North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
11

This is a story so nutty that it would be hilarious if there were no children involved. Instead, it is an outrage.

When the fringe rightwingers of the Tea Party won control of the North Carolina legislature in 2010, they promptly passed laws authorizing charters and vouchers and transferring the funding from the state’s successful N.C. Teaching Fellows Program (which prepared career teachers) to the temps in Teach for America.

Then they looked wistfully to Tennessee and realized that what they were missing was a mechanism for state takeover of low-scoring public schools. Tennessee had its very own “Achievement School District,” funded by $100 million of federal Race to the Top money, and North Carolina wanted to do the same thing. The Tennessee ASD  took control of the state’s lowest-performing schools and pledged to catapult them into the top 20% of schools in the state.

By 2016, it was clear that the ASD was a total failure but that did not deter North Carolina lawmakers. Give them credit for a combination of gullibility and ignorance.

To help the state takeover pass, a very wealthy conservative entrepreneur from Oregon named John Bryan funded a campaign for the state takeover legislation. Bryan handed out about $600,000 to Legislative candidates from 2011 to 2016.

The bill passed, and now North Carolina had its very own Innovative School District. The law said the state would take over up to five low-performing schools in its first year, which would be turned into charter schools.

But now the story gets even better! Oregon entrepreneur John Bryan had his very own charter chain, called TeamCFA, which already operated 13 charters in North Carolina.

Why not give the contract for the ISD to TeamCFA?

The only problem was that no public school wanted to be part of the ISD. Each time a school was designated by the state, the parents fought back, contacted their legislator, and avoided the state takeover.

Ultimately, only one school joined the ISD: Southside Ashpole Elementary School in Robeson County. The school was turned into a charter school operated by a new company called Achievement for All Children.

Achievement For All Children is heavily connected to Oregon resident John Bryan, a generous contributor to political campaigns and school-choice causes in North Carolina. He has taken credit for passage of the law creating the Innovative School District.

The board of directors for Achievement for All Children includes former Rep. Rob Bryan, a Republican from Mecklenburg County who introduced the bill creating the new district. John Bryan contributed about $17,000 to Rob Bryan’s campaigns for the state legislature from 2013 to 2016.

Tony Helton is chief executive officer of both Achievement For All Children and TeamCFA, a charter school network founded by John Bryan.

But most of the questions this week focused on the qualifications of AAC, which was formed in February 2017.

An independent third-party evaluation by education consulting firm SchoolWorks said it’s unclear whether AAC “is legally eligible to operate and manage” Southside Ashpole because state law says the company chosen must have a record of results in improving performance for low-performing students or schools.

The company plans to partner with TeamCFA, which has 13 charter schools in North Carolina. But SchoolWorks says TeamCFA’s schools have “a mixed record of student achievement.”

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article208006534.html#storylink=cpy

The new Innovative School District had a new principal and its own Superintendent, quite a lot of leadership for one little school.

The State Board of education just got an evaluation of its takeover school.

Test scores, already low, dropped a bit. The new charter got a grade of F.

The school saw high administrative turnover:

Behind the scenes, the report says rifts developed between the principal and some faculty, which were due in part to the significant leadership changes in the district. In the past two years, the program has seen three superintendents, two principals and two different peoplerunning Achievement For All Children.

And despite the experiment’s negative evaluation, the state is supposed to throw more public schools into the “Innovative School District.”

Under state law, four more schools have to be added to the district for the 2020-21 school year. A list of 12 schools being considered for takeover (none in the Triangle) was released in September.

State board members and State Superintendent Mark Johnson met Wednesday with state lawmakers to ask them to approve a delay in selecting any new schools this year.

Expect public schools chosen to enter the failed ISD to fight back.

This is not funny. This is education malpractice.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, North Carolina, Privatization

Washington Post: Trump’s Claims of Immunity from Impeachment Are Unprecedented

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
37

 

Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to impeach the president. Any president who is impeached is tried by the Senate.

The relevant sentence says:

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

The White House sent a letter to the House declaring that its impeachment inquiry was “unconstitutional.”

The Washington Post wrote about this bizarre opinion and cited various legal scholars.

In a series of legal maneuvers that have defied Congress, drawn rebukes from federal judges and tested the country’s foundational system of checks and balances, President Trump has made an expansive declaration of presidential immunity that would essentially place him beyond the reach of the law.

In courts and before Congress, Trump’s legal teams are simultaneously arguing two contradictory points: that the president can’t be investigated or indicted by prosecutors because Congress has the sole responsibility for holding presidents accountable, and that the House’s impeachment inquiry is an unconstitutional effort that the White House can ignore.

“We have a president who simply doesn’t believe that Congress is a coequal branch of government,” said Elliot Williams, who helped run the Justice Department’s legislative affairs office during the Obama administration. “That’s a huge departure from anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.”

The broad legal effort escalated on Tuesday when the White House counsel sent a letter to House Democratic leaders dismissing Congress’s impeachment inquiry as “illegitimate” and stating that the entire executive branch would refuse to cooperate with it…

In his eight-page letter to Congress on Tuesday, White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone declared that “the President has a country to lead” and claimed that Congress’s attempts at oversight were overly partisan, lacked due process and ran afoul of constitutional principles. Echoing Trump, Cipollone made several political points in his letter, accusing Democrats of trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election….

Several legal scholars panned Cipollone’s letter as a political document with little legal relevance.

Michael J. Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, said the White House letter amounted to “a bunch of political talking points” with a “completely backwards” interpretation of the Constitution.

The Constitution gives the House the “sole power of impeachment” and does not prescribe how the process should unfold, said Gerhardt, author of “Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

“The president doesn’t get to dictate to the House how it should do its job,” he said. “This is an attempt to flout the law and place the president above the law.”

Ilya Somin, a professor at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, joked in a Facebook post that the Trump administration’s legal reasoning made him wonder “whether the White House counsel was sick the day they taught law at law school.”

Somin also rejected the assertion from the White House that the inquiry violates “constitutionally mandated due process.” An impeachment inquiry, he said in an interview, is not a criminal trial.

“What’s at stake is losing a position of power,” Somin said. “None of the rights the White House demands” are required by the Constitution.

But Trump has long held an expansive view of executive power and has cited Article II of the Constitution, which defines the powers of the executive branch, as a catchall that gives him wide latitude.

“Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” Trump said in a June interview with ABC News.

Several federal judges have disagreed with the administration’s claim that the president is above the law.

A federal judge in New York this week called Trump’s claims of immunity “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” The judge denied the president’s request to block the Manhattan district attorney from accessing Trump’s tax returns. “The Court cannot square a vision of presidential immunity that would place the President above the law with the text of the Constitution, the historical record, the relevant case law” or any other authority, wrote U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

In an earlier ruling in Washington, issued before the start of the House impeachment inquiry, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta refused to stop a House subpoena for Trump’s accounting firm records.

“It is simply not fathomable,” the judge wrote, “that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct — past or present — even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.”

Clearly, Trump has never read Article II of the Constitution, which does not allow him to do whatever he wants.  His lawyer seems to think that Trump is just too darn busy running the country to be impeached, but the Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment, notwithstanding the president’s busy schedule (Trump’s schedule consists mainly of watching FOX News, tweeting, lunching with Mike Pence, and playing golf).

If the House votes to impeach, Trump will have the rights of due process at his Senate trial.

That is, if the Constitution means what it says.

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform

Chicago Charter School Prepares to Join CTU Strike

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
2
Chicago Teachers Union

NEWS ADVISORY:
For Immediate Release| ctulocal1.org

CONTACT: Chris Geovanis, 312-329-6250, 312-446-4939 (m), ChrisGeovanis@ctulocal1.org

  • 7:00 a.m., Thurs. Oct. 10: Sharkey, charter teachers to announce strike date
    Passages charter school, 1643 W. Bryn Mawr Ave., Chicago

CTU president to join charter teachers as Passages announces strike date

CEO for lone CPS-funded charter earns equal to CPS CEO who oversees 500+ schools, as management undermines special ed, English language supports and sanctuary for immigrant/refugee students.

CHICAGO—After months of fruitless negotiations, CTU bargaining team members at Passages Charter School will announce a strike date at 7:00 a.m. this Thursday, October 10 at the school, located at 1643 W. Bryn Mawr. They’ll be joined by CTU President Jesse Sharkey, as tens of thousands of CTU members in CPS district-run schools brace for a possible strike next week.

Passages’ students speak dozens of languages, and come from across Mexico, Central and South America, Asia and the African continent. Close to 70 percent are low-income. Over half are Black, Latinx or other children of color. Almost four in ten have limited English skills, and the school has one of the highest percentages of refugee students in CPS.

Yet charter holder Asian Human Services, which owns and runs the school, continues to refuse to even bargain over, let alone agree to, sanctuary language to protect the school’s immigrant and refugee students.

“Last year, every union charter school we bargained with agreed to sanctuary language,” said CTU-ACTS Chair Chris Baehrend. “The CTU has even reached a tentative agreement with CPS around sanctuary language in district-run schools. But Asian Human Services, which has a mission of helping refugees and immigrants, refuses to even bargain with us over this critical issue. Many of our students come from immigrant and refugee families. They need these protections—especially in the era of Trump and with the huge carve-outs that remain in Rahm Emanuel’s ‘Welcoming City’ sanctuary ordinance.”

Staffing is also a critical issue. The school’s chronic shortage of teachers and paraprofessionals for English language learners and special education students is approaching a crisis level for students, creating high and destabilizing turn-over and harsh working conditions for remaining educators. Those educators voted unanimously to authorize a strike on September 23.

According to IRS data for the charter holder, Asian Human Services, CEO Craig Maki made $247,725 plus $16,000 in additional compensation for the latest year available. Yet Passages pays teachers at the school 28% less than their colleagues at CPS district-run schools.

# # #

The Chicago Teachers Union represents nearly 25,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, the nearly 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information, please visit the CTU website at www.ctulocal1.org.
Categories Accountability, Chicago, Teacher Pay, Union

Trump Hates the Government He Leads

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
44

The deranged man in charge of the federal government despises the people who work for the federal government.

If they dare to dissent from his unhinges behavior, he says they are spies or they are part of the “deep state” that is determined to thwart his self-aggrandizing policies.

Yet there are some who have spoken out, most recently 90 who served as national security professionals, including some on the Trump administration.

The key to understanding this disagreement is that Trump hates anyone who disagrees with him and everyone who knows more than he does. That’s almost everyone who is a career professional in the foreign service.

An article in the Washington Post describes the concerns of national security officials, who fear what Trump is doing but worry that speaking out will reinforce his idiotic complaints about a “deep state.”

Trump has feuded with the national security community since many in the Republican establishment opposed his candidacy in 2016. And throughout the investigation into Russian interference in that election, the president sought to disparage U.S. intelligence agencies as a part of a politically motivated campaign to sabotage his presidency and sought to target some who spoke against him as partisan foils.

Those who have come forward since the Ukraine impeachment inquiry was announced said they are determined to make clear that Trump’s conduct falls well outside the institutional boundaries of the presidency.

“What is happening currently is not normal,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who served as a U.S. intelligence officer on Russia and Eurasia before stepping down in 2018. “This represents a deviation from the way that these institutions regularly function. And when the institutions don’t work, that is a national security threat.”

She was among 90 national security veterans who signed an open letter published Sunday in support of the anonymous whistleblower who filed a complaint that Trump had acted improperly in asking the Ukranian president to investigate Biden in a July phone call.

Trump has attempted to intimidate other government officials into not cooperating by casting those who offered information to the whistleblower as “close to spies.” The open letter emphasized that the whistleblower “is protected from certain egregious forms of retaliation.”

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s critics have seized on criticism from ex-officials as evidence that Democrats have more than enough material to justify the impeachment proceedings against him and to try to remove him from office.

McGurk, the former special envoy charged with coordinating the global campaign against the Islamic State, issued a scathing series of tweets Monday calling Trump “not a Commander-in-Chief” for his abrupt decision to order U.S. troops out of northern Syria. The move could put Kurdish forces, longtime partners in the fight against ISIS, in jeopardy.

Trump makes “impulsive decisions with no knowledge or deliberation,” said McGurk, who registered similar concerns in December when he resigned in protest.

 

Categories Education Reform

Teresa Hanafin on Trump’s Stonewalling of Impeachment Inquiry

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
16

Teresa Hanafin writes the daily Fast Forward for the Boston Globe.

 

As he did with the Vietnam War, Trump has decided to sit out the House impeachment inquiry, using what constitutional experts say are bone spurs spurious arguments to claim that Democratic House leaders are conducting an illegitimate inquiry.

He not only is refusing to cooperate with the investigation, he also has declared war on Congress’s very right to investigate the executive branch. It’s a remarkable moment.

The result is that Trump is blocking all employees of the executive branch from testifying before Congress, will withhold every document Congress requests, and will ignore every subpoena that congressional committees issue. We’ll see today what the Dems do next.

Just remember this: Under the Constitution, the House is empowered to impeach, and can conduct an inquiry and hearings any way it wants. The president doesn’t get to tell the House what to do and how to do it.

Many of you have e-mailed me about the impeachment process. Think of it like a district attorney’s investigation and a grand jury. Several House committees (the prosecutors) are currently investigating to determine whether there are grounds for impeachment. If they decide they have enough evidence, they will write up articles of impeachment (charges) and present them to the full House (the grand jury) for a vote.

Nowhere in a grand jury process does the accused or his lawyers get to jump in, call witnesses, interview witnesses, subpoena witnesses, etc. It’s one-sided by design. And that’s also how a House impeachment process works.

So when Trump’s lawyer writes in his letter to House Democratic leaders that Trump is being denied “the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence, to have counsel present,” he’s being disingenuous. He knows very well that all of those rights kick in at the impeachment trial, which would be held in the Senate.

Categories Education Reform

Have You Heard? The Koch Plan to Eliminate Public Education

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
5

This is an important, can’t-miss podcast about the malign plans of one of the richest men in the world.

Business reporter Christopher Leonard has written a best-selling new book called Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.It’s an eye-opening account of how the Kochs built the private company that has made them richer than Bill Gates. Leonard spent seven years reporting the book, which gave him plenty of insight into what he describes as the Kochs’ fixation on dismantling public education. In a recent episode of the Have You Heard podcast with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, Leonard was blunt about what the Kochs are after. “The ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system. ” Leonard says don’t be fooled by the Koch’s sales pitch (like the Koch Network’s latest education venture, Yes Every Kid, headed by the VP of Communications for Koch Industries.) “There are going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, and efficiency. At its core though the Koch Network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different.”
You can listen to the entire interview here: https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/kochland
Categories Billionaires, Disruption, Education Industry, Evil, Koch Brothers, Privatization

Wendy Lecker: Why We Should Invest More In Neediest Children

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
18

Wendy Lecker is a civil rights lawyer who specializes in issues related to education and children.

A new Education Week national survey of school districts reveals disturbing gaps between state and federal policy and the reality in American public schools.

The vast majority of districts report major funding problems. Most list rising special education costs and rising levels of needy students as their top challenges. They also doubt they are financially prepared for the next recession.

The most serious funding problem districts report is convincing elected officials to sufficiently fund public schools. They give both state and federal officials poor marks for their ability to understand school spending, and cite state legislators as the biggest obstacle to making spending decisions that best address student needs. Rather than address need, state legislators perpetuate myths about school spending and quality.

Scholars Sally Nuamah, Jamila Michener, and Domingo Morel have found that poor communities, like school district leaders, lose faith in elected officials, and worse, in democratic institutions, when they experience policies that exacerbate rather than respond to their challenges.

Recent research highlights the failure of federal and state leaders to grasp the reality facing public schools. The most pernicious failure is the refusal to recognize the connection between poverty, funding and educational opportunity.

A new study of the effect of the 2008 recession, by Kenneth Shores of Penn State University and Matthew Steinberg of George Mason University, found that the economic downturn resulted in cuts in state and local school spending. Those spending cuts were associated with contemporaneous and persistent declines in student test scores.

Moreover, “school districts serving higher concentrations of low-income and minority students experienced greater declines in achievement from school-age exposure to the recession.”

Stanford education researcher Sean Reardon observes that test scores are a reflection of a difference in access to the opportunity to learn, affected by all circumstances in a child’s life, both in and outside of school. They often do not reflect school quality. Two recent analyses, from Ohio and North Carolina, emphasize this truth. Both found the state ratings of public schools, mostly based on test scores, track almost perfectly with school poverty.

Because children do not leave their life experiences at the schoolhouse doors, schools must have the tools to mitigate the effects of poverty in order to provide students with the opportunity to learn. National studies show that increased school spending improves academic and life outcomes — particularly for poor students.

Yet almost half the states still fund schools below recession levels. And a recent Urban Institute paper reveals that federal spending on education has dropped precipitously and is expected to keep dropping, despite rising student need. Since 2010, funding for Title I, the largest federal education program supporting children in poverty, dropped by $7 billion, as did funding for IDEA, the federal program for students with disabilities.

Rather than recognize that high-poverty schools need more tools, and thus more funding, to best serve their students, federal and state leaders mandate intervention strategies that are proven failures: school turnaround, school closures, and state takeovers of school districts.

A report from the National Education Policy Center shows that the poorer and less white a school district is, the more likely a state will aggressively intervene with these failed mandates.

Federal and state policies repeat a toxic cycle of disinvestment, punishment, then further disinvestment. 

Neighborhood and school segregation compounds the inequity. Children of color are five to seven times more likely than white children to be concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. African American and Latinx children are also concentrated in high-poverty schools.

No wonder that school districts and poor communities have little faith in their elected officials.

Massachusetts is bucking the trend of denying the connection between investing in public schools and student outcomes. A new Massachusetts school funding bill commits to closing that state’s 1.5 billion dollar school funding gap. In supporting the bill, state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz acknowledged that “closing the achievement gap requires two times the investment for our poorest students if we are serious about doing it at scale.”

Connecticut Voices for Children reports that Connecticut’s recovery from the 2008 recession is more unequal than the national recovery, which was among the most unequal in U.S. history. Connecticut’s middle class is smaller and whiter than it was before the recession. Moreover, the census revealed that Connecticut is the only U.S. state where poverty increased in 2018. Our leaders should learn from Massachusetts. Investing in our neediest children, both inside and outside of school, will not only improve their outcomes, it may also restore faith in our elected officials.

 

Wendy Lecker is a columnist for the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and is senior attorney at the Education Law Center.

 https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Wendy-Lecker-opinion-Investing-in-our-neediest-14491762.php

Categories Education Reform, Funding, Poverty

Leonie Haimson: DeBlasio’s Hypocritical Embrace of Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
18

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, is outraged that Mayor DeBlasio is handing schools over to Laurene Powell Jobs and the charter-promoting Robin Hood Foundation.

Powell Jobs has handed out $100 million to jumpstart “innovative” schools. Four of the 10 schools to which she gave $10 million each have already failed. Her closest associate is Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top was a disaster.

Over the last decade or so, the Robin Hood Foundation has primarily supported charter schools in its education portfolio, as might be predicted considering it was founded by hedge funders and its board is still composed largely of corporate executives and financiers.  According to Wikipedia, its board chair, Larry Robbins, is also the board chair of KIPP NY charter schools, and board chair of the Relay Graduate School, that trains teachers in the charter school “no excuses” regimented style of instruction. Robbins is also a member of the NY Board of Teach for America.

DeBlasio, who claimed to be a charter critic, has invited Robin Hood to open 18 new charter schools. Astonishing!

 

Haimson writes:

Given that these two private funders will help select the winners, or as Robin Hood put it, “will partner with the Department of Education on a rigorous selection process”, that means DOE will be sacrificing control for the design of these public schools to these two organizations for a relative pittance, compared to what it will cost to operate them.

But an even greater concern, as I expressed it to the Daily News, is that every new school will likely take space and funding away from our existing public schools, which are already underfunded and in many cases squeezed for space. Every new school makes overcrowding worse by eating up classroom space with the need to carve out new, replicated administrative and cluster rooms. 

We already have seen how worse inequities have resulted from the expansion of co-located charter schools in our public school buildings, as well as how the Gates-funded small schools initiative led to many of the remaining large high schools becoming even more overcrowded with the high-needs students that the small schools refused to enroll.  Many of these disadvantaged students at the large schools ended up more likely to be discharged, enrolled in low-quality credit recovery programs, or graduating without a Regents diploma  — all of which served the purposes of the organizations running the show as their small schools graduation data appeared better in comparison.  Another piece of evidence that DOE is caught in an infinite feedback loop: the Senior adviserto the XQ Institute is Michele Cahill, who ran the small schools initiative when she was at DOE. 

It feels as though we are seeing a rerun of the Bloomberg-Klein regime.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Privatization

Rhode Island: Governor Gina Raimondo’s Plan to Demolish Public Education in Providence

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
6

 

Andrew Stewart recounts the alarming plans that Governor Gina Raimondo has in store for Providence public schools. She is a former venture capitalist who seems to have an instinctive suspicion of the public sector. What she has in mind, he says, is the planned demolition of the public schools.

He writes:

Someday, after the operatic cycle of Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s political career has reached its concluding note, it will be a masterpiece of neoliberal assault upon the public sector, the commons, and the fabric of the welfare state in America to behold. It is absolutely essential, in order for the faculty and the students of Providence to fight back and win in this contest, to form a broad-based coalition that is centered on the success of students and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline.

Right now, a multi-year media narrative, assembled by allegedly-liberal local news outlets, is being utilized in order to justify the anti-democratic takeover of public education. (I will offer a further analysis of this narrative in a future report that time and space bars me from providing here.)

Motivation stems a number of reasons, including because the Providence Teachers Union is one of the largest white collar educator unions in the state and its majority composition is white women, meaning success would have a ripple effect for female workers statewide; the PTU benefits and salary package is one of the most robust offerings in the entire state economy and serves as a useful high watermark for all female service and public sector economy workers, especially with paid maternity leave. Whereas suburban teacher unions play a peripheral role in the respective municipal political debates, Providence Teachers Union is a major force in statewide politics. Simultaneously, another front of this attack can be found in the halls of the Community College of Rhode Island, where Raimondo seeks to crush the unionized faculty owing to its large membership, the subject of a future report….

Right now, Providence Public School Department is being taken over by the state and the state’s newly-appointed (by Raimondo) Education Commissioner Angélica M. Infante-Green, an alumnus of the Jeb Bush education privatization project Chiefs for Change, which has seen in the past decade a revolving door installed into various Ed offices in RI. Interim Superintendent Fran Gallo, who has a history in the district, seems to occupy a rubber-stamp position. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has recently moved to defund all other charter schools in the city so to move the money into his own personal project, the Achievement First Mayoral Academy, not unlike several other patterns of funding we have seen locally over the years whereupon the independent charters serve the purpose of creating good PR until they are defunded to make room for the big-box corporate players. Achievement First has a national reputation for abominable student abuses and their opaque, unaccountable budgetary processes pertaining to per-pupil expenditures have a distinct and negative impact on special needs and English Language Learner students both inside their charters and outside in the remaining non-privatized schools.

He reminds us that Raimondo’s campaign was funded by the hedge fund industry, which loves charter schools.

Raimondo ascended to her political position by starting out as the first woman elected Treasurer of Rhode Island. With a heavy war chest funded by the hedge fund industry, particularly Paul Tudor Jones, as well as Enron alum John Arnold, she walked into Treasury and saw the writing on the wall.

The Rhode Island Democratic Party was influenced since World War II by the diktats of ethnic Catholicism, with attendant anti-Communism, corruption, and conservatism. Treasury for decades had been run as little more than a bail-out fund for the state and its multiple ridiculous schemes, including failed real estate deals and other pay-offs that clearly violated the responsibility of not just a fiduciary but probably every sane child with a piggy bank.

With this in mind, Raimondo invested the state pension fund (which includes public school teacher contributions) into the hedge funds that in turn finance charter schools (Paul Tudor Jones’s Robin Hood Foundation finances Achievement First) [4], meaning that Providence teachers still to this day see a payroll deduction on their pay stub that finances the literal busting of their own union!

She was aided in this by donor John Arnold, who foisted upon the public, via the Pew Charitable Trust, a phony pension crisis narrative in the media [5] that was picked up by perceived non-partisan outlets like PBS. Raimondo is a pro at manufacturing a crisis to attack organized labor and this recent stab at PTU and Providence public schools bears striking resemblance to the pension heist of 2011.

Privatized education in Providence, he predicts, will be a cash cow for the corporate entities that feed off the misery of inner-city communities and schools.

The untold story, to which Stewart alludes, is not about failing schools, but about racism, structural inequality, white flight, and unexamined white supremacy. Nothing in Governor Raimondo’s plans will address root causes.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Providence, Rhode Island

Betsy DeVos Breaks the Law by Continuing to Collect Debt from Students After Judge Told Her Not to

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
50

Will billionaire Betsy DeVos go to jail for defying the direct order of a judge?

In 2015, for-profit Corinthian Colleges went bankrupt after state attorney generals complained of fraud. Thousands of its former students were left in the lurch with a mountain of debt for a worthless “education.” After the company filed for bankruptcy protection, the federal department of education ruled that as many as 335,000 students might have their debts canceled, “under The Borrower Defense to Repayment program—an initiative started in 2016 to provide loan relief for students who had been defrauded by predatory schools.” This was during the Obama administration.

However, when DeVos became Secretary of Education, she limited the program of loan forgiveness and began to hound many of the students who had been defrauded. The applications of some 160,000 students for loan forgiveness were shelved. DeVos was ordered by Judge Sallie Kim to stop hounding students to repay student loans that should have been forgiven.

But, as we have seen before, Secretary DeVos has great sympathy for for-profit corporations and no sympathy for students who were defrauded.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been threatened with the possibility of jail after a judge deemed she was violating a court order for continuing to collect student debts on a now-defunct school.

That ruling, handed down in June of 2018, was made by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim and prevented DeVos and her Department of Education for going after former students at the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges Inc.

However, Kim said she was “astounded” to discover that DeVos was violating the court order at a hearing in San Francisco on Monday after a filing by the Education Department earlier disclosed that more than 16,000 former students at Corinthian College “were incorrectly informed at one time or another … that they had payments due on their federal student loans.”

“At best it is gross negligence, at worst it’s an intentional flouting of my order,” Kim said, reported Bloomberg.

“I’m not sure if this is contempt or sanctions,” she added. “I’m not sending anyone to jail yet but it’s good to know I have that ability.”

The same story is here in the Washington Post.

Is it time to chant “Lock her up”?

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, For-Profit, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt
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