Big Education Ape: May 24, 2019

Friday, May 24, 2019

2018 Charter School Credit Ratings for Nine States, with a Focus on California and Michigan | deutsch29

2018 Charter School Credit Ratings for Nine States, with a Focus on California and Michigan | deutsch29

2018 Charter School Credit Ratings for Nine States, with a Focus on California and Michigan

There are situations in which B is a grade to be avoided.

Let us consider some 2018 charter school credit ratings as reported in Standard & Poor’s.

First, some background on “rated debt,” compliments of Zacks:

Just like stocks, debt instruments, specifically bonds, can be traded in public exchanges. Since corporate bonds can be a great deal more complicated than stocks, they sometimes come with ratings to help investors understand the potential risks and rewards. …

In finance, the word “rating” refers to a letter grade assigned to a corporation or its debt instruments by a rating agency. These ratings are based on the rating agency’s prediction of the default probability. In simpler terms, the better the rating, the more likely the firm will be able to make good on its promise to pay periodic interest and repay the principal. …

Next, a word about “investment grade” bonds from Investopedia:

An investment grade is a rating that indicates that a municipal or corporate bond has a relatively low risk of default. Bond rating firms, such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, use different designations consisting of upper- and lower-case letters ‘A’ and ‘B’ to identify a bond’s credit quality rating. ‘AAA’ and ‘AA’ (high credit quality) and ‘A’ and ‘BBB’ (medium credit quality) are considered investment grade. Credit ratingsfor bonds below these designations (‘BB’, ‘B’, ‘CCC’, etc.) are considered low credit quality, and are commonly referred to as “junk bonds.”

And now, about those charter schools:

According to S&P’s U.S. Charter Schools 2019 Sector Outlook, the following ratings capture virtually all of its 281 rated charter schools across 25 states for CONTINUE READING: 2018 Charter School Credit Ratings for Nine States, with a Focus on California and Michigan | deutsch29

Big Education Ape: Which Is Higher at BASIS Schools: Its AP Scores, or Its Debt? | deutsch29 - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2017/05/which-is-higher-at-basis-schools-its-ap.html

Thank You To The Assembly Members Who Passed AB 1505

AB 1505 Passes

How Could Education Reformers Get it So Wrong? - Living in Dialogue

How Could Education Reformers Get it So Wrong? - Living in Dialogue

How Could Education Reformers Get it So Wrong?
A Review of The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch, Part 2

This is a second post reviewing The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch. Part one summarized Ravitch’s essays from 2010, which was the time when corporate reform pivoted from what she called “the Death Star of education,” NCLB, to “the Executioner,” her term for the Race to the Top which spearheaded the Obama administration’s and the Billionaires Boys Club’s attempt to “blow up” the education “status quo,” in a failed attempt to produce “disruptive” and “transformative” reforms.

Had NCLB’s architects bothered to read education history and social science research, they would have learned that education scholars mostly agreed with Ravitch that, “No other nation tests every student every year,” and “No high-quality system judges the quality of teachers by the test scores of their students.” Had the Obama administration taken the time to listen to researchers and practitioners, it might have realized that his administration dramatically increased drill-and-kill malpractice by mandating the use of statistical models that Ravitch correctly described as “fundamentally flawed,” and “inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable.”

For instance, Ravitch draws upon the work of Dan Koretz, who “excoriates the reform movement for its indifference to the harm it caused.” Koretz, as well as Ravitch, makes a sophisticated, carefully worded, scientific case against the testing imposed under the Bush and, especially, the Obama administrations. It’s not surprising that impatient corporate reformers didn’t want to take the time to read such complex science. But there is no excuse for their failure to pay attention to this specific harm cited by Koretz. How could they not face up to the damage that would inherently result from teaching kids that there is just “one ‘right answer,’” as opposed to asking the “right question?”

NCLB did terrible damage to schools, but it held only about 1/5thof educators accountable for increasing test scores. The novice reformers didn’t understand why value-added teacher evaluations, that were CONTINUE READING: How Could Education Reformers Get it So Wrong? - Living in Dialogue

The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

Bernie Sanders has raised the bar for Presidential candidates by offering a hefty set of planks for an education platform. His Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education is the first substantive attempt to address education policy in a Presidential campaign we’ve seen in decades.

In the 2016 campaign, education was supposed to be an issue that Jeb Bush would ride to the White House, but instead conservative opposition to Common Core took the wind out of those sails. Democrats stuck to safe issues— more pre-school, cheaper college. Sanders has gone beyond that with ten broad goals backed up by a long list of specifics. Among those, we can find five really good ideas, one not-so-great idea, and one missed opportunity.

The Good

Tripling Title I. Title I funds are designated for schools with a high population of disadvantaged students. There is room for debate about some of the specifics of the title, but it is a good means of moving federal money out to schools that are underfunded and students who are underserved. Increasing the funding has the advantage of not requiring new agencies or mechanisms to gets support out there. Sanders has this listed both under his item for more equitable funding for schools and his goal of fighting segregation, and that makes sense because part of the problem of segregation is the segregation of resources.

Clamping down on charter schools. The big headlines for Sanders came from his pledge to ban for-profit charter schools, but that’s a nothing-burger. Hillary Clinton tried this angle in 2016, CONTINUE READING: The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

Dana Goldstein: Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation - The New York Times

Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation - The New York Times

Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation

When Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a wide-ranging speech on education Saturday, he became the first major Democratic candidate to propose a detailed plan to racially integrate schools, calling for $1 billion in funding to support local integration efforts, such as magnet schools and busing.

It was the type of robust agenda that integration advocates say they have waited decades for.

But for some, those ideas were overshadowed by more divisive elements of the proposal: Mr. Sanders’s plan to freeze federal funding for all new charter schools, and the link his plan made between charter schools and segregation.

Many Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, support charters as a way to provide more options to families, especially those that are too poor to move to a higher-quality school district or pay for private school. The impact of charters on school segregation is hotly disputed in education circles, and by linking these elements, Mr. Sanders touched a nerve in a highly charged debate within the party.

Blaming charters for school segregation is “galling,” said Amy Wilkins, a vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and a longtime advocate in Washington for racial equity in education. “What Brown v. Board of Education did was say that government can’t tell black parents which public schools they can and can’t send their kids to. What Senator Sanders is saying with his attempt to limit charter schools is telling black parents, who overwhelmingly support CONTINUE READING: Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation - The New York Times

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

You probably saw the quote from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos equating US public education with Soviet East Germany. That was a good headline (and great clickbait), but it's worth it to go and take a look at the full context of that quote. This will be long, but I can't help it-- I find strolling through the inside of Betsy DeVos's head kind of fascinating. I'd love to have her come join me at the local coffee shop for an afternoon.

The occasion of the speech was a presentation to Young America's Foundation at the Reagan Ranch Center. Young America's Foundation was founded in 1969, and it is as conservative as can be-- it is one of the co-founders and forces behind the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The organization bought the Reagan ranch "Rancho Del Cielo" in 1998 with the help of $10 million from Richard and Helen DeVos (Betsy's parent-in-laws).

So on this occasion DeVos was very much among her people, and we've seen in the past that these are the occasions on which she tends to let down her hair, stop playing to a wider audience, and let's her plutocrat flag fly.

She opens with a paean to YAF and Reagan, but she actually calls back to the group Young Americans for Freedom, founded 1959ish with a series of conversations in William F. Buckley's living room about what it means to be a conservative, resulting in the Sharon Statement (Young Americans for Freedom were eventually absorbed by Young America's Foundation) . That's a complicated topic on its own, as it represented a bit of a break with conservative thought at the time (which was struggling a bit with the not-terribly-popular Richard Nixon in the White House). The ideas of the Sharon Statement were carried into the 80s when all those college radicals grew up-- political freedom is inseparable from economic freedom, CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year | Diane Ravitch's blog

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year | Diane Ravitch's blog

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports that the Chan-Zuckerberg tech-based schools called Summit have been underreporting the percent of schools that quit their program every year.

After multiple news reports of high school students walking out in protest against the Summit tech platform, Summit responded by saying that only 10% of schools leave every year. That figure, writes Barnum, was widely reported.

Summit has led the “movement” for “personalized learning,” which is in fact “depersonalized learning.” To be personalized, there must be interaction between at least two persons, not interaction between a computer and a student.

Barnum writes:

When nearly 100 students walked out of their Brooklyn high school in protest last year, saying they were spending too much of their days in front of a computer, the story took off.

The students were complaining about their school’s use of Summit Learning, a curriculum and online learning system backed byFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the organizations behind Summit pushed back, CONTINUE READING: Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year | Diane Ravitch's blog

Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher. | Teacher in a strange land

Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher. | Teacher in a strange land

Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher.

I’m not much of a flag waver, really. I always thought that author James Baldwin captured my feelings precisely in Notes of a Native Son when he wrote:

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

These days, perpetual criticism is essential. We are headed into dark times, redefining the meaning of patriotism and sacrifice. It’s easy to lose faith in our government and the grand experiment—all men created equal—that founded this nation. It’s easy to let hope die when threats of another pointless war appear on the horizon.

I still believe, however, heart and soul, in the shining but imperfect ideals of a democratic education –equality under the law, the American common school, a free, high-quality education for all children, simply because they deserve it. Thirty years of teaching school have given me a hard crust of cynicism about many things related to education and America. But I never lost my enthusiasm for the Memorial Day parade.

For 25 years, my middle school band students marched through the small town where I taught and lived, in the Memorial Day Parade. There was a whole set of traditions around this event, which grew larger and more complicated every year: the aural passing down of our special drum cadences from the self-appointed 8th grade drumline leaders, mending the color guard flags originally purchased through a pizza sale back in ’88, and patching up hand-me-down snares and sousaphones scrounged from the high school.

There was never a budget for this–middle schools don’t typically have marching CONTINUE READING: Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher. | Teacher in a strange land

Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally - World Socialist Web Site

Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally - World Socialist Web Site

Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally

The Chicago Teachers Union held a rally outside the James R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago Wednesday under the slogan “Standing strong for the schools Chicago’s students deserve.”

Teachers have grown increasingly disillusioned with the high-flown “social justice” pretensions of the CTU, since it has collaborated for years with the city’s Democratic Party administration and former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in imposing school closings, layoffs, and countless other attacks on teachers and public education.

The CTU rally

As the rally took place, former CTU President Karen Lewis and the union’s political-legislative director Stacy Davis-Gates were holding closed-door discussions with newly inaugurated Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, to discuss plans for forthcoming attacks on teachers and public education. The labor agreement for nearly 25,000 educators expires on June 30.

Various national and local union officials, along with longtime political charlatans such as Jesse Jackson, took to the stage to offer demagogic speeches paying lip service to teachers’ aspirations, at the same time attempting to promote illusions in the Democratic Party, which has been responsible for attacking public education and teachers’ working conditions no less than the Republicans.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who has a salary in excess of $500,000, was introduced as “she who shuts it down across the country,” unintentionally summing up her role in sabotaging a whole series of teachers strike over the last year. She stated most bluntly the purpose of the event, saying, “So I’m really glad to be in Chicago today with the CTU welcome party to your new mayor.”

Randi Weingarten (left)

Current CTU President Jesse Sharkey, a leading member of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization, unconvincingly attempted to present himself and the CTU as skeptics and even potential opponents of Lightfoot, at the same time giving credence to her claims to be seeking a “fairer and more just city, not just for downtown but on the South and West Sides too, and the working-class neighborhoods.”

Making it clear that the CTU is opposed to any strike action to fight the new attacks being readied by Lightfoot and district officials, Sharkey has called for the intervention of a federal mediator in the contract talks.

Only a small crowd of 300-400 people were on hand at the rally, reflecting the mass disaffection of teachers with the CTU and the Democratic Party. By CONTINUE READING: Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally - World Socialist Web Site

What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools - The Washington Post

What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools - The Washington Post

What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools

Image result for What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools

A new analysis by a gun control advocacy group says there have been more than 65 publicly reported incidents of mishandled guns at schools in the last five years. They include:

A teacher’s loaded gun falling from his waistband during a cartwheel.
A student grabbing an officer’s gun while the officer attempted to subdue the student.
A teacher unintentionally firing a gun in class during a safety demonstration.

The analysis, by Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, has not deterred legislators in a number of states from moving to expand opportunities for teachers to carry guns in schools.

In Florida, teachers can now carry guns at schools under a new law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). In Texas, the legislature has sent a bill to the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, that would allow more teachers and school personnel to carry guns on campus. And in other states — including Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma and North Carolina — legislators are pushing to create programs that would allow for adults to carry guns in schools.

This post looks at the issue from the lens of black parents, whose children are shot by authorities and disciplined at school in far greater percentages than white children. This was written by Rann Miller, an African American educator who directs the 21st Century Community Learning Center, a federally funded after-school program located in southern New Jersey.

Miller spent six years teaching in charter schools in Camden, New Jersey, and is the creator, writer and editor of the Official Urban Education Mixtape Blog. His writing on race and urban education has appeared in Salon, AlterNet, and the Progressive, where I’m an education fellow. Follow him on Twitter:@UrbanEdDJ

By Rann Miller

I am an educator. I am a former social studies teacher and a current director of an afterschool program for a school district. I am also African American and the parent of a school-aged child, with two other children in CONTINUE READING: What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools - The Washington Post

School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda | radical eyes for equity

School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda | radical eyes for equity

School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda

On 20 May 2019, the Charleston Post and Courier offered this: Here’s what it takes for a SC school to be the No. 1 public high school in the US. And here is what is newsworthy:

The news was out before the sound of the school announcement system crackled through the halls: Academic Magnet High, long regarded as the top-performing high school in South Carolina, had climbed to No. 1 in a national ranking of public high schools.

Just three days later, The State (Columbia, SC) reported: Richland 1’s elite elementary school is also its whitest and least impoverished. This coverage explains:

Like all parents, Sara McBride just wanted her son to get the best possible education.

That’s why she tried to get her son into Richland 1’s highest-ranked school: Brockman Elementary. A school where class sizes are small and teachers’ advanced degrees and experience nets them a higher average salary.

The South Carolina Department of Education provides for 1270 public schools in the state a Poverty Index; for 2018, Academic Magnet High is the #1 least impoverished school in the entire state, and Brockman Elementary is #57, placing these two celebrated schools in the top 4.5% of all schools in the state in terms of extremely low poverty as well as disproportionate racial imbalances (Brockman is 75% white and AMH has only 3.5% black enrollment).

SC as a state ranks in the bottom ten of high-poverty states (about an 18% poverty rate) and has a relatively high percentage of black citizens (28%) as well as about 5-6% Hispanic/Latinx.

Across the U.S., there are some harsh facts about measurable student outcomes and demographics of students being served. Race, School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda | radical eyes for equity

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District – In the Public Interest

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District – In the Public Interest

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District

In the Public Interest, in partnership with California’s West Contra Costa Unified School District (WCCUSD) staff, directly measured the financial impact of charter schools on students who attend the district’s traditional public schools.

The report is a follow-up to our 2018 Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts, which was the first, and continues to be the only, effort to measure the direct cost of charter schools on California school districts.

Key findings from the report include:Charter schools cost WCCUSD $27.9 million during the 2016-17 school year.

Charter schools cost WCCUSD $27.9 million during the 2016-17 school year.
WCCUSD loses $978 a year in funding for each charter school student.

In the Public Interest recommends that each California school district should produce an annual report assessing the economic impacts of charter school expansion on district students. This data and analysis will empower local officials to balance the potential value of charter schools against the needs of students.

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District – In the Public Interest

Our Resources on Public Education

	The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts 5/8/2018A first-of-its-kind analysis revealing that public school students in three California school districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of privately managed charter schools.

	Fraud and waste in California’s charter schools 3/1/2018A report documenting that total alleged and confirmed fraud and waste in California’s charter schools has reached over $149 million, which represents only the tip of the iceberg due to lax regulation and little transparency.

	How charter schools impact public school district budgets 2/23/2018A compilation of studies by a variety of institutions and authors, all which share a similar finding: districts and the students they serve are undermined by prioritizing charter school growth over educational opportunities for all students.

Our Resources on Public Education - http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/?p=7919

Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger

Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger

Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers?

This blog will take a one-week early summer break and come back in June on a new, three-day, Monday-Wednesday-Friday summer schedule. Look for a new post on Monday, June 3.

Diane Ravitch made the announcement yesterday morning on her blog: A U.S. philanthropy has awarded $10 million in prize money to two companies—Kitkit School and Onebillion—for developing and testing out in Tanzania an electronic tablet program for teacherless education. “You knew this was coming, didn’t you?” writes Ravitch.

First it was Bridge International Academies, the for-profit, international private school venture underwritten by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other philanthropists and operating in Kenya, Liberia, Uganda and India. At Bridge Academies, students must pay tuition, teachers in the schools must continually recruit new students, and teachers must present scripted curricula delivered to them electronically from a central site. Critics have pointed out that by employing less educated teachers who merely present scripted lessons, colonialist efforts like this one are undermining the development of a strong profession of well qualified school teachers in the locations of such experiments.

This week the news is not about scripted curricula delivered to teachers in the Global South. This week’s XPRIZE is for newly developed, programmed tablets to do the job of the teachers.

Philanthropy News Digest describes the challenge XPRIZE presented to several tech developers when it asked them to come up with teacherless teaching: “Launched in 2014 with support from the Merkin Family, Dick & Betsy DeVos Family, and Tony Robbins foundations, Elon Musk, and other funders, the Global Learning XPRIZE challenged innovators to develop scalable solutions that enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing, and math skills within fifteen months. Each of the five finalists received $1 million to field test their CONTINUE READING: Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger

Latest News and Comment from Education

Friday, May 24, 2019

2018 Charter School Credit Ratings for Nine States, with a Focus on California and Michigan | deutsch29

Thank You To The Assembly Members Who Passed AB 1505

How Could Education Reformers Get it So Wrong? - Living in Dialogue

The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

Dana Goldstein: Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation - The New York Times

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year | Diane Ravitch's blog

Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher. | Teacher in a strange land

Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally - World Socialist Web Site

What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools - The Washington Post

School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda | radical eyes for equity

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District – In the Public Interest

Our Resources on Public Education

The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts

Fraud and waste in California’s charter schools

How charter schools impact public school district budgets

Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger

This blog will take a one-week early summer break and come back in June on a new, three-day, Monday-Wednesday-Friday summer schedule. Look for a new post on Monday, June 3.

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