Fraud, embezzlement in charter schools nationally resonate with problems in Connecticut - Courant.com

Fraud, embezzlement in charter schools nationally resonate with problems in Connecticut - Courant.com:

Hustlers Cash In On Charter School Craze

 Colin McEnroe

To Wit

7:30 p.m. EDT, July 3, 2014

If I showed you the headline "Weak Charter School Laws Enable Scams, Insider Dealing," you'd probably assume it's the latest shoe to drop in the unfurling scandal of FUSE, the punch-drunk charter school group attempting to run schools in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and — coming this fall! — Baton Rouge, where folks are getting nervous reading all those Connecticut stories.

But relax. It's not FUSE. That headline is from the Detroit Free Press, and it chronicles patterns of double-dealing by Michigan charter school companies, like the one where two insiders from one charter company bought a parcel of land and sold it to their own school for $50,000 more, pocketing the difference.

But it could just as easily have been from Pennsylvania, home of at least three massive charter school scandals including the story of two charter school executives who diverted $860,000 from the school to prop up other private projects while the school went without textbooks and paychecks bounced.

Or Minnesota, where a charter school executive embezzled $1.3 million over five years to pay for a lavish lifestyle while the school canceled field trips and ran out of supplies.

Or California, Ohio, Arizona. This stuff is happening everywhere. The best master document is "Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud and Abuse," by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education — but the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a similar report, and the Free Press just published a multi-part series documenting rip-offs and under-performance in Michigan charter schools.

The message is always the same: The essential concept behind the charter school movement is that, freed from the three Rs — restraints, rules and regulations — these schools could innovate and get the kinds of results that calcified, logy public schools could only dream about. And they do … sometimes.

But handing out uncountable millions to operators who would be given a free hand was also like putting a big sign out by the highway that says "Welcome Charlatans, Grifters, Credential-Fakers, Cherry-Pickers, Stat-Jukers, Cult of Personality Freaks and People Who Have No Business Running a Dairy Queen, Fraud, embezzlement in charter schools nationally resonate with problems in Connecticut - Courant.com:

 

Charter Schools - Dividing Communities since 1991

CHARTER SCHOOL SCANDALS WEBSITE

CHARTER SCHOOL SCANDALS

A compilation of news articles about charter schools which have been charged with, or are highly suspected of, tampering with admissions, grades, attendance and testing; misuse of funds and embezzlement; engaging in nepotism and conflicts of interest; engaging in complicated and shady real estate deals; and/or have been engaging in other questionable, unethical, borderline-legal, or illegal activities. This is also a record of charter school instability and other unsavory tidbits.

Keep checking

CHARTER SCHOOL SCANDALS

Be sure to check out two other Great blogs:

-THE BROAD REPORT (as in Eli)
-THE PERIMETER PRIMATE

California's education leaders - AWOL again - SFGate

California's education leaders - AWOL again - SFGate:

California's education leaders - AWOL again

Peter Schrag

Updated 11:41 am, Thursday, June 5, 2014

• 
  Johanna Paraiso is an English teacher at Fremont High School in Oakland, one of three Bay Area schools named in the lawsuit over the time poor and immigrant students spend learning. Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

There's no way to know how many California schools deny poor and immigrant children enough class time with competent teachers to give them the education that the California Constitution supposedly guarantees.

A major civil rights suit filed in Alameda County Superior Court last week names seven such schools - three of them in the Bay Area. But if Mark Rosenbaum of the ACLU, one of the lead lawyers in the case, is correct, there may be hundreds.

The suit was filed on behalf of 18 students at Castlemont and Fremont high schools in Oakland, Nystrom Elementary School in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, and two schools each in Los Angeles and Compton (Los Angeles County).

The case, Cruz vs. California, echoes the similar Williams case filed 14 years ago, but it focuses on an issue that Williams barely touched: the damaging denial of time for real instruction for some of California's academically neediest kids. But without saying so, it also casts serious doubt on Gov. Jerry Brown's effort to shift more control over schools from the state to the locals.

It's hard to believe that there are even seven Cruz schools in 21st century America, schools where:

-- Students are assigned endless hours of "inside work experience," cleaning classrooms, copying material, and doing other flunky work for teachers and administrators because there are no classes for them.

-- Students are "taught" week after week by a string of demoralized and inexperienced substitutes.

-- There are no mental health counselors - and often no counselors at all - to deal with the trauma of the shootings and other violence just outside the school door and where, for those and similar reasons, absenteeism and tardiness sometimes leave first-period classes with as few as five of the 25 students who are supposed to be there.

-- Because of the lack of support and miserable conditions, many teachers quit halfway through the school year, and sometimes sooner, and students' classes and courses are constantly shuffled to deal with the gaps.

But what may be even harder to believe is the pretense of state school officials, beginning with Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, who's devoted much of his four years in office to campaigning for re-election, that they didn't know about any of this and California's education leaders - AWOL again - SFGate:

Good Riddance to Common Core Testing | Diane Ravitch

Good Riddance to Common Core Testing | Diane Ravitch:

Good Riddance to Common Core Testing

A few years ago, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, David Coleman, and a merry band of policy wonks had a grand plan. The non-governmental groups like Achieve, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Coleman's own Student Achievement Partners would write the Common Core standards (paid for by the Gates Foundation); Duncan would require states to agree to adopt them as a condition of eligibility for a share of the billions of Race to the Top funds at a time when states were broke; the Feds would spend $370 million to develop tests for the standards; and within a few short years the U.S. would have a seamless system of standards and assessments that could be used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools.

The reason that the Gates Foundation had to pay for the standards is that federal law prohibits the government from controlling, directing, or supervising curriculum or instruction. Of course, it is ludicrous to imagine that the federally-funded tests do not have any direct influence on curriculum or instruction. Many years ago, I interviewed a professor at MIT about his role in the new science programs of the 1960s, and he said something I never forgot: "Let me write a nation's tests, and I care not who writes its songs or poetry."

So how fares the seamless system? Not so well. Critics of the standards and tests seem to gathering strength and growing bolder. The lack of any democratic process for writing, reviewing, and revising the standards is coming back to bite the architects and generals who assumed they could engineer a swift and silent coup. The claim, often made by Duncan, that the U.S. needs a way to compare the performance of students in different states ignores the fact that the Federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) already exists to do precisely that. In addition, critics like Carol Burris and John Murphy have pointed out that the Common Core tests agreed upon a cut score (passing mark) that is designed to fail most students.

As Politico reports, support for the federally-funded tests is crumbling as states discover the costs, the amount of time required, and their loss of sovereignty over a basic state function. The federal government pays about 10 percent of the cost of education, while states and localities pay the other 90 percent. Why should the Good Riddance to Common Core Testing | Diane Ravitch:

7-4-14 LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD

LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District):

To our readers: Happy 4th of July

3 by Jamie Alter Lynto... / 44min 

MORNING READ: Tuck throws a punch at Torlackson

Challenger to CA schools chief  blasts handling of Inglewood Unified takeover Marshall Tuck, the man who hopes to unseat Tom Torlakson as state superintendent of public instruction on Wednesday decried a legislative committee’s failure to authorize an audit of the state takeover of the troubled Inglewood Unified School District. Daily News Lawsuit Challenges New York’s Teacher Tenure Laws Parent

3min 

7-3-14 LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD

LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District): LAUSD expands search to find enough summer school teachersAs LAUSD kicked off its newly expanded summer school program last month, accommodating more students than ever before, one thing became clear: Sometimes, more money means more problems. And one problem district officials didn’t anticipate was findi

by mike simpson / 21h 

Summer Lost: Episode 1 - The Slide | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Summer Lost: Episode 1 - The Slide | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:

Summer Lost: Episode 1 - The Slide

It’s a sweltering summer afternoon in Philadelphia and Dion Jones is reading to his two sons, Jayven and Cameron, on a bench in Smith Memorial Playground.

It’s July 1 — one of the first weeks of summer vacation — and Jones just received a handful of free children’s books from the Philadelphia Eagles Youth Partnership.

“Which one do you want me to read?” Jones asks his boys. “‘More Bears!’?” he suggests, motioning at a book with a blue cover — a whacky poem by children’s author Kenn Nesbitt.

“Yeah!” shouts six-year-old Jayven with a big grin. Cameron, who is two, climbs on his dad’s lap as Jones begins reading rhymes from the book about a family of hibernating mammals.

The books "will help keep them active and keep them learning,” said Jones, who is also a single father and correctional officer who said he finds it difficult to ensure his kids stay engaged with learning activities during the summer.

After turning the last page, Jones scurries out of the park with his children so he can make it to work on time.

“It’s great that these programs exist,” Jones added. “It’s very hard to get my kids out be active with them and their learning, and it’s very nice that they’re free because some things don’t fit the budget.”

The Eagles Youth Partnership book drive gave away oodles of books at Smith Playground earlier this week to hundreds of parents like Jones. The event also featured cameos by the Eagles’ superhero mascot Storybook Man, who arrived in his patented green Bookmobile Summer Lost: Episode 1 - The Slide | Philadelphia Public School Notebook:

lol my common core | Missouri Education Watchdog

lol my common core | Missouri Education Watchdog:

lol my common core

inShare

What would Bill Gates write about his CCSSI investment? “I get to spend over $200 Million for standards adoption, implementation and PR campaigns and call it a performance about being the nation’s superintendent.”

Imagine that you are a student studying for your doctorate.  You are in the midst of writing your thesis which demands an extraordinary amount of time and effort.   How would you explain your thesis in one sentence?  Can such an exhaustive process be explained in our twitter obsessed world?   From  “Lol My Thesis” Showcases Painfully Hilarious Attempts to Sum up Years of Academic Work in One Sentence:

A true fact about the thesis stage of an advanced degree: Whatever the academic field, whether writing a fifty page bachelor’s or master’s thesis or 250 plus page doctoral dissertation, at some point, you will need to winnow your argument down to an abstract summary of a couple succinct paragraphs. Then, one inevitably finds—when riding elevators with colleagues and mentors, talking to relatives over holiday dinners, justifying one’s existence to friends and acquaintances—that the whole damned thing needs to somehow reduce to one intelligible sentence or two. It’s all anyone has the patience for, honestly, and it saves you the trouble of trying to reconstruct complex arguments for people who won’t understand or care about them and who generally only asked out of politeness anyway.

But how, how, to cram years of research, agony, turmoil, crushing failure and soaring lol my common core | Missouri Education Watchdog:

Russ on Reading: Walter Dean Myers: An Appreciation

Russ on Reading: Walter Dean Myers: An Appreciation:

Walter Dean Myers: An Appreciation

I was saddened to learn of the passing of the great young adult author, Walter Dean Myers. Myers was an important presence on my classroom bookshelves. His books spoke to a segment of my students who found very few voices they could relate to in literature. He wrote of poor African American kids on the streets of Harlem. Myers was acutely aware of the need for these children to see themselves in the pages of books.

I had the pleasure of meeting Myers on one memorable occasion. I was struck by his large physical presence and gentle manner. He was acutely aware of the great responsibility any author of young adult literature carried and he was determined to meet that responsibility with books that were of high quality and which transmitted values for young people to emulate.

Myers was intensely proud of maintaining his residence in Jersey City, New Jersey. He said he could see the children he was writing about walk past his window as he worked in his home.

As a young man Myers was an avid reader, but as he grew through his teenage years he realized that the books he was reading had little to say about young people of color like him. He grew resentful. He stopped reading and dropped out of school. Reading James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” turned things around. Myers found that “by humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me.”

Myers says that after reading Baldwin he discovered his mission in life. As he said in a March 2014 essay he wrote for the New York Times:

I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do when I wrote about poor inner-city children — to make them human in the eyes of readers and, especially, in their own eyes. I need to make them feel as if they are part of America’s dream, that all the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this country.

For many of the students in my classrooms in the 1980s and for surely Russ on Reading: Walter Dean Myers: An Appreciation:

My Independence Day Post Featuring Kate Smith and God Bless America | deutsch29

My Independence Day Post Featuring Kate Smith and God Bless America | deutsch29:

My Independence Day Post Featuring Kate Smith and God Bless America

July 4, 2014

For my July Fourth post, I would like to feature what is now a well-known American anthem as performed by the iconic Kate Smith, God Bless America. Written by Irvin Berlin and made famous by Smith, the song premiered in 1938. As noted in Parade magazine in August 2013:

…When Irving Berlin rediscovered his old song [originally written in 1918 yet unused] in 1938, he had been looking for a “peace song” as a response to the escalating conflict in Europe. He made changes to it and gave it to radio star Kate Smith to perform on her radio show on the eve of the first official celebration of Armistice Day—a holiday originally conceived to commemorate world peace and honor veterans of the Great War. (The peace part would be dropped in 1954, when it became Veteran’s Day.) In announcing the song’s premiere on her daytime talk show, Kate Smith declared, “As I stand before the microphone and sing it with all my heart, I’ll be thinking of our veterans and I’ll be praying with every breath I draw that we shall never have another war.”

For younger readers unfamiliar with Kate Smith, I offer this fact-packed biographical sketch:

She was dubbed “The Songbird of the South” and would be forever etched in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans as a true American symbol of World War II, especially after giving voice to Irving Berlin‘s classic song “God Bless America.” Her inspiring rendition went on to sell millions of war bonds and even helped a hockey team in the 1970s win the Stanley Cup.

Singing patriot Kate Smith was born Kathryn Elizabeth Smith on May 1, 1907. As a child she showed a devoted interest toward singing and dancing, initially appearing in jazz nightclubs before opting for a standard music career.

Discovered by the famed singer/dancer Eddie Dowling, Kate made her Broadway debut in his musical comedy “Honeymoon Lane” in 1926. Double-chinned and exceedingly heavyset, she served as the plump, singing slapstick foil to the star, and continued in that same predictable vein with the subsequent tour of “Hit the Deck” and in “Flying High” the 1930 Broadway show headlining Bert Lahr.

Unhappy at being made fun of in burlesque comedy and preferring to focus on her natural singing ability, Kate quickly joined forces with Columbia Records vice president Ted Collins who subsequently became her partner, protector 

My Independence Day Post Featuring Kate Smith and God Bless America | deutsch29:

The VergarGuments are Coming to New York State! | School Finance 101

The VergarGuments are Coming to New York State! | School Finance 101:

The VergarGuments are Coming to New York State!

Posted on July 4, 2014

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And so it goes… The VergarGuments keep-a-comin… spreading their way from California to the Empire State, from Albany to Buffalo. And what are VergarGuments you say?

Well, a VergarGument is a fallacious form of legal reasoning applied in the context of state constitutional litigation over causes of inequities and inadequacies of schooling selectively suffered by disadvantaged children. Yeah… that’s a mouthful, but it is worthy of its own newly minted, excessively precise definition.

The VerGargument arises from the recent Vergara case in California where a sufficiently gullible (or politically predisposed – you be the judge) judge accepted whole hog, the assertion that state laws governing the assignment and dismissal of teachers under district contractual agreementscaused that state’s most disadvantaged children to be disproportionately subjected to “grossly ineffective” teachers.

You see, “causation” is a pretty important part of such legal challenges. And here, the burden on those bringing the case against the statutes in question was to show (reasonably/sufficiently display a connection… not “prove” beyond any reasonable doubt… and also not quite the same as statistical causation) that those statutes are responsible for the selective mistreatment of those bringing the case to court (deprivation of their state constitutionally guaranteed rights) . As I explained in my previous post, the causation assertion is suspect on simple logical grounds, with little need to get into the weeds of the statistical analyses.

The assertion that state policy restrictions on local contractual agreements is a primary (or even a significant) cause of teaching inequity is problematic at many levels.

First, variation in access to teacher quality across schools within districts varies… across districts. Some districts (in California or elsewhere) achieve reasonably equitable distributions of teachers while others do not. If state laws were the cause, these effects would be more uniform across districts – since they all have to deal with the same state statutory constraints (perhaps those The VergarGuments are Coming to New York State! | School Finance 101:

FLASHBACK: 4th of July

FLASHBACK: 4th of July

Nite Cap 7-4-13 #neara13 #RYH4Ed #BATsACT #thankateacher #EDCHAT #P2 #HEREPASTJUNE

James Baldwin said it best: "For these are all our children, and we will profit by or pay for whatever they become."A BIG EDUCATION APE NITE CAPTODAYEducation is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world - Nelson Mandela - Wait, What?Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world - Nelson Mandela - Wait, What?: Education is the most powerful weapon

by mike simpson / 1d 

FLASHBACK: 4th of July 2012

FLASHBACK: 4th of July 2012JFK...the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of ..."But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that "knowledge is power," more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we c

by mike simpson / 7h 

Big Education Ape Nite Cap 7-4-12 #SOSCHAT #EDCHAT #P2

Big Education Ape: 7-4-11 PM Charter School whiplash in NOLA Edition #NEARA11

Today's Big Education Ape Posts on Parents 4 democratic Schools #education #NEARA10