Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: PA: Judge Cuts School Funding + Testing Still Incentivizing Cheating

CURMUDGUCATION:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION:

PA: Judge Cuts School Funding

by Peter Greene / 12min

Here in Pennsylvania, we've had a potentially game-changing ruling come down that could create all new problems for school districts and their funding. This story has many moving parts, so you'll have to stick with me for a bit here. The short version of the story is this. The Lower Merion School District raised taxes. Somebody sued them. The judge in the case ruled that the tax increase was unnec

YESTERDAY

Testing Still Incentivizing Cheating

20by Peter Greene / 1d

Yesterday out of Texas we have a new version of an old story-- a school that found a creative-ish new way to cheat on the Big Standardized Test. This is a predictable and, at this point, oft-noted phenomenon. If you take a bunch of numbers and tie them to high stakes, people will look for ways to manipulate those numbers. Which is kind of the point of making those numbers high stakes. But some peo

Leave Those Kids Alone

96by Peter Greene / 1d

Pre-K is the growth sector of the privatized school industry. There's no existing institutional structure to sweep aside, and there's near-universal agreement that a good Pre-K foundation is important for all future success, coupled with research indicating that many of our children are already behind on the first day of kindergarten. Unfortunately, "good Pre-K foundation" is a phrase th

SEP 08

Can Evidence Improve America's Schools?

40by Peter Greene / 2d

That's the question asked by Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) asks over at the Fordham blog. The piece harkens back to Chester Finn's 1986 book titled, unironically, What Works. And the piece also ties into Petrilli's ongoing series about how to drive change in education. After noting that nothing from Finn's work has ever really gotten traction, Petrilli bemoans our benighted edu-state. Educatio

SEP 07

Virtually Teaching

25by Peter Greene / 3d

"Teacher Shortage Crisis Forces Districts To Innovate" I get emails, often from folks who are thrusting their PR releases blindly into the blogosphere. Somebody or something told them I'm an education blogger, and so they add me to a mailing list, and mostly I don't pay attention. But the subject line that appears above caught my attention, and so I read my email from Shelly Smith, PR Ma

Mother Jones: Black Teachers Matter

55by Peter Greene / 3d

I usually save my reading recommendations for Sunday, but if you read one article this week, it must be " Black Teachers Matter " by Kristina Rizga at Mother Jones. Rizga addresses the all-important question of why we're missing so many black teachers in this country (and she does it far more thoughtfully than the folks at Brookings ) by focusing on one school in the Philadelphia distric

SEP 06

Chester Finn, the Death of Democracy, and Opposites Day

19by Peter Greene / 4d

So today, conservatives hate tradition, and democracy is increased by taking away the vote. Behind the paywall at Wall Street Journal, Chester Finn (honcho emeritus of the Thomas Fordham Institute), Bruno V. Manno (Walton Foundation), and Brandon Wright ( Fordham ) are happy to announce the death of one more piece of democracy in this country. The trio reports that charter schools are spearheading

Brown Goes To Boston

36by Peter Greene / 4d

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 amazi

SEP 05

FL: Still Stupidly Punishing Children

100+by Peter Greene / 5d

Sigh. So you will probably recall that some of Florida's educational leaders have lost their damned minds , having decided that the full force of districts and state powers must be brought to bear in order to beat a bunch of nine-year-old children into compliance. In some school districts, administrators had concluded that third grade children who opted out of the Big Standardized Test could not b

SEP 04

Why Charters Love "Public School"

100+by Peter Greene / 6d

The question is up for pseudo-debate once again because of the National Labor Relations Board decided in two separate cases that charter schools are private corporations . The decision is new, but the fact that charters are private businesses is not. While charter fans are trying to act shocked and surprised ., I'm just going to go ahead and link, for the six-zillionth time, to that special occasi

Brookings Fails at Teacher Diversity Research

14by Peter Greene / 6d

This is just exceptional. In mid-August, Brookings released a report looking at the huge inequity in the teacher force , specifically the question of how to get more teachers of color in the classroom. Their conclusion, loosely paraphrased, is that the problem just can't be solved . Which seems, I don't know-- counterintuitive? improbable? wrong? There are some red flags in this report. Right up f

SEP 03

ICYMI: Fall kick-off edition (9/4)

12by Peter Greene / 6d

As always, if you see something that really speaks to you, share it. Michigan Spends $1 Billion on Charter Schools But Fails To Hold Any Accountable Well, that headline for this Detroit Free press pretty well covers it. Schools Open, Schools Close-- Charter Schools and the Ties That Bind From Harvard, a thoughtful consideration of the real costs of school closures Rubric for the Rubric Concerning

Some Gates Charter Personalized Love

16by Peter Greene / 6d

Don Shalvey has been pushing charter schools for many, many years. He was serving a superintendent of the San Carlos School District when he launched the first charter school in California . That was 1992. In 1998 he joined with Reed " Elected Schools Boards Suck " Hastings (Netflix) to for Californians for Public School Excellence, an astroturf group created to push charter school legis

Is Poverty No Longer a Thing?

35by Peter Greene / 7d

Mike Petrilli was over at Campbell Brown's place this week where A) he was oddly billed as a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a book author, but not as the head honcho of the Fordham Institute and B) suggesting 

 CURMUDGUCATION:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The original plan called for pipeline to run though mainly-white Bismarck

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The original plan called for pipeline to run though mainly-white Bismarck:

The original plan called for pipeline to run though mainly-white Bismarck

The Snake is headed our way.

Isn't this the way things go?

According to court documents, original proposals for construction placed the pipeline near the water supply for Bismarck, a city that is 88% white. “They altered the route because people were concerned about the impact on the city’s water supply,” Jan Hasselman, an Earthjustice attorney representing the tribe said in an interview. “ (The government) put the risk on the tribe. That’s not right.” -- High Country News

The Army Corps of Engineers has a long history of taking lands at Standing Rock including the creation of Lake Oahe which inundated prime agricultural lands and fruit orchards so mainly-white Bismarkians would have a place to water ski and fish for walleye.

Super proud of the Windy City for the big turnout at yesterday's solidarity rally and march on the Army Corps of Engineers office. Other protests took place in cities around the country,including Bismarck. 

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg's ruling was a big blow. But Justice Dept. and Army Corps of Engineers heard footsteps and have temporarily halted operations.

Classic Obama... He calls on Dakota Access to "voluntarily" delay bulldozing Sioux sacred Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: The original plan called for pipeline to run though mainly-white Bismarck:

NYC Public School Parents: The lawsuit just filed on behalf of the receivership schools

NYC Public School Parents: The lawsuit just filed on behalf of the receivership schools:

The lawsuit just filed on behalf of the receivership schools

Wendy Lecker, one of the attorneys from the Education Law Center who sued the State Division of the Budget and the State Education Educationlast week for denying funds to struggling schools on behalf of parents, wrote this summary of the case below.  Three of the schools are in NYC as explained below.  More on how these schools intended to use these funds are here.  Here is the verified petition.

Attorney Wendy Lecker

On September 2, parents from Albany, Yonkers and New York City filed a lawsuit against the state seeking the release of receivership grant money that the Division of Budget is withholding from their children’s schools, as well as six other schools across the state.  

In 2015, New York State passed Education law 211-f, known as the Receivership Law, which directed the Commissioner of Education to designate New York public schools as “persistently failing” based on test scores and other outcome data. Appropriations legislation also passed in 2015 directed that these “persistently failing” schools were eligible to receive $75 million in funding for two-year grants.

The appropriations law mandated that the State Education Department (“SED”) develop an expenditure plan for these “transformation grants,”  that the Division of Budget (“DOB”) NYC Public School Parents: The lawsuit just filed on behalf of the receivership schools:

This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates’ Education Investment Brought to You by Bill Gates | FAIR

This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates’ Education Investment Brought to You by Bill Gates | FAIR:

This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates’ Education Investment Brought to You by Bill Gates

This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates’ Education Investment Brought to You by Bill Gates | FAIR:

Bill Gates’ influence is so ubiquitous it’s invisible. (photo: Sebastian Derungs/WEF)

The Guardian (8/31/16) published a broadly positive report on Liberian education, which is handing over the reins of 120 primary schools to a consortium of private education companies and NGOs in a pilot program exploring privatization of the West African nation’s schools. One passage in particular was especially glowing:

The deputy minister [of Education], Aagon Tingba, is reading The Bee Eater, a biography of Michele Rhee, a polarizing educational reformist and former chancellor of Washington, DC, public schools. “She changed the lives of children in Washington, but people complained her methods were controversial. But she made a difference. So why can’t we do that here?

What the piece failed to note—other than the fact that Rhee’s tenure left DC’s schools “worse by almost every conceivable measure” (Truthout, 10/23/13)—is that multi-billionaire Bill Gates is both the major investor of the company administering the Liberian education overhaul and the principal of the Gates Foundation, sponsor of the Guardian’s Global Development vertical, where the story appeared.

The story clearly labels the Gates Foundation as its sponsor. What it never mentioned is that Bill Gates is a major investor of the firm at the heart of the story, Bridge Academies International, having pitched in, along with Facebookco-founder Mark Zuckerberg and eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, $100 million for the “education startup.”

Making the conflict more glaring is the fact that this is a personal, for-profit investment for Gates, not a charitable donation.

The Guardian claims its Global Development vertical, launched in 2011, is “editorially independent of any sponsorship.” According to its most recent tax filings in 2014, the Gates Foundation has an on-going $5.69 million grant toGuardian News Media Limited.

The Guardian has run other puff pieces on the Gates Foundation in this vertical, such as “Gates Foundation Annual Letter: What Do You Think of Their Vision?” (1/22/15), which is basically an investment letter, along with “Melinda Gates Hits Out at ‘War on Women’ on Eve of Summit” (7/7/12) and “Bill Gates: Digital Learning Will Revolutionize Education in Global South” (1/22/15).

FAIR has written for years about how Gates’ investment tentacles influence the media. He’s done softball interviews pushing common core with ABC(3/18/14), helped bankroll charter school reporting at the LA Times(8/24/15), funded the talking heads behind Race to the Top (9/1/10).

The Gates Foundation gives grants in the hundreds of thousands and often millions to such media organizations as NBCUniversal, Al Jazeera, BBC,Viacom (CBS) and Participant Media (the producer of pro-charter school documentary Waiting for Superman). Both Gates and the Gates Foundationare sizable shareholders in Comcast, which is the primary investor inBuzzfeed and Vox, as well the parent corporation of MSNBC and NBC News–the latter of which teamed up with Gates and other noted education experts like Exxon and University of Phoenix Online for the week-long charter school commercial “Education Week”.

In 2009, the New York Times reported that the Gates Foundation was partnering with media companies to write and shape stories to “embed” messages in primetime dramas:

It is less well known as a behind-the-scenes influencer of public attitudes toward these issues by helping to shape story lines and insert messages into popular entertainment like the television shows ER, Law & Order: SVU and Private Practice. The foundation’s messages on HIV prevention, surgical safety and the spread of infectious diseases have found their way into these shows.

The Times report was solely in the context of Gates’ health initiatives; it’s not clear if the foundation also co-produced TV shows to advance its school privatization agenda.

FAIR reached out to the writer of the piece, Nadene Ghouri, asking why she did not disclose the glaring conflict of interest. At the time of publication, Ghouri has not returned our request for comment.

His enormous wealth and the reach of media parent corporations seem to exempt Gates from routine disclosure requirements. He was offered up as an education expert in the pro-charter Waiting for Superman, without any mention of the fact that he donated at least $2 million to the film and had amedia partnership with its distributor, Viacom. He is given softball interviewsin Comcast-backed Vox without disclosure that he’s a major Comcastinvestor. Because his stake in media companies is laundered enough times, it’s assumed not to merit mention.

In the case of the Guardian, Gates effectively owns an entire vertical, so when one of his investments is written up, one doesn’t notice the conflict of interest—like a fish doesn’t notice water. Because his influence is everywhere, it appears to be nowhere.This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates’ Education Investment Brought to You by Bill Gates | FAIR:

Back to School 2016 - Issues Teachers and Students are Facing

Back to School 2016 - Issues Teachers and Students are Facing

Pleas e join Internet radio host Dr. James Avington Miller Jr. for a special Back To School 2016 War Report. Dr. Miller will be reporting on many of the issues and situations teachers and students foun d when they came back to school these last few weeks.

Dr. Miller will be exposing the following issues and more:
Teacher Shortages
Digital Nightmare Curriculum
Teachers having to work for Uber just to keep a foothold in the Middle Class
Federal Government Over-Reach
Guidelines on Police in Schools
The Rising Struggle to make Black Education Matter
The Treacherous Onslaught to Privatize Our Public Universities and Colleges
And Much More.

Please tune in and call in and learn.

Knowledge is power !

RESISTANCE MATTERS
RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE
RESISTANCE IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF EXPRESSION OF DEMOCRACY
RESISTANCE IS SURVIVAL

Please click on the website below to listen live:
http://bbsradio.com/thewarreport
2:00 PM PDT
4:00 PM CDT
5:00 PM EDT
or
A direct listen-in line only
Station 1 - 716-748-0150
To call-in and interact live
Station 1 888-627-6008 toll free  

The official website for  The War Report on Public Education | Facebook

Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter

Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter:

Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter

Tonya Ray, center, a math teacher at the Academy of Public Leadership, talking with students in Detroit, May 11, 2016. (Joshua Lott / The New York Times)

The struggle for equitable education went to summer school, and the new school year is getting underway with leading Black organizations bolstering the movement against the central components of the corporate education reform agenda.

In an earthmoving decision for the education landscape, the NAACP -- the nation's oldest civil rights organization -- voted at its July national gathering to call for "a moratorium on privately managed charter schools," saying charter schools:

do not represent the public yet make decisions about how public funds are spent [and have] contributed to the increased segregation rather than diverse integration of our public school system.... Researchers have warned that charter school expansions in low-income communities mirror predatory lending practices that led to the sub-prime mortgage disaster, putting schools and communities impacted by these practices at great risk of loss and harm.

A moratorium would halt the granting of any more licenses to open new charter schools -- that is, schools funded by the public but privately run and not accountable to democratically elected school boards. The NAACP announcement has corporate education reformers reeling. Rick Hess, director of education policy at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said that if local governments adopt the NAACP's proposed moratorium, "It would give a permanent black eye to the sector."

If the NAACP's stance on charters would bruise the corporate agenda, then thedeclaration from the Movement for Black Lives -- the newest civil rights coalition, comprised of dozens of grassroots organizations around the country -- would flatline it altogether. The coalition released a policy platform at the beginning of August that called for, among other things, a moratorium on all out-of-school suspensions and the removal of police from schools, replacing them with positive alternatives to Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter:

The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to Destroy America's Great Public Universities | Alternet

The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to Destroy America's Great Public Universities | Alternet:

The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to Destroy America's Great Public Universities
There was one unifying factor that drove Sanders’ unexpected groundswell of support.

Anyone who attended one of Bernie Sanders’ rallies during the Democratic primary campaign knows what the central issue was behind his call for “political revolution.” There was one unifying factor that drove Sanders’ unexpected groundswell of support, and that crystallized all the themes of economic inequality and social injustice he repeated in stump speech after stump speech. Not by coincidence, it was also the most prominent issue on which Hillary Clinton ultimately felt compelled to move almost all the way to Sanders’ position, after repeatedly insisting that she disagreed with him. That issue was the cost of a college degree, perhaps the most visible symptom of a far-reaching attempt by the super-rich and their ideological allies to reshape public education to serve their interests.

At a certain point in every rally, the Vermont senator would ask young people in the crowd to call out how much they owed in student debt. I’m twice the age of many Sanders voters, and I heard numbers that dwarfed any amount of debt I have ever amassed in a lifetime of irresponsible credit-card spending. Generally, the winner in a Bernie call-and-response session owed somewhere between $90,000 and $120,000 in higher-education debt, but sums in excess of $150,000 were not unknown. Maybe that level of debt seems almost comprehensible for someone who went to Harvard or Stanford and then straight into law school or medical school, although I still suspect it’s likely to have a baleful effect on those individuals and the whole society. But Bernie’s core audience went well beyond the Georgetown Law demographic — they were likelier to be graduates of Penn State or Arizona State, UMass or UConn or UCLA. When kids from those schools The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to Destroy America's Great Public Universities | Alternet:

Activist Sues Chicago Public Schools For Records Of Troy LaRaviere's Ouster: Chicagoist

Activist Sues Chicago Public Schools For Records Of Troy LaRaviere's Ouster: Chicagoist:

Activist Sues Chicago Public Schools For Records Of Troy LaRaviere's Ouster

A local activist has filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Public Schools, claiming the District has dodged Freedom of Information Act requests for records related to the ouster of former Blaine Elementary School Principal Troy LaRaviere.

“Government agencies stonewall the public because they think they can get away with it. They can't,” said Nick Burt, the plaintiff in the suit. “If CPS is terminating educators because they are critical of the mayor's wasteful and ineffective school privatization agenda, the public has the right to know.”

LaRaviere, an oft vocal and fiery critic of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, was removed from his position as Principal of Blaine elementary in April one month after appearing in an ad for former Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. He was later named President of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association in May, but continued to contest his dismissal at Blaine until the end of August when he resigned.

“The flimsy charges you’ve leveled against me-combined with the recent elevation of my school as the #1 neighborhood school in Chicago-makes it obvious that your actions against me have everything to do with politics and nothing to do with what’s good for students and families,” LaRaviere wrote in his resignation letter, which he posted publicly on his blog. “Therefore the point that I wished to make in the hearing process, has already been made-loudly and clearly.”

Burt filed the FOIA requests for records in April, which were first denied by CPS’s FOIA officer for being “unduely burdensome.” According to emails from the District, the broad initial request would’ve encompassed its more than 30,000 employees. Burt then narrowed his request to 18 specific employees with a handful of search terms related to LaRaviere and Bernie Sanders, which the District contended was still too burdensome, as it alleged the narrowed request would’ve yielded more than 6,000 results.

Burt further narrowed the request, but CPS simply stopped responding. According to Dan Massoglia of MK Law, the firm representing Burt, a June letter from the Office of the Attorney General to the District demanding an official response also went unanswered.

“CPS has willfully and intentionally violated the law by its serially uncommunicative pattern of conduct related to requests for information about Principal Troy LaRaviere and Senator Bernie Sanders,” reads the complaint. “Whether CPS' repeatedly ignoring communications from a member of the public and from government oversight bodies is a product of the actions of individual employees or a result of budgetary priority, it is, under the act, willful and intentional.”

Burt says while he wouldn't speculate as to what, if anything, CPS might be trying to conceal, its non-compliance with laws regarding FOIA doesn't dampen his curiosity.

"When an institution as mired in conflict and controversy as CPS ousts one of its highest-profile critics, it can't help but look suspicious," said Burt. "Politically motivated firings, if that's what it was, can have a chilling effect on educator activism and outspokenness, at a time when such dissent is necessary to save our city's schools."

We’ve reached out to CPS for comment and will update when they respond.Activist Sues Chicago Public Schools For Records Of Troy LaRaviere's Ouster: Chicagoist:

State agrees to make sure English learners receive help - LA Times

State agrees to make sure English learners receive help - LA Times:

State agrees to make sure English learners receive help

Jesus Perez, an eighth-grade student at Mountain View Middle School in Moreno Valley, is among 1.4 million California students classified as an English learner. (Allan Gerson)

Some school districts had only a smattering of foreign-language speakers, somaybe that’s why no one tried to teach them English. In others, perhaps, it was difficult to find qualified staff — or these students weren’t the highest priority.

But up and down the state, for at least a decade, according to the federal government, tens of thousands of English learners in elementary, middle and high school received no services to help them learn the language and keep up academically while they did, even though the law required that they get it.

Under pressure from a lawsuit and federal authorities, California pledged Friday to make sure that all 1.4 million students who are English learners receive special academic help. 

The settlement with the U.S. Justice Department echoes the earlier resolution of a lawsuit covering the same ground, but goes further in establishing the state’s role to ensure that these students receive high-quality instruction.

For years, California had been allowing school districts to avoid giving needed and legally required help to thousands of students with a limited ability to speak English, according to the Justice Department and civil rights advocates. The school districts even acknowledged the problem in documents routinely filed with the state.

When challenged on why California tolerated these violations, state officials insisted they had met legal oversight obligations by collecting data and by directing districts to comply with the law.

Under the settlement, state officials continue to deny that they ever did anything wrong, but they have agreed to change.

The  state now commits to notifying school systems and independently operated charter schools within 60 days when it determines they are failing to serve English learners State agrees to make sure English learners receive help - LA Times:

Challenging Connecticut Judge’s ignorant statements about “disabled” children - Wait What?

Challenging Connecticut Judge’s ignorant statements about “disabled” children - Wait What?:

Challenging Connecticut Judge’s ignorant statements about “disabled” children

In an extremely powerful Hartford Courant commentary piece, Andrew Feinstein, a special education expert and advocate, addresses the “dark poison” contained in Judge Thomas Moukawsher’s recent ruling in the CCJEF v. Rell case. (See Wait, What? post entitled,Inside school funding “victory,” CT Judge apparently seeks to set special education services back 40 years).

Attorney Feinstein writes;

“…Judge Moukawsher proposed that certain children with severe disabilities be denied a public education. He says, “The call is not about whether certain profoundly disabled children are entitled to a ‘free appropriate public education.’ It is about whether schools can decide in an education plan for a covered child that the child has a minimal or no chance for education, and therefore the school should not make expensive, extensive, and ultimately pro-forma efforts.” He claims, inaccurately, that “no case holds otherwise, and this means that extensive services are not always required.”

This triage proposal is at odds with what the litigants argued in the case and diametrically opposed to federal civil rights law. The judge proposes discriminating against the severely disabled. Yet, discrimination based on the severity of disability violates the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Judge Ellen Bree Burns addressed this issue head-on in Messier v. Southbury Training School. Federal ADA regulations provide that a public entity, such as a school board, may not provide different benefits or services to individuals with disabilities or to any class of individuals with disabilities than is provided to others unless such action is necessary to provide qualified individuals with disabilities with benefits or services that are as effective as those provided to others.

Judge Burns wrote that courts have repeatedly held that the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act prohibit discrimination based on the severity of disability. Specifically, she held that Challenging Connecticut Judge’s ignorant statements about “disabled” children - Wait What?:

 

Lily and Randi get their seat at the table. They are surrounded by corporate reformers. | Fred Klonsky

Lily and Randi get their seat at the table. They are surrounded by corporate reformers. | Fred Klonsky:

Lily and Randi get their seat at the table. They are surrounded by corporate reformers.

If any two people know how to win a vote it’s Randi and Lily.

When the NEA and the AFT gave Hillary an early endorsement over Bernie Sanders, many scratched their heads trying to figure out what the two teacher unions gained by this.

By hitching the unions’ wagons to the HRC campaign so early, it seemed to many observers that we lost whatever bargaining chip we had.

The AFT’s Randi Weingarten and the NEA’s Lily Eskelsen Garcia promised members that an early endorsement would ensure that teachers got a seat at the table.

And so it has.

Mother Jones published a list of those who are serving on Hillary’s K-12 policy working group.

The previously unreleased list includes:Lily and Randi get their seat at the table. They are surrounded by corporate reformers. | Fred Klonsky:

Arne Duncan Praising Charters Again | Diane Ravitch's blog

Arne Duncan Praising Charters Again | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Arne Duncan Praising Charters Again

Arne Duncan was the best friend the charter industry ever had in the federal government. He praised them again and again, and he periodically announced that he had found a charter school that had closed the gaps and done what no public school could do. He lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on them. I can’t recall him ever praising any public school the way he praised privately managed charters. Apparently, he hasn’t changed his mind. In this article that appeared in The Atlantic, Duncan is back to his old stand, singing the virtues of charters.

But once again, as I have in the past, I have to save Albert Shanker from the bold assertion that he was the visionary who created the charter movement. It is true that Shanker was one of the first to describe a new kind of school that he called a charter school (the other was Raymond Budde at the University of Massachusetts). In 1988, he sang the praises of this experiment. He saw it as a school within a school, made up of union teachers, that would be free to try new methods to teach the disaffected, the kids that regular public schools were not doing well with. He thought these schools would seek out the toughest kids. He said that the charter would have to get the permission of the local teachers’ union before starting. It would be an autonomous teacher-run school with a five-year grant of authority. He saw it as an R&D lab that helped public schools try out and learn new ways to educate.

What people like Duncan and others who invoke Shanker’s name will never tell you is that Shanker turned against his creation only five years later, in 1993. He concluded that charters had been taken over by corporate interests and that his idea had become a vehicle for privatization of public schools. He denounced them as vociferously as he denounced vouchers.
See pp. 123-124 of my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” (The page numbers might be different in the new edition. Just read Chapter 7.)

Twenty-three years ago, Shanker repudiated his love for charter schools. Yet people like Duncan continue to salute him as a founding father, as if that makes privatization palatable. Arne Duncan Praising Charters Again | Diane Ravitch's blog: