When we consider the charter industry, it’s hard not to notice how it has become fertile territory for entrepreneurs with no education experience. Take a case in point: The meteoric career of Ron Packard. Begin by reading this dated biography, posted on SourceWatch. When it was written, Ron was making $5 million a year as CEO of the online charter chain K12 Inc. The company had a market value of
Three students at the University of Mississippi posed with rifles at a memorial to Emmett Till, a Black boy who was murdered by vigilantes in 1955. For a long period of time, open racism was underground. Now, thanks to our president, racism is okay again. The students were suspended by their fraternity . But not by the university. Not yet.
Jan Resseger reminded me of this moving paragraph in Eve Ewing’s profound book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side: Understanding these tropes of death and mourning as they pertain not to the people we love, but to the places where we loved them, has a particular gravity during a time when the deaths of black people at the hands of the state—through such m
It is very cool to home school in California! There are charter schools for home schoolers where you don’t have to go to school! Home schoolers get a list of approved expenses , and they can decide how to spend the public’s money. How cool is that! This is a program that Betsy DeVos must love! True educational freedom on the public’s dime! In California, there’s a way parents can use money from t
Our friend Peter Greene is now a regular contributor to Forbes, where he enlightens readers from the business community about education. Many years ago, I wrote a column for Forbes and visited their offices. I discovered to my surprise that my editor was married to a classroom teacher. We have friends everywhere. Recently, Peter has been enlightening readers of Forbes about standardized testing.
A year ago, reformers were touting D.C. as their triumphant example. Those graduation rates! Unfortunately, like every other reformer tale, it was a hoax. The graduation rate was phony . Students were walking across the stage without the necessary attendance or credits. Metrics! “Critics view the problems, particularly the attendance issue, as an indictment of the entire data-driven evaluation sy
Valerie Jablow is a parent and blogger in D.C. who thinks that the city government should take care of all children, not just charter schools. What a revolutionary idea! And she believes that charter schools should be accountable and transparent, which puts her at odds with the charter industry. She writes here about a recent meeting of the City Council, which demonstrated that transparency is ab
Katy Crawford-Garrett is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico. Success Academies, a network of 47 charter schools in New York City that serves a majority of Black and Brown youth from poor communities, has long been considered a star of the school reform movement, garnering accolades from politicians, philanthropists, and the media. Founded by Eva Moskowitz in 2006, Success Acad
Jersey Jazzman seems to be in an endless battle with New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The Star-Ledger, or at least with the writer of its editorials. He went to the trouble of getting a doctorate in statistics so he could persuade that editorialist to understand how the charters produce high test scores. It is called creaming, picking the best and excluding the rest. This article explains how in w
Jan Resseger writes here about Raj Chetty’s return to Harvard to start a new project, reviving the American dream. l In the past, we have known Raj as the prime author of a widely doubted study that concluded that one effective teacher (who raised test scores) would have a significant impact on lifetime earnings, pregnancy rates, and other important life outcomes. In the years since that study wa
Bill Phillis points to the latest online charter scams. He forgot to mention the A3 scam in California, in which eleven people were indicted based on allegations that they embezzled between $50-80 million by inflated enrollments and phantom students. Indiana and Oklahoma online charters caught stealing tax dollars It should not be surprising that online charters steal tax funds for students
Linda Blackford, a writer for the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald Leader asks whether Kentucky can somehow manage to avoid the charter scandals that have occurred with startling frequency in other states. The Kentucky legislature authorized charters but has not yet funded them. The parents in SOS Kentucky have thus far stopped the funding of charters, because the money will defund the public schools
This is an inspiring video. It will activate couch potatoes. Johanna Quaas is 92 years old. Remind me why some schools are cutting physical education to make time for more testing.
Mercedes Schneider was curious to learn about the new organization Results for America. And so she went to the source: tax documents. The origin story is almost comical, as one useless but well-funded Organization begets another one. The Result for America: big take-home pay for executives. Lots of verbiage. If RFA is really interested in evidence-based policy, it will speak out against privatiza
Democracy raised its voices in the streets of Puerto Rico, demanding the resignation of the governor of Puerto Rico. He said no. They said yes. He is resigning today, according to this report from CNN: Puerto Rico’s embattled governor Ricardo Rosselló is expected to resign today after more than a week of protests that have rocked the capital city of San Juan. The dominos began to fall yesterday w
The Republican National Committee did background research on Betsy DeVos. Some of it might surprise you. It was leaked and posted by Axios. Here is the slightly redacted result.
The Virtual Charter schools of for-profit K12 Inc. have been noted for high attrition, low test scores, low graduation rates, and high profits. The corporation currently operates a virtual charter school in Georgia which is the largest “school” in the state but of course low-performing. Now it proposes to open another K-12 online charter that will eventually enroll 8,000 students. It will be care
The people of Puerto Rico are in the streets demanding the resignation of Governor Rosselló, following the release of emails revealing his bigotry and contemptuous comments about those who elected him. Former Secretary of a Education Julia Keleher was brought to the Island to privatize public schools, adopting the Trump-DeVos plan of charters and vouchers. She was recently arrested on fraud charg
Teresa Hanafin writes the daily Fast Forward for the Boston Globe. Here are two stellar items from today’s bulletin: So Trump is manipulating his gullible supporters again (I could start an item with those words every day), trying to convince them that replacing decrepit barriers on the southern border — a regular maintenance item that every recent administration has done — is the same as buildin
The Charter Industry has led a sterling marketing campaign to persuade the public that they are public schools, that they are far better than “traditional” public schools, and that they are hotbeds of innovation. None of this is true. They are privately managed schools. They receive public money but they are not public schools. Other than those that select their students, they do not get higher t
John Merrow here examines the public purpose of public schools, which has been corrupted by forty years of treating standardized tests as the measure of school success. He writes: What exactly is the public purpose of school? Why do communities invest in the education of all their young, instead of simply leaving the task of education to families? We know that parents send children to school for
Andy Spears, publisher of the Tennessee Education Report, explains how voucher forces finally passed a bill in Tennessee. The FBI is investigating how one vote flipped at the last minute. But no matter the outcome of these investigations, backers of school privatization can claim public policy victory. It took a new governor, an unscrupulous house speaker, and untold dark money dollars, but after
Chester Community Charter School is the largest brick-and-mortar charter school in Pennsylvania, with more than 4,000 students. It is a for-profit charter school owned by a wealthy lawyer named Vahan Gureghian, who was the largest individual contributor to former Governor Corbett. It is hard to know how much money CCCS makes, because its books are not open to the public. It must be doing very wel
More about the indictments in the $80 million California charter school scam At least three individuals that were indicted in the California charter scam have connections with the STEAM charters in Ohio. Diane Ravitch called our attention to Mercedes Schneider’s investigation of the California fraud. It is of interest that one of the counts against those involved is securing funds for stude
Ed Johnson is an adherent of the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, who wrote and spoke about the superiority of Improvement over disruptive change. Ed lives in Atlanta, where the school board and its superintendent believe that they must shock the system, privatize, impose constant disruption. As he shows in the chart below, their approach (the so-called “portfolio model”) has made matters worse.
Sarah Lahm wrote in The Progressive about a community battle in St. Paul, Minnesota, over the fate of a historic church building. The church in question is St. Andrew’s. Built in 1927 in the Romanesque Revival style, the brown brick church boasts an impressive, multicolored terra-cotta tile roof and a handsome bell tower. From the street, it looks alive and well kept, although Mass hasn’t been ce
Domingo Morel is a scholar of state takeovers. He wrote a book called Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy. He was also a member of the team from Johns Hopkins that studied the problems of the Providence schools. And, what’s more, he is a graduate of the Providence public schools. In other words, he has solid credentials to speak about the future of the Providence public schools. The
The Center for American Progress is considered by the media to be the voice of the Democratic establishment, or at least the Obama-Clinton center of the party. Referred to as CAP, it is resolutely pro-charter school, pro-testing, and anti-voucher (if it were not anti-voucher, its education agenda would be identical to the DeVos agenda). So who are the experts who speak for the Democratic mainstre
Laura Chapman has been doing research on the Center for American Progress, which the media views as the voice of the Democratic Party. This may be the most depressing thing you read today. It calls for a return to the principles of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Both failed. CAP wants to resuscitate the worst features of both. Maybe CAP can persuade Arne Duncan to return as Secretary o
We learned recently that Oklahoma officials have charged the EPIC online charter with fraud, alleging that its leaders siphoned off $10 million for themselves while inflating enrollments of ghost students. Schneider does her specialty investigation of EPIC’s tax returns and discovered that the corporation was created in 2009 for a variety of purposes, but not education. It eventually amended its
Salt Lake City station KUTV noticed that the charter industry has a good friend in the Legislature. He has made millions from charter schools. Journalists Chris Jones and Nadia Phlaum report: State Sen. Lincoln Fillmore (Dist. 10) is one of the foremost experts on charter schools in the state legislature. That makes sense given that he runs Charter Solutions, a company that from 2015 to 2018 has
Under normal circumstances, when a teacher disagreed with the state educatuon department’s decision to switch from one test to another, it would be called a difference of opinion. Under normal circumstances, when teachers called attention to the state chief’s decision to ignore the recommendations of his evaluation team and pick a different assessment, it would be treated as criticism and grounds
Nick Melvoin was elected to the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District with the most money ever spent on a school board election in American history. The money came from the charter lobby. It was not hard to assume that he owed an enormous debt of gratitude to Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Richard Riordan, Bill Bloomfield, and the other uber-rich who funded his election. Yet, I feel sorry f
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, posts frequently about education in his state. Last week, National Public Radio’s Alexandra Starr first reported on Florida’s mandatory retention of 3 rd graders who don’t pass a reading proficiency test. Even though it is stigmatizing for children to be retained, and “multiple studies have found that flunking a grade makes it much more li
The University of New Orleans was one of the first to jump into chartering after Hurricane Katrina, and it just announced that it is closing down its charter organization, New Beginnings, as a result of a slew of academic problems and malfeasance. After allegations of grade-fixing and a major fiasco involving class credits that left dozens of students unable to graduate, the public charter board
Alternet published an expose of documents from Hillary’s 2016 campaign that reveal the names of the billionaires who shaped her education agenda. The documents were leaked by Wikileaks. The education portion of the document
