Education Research Report
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Network For Public Education uncovers how U.S. DOE wastes a billion on defunct charter schools | Cloaking Inequity
Network For Public Education uncovers how U.S. DOE wastes a billion on defunct charter schools | Cloaking Inequity
NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION UNCOVERS HOW U.S. DOE WASTES A BILLION ON DEFUNCT CHARTER SCHOOLS
Network For Public Education uncovers how U.S. DOE wastes a billion on defunct charter schools | Cloaking Inequity
NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION UNCOVERS HOW U.S. DOE WASTES A BILLION ON DEFUNCT CHARTER SCHOOLS
In @BetsyDeVosED’s budget, there are major cuts to programs like the Special Olympics. Sec. DeVos didn’t know the number of kids who would be hurt by that cut, so I made sure she now knows that 272,000 kids are seeing their support taken away. pic.twitter.com/6ZiOfDU4Ou— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) March 26, 2019
A blistering new report from the Network for Public Education (NPE) documents how the federal government, through the U.S. Department of Education, wastes hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on grants awarded to charter schools that never open or quickly close. The Department of Education is also funding charter schools that blatantly discriminate in their discipline, curricular, and enrollment practices.
The Washington Post broke the news here this morning
Now do your part.
Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride,estimates that the federal Charter Schools Program, over its history, has awarded over $4 billion in seed money to charter schools. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federally grant-awarded charters is 39%.
Here is a quick summary of what NPE found.
Hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars have been awarded to charter schools that never opened or opened and then shut down. In some cases, schools have received federal funding even before securing their charter.
- Our investigations barely skimmed the surface of the thousands of charter school grant recipients that never opened or opened but then closed. Of the schools awarded grants directly from the department between 2009 and 2016, nearly one in four either never opened or shut its doors. The CSP’s own analysis from 2006-2014 of its direct and state pass-through funded programs found that nearly one out of three awardees were not currently in operation by the end of 2015.
The CSP’s grant approval process appears to be based on the application alone, with no attempt to verify the information presented. Schools have been approved for grants despite serious concerns noted by reviewers.
- The CSP’s review process to award grants does not allow the verification of applicants’ claims, thus leading to what award-winning, New York Times journalist Mike Winerip referred to as an “invitation for fiction writing.” This process resulted in numerous examples of awardees that claim they seek to enroll high percentages of minority and disadvantaged students, even while their programs and policies are designed to draw from advantaged populations. Finally, we found instances where achievement and/or demographic data on applications were cherry-picked or massaged, with reviewers instructed to accept what was written as fact.
Grants have been awarded to charter schools that establish barriers to enrollment, discouraging or denying access to certain students.
- Multiple schools we examined enroll smaller percentages of students with disabilities and students who are English language learners than the surrounding schools. Some appear to be designed to encourage “white flight” from public schools. Thirty-four California charter schools that received CSP grants appear on the ACLU of Southern California’s list of charters that discriminate—in some cases illegally—in admissions, and 20 CSP funded Arizona charters appear on a similar list created by the Arizona ACLU. One Pennsylvania charter receiving multiple grants totaling over one million dollars from CSP states on its website that its programs as limited to students “with mild disabilities.”
Recommendations by the Office of the Inspector General have been largely ignored or not sufficiently addressed.
- We reviewed numerous OIG audits that found significant concerns over how CSP money is spent and that described the lack of monitoring the Department carries out to ensure those funds contribute to the intended goals of the grants. Each audit includes specific recommendations. But not only is there little evidence the department has adopted any of these recommendations; the current Secretary has denied responsibility for oversight, believing that it falls outside the federal government’s purview—even though this is a federal grants program.
The department does not conduct sufficient oversight of grants to State Entities or State Education Agencies, despite repeated indications that the states are failing to monitor outcomes or offer full transparency on their subgrants.
- Although the vast majority of public charter school grants are awarded to state education agencies (SEAs), our report reveals that the Department has shown no oversight when SEAs pass funding along to individual charters or charter organizations as subgrants. We found a continuing record of subgrantee schools that never opened or closed quickly, schools that blatantly discriminate in their discipline, curricular, and enrollment practices, and schools that engage in outright fraud as well as in related-party transactions.
The CSP’s grants to charter management organizations are beset with problems including conflicts of interest and profiteering.
- The Office of the Inspector General’s 2016 audit of CSP funded CMO’s and their related schools found that of the 33 schools they reviewed, 22 had one or more of the following: conflicts of interest between the CMO or the charter, related-party transactions and insufficient segregation of duties. We found troubling examples of CMOs that received massive grants that engaged in practices that push-out low-performing students, violate the rights of their students with disabilities and cull their student bodies through policies, programs and requests for parental donations.
Under the current administration, while Congressional funding for the CSP rises, the quality of the applications and awardees has further declined.
- Based on our review of grant awards to SEAs and non-SEAs in 2017 and 2018, we provide evidence that the quality of the applications and the receiving grantees are likely getting worse, which may result in increased fraud, mismanagement and charter failure.
Send your letter to Congress today and say, “No more!”
Then share the report: http://networkforpubliceducation.org/asleepatthewheel/
At a time when Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump propose slashing funding for public education, it is outrageous that this wasteful giveaway to schools that may not ever exist is increased to half a billion dollars a year.
This post was directly excerpted from the NPE press release. Full Disclosure: I serve as one of the founding governing board members of NPE.
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Network For Public Education uncovers how U.S. DOE wastes a billion on defunct charter schools | Cloaking Inequity
Long Awaited Bipartisan School Funding Plan Proposed for Ohio | janresseger
Long Awaited Bipartisan School Funding Plan Proposed for Ohio | janresseger
Long Awaited Bipartisan School Funding Plan Proposed for Ohio
Long Awaited Bipartisan School Funding Plan Proposed for Ohio
Yesterday Ohio Representatives Robert Cupp (R-Lima) and John Patterson (D-Jefferson) released a much needed, bipartisan proposal for a new Ohio school funding formula. The Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan, of course, is preliminary. It will be proposed as the substance of the Ohio House Education Budget and would have to be enacted by the Legislature. (Quotes in this post come from the preliminary PowerPoint presentation from Monday afternoon’s session.)
Conceptually the plan described yesterday afternoon would raise the level of state support for K-12 public education to a more adequate level and additionally address what is currently inequitable distribution of funding across the state’s 610 school districts. The Cupp-Patterson Plan considers not only each school district’s capacity to raise funds from its local property tax base but also considers the amount and concentration of family poverty.
The details are not yet available, and of course, the details matter a lot in a school funding formula. A state can make its formula more equitable, while at the same time underfunding the total allocation of state funds; such a plan merely levels down all districts. We’ll need to look at the amount of funding the Cupp-Patterson Plan recommends. Then, of course, because this plan is intended to serve as the basis of the Ohio House Education Budget, we’ll need to look at what the Legislature agrees to fund. A workable school funding formula would need to be fully funded.
In recent years without a fair and adequate formula, Ohio has merely imposed punitive, outcomes-based school accountability—punishing the lowest scoring schools and school districts. Currently Ohio rates and ranks schools and districts on a state report card largely derived from aggregate standardized test scores—which have for decades been shown to correlate less with school quality and more with family and neighborhood poverty. The state CONTINUE READING: Long Awaited Bipartisan School Funding Plan Proposed for Ohio | janresseger
The Geology of School Reform: Social Justice Humanitas Academy in Los Angeles (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
The Geology of School Reform: Social Justice Humanitas Academy in Los Angeles (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
The Geology of School Reform: Social Justice Humanitas Academy in Los Angeles (Part 1)
The Geology of School Reform: Social Justice Humanitas Academy in Los Angeles (Part 1)
Many readers have visited the majestic Grand Canyon. It is an unforgettable sight.
What is obvious to visitors are the strata, geological layers of different shades of red, beige, and brown, that reveal plant and animal life that lived eons ago.
OK, Larry, I get the strata part giving a glimpse of past life in layers piled atop one another. What’s the connection to school reform?
Every district, every school in the U.S. has historical layers of reform piled atop one another although the time frame is far less than an eon. A case in point is the Social Justice Humanitas Academy located within Los Angeles Unified School District. Consider the following official information about the school.
Our mission is to achieve social justice through the development of the complete individual. In doing so, we increase our students’ social capital and their humanity while creating a school worthy of our own children.
According to the website, that mission is the school’s vision of what it aspires to:
A school’s vision is its inspiration, articulating the dreams and hopes for the school community. At Social Justice Humanitas Academy, our vision is: We will achieve self-actualization [original bold-faced]. The concept of self-actualization comes from Abraham Maslow, a leader in humanistic psychology, who understood a good life to be one in which an individual maximized their potential to become the very best version of who they are.
Directly below the mission statement is the following graphic.
While the above statement is general, the mission for the 9th grade entering class in 2018 is more specific:
Our mission is to provide a loving transition into young adulthood by: CONTINUE READING: The Geology of School Reform: Social Justice Humanitas Academy in Los Angeles (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Six Fixes for the College Admissions Scandal | The Merrow Report
Six Fixes for the College Admissions Scandal | The Merrow Report
Six Fixes for the College Admissions Scandal
Six Fixes for the College Admissions Scandal
If you Google ‘College Admissions Scandal’, you’ll get 157 MILLION citations. That’s how it is dominating our conversations. It is absorbing stuff, the story of rich people getting yet another advantage in gaining access to the top shelf–but this time getting caught in the act. Some of the pieces I have read include thoughtful suggestions about how to make the admissions process more fair, but most are largely salacious details and hot air/outrage. I’d like to suggest SIX changes that could make the process a little bit more fair.
My bona fides: I recorded the process at four elite private institutions–Williams in 1986, Amherst in 2004, and Middlebury in 1990 for PBS and Dartmouth for NPR in the late 1970’s. In every instance, some applicants had been ‘flagged’ by athletic coaches or heads of the music and drama departments. Some applicants were flagged as ‘legacies,’ meaning a close relative had graduated from the college, and others were noted because their families had the capacity to make a major gift (or had already made one). That’s standard operating procedure at elite institutions; the central question is, of course, how low would an institution go to accepted a ‘flagged’ applicant? As a reporter, I could only ask that question. At the end of the day, it depended upon the integrity of the process and of the individual members of the admissions committee.
Producer Tim Smith and I were the first television journalists to get access to college admissions, at Williams in the spring of 1986. We spent three days videotaping everything that moved, and of course the Committee talked about ‘flagged’ applicants, including athletes, musicians, and children of alumni, but it never CONTINUE READING: Six Fixes for the College Admissions Scandal | The Merrow Report
Choosing Democracy: Community Coalition on SCUSD Budget Crisis
Choosing Democracy: Community Coalition on SCUSD Budget Crisis
Choosing Democracy: Community Coalition on SCUSD Budget Crisis
Community Priority Coalition
March 6, 2019
Superintendent Jorge Aguilar
Re: SCUSD financial crisis
Dear SCUSD Board Members:
The Community Priority Coalition (CPC) is very concerned about the Sacramento City Unified School District's financial health and deficit spending that will negatively impact students in the District. The Community Priority Coalition members consist of Black Parallel School Board, Building Healthy Communities. Hmong Innovating Politics, La Familia Counseling Center. Making Cents Work, League of United Latin American Citizens (Lorenzo Patiรฑo Council #2862), Sacramento Area Congregations Together, Democracy and Education Institute, and Public Advocates Inc.
Since 2016, the Community Priority Coalition has submitted to the Sacramento City Unified District Board an alternative budget that reflect the following Coalition priorities: 1) Class Size Reduction (24 to 1); 2) Professional development in cultural proficiency and restorative justice; 3) Additional instructional assistance for English Language Learner and increased efforts to involve their parents in their education programs. including bilingual counselors, teachers, social workers and other staff; and 4) After-school/early intervention programs. Although, CPC clearly understands that the District will make very difficult decisions; we are most alarmed that you are unable to address the key concerns of the Coalition given the District history and current financial crisis.
On December 12, 2018, the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), released the Sacramento City Unified School District's Fiscal Health Risk Analysis report. The purpose of the report is to evaluate SCUSD fiscal health and risk of insolvency in the current and next two fiscal years. The report indicted the District’s financial health by stating “that the district will be cash insolvent in November 2019 (estimated to be October 2019 at the time of FCMAT’s fieldwork) unless significant action is taken.”
Historically, the District’s mis-management in the accounting department, poor budget development process, poor board decisions, and failure to address the structural deficit have placed the quality of education for the SCUSDs' students in jeopardy. Moreover, the current financial crisis will undermine the Local Control Accountability Plan process and shut out key stakeholders in the process.
We understand that the District doesn’t want receivership nor do the Coalition, but the historical practices of the District gives us much pause. Therefore, we are urging the district not to use the
District's budget shortfalls in a way that will balance the budget on the backs of students, teachers and staff.
The Community Priority Coalition sincerely wants to work collaboratively with the Superintendent and SCUSD Board for the betterment of our children.
Sincerely,
Community Priority Coalition
Community Priority Coalition
4625 44th Street, Rm 5 Sacramento, CA 95820
Jessie Ryan, President
Darrel Woo, First Vice President
Michael Minnick, Second Vice President
Christina Pritchett
Lisa Murawski
Mai Vang
Leticia Garcia
Rachel Halbo
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