrase is settled national policy in the United States, but it has never been fully honored.
 
Those words should be symbolically carved onto the entranceways of every school, legislature and education ministry on Earth.

In Finland, they already are.

Pasi Sahlberg is a Finnish educator who has researched and examined education policies in Finland and the United States. His book “Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from Educational change in Finland”published by Teachers College Press won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award issued by the University of Louisville for an idea that has potential to change the world. He is currently Professor of Education Policy at the UNSWSydney.


William Doyle has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Finland, as a lecturer at Finland’s largest teacher training university, and as an advisor to the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland. In the last three years he has been a public school father in New York City and Tokyo, and currently in Helsinki, where he lives with his family.

Sahlberg and Doyle are co-authors of “Let the Children Play: For the learning, well-being, and life success of every child” (2019), published by Oxford University Press.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Equity, International
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