Florida private schools get nearly $1 billion in state scholarships with little oversight, Sentinel finds - Orlando Sentinel

Florida private schools get nearly $1 billion in state scholarships with little oversight, Sentinel finds - Orlando Sentinel

Schools Without Rules: 

An Orlando Sentinel Investigation

Florida private schools rake in nearly $1 billion in state scholarships with little oversight. 

Part 1 of 3 Parts

By Leslie Postal, Beth Kassab and Annie Martin Staff Writers

Private schools in Florida will collect nearly $1 billion in state-backed scholarships this year through a system so weakly regulated that some schools hire teachers without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls and falsify fire-safety and health records.

The limited oversight of Florida’s scholarship programs allowed a principal under investigation for molesting a student at his Brevard County school to open another school under a new name and still receive the money, an Orlando Sentinel investigation found.

Another Central Florida school received millions of dollars in scholarships, sometimes called school vouchers, for nearly a decade even though it repeatedly violated program rules, including hiring staff with criminal convictions.

Despite the problems, the number of children using Florida’s scholarship programs has more than tripled in the past decade to 140,000 students this year at nearly 2,000 private schools. If students using Florida Tax Credit, McKay and Gardiner scholarships made up their own school district, they would be Florida’s sixth-largest in student population, just ahead of the Jacksonville area.

“The scholarships are good. The problem is the school,” said Edda Melendez, an Osceola County mother. “They need to start regulating the private schools.”

>>> Florida private schools: Readers share their experiences, views

Melendez complained to the state last year about a private school in Kissimmee. The school promised specialized help for her 5-year-old twin sons, who have autism, but one of their teachers was 21 years old and didn’t have a bachelor’s degree or experience with autistic children.

“I feel bad for all the parents who didn’t know what’s going on there,” she told the state.

Last year, nearly a quarter of all state scholarship students — 30,000 — attended 390 private schools in Central Florida. The schools received $175.6 million worth of the scholarships, which are for children from low-income families and those with disabilities.

During its investigation, the Sentinel visited more than 30 private schools in Orange, Seminole, Lake, Osceola and Brevard counties, reviewed thousands of pages of public records and interviewed dozens of parents, private school operators, state officials and policy experts.

Unlike public schools, private schools, including those that accept the state scholarships, operate free from most state rules. Private school teachers and principals, for example, are not required to have state certification or even college degrees.

One Orlando school, which received $500,000 from the public programs last year, has a 24-year-old principal still studying at a community college.

Nor do private schools need to follow the state’s academic standards. One curriculum, called Accelerated Christian Education or ACE, is popular in some private schools and requires students to sit at partitioned desks and fill out worksheets on their own for most of the day, with little instruction from teachers or interaction with classmates.

And nearly anything goes in terms of where private school classes meet. The Continue reading: Florida private schools get nearly $1 billion in state scholarships with little oversight, Sentinel finds - Orlando Sentinel

Schools Without Rules: An Orlando Sentinel Investigation

The Orlando Sentinel spent months reporting on Florida’s scholarship programs, which will send nearly $1 billion to private schools this year. The Sentinel also reviewed thousands of pages of Florida Department of Education documents, court records and other materials in addition to interviewing dozens of people, including parents, students, school operators and policy experts.

• 
  SENTINEL SCHOOL ZONE 

  Private schools' curriculum downplays slavery, says humans and dinosaurs lived together

  Leslie Postal, Beth Kassab and Annie Martin

  Some private schools in Florida that rely on public funding teach students that dinosaurs and humans lived together, that God’s intervention prevented Catholics from dominating North America and that slaves who “knew Christ” were better off than free men who did not. The lessons taught at these...
• 
  SENTINEL SCHOOL ZONE 

  Without scholarship money, private school Agape continues to struggle

  Annie Martin

  Months after Agape Christian Academy was yanked from the state’s voucher programs, the private school in Pine Hills continues to flounder, racking up debt and struggling to keep the water and air-conditioning running. The school’s hopes for getting voucher money in the near future evaporated this...
• 
  EDUCATION 

  Florida private schools get nearly $1 billion in state scholarships with little oversight, Sentinel finds

  Leslie Postal, Beth Kassab and Annie Martin

  Florida private schools will collect nearly $1 billion in state-backed scholarships this year so weakly regulated that some schools hire teachers without college degrees.
• 
  EDUCATION 

  Orlando private school with troubled history took millions of dollars in state scholarships.

  Annie Martin, Leslie Postal and Beth Kassab

  Agape Christian Academy took $5.6 million in state-backed scholarships during the past five years as the private school repeatedly violated the few rules that govern Florida’s scholarship program.
• 
  EDUCATION 

  After student alleges abuse, principal shutters one private school, opens another

  Beth Kassab, Leslie Postal and Annie Martin

  How one Brevard County private school operator was able to continue benefiting from public vouchers and tax credits even after one of his schools was shut down.

• 
  SENTINEL SCHOOL ZONE 

  Florida's school voucher and scholarship programs face little oversight

  Florida provides little oversight of its scholarship programs for private schools, often called school vouchers, that some schools hire teachers without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls and falsify fire or health records. A previous version of this video contained an inaccurate...
• 
  EDUCATION 

  Timeline of private school vouchers in Florida

  Leslie Postal, Beth Kassab, Annie Martin and Adelaide Chen

  Timeline of school vouchers in Florida
• 
  EDUCATION 

  Florida private schools: Readers share their experiences, views

  Sentinel staff

  Parents, educators, advocates and others have responded to the Orlando Sentinel’s investigative project on Florida’s scholarship programs, which will send nearly $1 billion to private schools this year, by sharing their own experiences and views. >>>Share your views with us here for possible inclusion...
• 
  EDUCATION 

  State revokes Melbourne private school's scholarships

  Beth Kassab and Leslie Postal

  A private school in Melbourne with ties to two other schools already sanctioned by the state will be revoked from Florida’s scholarship programs, the Florida Department of Education said Tuesday. Yakol Christian opened in August with fewer than 20 students, all of them on one of the state’s three...
• 
  EDUCATION 

  Florida lawmakers, officials call for reform of private schools that get state scholarships

  Beth Kassab, Leslie Postal and Annie Martin

  Lawmakers, local elected officials and policy experts are calling for reform after an Orlando Sentinel investigation revealed that private schools take nearly $1 billion in state scholarships but have little oversight. The Sentinel series detailed how private schools can submit falsified fire inspections...

  
  

  Florida private schools get nearly $1 billion in state scholarships with little oversight, Sentinel finds - Orlando Sentinel

Checks and Balances Help Protect Us from Betsy DeVos | janresseger

Checks and Balances Help Protect Us from Betsy DeVos | janresseger

Checks and Balances Help Protect Us from Betsy DeVos

Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of the NY Times Book Review, is quite a writer, and it is fascinating to contrast the Betsy DeVos we’ve come to know in the months since she became U.S. Secretary of Education with the Betsy DeVos we meet in Tanenhaus’s Vanity Fair profile of the western Michigan DeVos Empire.  Tanenhaus writes: “In the solar system of elite Republican contributors, Richard DeVos Sr., who died Thursday at age 92—one of the two founders of Amway, the direct-sale colossus—occupied an exalted place, and his offspring did too. Since the 1970s, members of the DeVos family had given as much as $200 million to the G.O.P. and been tireless promoters of the modern conservative movement—its ideas, its policies, and its crusades combining free-market economics, a push for privatization of many government functions, and Christian social values. While other far-right mega-donors may have become better known over the years (the Coorses and the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson and the Mercers), Michigan’s DeVos dynasty stands apart—for the duration, range, and depth of its influence.”

Tanenhaus suggests that, “Trump was a useful vehicle for advancing nationally the revolution the DeVoses had already enacted in Michigan. There was, for instance, Betsy DeVos’s campaign to undo the state’s public education system and replace it with for-profit and charter schools that, as she had put it two decades earlier, shared her mission of ‘defending the Judeo-Christian values that made us what we are, but which are under attack from the liberal elite.’  There was also the campaign she and her husband had waged to weaken Michigan’s unions… Other lessons can be found in the pulp-fiction career of Betsy DeVos’s younger brother, Erik Prince, the former navy SEAL, who started Blackwater—the mammoth security company…. Behind all this is the story of a family dynasty that has been a driving force on the far right—the Michigan Medicis of Donald Trump’s America.”

So… how’s it going for Betsy after nearly 20 months on the job?

Last week a House and Senate conference committee approved a compromise education appropriations bill for FY 2019.  It must still be voted on by both houses of Congress and signed by the President, but Education Week‘s federal education policy reporter Continue reading: Checks and Balances Help Protect Us from Betsy DeVos | janresseger

A tale of two covers - YouTube

A tale of two covers - YouTube

A tale of two covers

enrique baloyra

After years of perpetuating the myth that the public schools are failing, Time Magazine is finally setting the record straight.
In 2008 Time featured D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on its cover with a broom, as she fired hundreds of teachers working in the district’s poorest schools. Rhee ended up resigning in disgrace before investigators could link her to widespread fraud and corruption in a group of charters she established.
Then there was the “Rotten Apples” cover in 2014, which basically accused unions of protecting bad teachers, with the underlying message, “that’s why public schools are failing.”
But it turns out it’s politicians who are failing our schools.
That’s why this week’s Time has three teachers on different versions of its cover, sharing stories about their struggles to make ends meet, while facing the challenges of teaching in some of the nation’s most underfunded schools.
“Teachers are out to regain the upper hand.”
“And they promise to turn out in force for November’s midterm elections, where hundreds of teachers are running for office on platforms that promise more support for public schools. They have also sought to remind the public that they are on the front lines of America’s frayed social safety net, dealing with children affected by the opioid crisis, living in poverty and fearful of the next school shooting.” http://time.com/longform/teaching-in-...
Keep in mind, there are schools where every student lives in poverty. These kids arrive years behind their middle class counterparts in reading and writing skills. Every summer they get farther behind in their math skills. They suffer from malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, and serious trauma at several times the national average. We should be supporting the teachers whose work it is to bring these kids up to grade level.
And the public is figuring this out for themselves. In fact, recent polling suggests 60% of Americans think teachers should have the right to strike. Even in the reddest states, voters are backing tax increases for education spending, teachers are winning their bids for elected office, and communities are fighting back when corporate charters come to town.
But the fight to take back our schools has only just begun. Good thing November sixth is right around the corner.

Category

News & Politics

A tale of two covers - YouTube

Will Bezos Heed Other Education Philanthropy Mistakes? | Education News | US News

Will Bezos Heed Other Education Philanthropy Mistakes? | Education News | US News
Will Bezos Heed Other Education Philanthropy Mistakes?
The world’s richest man is heading down a path of charitable giving that has tripped up some of his contemporaries.

AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF Bezos is the latest tech giant to splash onto the education philanthropy scene, announcing plans to develop a network of preschools funded through an initial $2 billion commitment.

"The Day 1 Academies Fund will launch an operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos wrote in a letter posted to Twitter on Thursday morning. "We will build an organization to directly operate these preschools."

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In doing so, Bezos follows in the footsteps of other tech giants, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell (the widow of Steve Jobs), who have all directed through their foundations hundreds of millions of dollars – billions, in the case of Gates – to various education initiatives.

To be sure, Bezos – who also plans to use some of the money to aid nonprofits that help homeless families – is not new on the education scene. The Bezos Family Foundation, founded in 2000 and run by Bezos' parents, focuses solely on education, and earlier this year Bezos gave $33 million to a scholarship program for children brought to the United States illegally, TheDream.us.

But the uptick in philanthropic giving from such organizations has sparked heated debates about the influence they wield over public education and their overall impact.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been involved in education for nearly two decades and has directed billions of dollars into advancing policies that gave rise to the education reform movement.

Some of the foundation's biggest bets have been in its decision to back the Common Core State Standards – academic benchmarks for what students should know by the end of each grade – and its push to reimagine teacher evaluation and compensation systems based in part on student test scores.

But the foundation has been widely criticized for funneling funding into what some consider silver-bullet policies or the latest education fad.

In May 2016, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Gates Foundation, apologized for the foundation's misread of how ready – or not ready, as it turned out – states were to handle implementation of the Common Core standards. And last year, Gates himself offered somewhat of a mea culpa for the foundation's involvement in teacher evaluation.

In fact, in outlining plans for a new $1.7 billion investment last fall, the Gates Foundation made a Continue reading: Will Bezos Heed Other Education Philanthropy Mistakes? | Education News | US News

Leading Democratic Congressman Honored by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Leading Democratic Congressman Honored by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Leading Democratic Congressman Honored by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

Hakeem Jeffries from Brooklyn is one of the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress. He is considering a bid to be chair of the Democratic Caucus.

On September 13, he was honored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and received its first “African American Charter School Leadership Award.” The event is referred to in the official invitation as #BringTheFunk. The award noted that he is a “faithful supporter” of New York City’s Success Academy charter chain, a favorite of the hedge fund industry, which may well be the best funded charter chain in the nation, known for its strict discipline, its high test scores, and its high attrition rates.

The event was sponsored by the rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation, Campbell Brown’s “The 74,” and Education Reform Now. Campbell Brown is a close friend of Betsy DeVos; Education Reform Nowis affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the hedge funders’ organization. Education Reform Now and DFER exist to promote charter schools.

Like so many privately managed charter schools, the new award is segregated, for blacks only.

To understand why Congress is paying $440 million a year for new charter schools, even when there is no need for funding for new charter schools, even though they are amply funded by philanthropists and billionaires, even though they draw funding away from public schools, even though the federal General Accountability Office found that they are rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, even though charter school scandals are increasingly common, even though the NAACP called for a national moratorium on new charter schools, start here.Leading Democratic Congressman Honored by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

We’re All Civics Teachers – Constitution Day, 2018 – Live Long and Prosper

We’re All Civics Teachers – Constitution Day, 2018 – Live Long and Prosper

We’re All Civics Teachers – Constitution Day, 2018

WE’RE ALL CIVICS TEACHERS

A middle school social studies teacher once commented to me that he had trouble teaching his curriculum because so many of the students in his classroom were reading “below grade level.” My response was, “We’re all reading teachers.”

A few days ago, the Annenberg Public Policy Center released its annual Constitution Day Civics Survey. The results of the survey suggest that we’re all civics teachers, as well – or we ought to be.

The survey found that Americans don’t know enough about how our government works. Some highlights:

• A quarter (27 percent) incorrectly said the Constitution allows the president to ignore a Supreme Court ruling if the president believes the ruling is wrong;

• A plurality (41 percent) incorrectly said that both the House and Senate must approve before a nominee becomes a justice on the Supreme Court (30 percent correctly know that the Senate alone confirms);

• Only a third of Americans (32 percent) can name all three branches of government.

BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT

It’s only slightly comforting that Americans probably know that we have the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights even though they might now know which Amendment they’re in. But it is very disturbing (at least to me) that only about one-third of Americans surveyed can name all three branches of the government.

Can you?

Can you name the President Pro Tempore of the Senate? Did you know that he is third in line for the presidency after the Vice President and the Speaker of the House? (It’s Orrin Hatch. Are you surprised that it isn’t Mitch McConnell?)

How many members of the House of Representatives are there? How was that number arrived at? What is the “System of checks and balances?” How many members are there of the Supreme Court? Why did the founders decide that the President should be chosen by Electors instead of the people themselves?

THE AMENDMENTS

(The following information is from the 2017 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey)

While 37% of those surveyed couldn’t name any of the rights guaranteed under the Continue reading: We’re All Civics Teachers – Constitution Day, 2018 – Live Long and Prosper

Despite F Ratings, Dyslexia Charter School Has Gotten Repeated State Approval

Despite F Ratings, Dyslexia Charter School Has Gotten Repeated State Approval

Despite F Ratings, Dyslexia Charter School Has Gotten Repeated State Approval

Interest in charter schools for students with disabilities is on the rise. Will such schools destroy the Individuals with Disabilities Act’s (IDEA) rights of children?

IDEA is the reauthorization of the 1975 Public Law 94-142. While parents might be dissatisfied with dyslexia programming in public schools, how can they be assured charter schools will provide better assistance including inclusion in charter schools?

A school for students with dyslexia continues to stay open despite two F grades from the BESE, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The Louisiana Key Academy is run by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and his wife, Laura. Both are physicians. Neither are specialists in reading disorders, although they have a child with dyslexia.

Sen. Cassidy supported the appointment of Betsy DeVos for education secretary, and discussed dyslexia at her confirmation hearing. He received $70,000 in campaign contributions from the DeVos family. DeVos is hell-bent on destroying democratic public schools. She favors charters, technology instead of teachers, and vouchers.

Parents of students with dyslexia and learning disabilities are concerned that public schools don’t provide students with appropriate reading instruction. Only some states address dyslexia under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) has become a spokesperson of sorts for students with dyslexia. Some of this stems from a congressional confrontation he had with former Continue reading: Despite F Ratings, Dyslexia Charter School Has Gotten Repeated State Approval