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vouchers make no sense. the real issue is overall inefficiency with funds. throwing more money into a sinkhole is stupid. pensions for teachers, etc. they need an overhaul, not more money.
and dont even get me started on public universities
ALEC Admits School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia
School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students. But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize public schools.
But the times they are a-changin'. Wisconsin is well on its way towards limitless voucher schools, and last month, Nevada signed into law a universal "education savings account" allowing parents to send their kids to private or religious schools, or even to homeschool them - all on the taxpayers' dime. On the federal level, a proposed amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would have created a multi-billion-dollar-a-year voucher program was only narrowly defeated in the US Senate.
The American Federation for Children (AFC), chaired by Amway billionaire Betsy DeVos, estimates that vouchers and voucher-like tax-credit schemes currently divert $1.5 billion of public money to private schools annually. But that is not enough. By expanding "pro-school choice legislative majorities" in state houses across the country the organization hopes that $5 billion a year will be siphoned out of public schools by 2020 and applied to for-profit and religious schools.
With vouchers gaining momentum nationwide, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is meeting in San Diego today, has decided to drop the pretense that vouchers have anything to do with social and racial equity, and is now pushing vouchers for the middle class - a project which, if pursued enough in numbers, will progressively erode the public school system and increase the segregation of students based on race and economic standing.
ALEC Comes Clean, Vouchers Are for the Middle Class
The agenda for this week's ALEC meeting includes a presentation en led: "Problems in Suburbia: Why Middle-Class Students Need School Choice, Digital Learning and Better Options."
Perhaps more importantly, ALEC's revisions to three of its "model" voucher bills make clear that it is changing focus from underserved inner-city schools to middle-class suburbia. The talking points at the end of the bills state:
- "Legislators … should keep in mind the financial burden many middle-class families face in paying for private schools."
- "The authors believe that all children from low- and middle-income families should receive public support for their education regardless of whether they are attending a public or private school."
- "The authors do not adjust the amount granted to an ESA [Education Savings Account] student based upon the student's income because states do not adjust the public investment for a student attending a traditional public school or a charter based upon their household income."
As if to further nail down the point that school vouchers are not about equity, ALEC also advises legislators against including language "banning discrimination in hiring." But if they choose to do so, they should "take care not to interfere with the ability of religious ins utions to hire individuals who share their religious beliefs."
"Abolishing the Public School System"
ALEC is not the only organization coming clean on vouchers.
At the American Federation for Children's National Policy Summit held in New Orleans, lobbyist Scott Jensen - who, before being banned from Wisconsin politicsfor violating the public trust served as chief of staff to governor Tommy Thompson, and was a prime mover behind the first voucher program in the nation - admitted that vouchers were really all about "pursuing Milton Friedman's free-market vision" even though the ideological agenda was nowadays sugarcoated with "a much more compelling message ... of social justice."
Ditching the Marketing Plan
By shifting the focus from poor, minority children to the predominantly white middle class, ALEC has come full circle. Vouchers were first proposed in the 1950s as a way for white families to get around the desegregation resulting from the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision. ALEC first pitched vouchers to legislators in 1984 as a way to "introduce normal market forces" into education and to "dismantle the control and power of" teachers' unions. While there was a narrative of parent "empowerment" at that time, there was not even a passing mention of children - let alone minority children.
But when William Bennett joined Ronald Reagan's cabinet in 1985, vouchers soon gained a unique selling point. In the words of The Black Commentator:
Former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett understood what was missing from the voucher political chemistry: minorities. If visible elements of the Black and Latino community could be ensnared in what was then a lily-white scheme, then the Right's dream of a universal vouchers system to subsidize general privatization of education, might become a practical political project. More urgently, Bennett and other rightwing strategists saw that vouchers had the potential to drive a wedge between Blacks and teachers unions, cracking the Democratic Party coalition. In 1988, Bennett urged the Catholic Church to "seek out the poor, the disadvantaged…and take them in, educate them, and then ask society for fair recompense for your efforts"–vouchers. The game was on.
Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups across the nation soon launched massive whitewashing campaigns; they started churning out policy reports and books purporting to show how school vouchers would actually benefit minority students. Examples include: We Can Rescue Our Children: The Cure for Chicago's Public School Crisis (Heartland Ins ute, 1988) and Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City (Cato Ins ute, 1990).
By proposing schemes with vouchers weighted to boost racial diversity, or restricted to children from low-income families, the organizations pushing vouchers were able to kill two birds with one stone. They made them acceptable by obscuring thesegregationist history, and, crucially, they could now cast themselves as the "new" civil rights movement.
In state after state, politicians were in on the trick. They would sign limited voucher programs into law as "civil rights" measures only to gradually expand the programs to higher-income white families.
...
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...ds-in-suburbia
iow, the entire rigthwingnut push for charter schools:
1. resegregation, esp in the Confederacy.
2. taxpayer $Bs transferred to BigCorp
3. destruction of public schools and teachers (Dem) unions
4. taxpayer $Bs transferred to religious schools indoctrinating Biblical bull , historical lies, Christian supremacy, Christian theocracy.
vouchers make no sense. the real issue is overall inefficiency with funds. throwing more money into a sinkhole is stupid. pensions for teachers, etc. they need an overhaul, not more money.
and dont even get me started on public universities
“Smell something, say something!” Teachers’ unions do not hurt student outcomes.
Welcome to the first edition of a new OTE feature, dedicated to the parting admonition of the great Jon Stewart: when it comes to BS, “smell something, say something!”
To be clear, I’m not trying to emulate the fact checkers out there. Nor am I going to peruse the papers, like Dean does soeffectively, to find errant economics reporting. Instead, I’m just going to occasionally pounce on a specific brand of assertion: a stylized, accepted fact that isn’t a fact at all.
For example, conservative partisans (as well as many centrist D’s) consistently assert that teachers’ unions are bad for student outcomes, and if we want to improve such outcomes, we must diminish the impact of teachers’ unions. Most recently, this negative role of unions was a featured assertion in a Republican primary debate.
That claim smelled bad to me, as in I know of no body of evidence to support it. I know it’s a constant refrain, but I figured I’d have seen something from the deep academic community that runs analyses of such issues over the years to support it, and I haven’t.
Maybe I missed it. So I asked some experts in this field and they confirmed my intuition.
–Berkeley econ prof Jesse Rothstein, who’s done important work on “value-added-measurement” in teacher evaluations, confirmed my priors that such evidence is wanting.
–He and education policy expert Kevin Carey made the same interesting point: there’s a significant measurement challenge in that school districts that don’t have unions, and would thus serve as a useful control, “tend to have teachers associations and/or contracts that aren’t too different from what unionized districts have” (Rothstein).
–The unions themselves will correctly tell you that states with fewer unions, including “right-to-work” states, have worse student outcomes. And there are countries, like Finland, that have very high unionization rates and consistently rank highly in international comparisons of student outcomes. But, as Carey stressed, right-to-work states are also poorer, and Finland ain’t the US, and there’s the quasi-union arrangements noted above, even in non-union states. So it’s very hard to make an all-else-equal run at this question.
–Larry Mishel shares this paper by himself and Emma Garcia. It tests–rigorously, I thought–for correlations–again, we’re not talking causality–between the strength of teachers unions and whether unions shift more experienced and higher credentialed teachers away from poorer schools. Their results fail “to show an association between the strength of unions in the states and the allocation of teacher credentials across schools. We find no negative or no association between the allocations of credentials in average schools or in high poverty schools and the unions’ strength…we find no association between the unions’ strength and the misallocation of credentials among high poverty schools relative to the average.”
In other words, there is nothing like a well-established consensus that teachers’ unions have any impact one way or the other on student outcomes.
That doesn’t mean teachers’ unions are great for kids either. It means that when you hear a politician bashing teachers’ unions on behalf of students, they’re BS’ing…so: smell something and say something.
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/smell-...d+Bernstein%29
Only conservatives would think the poorest schools with the most challenging job to do need to be shut down.Only liberals would think that closing failing schools is a bad thing.
ter McGee
We ain't all Highland Park and Westlake, yo. Stats don't tell the whole story. Just because you grew up in a rough place, with the roughest kids, doesn't mean the neighborhood place of learning needs to be shut down.
Something like the reverse, in fact, might be true.
How do you get a ticket out of the neighborhood, when the school gets shut down?
Bus em to Westlake and Highland Park and Stratford and Alamo Heights? Get real: that ain't gonna happen.
Reality alert!
ter McGee
Many urban underperforming schools are used to warehouse troublemaking teenage boys. The cops, parent(s), and businesses in the area greatly appreciate the kids being watched by an adult for 8 hours and coming home tired. The dirty little secret...
pgardn
using high schools as minimum security detention facilities is part of the problem educationally speaking and a big part of why some schools chronically underperform, but of course you're right to point out there's a social benefit to keeping teenagers inside all day.
Public schools mirror the socioeconomic structure around them.
This is not an easy fix. Which is why it has not been.
Fixed.
The problem is the courts...you can say anything you want to a teacher in class and get a slap in the hand, but tell a Judge anything in his court and you wind up in JJ
True dat.....one third of kids live in poverty....but schools are getting better...
Teachers in TX make a decent wage.....so why is there a teacher shortage?
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entr...rate_education
It's not new year teachers that are in shortage...it's experience class room teachers...especially in low socio=economic areas....and tying pay to student performance just makes this problem worse because the 'better teachers' wind up migrating to schools with better kids.....it's sad really....“It’s a sad, alarming state of affairs, and it proves that for all our lip service about improving the education of America’s children, we’ve failed to make teaching the draw that it should be, the honor that it must be,” mused Times columnist Frank Bruni.
That Bruni would bemoan such a state of affairs is ironic, as he has used his column over the years to repeatedly argue that teaching is too easy a profession to enter and too easy to keep, and amplified the voice of reformers who want to want to make the profession more precarious. But the reality is that speaking of a “shortage” at all is a kind of ideological dodge; the word calls to mind some accident of nature or the market, when what is actually happening is the logical (if not necessarily intended) result of education reform policies.
“This is an old narrative, the idea that we aren’t producing enough teachers,” says Richard Ingersoll, an educational sociologist at University of Pennsylvania who has written extensively on the subject of teacher shortages. “As soon as you disaggregate the data, you find out claims of shortage are always overgeneralized and exaggerated. It’s always been a minority of schools, and the real factor is turnover in hard to staff schools. It may be true enrollment went down in these programs nationally, but there are so many former teachers in the reserve pool.” In other words, the problem isn’t that too few people entering the profession, but rather that too many are leaving it.
Such high turnover rates are disruptive to school culture and tend to concentrate the least experienced teachers in the poorest school districts. A 2014 paper by Ingersoll and his colleagues shows “45 percent of public school teacher turnover took place in just one quarter of the population of public schools. The data show that high-poverty, high-minority, urban and rural public schools have among the highest rates of turnover.”
“If you look at the shortage areas in terms of subject or what districts are having trouble filling jobs, it’s a shortage of people who are willing to teach for the salary and in the working conditions in certain school districts,” says Lois Weiner, an education professor at New Jersey City University and author of The Future of Our Schools. “It’s not a shortage in every district. Look at the whitest, wealthiest districts in every state and call up the personnel department, ask if they have a shortage in special ed or bilingual ed. They don’t—in fact, they are turning candidates away.”
As Teacher Pay Lags, Attrition and Class Size Grow
Despite having a starting salary that is on par with other states, the average teacher in Texas makes about $49,000 a year — about $8,000 below the national average. Teacher pay in Texas ranked 30th in the nation during the 2010-11 school year, dropping to 35th two years later, according to an annual state-by-state analysis by the National Education Association.
showed a marked increase in teachers reporting that they had taken second jobs during the school year to make ends meet.
showed teachers increasingly spending their own money on school supplies. In 2013, teachers said they spent an average of $697 on school supplies, a $130 increase over 2010.
Despite a boom in alternative certification programs promising a fast track to teaching, the state faces a chronic — and growing — shortage of certified teachers in middle school math and science. In those subjects, according to Texas Education Agency data, 32 percent of educators are teaching outside their field. The figures for English-language learning programs, in which the number of students has grown 25 percent in a decade, are even higher. Across all grades, 41 percent of the teachers assigned to those programs are not certified.
Since 2005, Texas has dropped from 36th to 47th in per-student spending. In the 2012-13 school year, the state’s budget allowed for $8,200 a student, which was higher than only Arizona, Indiana, Oklahoma and Utah — and below the national average of $10,200.
The fight is over the consequences of lawmakers’ $5.4 billion budget cut to public education during the 2011 legislative session.
Months later, Texas public schools opened their doors without state funding to account for growing student enrollment — something that had not happened since the modernization of the state’s public education system more than 60 years prior.
There was an immediate effect on teachers, from those who lost their jobs to those who lost faith in the system. For the first time in a decade, the number of teachers employed by the state’s public schools declined, with the attrition rate jumping from 8.9 percent in 2010 to 10.5 percent in 2011. The number of elementary school classes with waivers to exceed the state’s 22-student cap soared to 8,479 from 2,238 the year before.
http://www.texastribune.org/2014/07/...ss-sizes-grow/
How Jeb Bush's Florida Plan for School 'Choice' Created an Industry of Corruption and Chaos
"We're making decisions just based on the money.” That’s Rosemarie Jensen talking, a tone of exasperation creeping into her voice as she describes the influence of money on education policy in South Florida.
In her view, charter schools — the privately managed, publicly funded en ies that operate outside the oversight of democratically governed school systems — are not now what they originally claimed to be: centers of innovation created by teachers and parents. Jensen has taken note of the amount of money these schools spend on advertising and marketing. She complains that the middle school her children attended can't get money to construct a safer point of entry, while the state steers funds to charters for new construction. She believes that making public schools compete with charter schools for money dilutes funding that should be paying for better education for all kids. While she used to be open-minded about these schools, she now considers herself to be “anti-charter."
She’s not alone. Charter schools may continue to enjoy generally favorable ratings in national surveys of Americans, but many parents and public officials across South Florida, where these schools are now more prevalent than in other parts of the country, openly complain about an education "innovation" that seems more and more like an unsavory business venture.
Undermining Public Education
The obsession over money that is driving charter school growth in Florida is increasingly evident to those who bother to look.
"Outrageous," is the word former state Senator Nan Rich uses to describe recent decisions Florida lawmakers made to steer more money toward these schools. Until she termed out, Rich represented the 34th District that overlaps part of Broward County. Although she has never opposed charter schools, she now believes financial demands coming from the sector have become unreasonable.
As a recent article in Florida’s Herald-Tribune notes, for the past two years, only charter schools have received capital outlay funds from the state for new construction. Now charter school lobbyists say their schools deserve a share of local property taxes too.
"When they were started, charters were never supposed to tap capital funds," Rich explains, "but gradually lawmakers with ties to the charter industry tipped the scales to favor them financially."
"I'm not one who opposes charter schools that are set up the way they were intended," Rich adds. But she now believes, "The whole movement…is undermining public education and moves public money to private interests."
http://www.alternet.org/education/ho...ter1042126&t=2
Another red state ed up by Repug MISgovernance.
The predatory capitalists won't stop until they have all our property taxes, schools funds, Social Security funds.
How the GOP and Education Privatizers Are Using Charters to Bleed Pennsylvania Schools Dry
Teachers are now working for free in a school district undone by charter schools and state government neglect
As schools across Pennsylvania open their doors for the new school year, there’s one district in the state where teachers will be hard at work even though they’re not likely to get paid.
The teachers are actually already on the job, having reported for work a week early as originally expected. But when the district’s administration announced it could not meet a scheduled payroll on September 9, a week after classes start, the teachers – along with janitors, nurses, and other school personnel – held an impromptu meeting and voted to temporarily forego pay.
The teachers are employed by the financially strapped school district of Chester Upland, located about 20 miles west of Philadelphia. Years of deliberate under-funding by the state, coupled with policies that favor the rapid expansion of publicly funded but privately operated charter schools, are bleeding the district. The dedication of committed and caring educators seems to be one of the few forces binding the shattered school community together.
“We aren’t broken,” says Dariah Jackson, one of the teachers working for no pay tells Salon in a phone interview. Jackson, a Special Education and Life Skills Support teacher in grades 3-5, says, “I’m in my classroom, as are my colleagues, ready for the students to walk through the door next week.”
When asked how long is “temporary” in their resolve to work with no pay, Jackson says, “No one has set a time limit for now. We have to be here for our students. They need a place to go.”
But while Jackson and her colleagues show their determination to meet the needs of the students, there are forces acting in Chester Upland, and across Pennsylvania, focused on anything but that.
School Breakage 101
“Chester Upland is broke,” explains Wythe Keever, spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Education Association. “Actually, they’re a lot worse off than broke,” he tells Salon.
“They have an operating budget deficit in excess of $20 million that is expected by the end of the year to go beyond $40 million.”
“The school district is in danger of not existing,” says Jeff Sheridan, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, in a report by Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post [3].
What’s not helping for sure is an ongoing imbroglio over Pennsylvania’s state budget. Legislators and Wolf have been unable to come to an agreement on the state’s fiscal responsibilities, delaying budget completion for over 50 days. What’s the fight about?
Education funding [4].
The newly elected Democratic governor insists on increasing school funding and correcting unfair distributions – particularly those that go to online “cyber” charter schools [5] – while an entrenched Republican legislature continues to exhibit reluctance to adequately and fairly fund the state’s schools.
So school districts across the state are having to dig deeper into their own local resources to fund the reopening of schools. Districts like Chester Upland, that are heavily reliant on state aid, simply don’t have coffers to dig into.
But there are also long term “structural problems,” explains Keever.
As Layton recounts in her report, “Chester Upland’s financial problems date to 1994, when it was first classified by the state as being in ‘economic distress.” The district has been in and out of state receivership since.
“A similar financial collapse occurred in the district in 2012,” Layton continues, “and the teachers also agreed to work without pay then. In the end, a federal judge ordered the state to pay the district, and lawmakers arranged a bailout, so that employees’ paychecks were just a couple of days late.”
One of those “structural problems” is that Chester Upland is a school district serving a lot of families living in poverty. According to Wikipedia [6], in 2009, “the District residents’ per capita income [7] was $13,521, while the median family income [8] was $30,900.” Both figures are way below national and Pennsylvania state averages. Only 10 percent of the people who live in the school district have college degrees.
Schools that serve communities that are so disproportionally poor are bound to be financially at risk in a system such as America’s where the financial base for schools starts with local property taxes. But the state of Pennsylvania compounds the problem by deliberately under-funding the schools in the state that are most in need of money.
As Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker [9] explains on his blog, “the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has among the least equitable state school finance systems in the country [10],” giving less state and local revenue to the state’s highest needs schools like Chester Upland.
A national report released by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year spotlighted the Quaker State as being among the worst of the 23 states across the country that distribute more education money to richer school districts and less money to those with the least means.
As The Post’s Emma Brown [11] wrote when the report was released, “Pennsylvania’s state and local per-pupil spending in its poorest school districts is 33 percent lower than per-pupil spending in the state’s most affluent school districts, the highest differential in the country.”
Charters Sap the District
Charter schools add to the financial burden placed on resource-starved schools like those in Chester Upland.
According to a local news outlet [12], teachers in Chester Upland “say the district’s ongoing financial problems are because of the state’s funding formula, specifically what the school district is required to pay to charter schools. The school district receives about $16,000 for children with learning disabilities from the state, but it is required to give the charter schools $40,000 for each student listed with a learning disability.”
“It’s absolutely an unsustainable expense,” Keever explains. The Chester Upland district now pays about $64 million, over half of its budget, to the charter schools – more money than what the school district gets from the state.
Professor Baker, a school finance expert, says this method of financing special education in charter schools “is poorly conceived, creates perverse incentives for charter school operators, and inappropriately drains disproportionate resources from sending districts.”
Further, as Keever explains, “When students and funding are drawn away from a traditional public school, the traditional public school can’t reduce their overhead because they have fixed costs. They have to operate the buses and feed the students and pay the light and water bill. Charter schools taking away a few students from different grade levels doesn’t produce any savings. You still have to staff the same number of classrooms.”
A Special Education Scam
To be fair, charter schools, which have been expanding over the years, now educate about half of the students in the district. But there are good reasons to believe the charter schools have turned these payments for special education services into a profit center.
“The charter schools are submitting bills for students with special learning that are $10,000-17,000 more than what neighboring school districts are paying.,” Keever points out.
Indeed, Valerie Strauss [13], on her blog at The Washington Post, points to a report from Chester Upland’s state-appointed receiver, Francis Barnes, who do ents how
the charter schools seem to mine the local district of low-cost special education students while leaving the traditional schools with students who have the most severe disabilities. He points to data showing the district’s charter schools tends to serve high proportions of low-cost special needs students – those with speech and hearing disabilities, for instance – while serving low proportions of high-cost special needs students, such as those with autism or emotional problems.
“Payments to the charters are absolutely more than what it costs to educate these children,” Keever contends. “Many of the children designated special needs in the charters are actually receiving low-cost services that the charters are billing at $40,000.”
Charter Fraud Is Rampant in Pennsylvania
It’s not at all hard to believe there might be something fishy about a charter school operation in Pennsylvania. Last year, a report [14], “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” found charter school officials in the state have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since 1997.
The report found an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated.
Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school.
A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.
Because Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, the $30 million do ented in this study is likely the minimum possible amount.
Another report revealed how Pennsylvania charters across the state had gamed the system for special education funding. The report found in 2013, public schools paid out $350 million for charters to educate special education students but the charter schools spent only $150 million on special education services, resulting in a $200 million profit [15] for the charter industry.
None of this evidence of financial fraud has been uncovered by state agencies overseeing the charter schools. The evidence has been brought to light by whistleblowers, media coverage, and watchdog groups – not by state auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud. And charter schools, which self-report their enrollments to the district and the department of education, can operate for years without fear of an audit.
Charter Operators Get Mansions While Teachers Can’t Get Paid
What needs to change, at the very least, is the funding formula for how charter schools are paid for special education services.
The Pennsylvania State Education Association has presented recommendations [16] for changing the state’s charter school law, that include fixing the special education inequities, enforcing some financial transparency on charters, and capping charter school undesignated fund balances.
To his credit, Governor Wolf has taken steps [17] to correct the funding formulas for special education in a way that would help cash strapped districts like Chester Upland. The charter school industry, unfortunately, has fought him at every step, and Wolf’s latest proposal was rejected by a Pennsylvania district court [18].
In Chester Upland specifically, “The charter schools have ac ulated massive fund balances,” due to gaming the state’s charter funding system, Keever contends. He points to one charter in particular, Chester Community Charter School.
Chester Community Charter, the largest charter in the district, is managed by a company owned by Vahan Gureghian. Gureghian, an attorney and prodigious donor to Republican politicians [19], recently put on the market his Palm Beach, Florida mansion listed at $84.5 million. The “French inspired” house [20] features 35,000 feet of living space, a bowling alley, and a moat.
“It’s difficult to pin down how much the Chester Community Charter School and others have profited,” Keever admits. “The charters have refused to honor right to know requests under the state’s open records laws, so there’s little to no way to do ent how much the management company that runs that charter is actually taking out.”
While the full extent of charter school profiting remains a question, nevertheless, Gureghian and his expansive Palm Beach estate strike quite a sharp contrast to Dariah Jackson and the rest of the Chester Upland educators willing to work for no pay.
Speaking from her small classroom, in a beleaguered school, in a long-struggling community, Jackson remains defiant. “I want everyone to know we care about our students. The paycheck is not what’s foremost in our minds.
“Now we just need our elected officials to act.”
For the students’ sake, let’s hope they do.
http://www.alternet.org/education/ho...ia-schools-dry
Repug MISgovernance is not just incompetence it's willful, intended misgovernance for profit.
redistribution of taxpayer $100Ms to BigCorp
Web of Secrecy Surrounding Federal Half-a-Billion Handout to Charter Schools
More than $200 million in fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school industry have been do ented.
Already the federal government has spent $3.3 billion in American tax dollars under the Charter Schools Program (CSP), as tallied by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
But the government has done so without requiring any accountability from the states and schools that receive the money, as CMD revealed earlier this year.
Throwing good money after bad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for a 48 percent increase in federal charter funding earlier this year, and the House and Senate budget proposals also call for an increase—albeit a more modest one—while at the same time slashing education programs for immigrants and language learners.
The clamor for charter expansion comes despite the fact that there are federal probes underway into suspected waste and mismanagement within the program, not to mention ongoing and recently completed state audits of fraud perpetrated by charter school operators.
Earlier this year, the Center for Popular Democracy do ented more than$200 million in fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school industry in 15 states alone, a number that is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
http://www.alternet.org/education/we...er1042348&t=12
Bankruptcy Is a "Huge Opportunity" to Privatize Schools Says EdBuild
One big reason for this obsession?
There's at least half a trillion dollars a year up for grabs for corporations that want to line their coffers with taxpayer money. K-12 education, Rupert Murdoch explained in a press release a few years ago, is a "$500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting to be transformed."
"When you think of bankruptcy … this is a huge opportunity. Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids; bankruptcy is a problem for the people governing the system, right? So, when a school district goes bankrupt all of their legacy debt can be eliminated ... How are we going to pay for the buildings? How are we going to bring in new operators when there is pension debt? Look, if we can eliminate that in an entire urban system, then we can throw all the cards up in the air, and redistribute everything with all new models. You've heard it first: bankruptcy might be the thing that leads to the next education revolution,"
how bankruptcy could potentially lead to the kind of public-to-private "redistribution" Sibilia has in mind.
"Once you've cleared any hurdle the state has set up and file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the case goes before a federal judge who reviews the bankruptcy plan the municipality has submitted. The judge can only accept it or reject it, and is not allowed to propose any changes. This gives you plenty of leeway to impose radical policy changes under the guise of saving money. You could, for example, turn traditional public schools into charters and undo union contracts,"
"After undergoing improvement efforts, a struggling private firm that continues to lose money will close, get taken over, or go bankrupt … Urban school districts, at long last, need an equivalent."
Disaster Capitalism Is Now Expressly Embraced by the Corporate Right
At an education reform meeting in 2011, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner argued that Katrina was not all bad. There were, he said, "bright spots" as the hurricane literally swept away public schools and paved the way for charter and voucher schools.
With Detroit in fresh memory, it is hardly a surprise that Governor Rauner is now making a callous push for the Chicago Public Schools District to declare bankruptcy to "restructure contracts" and address a $1.14 billion budget shortfall instead of raising revenue to meet the need to fund 21st century schools. He also tried to blame teachers' unions for balking at having their contracts torn up and pensions gutted.
Rauner has pitched bankruptcy as a last resort once all other options are exhausted, but preaching to the choir behind closed doors in New Orleans, Sibilia threw caution to the wind. Not only did she suggest that this was the solution the corporate school reform movement has been waiting for; she also made it clear that once bankruptcy is declared, the current public school teachers have got to go:
"The schools of choice that will largely replace the old schools have new teachers; they have a completely different teaching corps than those of the public schools."
no joke for the children and families and educators affected by the reformers' willingness to push every lever - no matter how disruptive or destructive - to undermine public schools and funnel money to the for-profit firms who turn around and spend big bucks on lobbying, elections, and non-profit groups, such as AFC and EdBuild, that help advance their bottom line at the public's expense.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...s-says-edbuild
With so many BigCorp/1%/VRWC attacks to suck down taxpayers $Ts, a good number of the attacks will probably succeed. There's no stopping them. America is ed and un able.
Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State
Ohio seems to have taken a page from Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.
Last month, state officials releasing an early batch of test scores declared that two-thirds of students at most grade levels were proficient on reading and math tests given last spring under the new Common Core requirements.
Yet similar scores on the same tests meant something quite different in Illinois, where education officials said only about a third of students were on track. And in Massachusetts, typically one of the strongest academic performers, the state saidabout half of the students who took the same tests as Ohio’s children met expectations.
It all came down to the different labels each state used to describe the exact same scores on the same tests.
That kind of inconsistency in educational standards is what the Common Core — academic guidelines for kindergarten through high school reading and math that were adopted by more than 40 states — was intended to redress. But Ohio is not alone in adjusting the goal posts. In California and North Carolina, state officials reporting headline results lumped together groups of students who either passed or nearly passed the tests. And in Florida, the education commissioner recommended passing rates less stringent than in other states.
“This was exactly the problem that a lot of policy makers and educators were trying to solve,” said Karen Nussle, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, a Common Core advocacy group, “to get a more honest assessment of where kids are and being transparent about that with parents and educators so that we could do something about it.”
But as the results from the first Common Core tests have rolled out, education officials again seem to be subtly broadening definitions of success.
“That mentality of saying let’s set proficient at a level where not too many people fail is going to kill us,” said Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a nonprofit think tank. “The global standard of what proficient is keeps moving up.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/07...tate.html?_r=0
JEB great FL accomplishment
This Florida charter school sounds like every parent and teacher's education nightmare
How would you feel as a parent if a little more than one month into the school year the principal of your new charter school fired the bulk of teachers and forced others to take huge pay cuts, lose benefits to remain?
That's what happened at Paramount Charter School in Broward county where stunned parents discovered their kids were sitting around and drawing all day because there were no teachers left:
"I just picked them up one day and all their teachers were gone," Brooks said, still incredulous. "I'm looking around like, 'OK, where's your teacher? Where's your teacher?' Nobody had a teacher."
And where were the teachers? Looking for new jobs. As many as 20 were fired and many more resigned:
Those who weren't fired were given a stark choice:
Three now-former Paramount teachers who, fearing retaliation, spoke on condition of anonymity said about 20 teachers lost their jobs, many in a mass firing, the others resigning."One by one, she would call everybody in and they were getting fired, fired, fired," one teacher said.
One said that after the mass firings, she was called into the room and told that the school wanted to keep her, but that if she wanted to keep her job she would have to take a cut in pay from $36,000 to $30,000 and that promised benefits, including health care, would be cut.
The teachers who spoke with Local 10 News in Miami said the school was a mess from the minute it opened the doors—teachers didn't have lists of their students names, no teaching supplies, no student schedules. Teachers and parents say they feel betrayed and worse yet—their kids are paying the price. See more on the unbelievable mismanagement of this Florida Charter school at Local10News.com.
The Paramount Charter School website proudly notes how charter schools are free of those pesky regulations that drag down traditional public schools:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1...e?detail=email
Charter schools are public schools that operate under a performance contract, or a “charter” which frees them from many regulations created for traditional public schools while holding them accountable for academic and financial results.
The charter contract between the charter school governing board and the sponsor details the school’s mission, program, goals, students served, methods of assessment and ways to measure success. The length of time for which charters are granted varies but most are granted for five years.
The Florida Legislature, in authorizing the creation of public charter schools, established the following guiding principles: high standards of student achievement while increasing parental choice; the alignment of responsibility with accountability; and ensuring parents receive information on reading levels and learning gains of their children.
Charter schools are intended to improve student learning; increase learning opportunities with special emphasis on low performing students and reading; and measure learning outcomes.
Charter schools may create innovative measurement tools; provide compe ion to stimulate improvement in traditional schools; expand capacity of the public school system; and mitigate the educational impact created by the development of new residential units.
Did the principal and other staff also take pay and benefits cuts?
Why Are Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy Charter Schools Suspending Students Left and Right?
One principal issued 44 out-of-school suspensions to her 203 kindergartners and first graders. Who does that benefit?
According to a report by the website Chalkbeat, in New York City charter schools suspended students at about three times the rate of traditional public schools. Chalkbeat found that "charter schools suspended at least 11 percent of their students that year, while district schools suspended 4.2 percent of their students." Their study also concluded "The charter-school suspension rate is likely an underestimate because charter schools don't have to report suspensions that students serve in school."
Merrow then turned to the Success Academy Charter Schools where discipline for their "scholars" is much more punitive. According to Merrow, "Last year, principal Monica Komery issued 44 out-of-school suspensions to her 203 kindergartners and first graders." Her school is one of 34 Success Academies operating in New York City. The schools are publicly funded, but under private control. Komery admitted "We do have a zero-tolerance policy around certain behaviors," but claimed "I don't just suspend children as the first course of action" and argued "It's well-thought-out. It's a process, and there are systems in place."
Moskowitz, when interviewed by Merrow, defended the suspension policy because "If you get it right in the early years, you actually have to suspend far less when the kids are older, because they understand what is expected of them.
According to Merrow, Success Academy's "code of conduct runs six pages and identifies 65 infractions, from bullying and gambling to littering and failing to be in a ready-to-succeed position."
These policies seem more like preparation for "Walking while Black" in Stop-and-Frisk New York City than a school discipline code.
http://www.alternet.org/education/wh...er1044691&t=22
For-profit, militarized, blindly authoritarian charter schools, another reason America is ed and un able.
Commanding General Moskovitz: $475K
Top 16 NYC charter school executives earn more than Chancellor Dennis Walcott
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/...icle-1.1497717
You don't have enough information to judge on this. Six pages and 65 infractions. So? In today's litigious society, if you don't list every single thing, you'll end up getting sued over it.
Kenny's salary supposedly comes from only privately raised funds per Wikipedia. Does that mean the charter schools she manages don't get federal/state/city money?
In April, Success Academy applied for an increase from $1,350 to $2,000 in the annual per student payment it receives from the state to operate 10 of its charter schools, reports the New York Daily News.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/25/controversial-success-aca_n_1625256.html
I think many of Success Academy and other charter thingies are in former taxpayer-funded public buildings, and/or actually cohabiting in public school buildings alongside the non-charter dreck.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-26-2015 at 02:51 PM.
65 infarction in 6 pages? applies to K-4? These are infractions for suspending, expelling kids. It's ing control-freak's wet dream.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-26-2015 at 03:01 PM.
you're an idiot. it's 6 ing pages. 65 infractions. you know this.
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