The biggest and worst charter scandals are perpetrated by virtual charter schools. Why do states tolerate their waste, fraud, and abuse? The only online charters should be operated and supervised by public officials, not by grifters and entrepreneurs. Indiana was just scammed of more than $68 million by two virtual charters. This was money that should have spent on children and in classrooms to r
Jersey Jazzman notes that charters in his state are on the horns of a dilemma: on one hand, public school advocates are suing to block charter expansion, because they drain away public school funding: on the other hand, charters want to join a lawsuit that would allow them to share in a settlement intended to provide equity for public schools in impoverished districts. JJ is a very smart guy but
Teresa Hanafin writes the Fast Forward feature for the Boston Globe, interpreting the big events of the day and referring to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the weather, and sports in Boston. She writes today about the Department of Fake Outrage: I am so sick and tired of this week that I was tempted to make this a TFF. But too much happened yesterday to ignore. Nonetheless, in honor of it being the Fr
Charter advocates have reacted with astonishment and outrage at the Trump-DeVos decision to fold the federal Charter Schools Program into a block grant to the states, along with 29 other programs. The Trump administration’s goal is to shift federal funding to states and let them decide how to spend the money. Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat writes the story here, detailing the administration’s rationale
When Rudy Guiliani was planning to run for mayor of New York City in 1993, he commissioned a study of his vulnerabilities so that he would be prepared to respond to attacks. The vulnerability study compiled a long list of his deeds and misdeeds that would give ammunition to critics. After he read it, Guiliani ordered that it be destroyed, lest it fall into the wrong hands. Apparently, one copy wa
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews SLAYING GOLIATH. This is the second part of his review. This is an excerpt of a long and thoughtful review. This second post will focus on Ravitch’s analysis of the research which predicted the defeat of accountability-driven, charter-driven policies. Perhaps the most striking pattern documented in Slaying Goliath is how they faile
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews SLAYING GOLIATH in two-parts. This is part one. He begins: Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools is the history of the rise and fall of corporate school reform, but it is much more. It isn’t that surprising that a scholar like Ravitch, like so many
Jeff Bryant has written a powerful story that reveals the growing dominance of corporations in schools. In the expanding effort to privatize the nation’s public education system, an ominous, less-understood strain of the movement is the corporate influence in Career and Technical Education (CTE) that is shaping the K-12 curriculum in local commu nities. An apt case study of the growing corporate
The Washington Post reports that school bullying is following the model created by the Big Bully in the White House, who delights in ridiculing others. Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered “Ban Muslims” at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the pres
A few people in Los Angeles who think a great deal about education issues decided to launch a new website. They are real people who are not funded by billionaires Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, the Waltons, Bill Bloomfield, Michael Bloomberg, or Bull Gates. Imagine that! Blogger Sara Roos writes an introduction: Dears: With this I am announcing the launch of the Los Angeles Education Examiner , a site
Fred Smith was the testing expert at the New York City Board of Education for many years. After he retired, he became a relentless truth-teller about the flaws of standardized testing and the clever means of distorting the stats to produce the desired results. He currently acts as an unpaid advisor to opt-out parents. Smith sent this article from 2007 that shows how Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced a budget proposal that earmarked new spending on education, but no raises for teachers, whose pay is below the average for southern states. For Louisiana public school teachers, a group that includes some of Gov. John Bel Edwards’ earliest and most avid supporters, the governor’s first post-reelection budget proposal has good news and bad news. The go
Jackie Goldberg is running for re-election to the Los Angeles Unified School Board. She is an experienced public official who has supported public schools for decades as a school board member and state legislator. A rightwing billionaire dumped nearly half a million into her low-budget race to try to stop her in the March 3 election (early voting has already started.) Jackie was endorsed by the U
The controversy over the Common Core standards has died down since so many states have renamed and rebranded them as if they no longer exist. But below the eye of public attention, Common Core does what it was intended to do: It has created a marketplace for vendors. Alex Harwin, in her update of the marketplace, writes that more than two-thirds of district leaders say they are still buying CCSS
Teresa Hanafin writes the “Fast Forward” column for the Boston Globe: The biggest story that is still reverberating today isn’t Bernie Sanders’ victory in the New Hampshire primary, or Pete Buttigieg’s close second-place finish, or Amy Klobuchar’s remarkable rise, or the surprising slide of Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden. No, it’s Trump’s stunning, deliberate, and unprecedented insertion of presi
Discounting for the rhetoric and hyperbole, it is worth reading Bill and Melinda Gates’ letter about what they do and why they do it. They claim that Deborah Meier was one of their primary inspirations for their work in education, but knowing Debby Meier, I doubt that they read her book The Power of Their Ideas or that they understood what she was saying. Both of us had the chance to attend excel
Mike Bloomberg has this problem with minorities because of his many years of telling the police in New York City to stop black and brown youths and frisk them, without cause. When he began his campaign for the presidency, he went to a black church and apologized for stop-and-frisk. But the damage had been done. The Washington Post found one of what must be many videos where Bloomberg touted his s
Many researchers were amazed to see that the state of Mississippi had a sharp growth in its fourth-grade reading scores. Fortunately, the far-right Thomas B. Fordham Institute reveals how this happened. The surest path to success in fourth-grade reading on NAEP is to hold back third-graders who did not pass the third-grade reading test. It works! It increased Florida’s fourth-grade reading scores
Peter Greene nails it here, in discussing how Trump and DeVos folded the federal Charter Schools Program into a big, fat block grant that states can spend however they wish. For decades, Republicans have been wanting to eliminate social programs by turning them into block grants to the states. Now, as Valerie Strauss reported , charter school advocates are outraged. Brought to the dance and aband
No U.S. Attorney General in history has ever turned the Department of Justice into a political tool belonging to the president. Until now. Bill Barr has totally politicized the Department. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote today: There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus. Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can es
Trump proposes to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, which are very small appropriations, but which Republicans have always hated. I seem to recall that he wants to eliminate NOAA so the weather service can be completely privatized, and the public will have to pay to find out what the weather is and might be. Laura Chapman adds: In addition to the cuts to education pro
The Education Law Center is suing to block former Governor Chris Christie’s 2016 decision to expand charters in Newark: About Us News February 11, 2020 NJ SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW STATE COMMISSIONER’S DECISION TO DRAMATICALLY EXPAND CHARTER SCHOOLS IN NEWARK The New Jersey Supreme Court has granted a petition filed by Education Law Center (ELC) to review the State Commissioner of Education’s 2
Four years ago, Michael Bloomberg spoke candidly in Aspen about his stop-and-frisk policies that targeted young black and Hispanic men, but he immediately requested that it not be released to the public. Although he was proud of his policy, he knew there was something that wasn’t right about targeting young minority males. Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote about the racist, disastrous poli
When Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education, he touted the idea that every student should be college ready. There has been considerable debate about which was Arne’s most memorable utterance. Some say it was his claim that Hurricane Katrina “was the best thing that ever happened to the schools of New Orleans,” despite the deaths of over 1,000 people. Others think it was his crack that the reason
To the shock and consternation of charter school advocates, the Trump budget proposal abandons the controversial federal Charter Schools Program, turning it into a state bloc program that turns the money over to the states. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools issued a scathing denunciation of the axing of the federal charter school programs, which has enriched the big corporate chart
Laura Chapman writes: “EdReports, an independent curriculum review nonprofit, rates curriculum on three gateways: Text Quality, Building Knowledge, and Usability. Amplify CKLA earned a green rating in all three.” This should not be regarded as a trustworthy endorsement. Here is Why. Recall that the Common Core State (sic) Standards were first marketed as if they were not intended to be about curr
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) is in charge of the appropriations for most social programs. She released this list of the programs that the Trump administration wants to slash or gut. She stands in his way, which illustrates the importance of re-electing a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and electing a Denocratic Senate to stop the attacks on needed, successful federal programs
ProPublica has another important expose, this one about the Navy’s dependence on flawed technology. I donate to ProPublica. This investigative journalism has never been more important. The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money. Ten sailors paid with their lives. COLLISION COURSE When the USS John S. McCain crashed in the Pacific, the Navy blamed the destroyer’s crew for the l
This post was submitted as a comment by a reader who self-identifies as “Democracy”: There’s little question that the SAT and ACT are marginally “good” at predicting success in college. I’ve made this point here numerous times. The best predictor of success in college is high school grade point average (including an SAT score doesn’t add much). Moreover, research shows that “the best predictor of
One of the regular commenters on the blog signs in as NYC Public School Parent. She wrote the following: The ed reformers have set up a game with rules in which they always win. If 100% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the standards are too low. If 50% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the schools are terrible. If a charter comes in and cherry pick
Five years ago, Kevin Welner and Gary Miron explained why you should not believe claims about charter “wait lists.” At the same time that they released this caution (2014), the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools [sic] put out a press release claiming that more than one million students were wait-listed to get into charter schools. Five years later, the New York Times cited this press re
Tonight (before the Oscars) I spoke at the Mark Taper Auditorium in the Los Angeles Central Library. It was a magnificent event, led by Alex Caputo-Pearl of the United Teachers of Los Angeles. The library is an elegant building that has been renovated. The auditorium is gorgeous. The audience was wonderful. The event was videotaped so I hope to post it here. I noticed that many big contributors t
David North of the Center for Immigratuon Studies recounts the story of the Gulen charter schoo l that thought it could open in a rural Alabama district with a declining enrollment. In Texas and other states, groups started or inspired by Pastors for Texas Children have relied on rural Republicans to block vouchers because they love their public schools, the heart of their communities. The federa
The United Teachers of Los Angeles is militantly fighting back against the privatizers who are attacking public schools and seek to divert public money to charters and vouchers. The UTLA embodies Resistance to privatization and to those who oppose full funding of Los Angeles’ public schools. UTLA has created a billboard portraying the “ Corporate Special Interests Vs. Our Public Schools.” Open th
Michael Mulgrew is president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, the largest local in the nation and in the American Federation of Teachers. He published this article in the New York Daily News, which is strongly pro-charter and often writes about the “success” of the city’s charter schools compared to its public schools. Mulgrew explains here the secrets of charter “success.” The r
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Trump singled out a child from Philadelphia who, he said, was “trapped in a failing government school.” In fact, the child attends one of the city’s most elite charter schools. Didn’t Betsy DeVos realize she had given $1.3 million to the self-same charter school in 2019? President Donald Trump turned a Philadelphia fourth grader into a poster child for the
Despite my ongoing struggle to overcome the remnants of the flu, I managed to get through an event last night with the United Educators of San Francisco. I have become very comfortable with a new format, in which I don’t give a speech but instead engage in conversation with the interlocutor. Last night, my partner was Susan Solomon, the union president. I learned from her about the difficulty tha
Kate Chopin wrote “The Awakening,” a classic of feminist writing. Garrison Keillor wrote about her today in “A Writer’s Almanac.” Keillor also published this delightful poem today: Where’s that thing? by John Kenney Where’s that thing? you ask me looking in the cabinet above the stove. The new one or old one, I reply, fairly sure you know what I mean. Old one. Under the sink. It’s not there. Just
Laura Chapman, intrepid researcher, reports on Bill Gates’ next adventure in education. comment Laura H. Chapman chapmanlh@aol.com 69.133.10.177 Gates is not finished with meddling in public education. Far from it. In case you missed it, here is the new twist on how he will be spending money. In June of 2019, Alex Gangitano of The Hill reported “Bill and Melinda Gates launch lobbying shop.” The n
The Orlando Sentinel surveyed Florida’s voucher schools and found that nearly 160 of them openly discriminate against LGBT students, families, and staff. Democratic legislators object and have been meeting with the head of the state’s Step Up for Students, which transfers hundreds of millions of dollars (that would otherwise go to the state as taxes ) to voucher schools. Some major corporations h
Steven Singer read a recent study about how and when to praise students. He compared it to earlier studies. Too much is bad. Too little is bad. He writes: So what are teachers to do? Frankly, researchers don’t know. They look at discrete data sets and try to make broad conclusions. However, when you’re dealing with something as complex as the minds of children , this approach is destined for fail
Nancy Bailey features a post about an absurdly inappropriate reading program, citing work by Betty Casey in Tulsa. Casey interviewed experienced reading teachers, who gave her examples of age-inappropriate questions in the Core Knowledge Amplify scripted program. Casey writes: Do you think primogeniture is fair? Justify your answer with three supporting reasons. You may think this is from a high
Jan Resseger describes the chaos and disruption caused by Ohio’s choice-made Legislature. The Ohio House is trying to curb the overreach of the expanded voucher program, which unexpectedly swooped up some white,
