Arthur Goldstein, veteran NYC teacher, traveled to Pittsburgh for the Public Education Forum, which will be live-streamed by MSNBC. Outside he sees a group of protestors from the charter industry, complaining that public schools get any notice at all. Six percent of America’s children are in charters. Almost 90% attend public schools. Goldstein remembers the many events where the charter industry
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, responds here to critics of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel,” the landmark analysis of the deeply flawed federal Charter Schools Program and invites comments and criticisms. NPE wants readers to scrutinize the report carefully. If there are any errors, we will promptly correct them. She writes: Examining a list of nearly 5000 charte
For Immediate Release December 13, 2019 CONTACT: Ori Korin 202-374-6103 okorin@aft.org Eric Jotkoff 617-784-1877 ejotkoff@nea.org Education, Civil Rights and Community Groups Respond to News of Planned Protest at Democratic Presidential Forum in Pittsburgh PITTSBURGH —Several leaders of the 11 organizations co-hosting a forum on public education with eight Democratic presidential candidates this
Jan Resseger will be in Pittsburgh tomorrow for the Public Education Forum where Democratic candidates will be questioned about their stands on important issues in public education. One of those issues is where the candidates stand vis-a-vis charter schools. Resseger points out that the NPE report, Still Asleep at the Wheel, provides fodder for asking candidates about the federal Charter Schools
Teresa Hanafin of the Boston Globe raises an interesting point that I have not seen anywhere else? In the Senate trial of Trump, Mitch McConnell is coordinating his actions with Trump and his counsel. Is this appropriate? Does it show impartiality? She writes: “Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to quash Trump’s desire to go full Apprentice with the trial in the Senate, c
Betsy DeVos gave New Hampshire $46 million from the federal Charter Schools Program to double the number of charter schools in the state. She uses the federal funding of $440 million as her slush fund to rapidly expand charters. [CORRECTION: I ORIGINALLY WROTE THAT NH REJECTED $25 MILLION; THAT WAS AN ERROR. NH REJECTED $46 MILLION.] In 2018, Democrats won control of the state legislature. This m
Apparently, anyone who disagrees with Donald Trump is “scum.” Or, “human scum.” I am scum. Are you scum too? December 12, 2019 Meyerson on TAP ‘Scum.’ Speaking at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday night, our president lamented the fate of his loyal lieutenants Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, both convicted of serious crimes in the course of getting Trump elected. He went after the FBI a
Betsy DeVos awarded $25 million to Alabama to grow some charter schools. She gave the money to an organization called “New Schools for Alabama,” which is supposed to launch 15 new charters over the next five years. Where there is money, there will always be takers, even where there is no need. This year, two charters are in the incubation stage. One is in Perry County, which has only two K-12 pub
The New York Times recently wrote an article claiming that many black and Hispanic families were disappointed that Democratic presidential candidates were abandoning the charter school crusade beloved by the leaders of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and currently by Betsy DeVos. Steven Singer disagrees. He responds bluntly that charter schools exploit children of color. He writes: Go t
Sue Legg of the Florida League of Women Voters wrote here about concerns about teachers’ pensions and whether the 2020 legislature is planning to undermine them. She writes: There are rumblings that the 2020 Florida Legislature may revise funding for the Florida Pension Plan. There is no question that the retirement system revenue has declined; it has not been 100% funded since the 2008 recession
In the era of Bush-Obama education policy, it became conventional wisdom to blame schools for the effects of poverty. Civil rights lawyer Wendy Lecker explains that the test-and-punish regime continues by blaming schools and punishing them for chronic absenteeism. She writes: NCLB measured school quality based on standardized test scores and relied on sanctions such as school turnaround, takeover
Newly elected Governor Andy Beshear campaigned on a platform prioritizing public education and promising to oust the state board appointed by DeVos ally Matt Bevin, as well as the state commissioner it appointed, Wayne Lewis, who supported charter schools. (The Legislature passed a charter authorization bill but never funded any charters.) Beshear stated bluntly that he does not support charters
Prominent groups that support public schools–not charter schools or religious schools–are meeting on Saturday in Pittsburgh to discuss the future of public education with Democratic presidential candidates. The billionaire-funded charter industry is angry that they can’t control the event and they have released their plans to disrupt the event. Contrary to the claims of the charter industry, char
Andy Borowitz (humorist) says Donald Trump was named Person of the Year by Popular Sociopath. For the third year in a row, Donald J. Trump has been named Person of the Year by the magazine Popular Sociopath, the publication announced on Thursday. “Once a year, we at Popular Sociopath recognize the person who best epitomizes sociopathic-personality disorder, which manifests in antisocial behavior
Today in the Washington Post, Eric Holder criticized Bill Barr for his aggressive, partisan support of Trump. Holder was Obama’s Attorney General. Barr is Trump’s Roy Cohn. Barr has professed his belief that the president’s powers have no limits; Congress must bow to the president. He has joined the “culture wars” by attacking “liberals,” which is an opinion, not an expression of the law. Republi
Steven Singer will be in Pittsburgh on Saturday as part of the Network for Public Education delegation to the MSNBC forum on public education. Here are his questions for the candidates. He won’t get to ask them all, but they are all great questions!
The Network for Public Education Action is one of the pro-public education groups that will participate in the forum on Public Education Issues in Pittsburgh on Saturday. The event will be livestreamed on MSNBC. Since the event was announced, candidates Cory Booker and Michael Bennett have joined the list of speakers. Each group will have the opportunity to ask one question of one candidate. Plea
I benefit by reading the investigations done by ProPublica. I signed up for their alerts about democracy and how to protect it. A User’s Guide to Democracy DEMOCRACY WORKS FOR YOU. HERE’S HOW TO BE A BETTER BOSS. Hi there, Who’s ready to become smarter, more engaged and more empowered when it comes to Congress? If you’ve signed up for this newsletter, hopefully your answer is … Over the next seve
Michael Kohlhaas, blogger in Los Angeles, writes here about a charter leader who harassed a teacher who protested his staff’s lack of qualifications. Excelencia Charter Academy is yet another creepy little charter school run by yet another shockingly unqualified creepy little galaxy-brained grifter, this one known as Ruben Alonzo, going about the place making creepy little announcements of delusi
Curtis Cardine, former superintendent of both public and charter schools, is the preeminent expert on charter schools in Arizona. He created the Grand Canyon Institute to study education issues, and it keeps a close eye on charter malfeasance. Cardine has written two books that are well worth reading to learn about the failures of the charter industry in Arizona. He is an expert in school finance
Thomas Ultican wrote a post about the billionaire-driven world of educational technology , which has nothing to do with education or learning, but everything to do with scoring profits. The edtech industry is driven by greed. He begins: Anthony Kim founded Education Elements in 2010. He sold Provost Systems – which built virtual schools – to Edison Schools in 2008 and was ready for a new project.
Newly elected Democratic Governor Andy Beshear kept a campaign promise and threw out the Bevin-appointed state school board. The Bevin board still has unexpired terms and they plan to sue to hold on to their seats. Their state commissioner Wayne Lewis–no friend to public schools or teachers–made clear he will hang on to his position as long as possible. Governor Beshear named a new board. The old
Steven Singer discovered that the Pennsylvania Department of Education invited citizens to comment on the state’s charter law. Now is your chance to be heard. Steven has some definite ideas about what needs to change and he tells you where to send your own comments. He writes: This is a huge opportunity for residents fed up with the nonsense the school privatization industry has been getting away
A report on a 25-year-old court case in North Carolina was released yesterday . The long-anticipated report rebukes the past decade of education policy in the state, led and directed by the Republican majority in the state’s General Assembly. The powers that be don’t like to spend money on education. The report lays out …an important new roadmap for ensuring that our public schools provide every
Bill Phillis posted this powerful letter on his blog for the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding. The Honorable Michael DeWine 77 S. High Street, Suite 30 Columbus, OH 43215 Dear Governor DeWine, The headline of an article in the October 27, 2019 Youngstown Vindicator reads: “DeWine Says HB70 Must Be Replaced.” We are happy to learn that you want to maintain local control o
Rahm Emanuel is gone. The boosters of privatization are out of power in Chicago. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has committed to improving the public schools that the vast majority of students attend. No new applications to open charter schools this year in the city of Chicago. It is a new day in Chicago, with new leadership. Yana Kunichoff writes in Chalkbeat: No new charter schools are applying this year
The York Dispatch, a newspaper in a district that has been targeted for state intervention, blasted the state with a scathing editorial. I hope the editorial board will forgive me for reprinting it in full. “Financial recovery” has not helped any district; it is a disaster for the students, teachers, and schools. It accomplishes nothing but disruption. The vultures are circling, and York City Sch
Rachel Cohen writes here about the charter supporters backing Pete Buttigieg. Billionaire Reed Hastings held a fundraiser for Mayor Pete. Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has given millions to the California Charter Schools Association. He has said he looks forward to the day when there are no elected school boards. He likes schools run by corporate boards. He says they didn’t discuss charter schools, w
Anu Partanen and Trevor Corson we’re living in a comfortable neighborhood in Brooklyn but worried about economic pressure and the future. When Anu got an offer of a job in her native Finland, they moved there. They wrote this article to explain that Finnish society arrived at an agreement to provide excellent public services, to pay higher taxes, to protect the health and wellness-being of their
John Merrow writes here about the stagnant scores reported on NAEP, PISA, and every other measure. They are an indictment of the test-centric policies of Bush, Obama, and Trump, he says. He writes: Given the PISA results and the harsh truth that NAEP scores have been disappointing for many years, it’s time to rename NAEP. Let’s call it the National Assessment of Educational Paralysis , because pa
The charter industry has lobbied for years to promote the idea that public schools and their teachers and teachers unions are uniquely responsible for denying educational opportunity to children of color. Ever since the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman,” produced by billionaire charter supporter (and rightwing evangelical zealot Philip Anschutz), the charter industry has promoted the claim t
Valerie Strauss reviews “Still Asleep at the Wheel” here. She begins: “More than 35 percent of charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars, according to a new report from an advocacy group that reviewed records of nearly 5,000 schools. “The state with the most cha
Last spring, the Network for Public Education published a report on waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program. The report, called Asleep At the Wheel , documented the Department of Education’s failure to monitor the veracity or feasibility of applications for the program or to follow up on what happened to the money spent to launch new charter schools. It found that nearly $1
Some of us are old enough to remember the New York Times publication of “The Pentagon Papers,” the secret history of the war in Vietnam compiled by the Department of Defense; they were purloined by Daniel Ellsberg, who opposed the war and shared with the Times. The revelations in those papers helped to end that conflict. Now the Washington Post is publishing government papers about the long-lasti
Will Bunch, regular opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, excoriates McKinsey in this column. He writes: In the last few years, McKinsey & Co.’s image as a go-to high-paying job option for the Ivy League’s best and brightest has morphed into something uniquely dark and sinister, as outstanding journalism from the New York Times and others has shed a light on arguably the world’s most secr
When I worked in the first Bush Administration In 1991-92, McKinsey consultants were everywhere. Gaggles of very young, well-dressed people marched in and out of the White House with briefcases and plans. McKinsey has advised school districts, given them business plans to fix their problems. Does anyone ever check up on how their proposals turned out? Do they ever admit failure? I never figured o
ProPublica describes the role of McKinsey, those brilliant technocrats, in designing the practices that characterized Trump’s cruel crackdown on immigration. The problem with McKinsey is arrogance: they believe in their omniscience, absent human values. Sadly, the McKinsey mindset (data counts more than people) has been imposed on many school districts across the nation that hired them as managem
Over the past decade or more, policymakers have spent zillions of hours discussing governance (charters, vouchers, state takeovers, etc.), while ignoring the basic issue facing public schools: adequate and equitable funding. Jan Resseger writes here about the dramatic and much-needed response in Massachusetts to address the need to fund its schools appropriately: The legislature passed and the Go
Three years ago, the pro-charter, pro-voucher Thomas B. Fordham Institute published a study of Ohio’s voucher program . The study, conducted by David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik of Northwestern University is called “Evaluation of Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program: Selection, Competition, and Performance Effects.” The study concluded that the voucher program was failing to improve student ach
Thomas Armstrong recently wrote a provocative book with the same title as this essay. I invited him to write a post for this blog, and he did. His point of view stands in sharp contrast to the current policy environment of testing, data, competition, and punishment for teachers, principals, students, and schools that don’t hit test score benchmarks. He writes: The National Assessment of Education
Bill Radin writes in California-based “Capital & Main” about Eli Broad’s decision to spend $100 million to buy his leadership training program a place at the Yale School of Management. As Radin notes, Broadies left some notable messes behind. Broad’s philosophy is that educational problems are really management problems. Never having taught, he is projecting his life experience onto a sector with
I recently began subscribing to Garrison Keillor’s online daily website called ”The Writer’s Almanac.” He offers poems, celebrates the birthdays of famous writers, and includes things that interest him. Like this: On this date in 1660 , a professional female actress appeared on the English stage in a production of Othello . It’s one of the earliest known instances of a female role actually being
Tom Loveless has been writing about international assessments for many years. He was quick to blow the whistle on China when the previous international test scores came out, noting that unlike the U.S. and most other nations, China was not testing a cross-section of its students. In this article on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog, Loveless calls out China again for rigging the outcomes to mak
The state commissioner of Rhode Island has recommended a five-year renewal for a failing charter scho ol. The New England Laborers Construction and Career Academy has earned a one-star rating, the lowest possible ranking in the state’s school accountability system, for the past two years. Critics have long complained that charter schools are not held to the same standards as traditional public sc
Tune in! PUBLIC EDUCATION GROUPS WILL HOST TOP DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES AT 2020 PUBLIC EDUCATION FORUM MSNBC Will MODERATE AND LIVESTREAM PITTSBURGH FORUM ON DEC. 14 PITTSBURGH— The Network for Public Education Action will join with other public education groups, unions, civil rights organizations and community groups to host a forum for Democratic presidential candidates on Saturday De
Is Chester-Upland School District the frog in the boiling pot of water that is a warning to every other school district in the state of Pennsylvania? The Chester Community Charter School is a subject of endless fascination. It has absorbed 70% of the elementary school students in the impoverished district of Chester-Upland in Pennsylvania. Its scores are low, lower even than the district schools.
This is an interesting article that appears online in The Washington Monthly. It was written by a former law student of Jonathan Turley, who appeared as a legal expert to defend President Trump and to argue against his impeachment. I watched the panel of constitutional scholars and was puzzled by Turley’s claim that the House needed more evidence to impeach Trump. The evidence of the Ukraine sche
The media received early copies of Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s plan for K-12 education. Like Warren and Sanders, he proposes a large increase in funding for the neediest children and for early education. He wants to see a reduction in college tuition. He does not propose a wealth tax on the 1%. He is against for-profit charters but, unlike Warren and Sanders, would not eliminate or freeze the federal
Tufts University is taking the Sackler name off the buildings and programs endowed by the billionaire family because of its relationship to the opioid crisis. The Sackler billions were mostly derived from the sale of Oxycontin, which is a highly addictive opioid (and effective painkiller). Jonathan Sackler is a major funder of charter schools. He helped to start Achievement First, ConnCAN, and 50
Andre Perry led a charter chain in New Orleans. He became disillusioned. As a black scholar, he questions the Walton-funded effort to portray black support for charters as monolithic, which it is not. Perry wrote in response to the controversy that occurred when pro-charter demonstrators disrupted a speech by Elizabeth Warren in Atlanta. He is aware of the white Republican money behind the demand
Social scientists have repeatedly documented the close correlation between child poverty and academic achievement. You don’t have to be a social scientist to look at any graph that displays both test scores and family income: the kids from the richest families are at the top, and the kids from the poorest family are at the bottom. It is not surprising, because those with the least income have the
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider reveal the secret ingredient to the success of the Resistance to privatization/portfolio district strategy in Denver in this podcast. For years, Denver had been a feather in the cap of DFER and
