Audrey Watters: No Plan in Place to Protect Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2019 //
11

Audrey Watters begins each of her posts at HEWN with a description of a bird. Then she gets into the story, the story in this one being an “epistemic crisis,” a society where truth itself is doubted, experts are dismissed, and everyone is entitled to not only their own opinions but their own facts.

I particularly recommend her links. I enjoyed the one about Mr. Rogers. It compels to think about ourselves, who we are, what we believe, why. The kinds of questions we asked ourselves when we were adolescents but then got hardened into our lives as adults.

Categories Accountability, Fake News, Lies

Jan Resseger: The Tragedy of “Portfolio Districts”

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2019 //
19

Jan Resseger writes here about the damage that “portfolio districts” do to students, schools, and communities. The original concept for “portfolio districts” was developed by Paul Hill of the Gates-funded Center for Reinventing Public Educatuon at the University of Washington. The fundamental idea was that the school board would act like a stock portfolio manager, closing low-performing schools, replacing them with charter schools, keeping open the schools with high test scores. Students would choose where to go to school. The concept was adopted by many districts as the latest thing, and many beloved neighborhood schools serving black and brown communities were shuttered. If their replacement got low scores, it was also closed. The students were collateral damage.

She writes:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein launched this scheme in New York City by creating district-wide school choice, breaking up large comprehensive high schools into small schools with curricular specialties, encouraging the opening of a large number of charter schools, co-locating many schools—small specialty public schools along with charter schools—into the same buildings.  Those running the school district would consider all of these schools of choice as if they were investments in a stock portfolio. The district would hold on to the successful investments and phase out those whose test scores were low or which families didn’t choose.

Portfolio school reform has created collateral damage across the school districts which have experimented with the idea. After the Chicago Public Schools, another district managed by portfolio school reform theory, closed 50 schools at the end of the 2013 school year, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, and separately a University of Chicago sociologist, Eve Ewing tracked widespread community grieving when neighborhoods lost the public school institutions that had anchored their neighborhoods.

But there have been other kinds of collateral damage beyond the tragedy of school closures. In a new piece for the NY Times, Eliza Shapiro documents how district-wide school choice in New York City has contributed to inequity along with racial and segregation.

One problem is inequitable access to information. Parents who can afford to pay for consultants and who have the skills and position to understand how to navigate the system are able to privilege their own children with access to the schools widely thought to be desirable.  Shapiro explains: “There is a trick to getting to the front of the lines that clog sidewalks outside New York City’s top public high schools each fall. Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours. On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour. Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.”

Resseger adds:

My own children graduated from a racially and economically diverse public high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.  Articles like Shapiro’s cause me to appreciate our family’s privilege in a way I had never really previously considered.  From the time they entered Kindergarten, our children knew they would someday go to the big high school at the corner of Cedar and Lee.  At a week-long summer music camp in our school district, middle school students play side-by-side with some of the members of the high school band and orchestra. Our daughter learned to know the high school tennis coach when he worked with younger students in the city recreation program. And the summer before his high school freshman year, our son, knowing that the high school cross country team worked out in a city park during August, went to the park and asked the coach if he could start working out with the team. High school for our children was a natural, predictable, and exciting transition. How lucky we were.

 

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Portfolio District, School Choice

News: Big REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) Exits the Charter Real Estate Sector

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2019 //
3

Carol Burris writes about the latest news from the charter industry. This is the same company that Valerie Strauss wrote about, called “Entertainment Properties Trust.” It’s CEO, Dennis Brain, told an interviewer that charter schools were a sound investment, had long waiting lists, and were guaranteed government revenues.

But that rosy picture has dimmed. The long waiting lists are fictional. Charters are likely to close down suddenly. In some states, charter enrollment is declining. The REIT lost confidence in the future of charter schools and liquidated its charter school holdings.

Burris writes:

EPR Properties (NYSE:EPR) is a  triple net lease real estate investment trust (REIT). What that means is that it buys properties and then rents them with the tenant picking up costs like insurance, improvements, and all utilities. Therefore, every dollar EPR makes off the lease is profit. 

EPR used to love the charter sector. It would buy buildings and then rent them to charter schools. In 2017 it had 66 charter schools in its portfolio. By 2018, that number dropped to 60. 
 
EPR had a special relationship with Imagine Charter Schools. School House Finance, Imagine’s related organization, would buy the property. It would sell it to EPR. EPR would lease it back to School House, which would then lease it to one of Imagine’s charter schools at very high rates. 
 
EPR also had a special relationship with the for-profit charter management firm CSMI. It would buy their charter school’s buildings and then lease them to the schools. 

One of the CSMI schools wasCamden Community Charter School.  CSMI paid $300,000 to buy the land from the Camden Redevelopment Agency—the agency responsible for redevelopment efforts in the city. On April 9, 2013 CSMI sold the property to Education Capital Solutions LLC for $500,000, netting CSMI a two-week $200,000 profit.

Education Capital Solutions is the wholly owned subsidiary of Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR).  

In 2016 the school’s “operating lease” was $1,711,368. The next year it jumped to $1,871,506, which represents 17 percent of all school revenues. 

The school folded. But another charter came into the building for which the company could collect rent. 

Now EPR is getting out of the charter school business. It realized it was just too unstable. They have sold off their buildings to Rosemawr Management, LLC.

“Management cited competitive financing alternatives, which induced increasing earnings volatility of the charter school portfolio as the primary reason to sell it.  Additionally, the sell-off will improve overall rent coverage from 1.89x to 1.94x. ” 
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/636862/epr-properties-epr-disposes-charter-school-assets-for-454m
Where is EPR going? It is going to start buying up casinos instead. 
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Tennessee: “Achievement School District” Continues to Show Very Low Test Scores

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
11

Back in 2012, Tennessee introduced its “Achievement School District” and hired YES Prep charter founder Chris Barbic to run it. The ASD was funded with $100 million from the state’s Race to the Top grant. Barbic said he would take the state’s lowest-performing public schools, hand them off to charter operators, and catapult them into the top 25% in the state within five years. Year after year, the ASD showed no improvement. After four years, Barbic had a heart attack and left (he went to work for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation). The ASD never reached its lofty goals.

The latest report on the ASD continues to reflect the failure of the state takeover.

Caroline Bauman wrote in Chalkbeat about the now familiar poor results as the school semester started:

At a make-or-break moment for Tennessee’s turnaround school district, its 30 schools have collectively delivered another round of low test scores.

Only 3.4% of high schoolers in the Achievement School District met the state’s proficiency standards on this year’s math and English exams, while 12.6% of elementary students reached that benchmark, according to data released by the state education department Thursday.

The news is not surprising: The Achievement School District oversees 30 of the state’s lowest-performing schools, the majority of which are in Memphis.

Still, the scores deliver another blow to the credibility of the turnaround effort once heralded as a national exemplar. This year, the district — whose low-performing schools are taken over by charter school organizations tasked with improving them — lost its third leader, had its poor performance analyzed by an academic study, and came under scrutiny from the state’s new education chief. Commissioner Penny Schwinn says she plans to announce major changes to the district soon.

Those changes will target a district where only a handful of students meet the state’s standards in reading and math.

Only 7.5% of the achievement district’s elementary and middle school students scored on grade level in English, down slightly from last year. In math, 12% of students scored at grade level or higher, which represented an increase. Both remain well below state averages.

In the district’s five high schools, scores in Algebra I, Geometry, and English rose but remained very low, while U.S. History scores slightly dipped.

About 3% of high schoolers in Algebra 1 and 4% in English 1 scored on grade level. (Two of the five high schools are alternative schools that serve students who have already fallen behind in high school).

Open the link to see the comparisons between the ASD and the state.

It is sad that other states, such as Nevada and North Carolina, created state-takeover districts modeled on Tennessee’s ASD without waiting to see the results.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Tennessee

Steven Singer: White Billionaires Should Not Buy the Charter Debate

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
9

Teacher Steven Singer writes here about the protest at an Elizabeth Warren debate in Atlanta. 

He notes that a reporter for The Intercept, Ryan Grim, attended the rally and wrote that the protestors were funded by the Waltons, who have never shown any support for civil rights issues and are actively hostile to unions, which lift low-income workers out of poverty.

He also quotes Intercept journalist Rachel Cohen, who wondered why charter parents would object to higher transparency standards.

Singer points out that the billionaire Waltons have used their money to advance for their policy goals.

Carol Burris and Kevin Welner wrote in another article that Warren’s plan would mean additional funding for both public schools and charter schools without closing any charter schools. The Waltons object to her wealth tax proposal, as well as her promise to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, meant for startups but used now by Betsy DeVos to fund big corporate charter chains like KIPP, IDEA, and Success Academy..

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Walton Foundation

The Curious Case of The Century Foundation and Its Charter Advocacy

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
10

The Century Foundation is supposed to be a liberal foundation. I had numerous contacts with it when it was previously known as The Twentieth Century Fund. My most memorable experience involved my membership on a task force in 1983 or so, which prepared a critique of American education and the need for reform. For that era, our task force report was fairly run-of-the-mill. What was remarkable was that our staff director disagreed with the task force. He wrote a ringing defense of our public schools and took issue with the conclusions of the report. His name was Paul Petersen. He is now one of the leading critics of public schools, now one of the most widely published advocates for vouchers and charters. Well, we switched sides.

Fast forward to the present.

The Twentieth Century Fund is now the Century Fund. My ex-husband served on its board for many years. It has a reputation for its careful research and sober findings.

But last year, the Century Fund released a report about how charter schools can promote “diversity by design,” identifying 125 charter schools that promote diversity.

This raised eyebrows because charters have frequently been criticized for promoting segregation, most notably by the UCLA Center on Civil Rights.

The report was remarkable because it was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the anti-union, pro-privatization foundation of the billionaires who own Walmart. The Waltons say they have funded one-fourth of all charters in the nation. Since when does a liberal think tank take funding from a rightwing foundation and deliver a product that supports their charter crusade?

Last year, a parent activist complained about the bias of the report. She wrote her commentary on Leonie Haimson’s parent blog. Haimson, introducing her comments, pointed out a big flaw in the study. She wrote: This list of 125 schools was selected from 5,692 charter schools – only a tiny number.  The methodology is also questionable.  The authors identify these schools by analyzing their enrollment, websites and survey responses from school leaders.  Though the Century Foundation sent their survey about diversity to 971 charter schools, only 86 responded – which means that nearly 40 schools were put on the list even though the school leaders couldn’t be bothered to answer their survey.

This year, the Century Foundation recently accepted a grant of $407,053 from the Gates Foundation “to support the Century Foundation in addressing misconceptions that charter schools exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.”

Read the wording again. TCF is not being funded to inquire whether charter schools exacerbate segregation but to “address misconceptions” that they do. This is not research. It is a contract to provide support for an opinion that challenges the scholarship of people like Gary Orfield at UCLA and Helen Ladd at Duke.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Segregation

Dana Milbank on the Irony of the Impeachment Hearings

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
20

This story is probably behind a paywall. If it is not,  you will enjoy reading it in full. Dana Milbank is one of my favorite opinion writers.

He begins:

But his emails!

Gordon Sondland, Trump donor and Trump-picked U.S. ambassador to the European Union, apologized to impeachment investigators this week for failing to provide a more complete account of the president’s quids and quos with Ukraine:

“I have not had access to all of my phone records, State Department emails and many, many other State Department documents,” he testified, adding, “My lawyers and I have made multiple requests to the State Department and the White House for these materials, yet, these materials were not provided to me. And they have also refused to share these materials with this committee.”

Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the irony.

Donald Trump successfully made the State Department’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — failure to turn over all emails demanded by Congress a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign. “When is she going to release her emails?” he would demand, prompting “lock her up!” chants at rallies by saying Clinton defied a “congressional subpoena.”

And now, how many State Department emails has the Trump administration released as required by congressional subpoena?

Hold on, let me tally it up . . . Zero! Not a single one.

And not just State: The Energy Department, the Pentagon, Rudy Giuliani and the White House have all defied subpoenas and refused to provide any documents, while the administration has ordered officials not to testify and, in some cases, has confiscated officials’ notes and records to keep them from being provided to Congress.

There have always been document disputes between presidents and Congress. But this is the first such blanket refusal at least since Watergate, when Congress made the refusal itself an article of impeachment. If Trump succeeds — Republican lawmakers have, so far, defended the refusal, while courts have moved slowly — it will mean no future president would feel compelled to turn over a single document to Congress. 

Categories Education Reform, Hypocrisy

California Democratic Party: Charters Should Have Elected Boards

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
6

Here is an excellent idea from the California Democratic Party: Charter schools should be governed by elected boards, just like real public schools.

California is a bellwether for the nation. This strong stance shows that teachers are reclaiming their profession from billionaires and hedge fund managers.

Edsource reports:

Taking aim at the majority of charter schools in the state, the California Democratic Party has included language in its platform declaring that these schools should be overseen by publicly elected boards, in contrast to the self-appointed boards that run most of them.

The new language, adopted at the state party’s annual convention in Long Beach over the weekend, was promoted by the 120,000-member California Federation of Teachers and strengthens an already strongly worded section of the California Democratic Party’s platform on charter schools.

It is especially significant because it comes from a state with by far the largest number of charter schools in the nation, enrolling just over 10 percent of all the state’s public school students. It also underscored the ongoing divisions within the party over charter schools, which have become about one of the most contentious issues on the nation’s education reform agenda.

“We need to keep certain services public, and education is one of them,” said California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas.

The party platform includes this new language:

CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY PLATFORM

Urges “support for those charter schools that are managed by public and elected boards, not for profit, transparent in governance, have equitable admissions, adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality, and supplement rather than supplant existing public education program.” — Adopted by California Democratic Party, November 2019

 

 

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

“Grit” and “Resilience” Are Buzzwords that Blame the Victim for Not Pulling Him/Herself by Bootstraps

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2019 //
64

The Boston Globe published this opinion piece questioning the validity of concepts like grit and resilience. 

Author Alissa Quart interviews Christine White, a woman who grew up in extreme poverty yet managed to build a successful career helping people who struggled as she did. But not by coaching them to have more “grit” and “resilience.”

Christine White, writes Quart, has written

a number of posts on on her nonprofit’s blog questioning this resilience refrain. She believes that when “we are obsessing about resilience it obscures the fundamental issues that people have, like a lack of privilege or a history of trauma.” When “resilience” is applied to at-risk kids, says White, it implies “the solutions reside within an individual and not their context: ‘resilience’ skews conversations away from equity.” The assumption is that having “character” will help traumatized people flourish — and if they don’t flourish, there is an implied lack of character.

“Ninety percent of resilience conversations would be better if the focus was, instead, on racial and economic inequities,” she wrote in correspondence with me.

But “resilience” and “grittiness” have become ubiquitous honorifics — likely to come out of the mouths of not only teachers but also therapists, urban planners, businessmen, and policymakers, all praising individual pluck.

Thanks to Angela Duckworth’s bestseller of the same name, “grit” is now a part of American school life: In New Hampshire, for instance, some grammar school students are taught “grit skills” by teachers who follow a “grit curriculum.” One grit lesson includes interviewing a neighbor, for example, who has shown grit and creating that person’s “perseverance walk,” outlining how they achieved their goals.

The terms have even spawned an industry of books, apps, and gurus:

There is a now even a grit and resilience industry.

“Resilience is knowing that you are the only one that has the power and responsibility to pick yourself up,” says Mary Holloway, a “resilience coach” and the creator of the “Boom Bounce Wow Resilience Method.” There are also dozens of self-help books promising to make you more resilient or more gritty, including one that promises to create resilience with the subtitle “How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness.” One of the biggest resilience bestsellers is “Option B” by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Apps have also gotten into the resilience and positive psychology game, with names such as ResilientMe and Happify. And there is even a “resilience planner” bearing the legend “Stay Resilient 2019,” which is currently sold out…

There’s also a growing — though much smaller — academic backlash to the term “resilience.” Critics note the focus on “resilience” can ignore the structural gaps of our economy, for example. Should we really be building personal capacities to triumph over, say, the “adversity” that is the current scarcity of public funding for education?

Call grit and resilience what they are: a substitute for the structural and financial changes that give people genuine opportunity to get ahead.

These terms are an effort to substitute “the power of positive thinking” for equity.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Grit, Inequality, Poverty, Racism

Conservative Lawyers Opposing Attorney General Barr’s Opinions about the President’s Unlimited Powers

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2019 //
35

A significant group of conservative and libertarian lawyers, most of whom served in Republican administrations, released a statement taking issue with Attorney General William Barr on several points, but most especially his belief that the power of the president is unlimited.

Statement in Response to Attorney General Barr’s Address at Federalist Society

November 22, 2019

Statement from co-founders and additional members of Checks & Balances:

As lawyers, many of whom have served in upper level positions in prior Republican administrations, we consider ourselves duty-bound to uphold the Constitution as a document of liberty. In recent months, we have become concerned by the conduct of Attorney General William Barr.

We were troubled by his handling of the Mueller Investigation Report, including his release two days after he received the report of a short letter purporting to summarize its findings, and concluding with no factual discussion that there was no sufficient evidence of obstruction on the part of the President.  Subsequent review of the redacted Report made clear that there was actually extensive evidence of obstruction by the President, and that the only imaginable basis for Barr’s conclusion was his legal view that the President is given total control over all investigations by the Constitution, and thus cannot possibly be guilty of obstructing any criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.

We were also disturbed to read, when it became available for public review, the memorandum that Barr had submitted on June 8, 2018 to the Trump administration, before his appointment, laying out his views on the overall impropriety of the Mueller investigation as a whole, and explaining in detail Barr’s extremely expansive view of the character of Presidential powers.  It is clear to us that Barr’s views as enunciated in this memo are incongruous with settled notions of American government as one of checks and balances and shared powers among the three branches.

And we are now concerned by Attorney General Barr’s November 15, 2019 address to the Federalist Society at its annual convention, in which he issued a call to reform our government in order to “restore” the autocratic vision of executive power that he previously articulated.  In that speech, Barr rewrote history with the unsupported claim that his view of presidential power was shared by the Founders, and has been the dominant one throughout most of our history, only to come under attack during the past several decades.  His assertion, enunciated in bold face in the text of his speech, is that “both the Legislative and the Judicial branches have been responsible for encroaching on the Presidency’s constitutional authority.”

Barr’s view of history, including his claim that the Founders shared in any respect his vision of an unchecked president, and his assertion that this view was dominant until it came under attack from courts and congress a few decades ago, has no factual basis.  Actually, the Founders deliberately created a government of checks and balances, and the effectiveness of different presidents in exercising power within that framework has varied widely.  Indeed, the greatest assertions of presidential power have come in the last half century.  That our system has met those assertions with balanced responses of the other two co-equal branches is hardly a reason to abandon now the system that has served us well for so long.

Donald B. Ayer
George T. Conway III
Jonathan C. Rose
Charles Fried
Stuart M. Gerson
Orin S. Kerr
Trevor Potter
Paul Rosenzweig
Andrew Sagor
Jaime D. Sneider
Ilya Somin
J.W. Verret

Each of us speaks and acts solely in our individual capacities, and our views should not be attributed to any organization with which we may be affiliated.

The affiliations of the signatories are identified on the group’s “About” page. 

 

Categories Justice
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