Walton Family Foundation School voucher camel's nose is in the tent | Arkansas Blog

School voucher camel's nose is in the tent | Arkansas Blog | Arkansas news, politics, opinion, restaurants, music, movies and art:

School voucher camel's nose is in the tent

• THE CAMEL'S NOSE: Walton-backed organization promotes new voucher program that sends public money to private schools.

Cynthia Howell at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported this morning on a school development I've been watching with great interest: The arrival of school vouchers in Arkansas.

This is another Walton Family Foundation initiative. It has been spending heavily through a supported affiliate on promoting the availability of about 100 vouchers. The program has been given over by the state to be overseen by The Reform Alliance, an organization  Walton money funds. The alliance is run by a former employee of another organization the Waltons finance, the misleadingly named Arkansas Public School Resource Center. The Walton machine is not friendly to conventional public school districts.

The "Success Scholarship" program is, the headline says, for "special needs" kids. This is a broad spectrum of students who currently qualify in public school districts for "individual education plans."  This could include hyperactivity, dyslexia, autism and other conditions that, while needing special attention, sometimes don't prevent participation in regular classrooms most of the day. 

Some points to note:

* For a parent to qualify for a $6,600 annual subsidy in public money to attend a private school, there need be no showing that the existing public school lacks adequate services for a child or that the private school is more proficient. (Some of these schools even  rely on local public school districts for certain special ed needs.) The private school must have a special ed teacher and their teachers must have bachelor's degrees.

* As it stands,  tax dollars will be going only to religious institutions, the only private schools to sign up so far.

* There's no income qualification for parents to receive the money. The state payment isn't enough to cover the tuition at some private schools.

* Will the  state provide a comprehensive accounting of how the program is used. That is:

*  How many students.

* Racial breakdown.

* Economic breakdown.

* The type of individual education program of each child and some means of judging whether that need was served in both the public school left behind and the private school.

* The number of children with profound needs being served, such as those who spend little or no time each day in ordinary classrooms.

* If a Walton organization is being used as a pass-through of the money and enabler, will its work be subject to accountability under the Freedom of Information Act?

* Experience in other states.

The D-G article failed to dip into some of the experience of other states with similar programs. Take Louisiana. 

Here's one report on problems in implementing a "scholarship" program for IEP students there. And here's another.

Better ( worse) still is the crashing failure of a broader voucher program in Louisiana, which you may be sure is the goal for the "reformers" of Arkansas.

MIT found a voucher program for kids from poor schools actually harmed kids. Diane Ravitch observed:

In brief, the students who attended voucher schools lost ground academically. Attendance at a voucher private school lowered math scores by 0.4 standard deviation and increased the likelihood of a failing score by 50 percent. Voucher effects for reading, science, and social studies were also “negative and large.” The negative impacts of vouchers were consistent across all income groups. Apparently the voucher schools were the weakest private schools and were not as good as the so-called “failing public schools.”

Arkansas school administrators are wary. They were able to insert some modest protections in the "pilot' voucher bill passed in 2015. This included a testing provision. But we know how this works. Sone testing was included when the legislature opened the door to home schooling.  That's gone now. The prevailing mantra is this: Where does the state get off second-guessing a parent's decision or performance on a child's education.The answer is that there is a constitutional requirement that state money be spent on suitable and equal education. The state may decide how that command is defined. A parent, in his or her wisdom, may disagree. But they also may put their own money where their mouth is when that happens.

Billionaires pushing "school reform" began by pushing school vouchers. Vouchers ran into political resistance, That gave rise to charter schools — private schools  run, often for profit or at least in profitable ways for employees of management companies, with public money. As the "choice" gospel has spread through oiling of politicians, vouchers have returned.

Prediction: This first-year program will be judged a success before the school year is finished and the 2017 legislature will be asked to expand on its success with more ways to send public money to private church schools.School voucher camel's nose is in the tent | Arkansas Blog | Arkansas news, politics, opinion, restaurants, music, movies and art:

 

Beware of AstroTurf Ed Reformers

Astroturf lobbying refers to political organizations or campaigns that appear to be made up of grassroots activists but are actually organized and run by corporate interests seeking to further their own agendas. Such groups are often typified by innocent-sounding names that have been chosen specifically to disguise the group's true backers

Ohio Legislators Fail—So Far—to Block Investigation of Notorious Online Charter Schools | janresseger

Ohio Legislators Fail—So Far—to Block Investigation of Notorious Online Charter Schools | janresseger:

Ohio Legislators Fail—So Far—to Block Investigation of Notorious Online Charter Schools

Ohio is a state with huge Republican majorities—protected by gerrymandering—in both houses of the legislature, a Republican governor and an elected Republican supreme court. Few elections in the next few years will be contested; everybody is very safe.  Hence there are virtually no checks and balances.

Despite all this, the state has been moving by millimeters toward at least the most minimal regulation of an out-of-control charter school sector.  Most notably there has come a realization that the notorious online charter school magnates—people who have been buying the legislature for years—must somehow be stopped.  This is partly due to the relentless daily e-mail blasts from Bill Phillis, the former assistant state superintendent who led the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding to bring the school funding case,DeRolph v. Ohio, and win four times at the Ohio Supreme Court.  And it is because Ohio’s major newspapers have refused to let this issue go—Patrick O’Donnell, the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s education reporter and Jim Siegel and Catherine Candisky at the Columbus Dispatch—along with the editorial boards at the Plain Dealer, the Dispatch, the Akron Beacon-Journal and other papers.

Brent Larkin, the Plain Dealer‘s editorial director from 1991 until he retired in 2009, writes a Sunday column in which for a year he has been eviscerating the legislature for sending hundreds of millions of dollars to unscrupulous charter school entrepreneurs and thereby robbing the state’s public schools and our children.  Larkin did it again on Sunday:

“The biggest scandal in Ohio history is knocking on the Statehouse door… It’s about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars a year down a rat hole and selling out tens of thousands of children. Every penny of this massive waste of money would come straight from your pocket.  Every child who would get kicked in the teeth might as well be your neighbor. The villains who want to perpetuate this swindle are the Republicans who run the Ohio General Assembly.”

Here is what’s been happening recently as Bill Lager, operator of the notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) and his lobbyist Neil Clark have tried to pull every string to keep the Ohio Department of Education from auditing the 15,000-student school for what seem to be serious problems with its reporting of student attendance.  In a preliminary audit this spring, the state’s Department of Education discovered that ECOT’s students were logging on to their computers for an average of only an hour a day, even though the state has been paying the online school for 15,000 full time students.  (This blog has covered the long-running ECOT scandal here.)  The legislature passed a new law last winter that would penalize the agencies that sponsor charter schools when these authorizers neglect their oversight responsibilities, but ECOT and its attorneys have filed a lawsuit to block increased state oversight of the e-schools and their sponsors.  In late August at a legislative committee hearing, legislators friendly to ECOT—contending that the Department of Education has tried to use a new law retroactively—blocked a rule that would allow the Department’s investigation of attendance records to move forward.

Jim Siegel of the Columbus Dispatch quotes Rep. Greta Johnson, D-Akron, as she responded to the committee’s action to delay oversight of the notorious e-schools: “This is a clear case of Ohio Legislators Fail—So Far—to Block Investigation of Notorious Online Charter Schools | janresseger:

Jersey Jazzman: Back To School -- 2016

Jersey Jazzman: Back To School -- 2016:

Back To School -- 2016

And so another summer comes to a close, and those of us who actually teach children are headed back to our first jobs (aside from raising our families).

We'll be in our classrooms, dealing with innumerate evaluation systems put together by people who have no idea what it's like to teach in a public school. We'll be trying to figure out how we can prepare our kids for the almighty state exam without killing the love they have for learning. We'll be educating any child who walks through the doors of our schools while others extoll the virtues of "choice."

We'll be struggling -- and yes, sometimes failing -- to figure out how to run our classrooms in a way that respects all of our students, no matter who they are or where they come from. We'll fail because we're human; those of us who've been on the job for a few years are humble enough to have figured that one out. We'll fail and be our own worst critics afterward, because that's who we are and that's what we do.

We'll be working to get better, though. We'll turn to our colleagues for support and advice and we'll listen to our parents and our students and we'll keep running that long, tough mudder toward improvement. Charlotte Danielson's rubric will catch us on bad days where we're "teacher-centered" -- but we'll keep trying.

Some of us will give up. This isn't a job for everyone and a fair number of us figure that out pretty quickly. Those of us who have some wear on our tires will wave goodbye and grin ruefully. We told you. We told you...

We're already steeling ourselves for the special stupidity an election season brings to the world of education policy. We're going to get blamed for a whole host of problems: inequality, poverty, segregation, racism, economic malaise. Of course, we didn't create any of these issues on our own -- but we're the ones who are expected to fix it all.

"The best anti-poverty program is a good education!" the politicians will proclaim, all while slashing our budgets and breaking their promises to us about our middle-class benefits. If only us teachers were better! If only we really cared about our students -- you know, like the people who collect paychecks from 501(c)3's that are backed by billionaires! They are the ones speaking up for the children, not us -- and certainly not our disgusting unions!

These fine, reformy folks are the people who really know what teachers are thinking! Gadflies like me and all the others who are on my blogroll at the left are outliers! How could people like that intemperate jerk Jersey Jazzman, or Peter Greene, or Marie Corfield, or
Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price, or Katie Osgood, or Jose Luis Vilson, or Arthur Goldstein, orGary Rubinstein, or Mercedes Schneider* possibly know what teachers are actually thinking!

After all, they're only teachers...

We'll listen to this crap, mutter a few curses under our breath, and go back to our schools. We'll pick up our pointers and batons and wipeboard markers and paintbrushes and rulers Jersey Jazzman: Back To School -- 2016:

The Eternal Negligence of the Mainstream Media: “The World Is Not White” | the becoming radical

The Eternal Negligence of the Mainstream Media: “The World Is Not White” | the becoming radical:

The Eternal Negligence of the Mainstream Media: “The World Is Not White”

Somewhere among Urban Legend and the sort of fine-detail scholarly bickering that people outside of academia find tedious lies the truth about how many words Eskimo have for “snow.”

What is compelling about Eskimo words for “snow,” I think, is the idea that a people would become increasingly nuanced in proportion to how much something dominated their environment: Eskimo are so daily confronted with snow and the challenges of snow that they have a hundred words for all the ways it pervades their lives and world.

Conversely, in the very human effort to understand our world and human nature, one of our cliches includes a truism (speculative and mostly metaphorical) about fish being completely unaware of water since it is both ever-present and essential for their existence.

So when it comes to so-called mainstream culture in the U.S., we are, regretfully, fish and not Eskimo.

And the daily record of that obliviousness is recorded by the mainstream media.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Rapinoe, a World Cup and gold-medal winner with the U.S. women’s national team, becomes the first nonblack professional athlete to join in protesting during the national anthem since Kaepernick gained notoriety for sitting out the anthem in 49ers preseason games.

I could make this a quiz, but it would be one most people would fail for the exact reason I included both examples.

The word that shall not be spoken in the U.S. is “white.”

The New York Times editors apparently believe black people are not people, but they certainly cannot cross the line and confront that it is white people who “fail to understand”—or better yet, refuse to understand—”the lives of black Americans.”

And, really ESPN? Megan Rapinoe is “nonblack”?

And if we dig beneath the “rigid refusal to look at ourselves” (read: white Americans) we are able to unmask that when politicians or the media admit the U.S. continues to have a “race” problem, that is the whitewashed code for a “racism” problem—yet the other word that dare not be uttered.

In an interview from 1984, Julius Lester asked James Baldwin about “the task facing black writers,” and Baldwin replied:

This may sound strange, but I would say to make the question of color obsolete….

Well, you ask me a reckless question, I’ll give you a reckless answer—by realizing first of all that the world is not white. And by realizing that the real terror that engulfs the white world now is visceral terror. I can’t prove this, but I know it. It’s the terror of being described by those they’ve been describing for so long. And that will make the concept of color obsolete.

Baldwin’s confrontation of the power of normalizing white as that marginalizes black in the U.S. is portrayed brilliantly in a scene from Ralph Ellison’s (1952) Invisible Man where the unnamed main character finds himself in a hellish nightmare after being kicked out of college and sent on a cruel quest for work in The Eternal Negligence of the Mainstream Media: “The World Is Not White” | the becoming radical:

Has the @NAACP always had a critical view of charters? – Cloaking Inequity

Has the @NAACP always had a critical view of charters? – Cloaking Inequity:

Has the @NAACP always had a critical view of charters?

Jesse Turner, Professor of Literacy and organizer for educational change, also shares reflections and plans from the Save Our Schools march and rally. Denisha Jones, activist with all three “BUS” organizations– BadAss Teachers, United Opt Out, and SOS March — helps drive the conversation.

The Education Town Hall with Thomas Byrd is the premiere Live Wire show on We Act Radio, broadcasting from Historic Anacostia in Washington DC. It facilitates effective, community-supported approaches to education — in DC and beyond — and fosters strategic, transformational actions.

The weekly radio forum brings together public officials, advocates, students, parents, and educators to share resources and concerns. The Town Hall blog extends discussion. Participation is encouraged.

Host Thomas K Byrd is a product of DC Public Schools and a long-time education advocate in the District of Columbia.

Virginia Spatz, freelance writer/activist, serves as feature reporter.

Hear other Education Town Hall voices: http://educationtownhall.org/voices/.

The B.U.S. Thursday program represents the perspectives of

B= Badass Teachers

U= United Opt Out

S= Save our Schools

I previously joined on the B.U.S. Thursday program on We Act Radio Education Town Hall with Rosalie Friend and we discussed the bare inequality facing US children, NPE’s national report card which is sparking national discussion and John King’s Secretary of Education confirmation hearing.

Check out and Follow my YouTube channel here.

Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.

Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button on the home page.

Twitter: @ProfessorJVH

Click here for Vitae.Has the @NAACP always had a critical view of charters? – Cloaking Inequity:

CURMUDGUCATION: Brown Goes To Boston

CURMUDGUCATION: Brown Goes To Boston:
Brown Goes To Boston

Campbell Brown has decided to add her two cents to the sprawling debate about raising the charter cap in Massachusetts (and really, why not, because lord knows everyone else has added their two cents, or two million dollars).

Brown's argument is the same basic one repeated by other charter school proponents:

1) We should do it for the poor children.
2) Unions suck
3) Boston charters have had amazingly awesome results


Or as Brown puts it, "Wow. For Madeloni, her union, and their supporters, Boston charters are an extraordinary menace. Not because they are failing poor children of color, but because they are serving them so well. "


Each of these points is problematic. Let's go one at a time.

Do it for the poor children.  

Or more accurately, "do it for some poor children, but only if they speak English and are well-behaved."  Massachusetts has, to its credit, one of the best charter reimbursement formulae in the country, which means that sending Chris to a charter school doesn't mean that the ten students who stay in public school don't get totally shafted. Chris's former school still gets almost all of the per-pupil money that left with Chris-- or at least they would if Chapter 46 were fully funded, which it hasn't been for a few years now. But the proposed charter expansion is going to increase education costs for Massachusetts by many, many dollars; those dollars will either come from tax increases (unlikely) or other public education spending (more likely) or just not anywhere at all (also more likely) meaning that the charter tradition of robbing ten poor public school students to pay a charter to educate one poor student remains alive.

If charters want to do it for all the poor children, I'm listening. When you want to build a lifeboat for ten students by cannibalizing the ship that's carrying a thousand, your claim to a moral high ground is in trouble. Also, I am still waiting for charter fans to explain to taxpayers that taxes should go up so that  some few select students can be sent to private school at public expense. 

Unions suck.

Brown likes the assertion that urban public schools are entirely run by the teachers' union, and that unions only oppose charters because they are trying to preserve their big seat at the public teat.

This argument gets a little fuzzy in Massachusetts because on the one hand, Mass has some of the CURMUDGUCATION: Brown Goes To Boston:

OUTRAGE: How the DeVos Family Paid the Michigan GOP to Block Charter Accountability | Diane Ravitch's blog

OUTRAGE: How the DeVos Family Paid the Michigan GOP to Block Charter Accountability | Diane Ravitch's blog:

OUTRAGE: How the DeVos Family Paid the Michigan GOP to Block Charter Accountability

kay, maybe you can’t be shocked anymore to learn that billionaires have bought politicians. Still, when you read this article in the Detroit Free Press, I think you will be as outraged as I was and am. The charter lobby has outdone itself this time. I haven’t paid as much attention to the DeVos family as I should have. Their fortune comes from Amway. Betsy DeVos started a privatization organization deceptively named the American Federation for Children. The family would like to replace public education altogether, preferably with vouchers. They are devotees of the free market ideology, though they are happy to have government subsidize the free market. One thing is clear: they despise public schools and will gladly reward legislators to agree with them.

This article was written by Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. If the DeVos family and the Michigan GOP wanted to help the children of Detroit, would they insist on eliminating any accountability for charter schools?

Henderson writes:

“Bought and paid for.

“Back in June, that’s how I described the Detroit school legislation that passed in Lansing — a filthy, moneyed kiss to the charter school industry at the expense of the kids who’ve been victimized by those schools’ unaccountable inconsistency.

“And now, through the wonder of campaign finance reports, we are beginning to see what it took to buy the GOP majority in Lansing, just how much lawmakers required to sell out Detroit students’ interests.

“The DeVos family, owners of the largest charter lobbying organization, has showered Michigan Republican candidates and organizations with impressive and near-unprecedented amounts of money this campaign cycle: $1.45 million in June and July alone — over a seven-week period, an average of $25,000 a day.

“The giving began in earnest on June 13, just five days after Republican members of the state Senate reversed themselves on the question of whether Michigan charter schools need more oversight.

“There’s nothing more difficult than proving quid pro quos in politics, the instances in which favor is returned for specific monetary support.

“But look at the amounts involved, and consider the DeVos’ near-sole interest in the issue of school choice. It’s a fool’s errand to imagine a world in which the family’s deep pockets haven’t skewed the school debate to the favor of their highly financed lobby.

“And in this case, it was all done to the detriment of children in the City of Detroit.

“Deep pockets, long arms

“Back in March, the Senate voted to place charter schools under the same authority as public schools in the city, for quality control and attention to population need and balance, in line with a plan that had been in the works for more than a year, endorsed and promoted by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder.

“But when the bills moved to the state House, lawmakers gutted that OUTRAGE: How the DeVos Family Paid the Michigan GOP to Block Charter Accountability | Diane Ravitch's blog:

 

Oakland Prides Itself on Being Diverse — Until It Comes Time to Send Kids to School | News Fix | KQED News

Oakland Prides Itself on Being Diverse — Until It Comes Time to Send Kids to School | News Fix | KQED News:

Oakland Prides Itself on Being Diverse — Until It Comes Time to Send Kids to School

Celia Fragoso, 7, walks through the Oakland neighborhood of Sobrante Park on her way to Madison Park Academy on Aug. 26, 2016.(Brittany Hosea-Small/KQED)

Walking her daughter to school in their neighborhood of Sobrante Park in East Oakland, Marina Muñoz passes an old mattress on the curb and several abandoned cars. Then she crosses an empty lot covered with old clothes and smelly trash.

“Here in East Oakland, we are all poor,” says Muñoz in Spanish. “Poor in everything, including education.”

Oakland prides itself on diversity. Students in the district’s public and charter schools are 44 percent Latino, 26 percent African-American, 13 percent Asian and 9.7 percent white. But only a handful of its public schools fully reflect the district’s diversity. They are more likely to look like their own neighborhoods, which are largely segregated by race and class. That’s due in large part to the district’s enrollment policy.

Muñoz’s kids’ school, Madison Park Academy, reflects the neighborhood. It’s 95 percent Latino and African-American, and almost all the kids qualify for free and reduced lunch. More than half the kids in elementary school are English learners. Latino kids make up the biggest ethnic group in Oakland’s public schools. They’re also the most isolated from other races and the most concentrated in high-poverty schools, here and across the state.

The principal at Madison Park Academy has made a lot of improvements in recent years, with a health clinic and wraparound services for kids and families. Still, the school has larger-than-average class sizes and low test scores, compared with the top-tier schools in the district.

That bothers Muñoz. She’s convinced her kids are not receiving the same quality education as kids in the wealthy Oakland hills. One of the most frustrating moments for her was last year, when her son was a junior in high school. She said he had a substitute teacher in one of his classes for months.

“He would say, ‘They’re not even teaching me anything. Mom, come get me, I’m not doing anything,’ ” Muñoz said. “How are we going to send our kids to college if we don’t have well-trained teachers?”Oakland Prides Itself on Being Diverse — Until It Comes Time to Send Kids to School | News Fix | KQED News:

 Read part 1 of this series.

Two Moms Choose Between Separate and Unequal Schools in Oakland