Study: New Orleans Principals Admit to Manipulating Student Selection | deutsch29

Study: New Orleans Principals Admit to Manipulating Student Selection | deutsch29:
Study: New Orleans Principals Admit to Manipulating Student Selection

I have written several posts to date on the Educational Research Alliance of New Orleans (ERA) and its founder, Doug Harris.

ERA is conducting a number of studies on the privatization of most of New Orleans’ schools following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and which has culminated in a 100-percent-charter Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans by 2014.

In 2014-15, the remaining Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) consists of six direct-run schools and 14 charter schools, with with four of the 14 charters being “selective admission” schools– which means these school are (by definition) not open to the public.

Thus, the term “school choice” could well mean that it is the school that exercises greater leverage when it comes to choosing, not the parents.

ERA is studying this “choice”– with results that sometimes are not pretty for the “choice” advocates.

On January 15, 2015, Harris released his first report on the Walton-funded OneApp. (My commentary on the report can be read here, and my observations regarding the community meeting in which the first report was presented is available here.)

My post dated March 18, 2015, concerns ERA’s opening its June 2015 conference to the public yet charging $275 entrance fee, which will undoubtedly serve to exclude those whose children attend the very schools Harris and his ERA are researching.

But let us focus on the previously-introduced idea that “choice” belongs to the schools and can be utilized for schools to benefit themselves.

On March 26, 2015 ERA released its second study, entitled, How Do School Leaders Respond to Competition? Evidence from New Orleans, written by Huriya Jabbar. Here is Jabbar’s opening paragraph:

Understanding how schools respond to competition is vital to understanding the effects of the market-based school reforms implemented in New Orleans since 2005. Advocates of market-based reform suggest that, when parents and students can freely choose schools, schools will improve education in order to attract and retain students. But, for market-based school-choice policies to work, school leaders have to believe they are competing for students, and they have to choose to compete in ways that improve education.

Jabbar’s study was qualitative, based upon administrative interviews that included those of 30 New Orleans school principals:

The data for the study were obtained from 72 interviews with district leaders, charter-school board members, charter network leaders, and principals of 30 randomly selected schools in 2012–2013. This sample of schools represents the schools in New Orleans, including charter schools, direct-run OPSB and RSD schools, and schools at all grade levels. The interviews were transcribed and items systematically coded to identify categories of responses.

One of Jabbar’s findings: “Kids mean money,” so to speak:

School leaders defined competition as competition for students and the government funding that comes with them. Their comments in this regard 

Study: New Orleans Principals Admit to Manipulating Student Selection | deutsch29:

The Myth of Chinese Super Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books

The Myth of Chinese Super Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books:
The Myth of Chinese Super Schools

Diane Ravitch

A boy watching pro-democracy demonstrators from a school bus near a protest site in Hong Kong, October 2014

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World

by Yong Zhao

Jossey-Bass, 254 pp., $26.95

On December 3, 2013, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced yet again that American students were doing terribly when tested, in comparison to students in sixty-one other countries and a few cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Duncan presided over the release of the latest international assessment of student performance in reading, science, and mathematics (called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA), and Shanghai led the nations of the world in all three categories.

Duncan and other policymakers professed shock and anguish at the results, according to which American students were average at best, nowhere near the top. Duncan said that Americans had to face the brutal fact that the performance of our students was “mediocre” and that our schools were trapped in “educational stagnation.”

He had used virtually the same rhetoric in 2010, when the previous PISA results were released. Despite the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which mandated that every child in every school in grades 3–8 would be proficient in math and reading by 2014, and despite the Obama administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, the scores of American fifteen-year-old students on these international tests were nearly unchanged since 2000. Both NCLB and Race to the Top assumed that a steady diet of testing and accountability, of carrots for high scores and sticks for low scores, would provide an incentive for students and teachers to try harder and get higher test scores. But clearly, this strategy was not working. In his public remarks, however, Duncan could not admit that carrots and sticks don’t produce better education or even higher test scores. Instead, he blamed teachers and parents for failing to have high expectations.

Duncan, President Obama, and legislators looked longingly at Shanghai’s stellar results and wondered why American students could not surpass them. Why can’t we be like the Chinese?, they wondered. Why should we be number twenty-nine in the world in mathematics when Shanghai is number one? Why are our scores below those of Estonia, Poland, Ireland, and so many other nations? Duncan was sure that the scores on international tests were proof that we were falling behind the rest of the world and that they predicted economic disaster for the United States. What Duncan could not admit was that, after a dozen years, the Bush–Obama strategy of testing and punishing teachers and schools had failed.

One response of the Obama administration was to support an initiative called the Common Core standards, which set demands so high for students in every grade from kindergarten to senior year that most of those who have taken the tests associated with the standards have failed them. In New York State, for example, nearly 70 percent of students failed to reach “proficient” in reading, including 95 percent of students with disabilities, 97 percent of English-as-a-second-language learners, and more than 80 percent of black and Hispanic students.

Although the federal government is barred by law from influencing or controlling curriculum or instruction, the Common Core tests are federally funded. Tests, without doubt, influence and control curriculum and instruction. The Common Core standards are a gamble, because no one knows if they will raise test scores or even if they will improve education. But what they will certainly do is require many tens of billions in new spending on technology, because the new federal tests will be delivered online, meaning that every school district must have new computers, new bandwidth, and training for staff to use the new technology. No surprise: the testing industry (dominated by the British corporation Pearson) and the technology industry love the new standards. However, recent polls show that a growing majority of parents and teachers oppose the Common Core standards; they have become a political lightning-rod, drawing fire from those on the right who see them as federal evisceration of local control and from those on the left who dislike standardization and loss of professional autonomy.

Policymakers and legislators are convinced that the best way to raise test scores is to administer more standardized tests and to make them harder to pass. This love affair The Myth of Chinese Super Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books:

John Thompson: A Teacher Proposes a Different Framework for Accountability - Education Post

John Thompson: A Teacher Proposes a Different Framework for Accountability - Education Post:

John Thompson: A Teacher Proposes a Different Framework for Accountability

 Since Education Post publicly launched last September, we have had the privilege of getting to know people across the policy spectrum who are passionate about public education. Two in particular, Oklahoma teacher John Thompson and New York teacher Audrey Hill, are regular debaters in social media.

Though we agree on little, we strive to be respectful. Following a debate on accountability, we invited them to outline an alternative to the current system of test-based accountability. Thompson’s recommendation follows, and Hill’s can be found here.

I agree with Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, who says that Congress needs to find a way to “let 1,000 flowers bloom” and back away from a punitive approach to controlling schools. The federal government should hold states accountable for the validity and reliability of accountability protocols that are tied to federal money. It should concentrate on:

1. Equity and improving outcomes (which, real world, can’t be predetermined by a statistical model) and/or opportunities for underserved persons, or those who have faced a history of discrimination or underachievement.
2. Spurring innovation.

Also, in contrast to Race to the Top (RTT) and the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, federal interventions should favor “win-win” experiments, not innovations that will inevitably hurt some children in an effort to help others.

State Accountability and Consequences

Many reformers have an inflated appraisal of what accountability systems can possibly accomplish. Accountability can help improve schools, but there is no reason to believe it can drive systemic school transformations for the better.

States should determine how much they want to invest in accountability and design their systems accordingly. If states can afford an “Inspectorate,” with highly-trained teams of inspectors who are armed with data when visiting schools, that would be ideal. If not, most states have always had inspection and accountability systems for individual districts and schools, and the federal government could incentivize the improvement and/or the funding of those systems.

Data-driven accountability undermines those goals by making the juking of the stats the #1 priority. However, federal and state governments should encourage collaboration and experimentation in data-informed accountability. It could borrow from data-driven crime fighting to use metrics to identify “hot spots” of schools, systems, or other areas that need additional patrols, or other forms of oversight. Data can be used to pinpoint places for extra scrutiny.

Teachers and principals also should be evaluated on their professional practice, as observed by trained, flesh-and-blood human beings, using rubrics and observation techniques developed by Pianta and others. We already have an evaluation model—early education—that could be applied to traditional public schools. I don’t believe it’s possible or desirable for pre-K-to-12 schools to keep track of as many metrics as the best early education programs use, but they show that it is possible to raise John Thompson: A Teacher Proposes a Different Framework for Accountability - Education Post:

An Activist Handbook for the Education Revolution BUY ONLINE HERE

IAP || Book || An Activist Handbook for the Education Revolution:

An Activist Handbook for the Education Revolution

United Opt Out's Test of Courage

Edited by:
Morna M. McDermott, United Opt Out National
Peggy Robertson, United Opt Out National
Rosemarie Jensen, United Opt Out National
Ceresta Smith, United Opt Out National

Published 2014

Contributions by: Rosemarie Jensen, Shaun Johnson, Morna McDermott, Laurie Murphy, Peggy Robertson, Ruth Rodriguez, Tim Slekar, Ceresta Smith,United Opt Out National

Forward by Ricardo Rosa, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

This book is intended for educators, parents and community activists interested in reclaiming our public schools and reclaiming the public narrative around education policy. The book infuses research about the recent history of education policy reform, the strategies United Opt Out uses for fighting back against these policies, and proposes solutions that work to create sustainable, equitable, anti-racist, democratic and meaningful public education. This book is for anyone interested in an “insider’s look” behind the scene of forming an organization, or leading a resistance. Simultaneously the book provides scholarly-based research about the broader issues, policies and data around education reform, and the opt out movement.

Education policy has been heating up ever since NCLB but especially since the roll out of Race to The Top and the Common Core State Standards. Nationally publicized debates and discord over these policies are garnering public attention of teachers, parents, and whole communities. We hope this book will add to the library of other recent books such as Mercedes Schneider’s A Chronicle of Echoes (2014), Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error (2013) and Bowers & Thomas (eds) Detesting and Degrading Schools (2012), that have exposed the complex corporate interest in shaping education policies and the destructive influence such policies will have on our children and on our democracy. This book uses first person narratives infused with research and scholarship, to create personalized accounts into the life of education activism. Each chapter includes an Activists Handbook section to provide support for our activist/readers in their own efforts. We hope that our experiences will inspire others to take this charge upon themselves as well.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements. Forward by Ricardo Rosa. Introduction- by Peg Robertson. CH 1: Predators, Colonizers, and Corporate-Model Reform- ByMorna McDermott. CH 2: Who We Are- By Morna McDermott. CH 3: Changing the Narrative- By Ceresta Smith. CH 4: Occupy This- By Peg Robertson. CH 5: Taking Action- By Shaun Johnson, Ceresta Smith, and Morna McDermott. CH 6: Every Narrative Has a Lens: The Value of Social Justice- By Ceresta Smith and Morna McDermott. Ch 7: A Case Study in Reform Failure: The Inconvenient Truth- By Ruth Rodriguez. Ch 8: Strategizing 101- By Laurie Murphy. CH 9: Where Do We Go From Here -By Tim Slekar. Conclusion- ByRosemarie Jensen. APPENDIX.

BUY ONLINE HERE:  IAP || Book || An Activist Handbook for the Education Revolution:

Teaching About Policing and Race in America | Alan Singer

Teaching About Policing and Race in America | Alan Singer:

Teaching About Policing and Race in America

 Oceanside High School is located in a suburban, overwhelming White and middle class community on Long Island in New York. The school sponsors an annual Human Relations Day that brings in speakers and sponsor panels on a range of topics including HIV/AIDS awareness, drunk driving, military families, fire safety, and diversity.

I opened a discussion on race in America with two groups of students by examining the February 2015 statement by FBI Director James Comey. He was at Georgetown University on "Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race." According to Comey "all of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups . . . It is a hard truth that lives on."

The Oceanside students, who were almost all White, agreed with Comey that these were hard truths, but generally favored addressing individual values at home and school rather than more systemic social change. Some were from police families and were grappling with things they heard in the media and their love and concern for family members who put their lives at risk. I expressed support for their efforts to sort out conflicting feelings, but stressed that Comey and protesters were not targeting individuals but a "history" of racism in American society and police forces and other institutions that need to be reformed. I also questioned whether their life experiences in a small isolated White community and racially segregated school effectively prepared them for college and careers in a much larger and more diverse world.

According to the recently released United States Justice Department report the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, where Black teen Michael Brown was shot to death in August 2014 by a White police officer, is guilty of systematic racial bias. Police inFerguson disproportionately ticket and arrest African American men, including for "crimes" like jaywalking, and officials use the revenue collected from the fines to balance the town's budget. The Ferguson Chief of Police, municipal judge, city manager resigned as did two police supervisors after the investigation showed they were linked to racist emails. The Justice Department concluded that the Ferguson Police Department routinely violated the constitutional rights of its Black residents.

Over the winter months I participated in a series of forums and actions growing out of the Summer 2014 killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by police officers. Unfortunately, it seemed that at each gathering another unarmed Black man had recently been killed by police officers. In a previous Huffington Post I reported on a student forum on police-community relations at Uniondale High School on Long Island that opened with a dramatic student "die-in."

During this time I met with students at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City to discuss the impact of the "school-to-prison" pipeline, helped students at Alfred E. Smith High School in Bronx New York organize a petition campaign against the use of metal detectors in minority high schools, was interviewed by Susan Modaress ofInside/Out on the impact of the prison system on Black and Latino children whose family life is disrupted by the arrest and imprisonment of parents, and was a Teaching About Policing and Race in America | Alan Singer:

How did Anti-Public School Corporate Reformers become the Dominant Force in Education Reform? | The War Report on Public Education

How did Anti-Public School Corporate Reformers become the Dominant Force in Education Reform? | The War Report on Public Education:

How did Anti-Public School Corporate Reformers become the Dominant Force in Education Reform?

The following is a point by point summary by Dr. Deborah Owens, whose book, The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy is the main focus of a War Report on Public Education mini- series that begins today, Sunday, March 29, 2015.

We here at War Report encourage our audience to listen to the series, read this synopsis, and respond in the comments section. We will have a new blog post from Deborah each week, a live internet radio show, and a podcast. We will address questions from our audience and we urge listeners and readers to please call in, respond to the blog post, and then listen and read ahead in preparation for next weeks show on the Common Core and the Corporate Ed Reform Agenda.

by Dr. Deborah Owens

How did anti-public school corporate reformers become the dominant force in education reform?  Here’s what I learned in researching and writing my book:

• The campaign to end public education has been a decades long venture.  There have been forces that for at least the last 80 years have been engaged in an assault on the institution of public schools, claiming that they are socialist institutions and actively seeking to label public schools as “government” schools.  Vouchers are not a new idea — they were born in an era of Cold War mentality, anti- New Deal rhetoric, and Jim Crow resistance to integration.  Charter schools are nothing more than an extension of this idea and we are seeing the ramifications of this misguided so-called reform effort now.

• The book, The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy, and the series, is one of unity around the preservation of the institution of public schools.  The goal is for the public and the education community to cast aside any political or ideological beliefs that distract from an ultimate goal.
  That goal is the preservation of the public school system and local control of this systemwithin each community.

• How can we accomplish this goal?  First of all, acknowledge that there are differing ideological views about education in the U.S.  Very importantly, we must acknowledge that many are militantly against the CCSS for various reasons; most are against high-stakes testing and the data mining that has resulted from the testing movement; and others are equally opposed to charter schools.  But what unites us?

• Underlying all of this is the reality that corporations are dominating education policy decisions in a new environment of corporate and governmental mutualism that is out to usurp locally controlled public schools and that envisions children merely as a source of profit.  We must unite to stop this corporate assault. Do you want to defeat the Common Core? Stop the profit machine associated with these national standards.  Do you want to put an end to Draconian high stakes tests that are sucking the life out of education?  Stop the profit machine associated with high-stakes tests.  Do you want to reclaim public schools and end the incursion of the charter school movement?  Stop the profit machine associated with charter schools.

• If we are able to accomplish this, we will reclaim the sacred ground of public education for all children, for all families, and for all communities.  Holding teachers accountable for the test scores of their children will become history.  We will realize that true societal transformation begins with the communities in which children and families live and that the schools within How did Anti-Public School Corporate Reformers become the Dominant Force in Education Reform? | The War Report on Public Education:

Content standards collide with P.E. alternatives :: SI&A Cabinet Report

Content standards collide with P.E. alternatives :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet:

Content standards collide with P.E. alternatives

 (Calif.) Marching band. Reserve Officers Training Corps. Dance and cheer. Rodeo.

California high school students who participate in these and other extra-curricular athletic activities may be excused by their local districts from having to take regular physical education courses required for graduation.

But there is growing concern that these pupils, while physically active, are not receiving the educational content required under state-mandated P.E. standards. Lawmakers who’ve seen several bills in recent years aimed at specifying particular activities as eligible for exemption think it might be time to revisit the rules.

“This does open up a can of worms, so to speak,” Sen. Carol Liu said during a hearing last week on legislation clarifying that participation in high school rodeo can be grounds for a P.E. exemption.

“I hope that we can send some kind of message that somebody at the California Department of Education should be looking at this conundrum we have of people coming before us all the time asking for exemptions,” said Liu, a Democrat from La Canada Flintridge who chairs the Senate Education Committee.

California, attempting to combat an epidemic of obesity among school-age children and teens, was among the first states in the nation to mandate the amount of time students must spend in P.E. class.

The law states that the emphasis should be on physical activity but it also requires that students in grades 9-12 receive instruction in “a developmental sequence” across eight different subject areas.

The California Department of Education, in offering guidance around the related statutes, differentiates between physical activity and physical education, saying: “The terms…are often used interchangeably, but they differ in important ways. Every student needs both a quality PE program and physical activity program.”

The law gives school districts considerable discretion in terms of deciding what programs qualify a student for an exemption from P.E. classes but there are vagaries that cause confusion and uneven application across the state.

This, in part, has led to “spot bills” coming before the Legislature to specifically acknowledge that districts may grant P.E. exemptions for certain activities. None have passed.

In 2009 the CDE issued a letter from then-Superintendent Jack O’Connell addressing several questions around physical education requirements, including whether students in marching band, Junior ROTC and similar type activities could receive P.E. credit for those programs. For the most part, according to the letter, it is ultimately up to the district to decide whether these activities meet the physical education goals laid out by the state.

Last week, the bill from Republican Sen. Jean Fuller of Bakersfield that would add rodeo to the list was passed on by Lui’s committee to the Senate floor for a vote but not before it sparked the discussion about whether further state intervention is warranted.

Cindy Lederer, a P.E. teacher with the Fairfield/Suisun Unified School District and representative of the California Association of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, voiced her group’s “extreme opposition” to SB 138 saying that while rodeo no doubt offers students a learning opportunity and physical activity, it does not meet the state’s adopted high school content standards for physical education.

“We are very much in support of activities that encourage students to be active both during and beyond the school day,” Lederer told the Senate panel. “But these activities should be highly encouraged to supplement but never supplant quality physical education programs in our schools.”

A spokeswoman for the American Heart and American Stroke Associations expressed opposition toContent standards collide with P.E. alternatives :: SI&A Cabinet Report :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet: 

Wall Street’s new student loan scheme: Subprime loans are coming to financial aid - Salon.com

Wall Street’s new student loan scheme: Subprime loans are coming to financial aid - Salon.com:

Wall Street’s new student loan scheme: Subprime loans are coming to financial aid

Slimy new loan options proliferate, as Wall Street looks to do for education what it did to the economy

(Credit: Sean Pavone, Krivosheev Vitaly via Shutterstock/Salon)

 Wall Street wants to own your education destiny.

To the old saying about “death and taxes,” you can now add another: debt.

In fact, in contemporary America, debt is likely becoming at least as all-encompassing as the other two.

An increasingly powerful force behind the debt explosion is not what you might expect: not cars, not homes, not healthcare. It’s education.

Since the Great Recession, federal and state authorities have been disinvesting from their obligations to educate the citizenry. So now, nearly every state spends less on higher education than it did in 2007.  And most states continue to spend less on K-12 education than they did in 2007. Federal government expenditures on education are also in decline.

So the burden of financing education has increasingly fallen on local governments and individuals, who have responded by borrowing money to pay for schooling.

Education debt is rapidly becoming a cradle to grave omnipresence – from parents taking out kindergarten loans, to taxpayers shouldering the ballooning costs of exotic school bonds, to senior citizens staving off bankruptcies caused by college debts.

With edu-debt levels mounting higher and higher at every turn, cash-strapped parents, municipal governments and education institutions have turned to solutions from Wall Street.

According to at least one investment news source, banks are increasingly reluctant to back infrastructure investments like schools, so the financial industry is rushing in to fill the void. “The severely restricted capacity of banks to provide long-term debt for infrastructure deals comes at a time when the need for infrastructure spending across the globe is soaring,” the report notes. “A great deal of debt will go to the bond markets. But they will not be the full solution by any means.”

---

---

Instead, an emerging “private loan space” is introducing “a number of new vehicles.”

An alphabet soup of new financial vehicles – SLABS, CABS, PPPs, ISAs – that’s been created in the edu-debt sphere spells disaster, as Wall Street tightens its control of how – or even whether – the nation educates its future workers and citizens.

Turning Students Into SLABS

A lot has been written about college student loan debt, now nearly $1.2 trillion and counting. But too little attention has focused on Wall Street’s role in the run-up.

Recall, when Wall Street speculators wanted a market for subprime mortgages, they created high-risk derivative securities that bundled the mortgages to sell as investments. The speculators have done the same for student loans.

These student loan asset-backed securities, or SLABS, have a performance history that has “been very good, and investors’ rate of return has been excellent,” according to an article in Wikipedia.

SLABS are “hot,” a Wall Street Journal headline exhorted its readers in 2013. “Investors are flocking to SLABS,” a more recent article on the Huffington Post reports.

A post on the blog for left-leaning advocacy Demos explains, “Before the SLABS binge, most private student loans were actually made in connection with the college financial aid office, which helped ensure students weren’t taken for a ride, or weren’t borrowing more than they needed to. Between 2005 and 2007, the percentage of loans to students made without any school involvement grew from 40 percent to over 70 percent.”

It’s not hard to see the allure of SLABS. Student loans seem to be an endless stream of revenue as colleges and universities continue to increase tuition, economic conditions and employment transience feed the unemployed back into continuing education, and political leaders urge everyone to attend college. The income stream is nearly guaranteed to pay off because the loans are next to impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.

A Huffington Post article by Chris Kirkham states, SLABS offer “seemingly unlimited growth potential at virtually zero risk. The burden of college loan repayment falls entirely on students’ backs, shielding corporations from the consequences of default.”

Indeed, any attempt to write off the massive student debt would not only have to contend with government reluctance to lose such a profitable revenue source, but would also meet deep-pocketed opposition from the financial industry.

But SLABS are only a subset of Wall Street’s continuously expanding man spread in the edu-debt sector.

Selling Schools on CABS And Charters

Much less attention has focused on how government and education institutions are becoming more and more saddled with debt.

According to the website Governing.com, “Many local governments across the U.S. face steep budget deficits as they struggle to pay off debts accumulated over a number of years. As a last resort, some filed for bankruptcy.”

School district bankruptcies are occurring with alarming frequency, USA Today reported last year. “California saw a record number of school districts in fiscal distress in 2012; currently, eight school districts have negative certifications, meaning that based on current projections, the school districts will not meet their financial obligations for fiscal 2014 or 2015. Another 41 school districts may run out of money by fiscal 2016.”

California schools trying to stave off insolvency have increasingly turned to the financial sector for help. Writing at the Web of Debt blog site, Ellen Brown explains how financial brokers have promoted “something called ‘capital appreciation bonds’ (CABs) as a tool. … CABs have now been issued by more than 400 California districts, some with repayment obligations of up to 20 times the principal advanced (or 2,000 percent).”

Adding to the edu-debt burden is the rush to finance charter schools. Recently, theBloomberg news agency reported, “US charter schools are issuing a record amount of Wall Street’s new student loan scheme: Subprime loans are coming to financial aid - Salon.com:

Florida's Charter Schools: Unsupervised — SunSentinel.com

Florida's Charter Schools: Unsupervised — SunSentinel.com:

FLORIDA'S CHARTER SCHOOLS

UNSUPERVISED

Taxpayers, students lose when school operators exploit weak laws

Go to the Website to read Florida's Charter Schools: Unsupervised — SunSentinel.com:

Go to the Website to read Florida's Charter Schools: Unsupervised — SunSentinel.com:

FOLLOW THE MONEY

School districts often lose track of charter school spending.

VIDEO

Former charter school insiders complain about a broken system.

MAP

In the past five years, 56 South Florida charter schools have closed.

APPLICATION

Applicants must outline their plans, but not their financial backgrounds.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions regarding charter schools.

Go to the Website to read Florida's Charter Schools: Unsupervised — SunSentinel.com:

Charter School Operator With Four Fs Gets Cash to Open More | NBC 6 South Florida

Charter School Operator With Four Fs Gets Cash to Open More | NBC 6 South Florida:

Charter School Operator With Four Fs Gets Cash to Open More

 A charter school management company with a history of operating failing or shuttered schools has been approved for two more schools in Panama City, leaving some South Florida parents wondering why millions in public money continue flowing to the company and the schools it manages.

"Unbelievable," said John Wai, who was told two weeks into this school year that a Sunrise school managed by Newpoint Education Partners was shutting down because it could not find suitable permanent classroom space. That despite what his wife Mariya said were repeated assurances the school would survive. "She assured me everything's going to be ready," Mariya Wai told NBC Investigators.

• INVESTIGATIVETransport Firm in $400K Dispute With Dade Amid Lawsuits, Complaints

Instead, the school managed by Newpoint, Magnolia Academy for the Arts, and a sister school, Magnolia Middle, sent letters on September 1 informing parents of the shutdown, and instructing them to contact Broward public schools to enroll their children in other schools the next day.

Of 10 charter schools Newpoint Education Partners manages in Florida that have been graded by the state, four have F grades, meaning they are failing academically, according to the state. Another has a D grade, four have Cs and one, in Pensacola, has an A, according to state Department of Education records.

• INVESTIGATIVECentral Station Mistake Costing Taxpayers Millions

And those grades do not include schools that closed.

“I don’t know how they can continue to get funding for opening up charter schools across the state,” said John Wai.

• INVESTIGATIVEMiracle Skin Cream Fuels Hundreds of Complaints

“I’m absolutely in shock,” Mariya Wai said after NBC 6 informed her another Newpoint-managed school, in Tampa, shut down in 2013 after the superintendent there – citing concerns over low enrollment and financial stability -- recommended its charter not be renewed. “That means we are not the only family that went through this experience.”

But, in this corner of Florida’s Panhandle, the Bay County school board accepted its superintendent’s recommendation to approve two more Newpoint-managed charter schools, which project more than 600 students next year. Once approved by a district or the state, charter schools are funded with public money, but governed by private charter school boards.

While the Broward school district informed the state last September of the Newpoint-connected closings in South Florida, the state does not alert other districts about such failures. The locals would have to do their own homework to discover that.

Three weeks after the state was told of the closings in Sunrise, Bay County’s board voted to accept the Newpoint-managed schools there.

Board chairman Steve Moss told NBC 6, “As one board member, I did not know that a school failed in Broward County previously.”

But when NBC 6 Investigators tried to ask Bay County schools superintendent Bill Husfelt what he knew about Newpoint’s previous problem before recommending approval for two more of its charters, he said, “I’m not doing an interview,” then held two microphones and stood before local television cameras to answer others’ questions.

After the district stationed an armed deputy between our NBC 6 camera and the superintendent, Husfelt patted the deputy on the back and asked that he tell NBC 6 he would talk without the camera.

But when NBC 6 Investigators called him this week for a telephone interview, his spokesperson denied that request, as well.

NBC 6 also tried to ask Newpoint founder Marcus May about his company’s performance. But when he answered the door of his home in Sarasota, he almost immediately shut it without commenting.

Some local superintendents complain they cannot deny charters based on their management companies’ past performance, but the state DOE says it can be a factor.

“Charter school operators or applicants that have a poor track record of either academic or financial performance shouldn’t be approved to open up new schools until they’re able to demonstrate that they have the capacity to run a high quality Charter School Operator With Four Fs Gets Cash to Open More | NBC 6 South Florida: