Friday, August 28, 2015

Holding Charter Schools Accountable | Center for Popular Democracy

Holding Charter Schools Accountable | Center for Popular Democracy:

HOLDING CHARTER SCHOOLS ACCOUNTABLE

As the charter sector grows far faster than originally envisioned, the risks are high and growing, while the benefits are less clear.






Why Are Charters Exempt from Meaningful Oversight?
Charter enrollment has doubled three times since 2000. Today, there are an estimated 6,400 charter schools in the U.S. enrolling over 2.5 million students.[i] While charter schools were originally envisioned as small-scale, innovation incubators that encouraged risk-taking—and were therefore exempted from the majority of regulations governing the traditional public school system—the explosive growth of the industry has left the risks high and the benefits unclear.
Only minimal attention is paid to the question of management in charter schools, often leading to fraud and abuse. CPD exposed over $100 million public tax funds stolen in the charter school industry in our report, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.” The price of having inadequate charter regulations is too high, as charter mismanagement not only wastes millions of public tax payer dollars but also puts children in actual or potential danger. Without sufficient regulations to ensure true public accountability, incompetent or unethical individuals can inflict great harm on our communities.
The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) is working hand-in-hand with nearly 40 national and local partners to increase the level of charter school accountability. At the national level, CPD is working with a coalition including American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Opportunity to Learn Campaign (OTL) that comprise AROS – the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools. Together with AROS members, CPD is researching and sharing the effects of a lack of charter oversight for children and communities. CPD is also working to push for charter accountability legislation that will hold charter schools to the same standards of accountability as public schools.

[i] Source: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools 2014 Report, Estimated Number of Public Charter Schools & Students, 2013-2014.www.publiccharters.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/New-and-Closed-Report-February-20141.pdf

Nearly 2,500 Bridges to Nowhere: Congress Considers Expanding Charter Program Despite Millions Wasted on Closed Schools

PR Watch
As both the House and the Senate consider separate bills that would reauthorize and expand the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year Charter Schools Program (CSP), the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has examined more than a decade of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as well as documentation from open records requests. The results are troubling.

Albany Must Keep the Charter Cap

Earlier this year, the New York City Council passed my resolution urging the state legislature to keep the cap on charter schools. That was nothing new: Council Members have long showed their opposition to raising the cap. But, with recent efforts by powerful special interests, including more than $13 million spent in lobbying and campaign ads, we need to remind New York why raising the cap is not only unnecessary, but also harmful to our public school children.

System Failure: Louisiana's Broken Charter School Law

In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina, post-storm changes to the state’s charter school law have dramatically grown the number of charter schools in the state. Since 2005, charter school enrollment in the state has grown 1,188 percent. Through this growth, the Louisiana Department of Education’s Recovery School District—created to facilitate state takeover of struggling schools—has become the first charter-only school district in the country, with other states lining up to copy its model. Louisiana taxpayers have invested heavily, paying billions of dollars to charters and state takeover schools since the storm, including over $831 million in the 2014/2015 school year alone.

Report: Millions of Dollars in Fraud, Waste Found in Charter School Sector

The Washington Post - April 28, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - A new report released on Tuesday details fraud and waste totaling more than $200 million of uncovered fraud and waste of taxpayer funds in the charter school sector, but says the total is impossible to know because there is not sufficient oversight over these schools. It calls on Congress to include safeguards in legislation being considered to succeed the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Time for a Moratorium on Charter Schools

Al Jazeera America - April 14, 2015, by Amy Dean - Charter schools are everywhere. Not long ago, these publicly funded but privately run institutions were a relative rarity. Those that existed served mostly as experimental academies whose successful lessons could be applied elsewhere in their host school districts. But in the last 15 years, swaths of the U.S. public education system have been turned over to charters. In fact, they are being used as a means to crush teachers’ unions and to pursue high-stakes testing.
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Art Show Captures the Wrenching Effects of Closing a School - The New York Times

Art Show Captures the Wrenching Effects of Closing a School - The New York Times:

Art Show Captures the Wrenching Effects of Closing a School




The show “reForm” commemorates the Fairhill School in North Philadelphia and represents the pain of losing 31 schools. Credit Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times


PHILADELPHIA — A school may be made of bricks and mortar, but when one closes, the loss can feel like a death in the family.

So, when Philadelphia started to close 31 public schools three years ago, there was an outpouring of protests, grief and tears — emotions captured in “reForm,” a show that opened on Friday and focuses on one shuttered school and its neighborhood.

The exhibition, in a converted basement space at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in North Philadelphia, is a model of a classroom at Fairhill, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school a mile away that closed at the end of the academic year in 2013.

The space is filled with familiar equipment like lockers, books and desks — 80 percent of which comes from the school itself — but also includes written and oral testimony about the closure and its wrenching effect on students.

In a corridor, a row of cubbies from Fairhill has backpacks, jackets and coat hooks, and a glass case houses a stuffed bobcat, the school’s mascot, standing on a pile of opened books.




Kiara Villegas, 15, a former Fairhill student who participated in the project.Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times


Inside the classroom, a blackboard is covered by the text of a letter sent by Dr. William R. Hite, the school district’s superintendent, to Fairhill’s principal, Darlene Lomax, informing her of the decision to close the school.

“Our circumstances require us to reduce the unused space in our schools so that we can better use resources on providing students with a safe environment and a higher-quality learning environment,” says the letter, written on the board in what looks like a chalk script.

The room also contains a teacher’s lectern, affixed with part of a “property available” sign. This recalls the actual placard on the shuttered building, with which the school district hopes to attract buyers.

Among the most eloquent components are essays by nine Fairhill students Art Show Captures the Wrenching Effects of Closing a School - The New York Times:


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In a bankrupt Pa. school district, teachers plan to work for free - The Washington Post

In a bankrupt Pa. school district, teachers plan to work for free - The Washington Post:

In a bankrupt Pa. school district, teachers plan to work for free






Employees of the Chester Upland School District in Pennsylvania will show up for work on the first day of school next Wednesday, but they don’t expect to get paid.
The district, which has been struggling with financial and academic problems for decades, is on the edge of insolvency and cannot make payroll, state and local officials have said.
So on Thursday, about 200 members of the local teachers union voted unanimously to work without pay as the new school year opens. They were joined by secretaries, school bus drivers, janitors and administrators.
“The thought of it is very scary,” said John Shelton, 60, dean of students at the district’s only middle school and a 23-year employee. “It’s mind-boggling because there’s truly uncertainty. But we are all in agreement that we will come to work, so that the children can get an education.”
Shelton, who will be able to count on some income from his moonlighting job as a janitor, said he and his colleagues are willing to sacrifice because the students rely on the schools. “Some of our children, this is all they have as far as safety, their next nourishing meal, people who are concerned for them,” he said. “We are dedicated to these children.”
The district is about 20 miles west of Philadelphia and serves roughly 3,300 students, most them low-income.
A similar financial collapse occurred in the district in 2012, and the teachers also agreed to work without pay then. In the end, a federal judge ordered the state to pay the district, and lawmakers arranged a bailout, so that employees’ paychecks were just a couple of days late.
[Pennsylvania school district on verge of collapse (and using free labor to stay open)]
Chester Upland’s current fiscal crisis, however, is more serious, said Jeff In a bankrupt Pa. school district, teachers plan to work for free - The Washington Post:
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Buyer’s remorse. NEA and edTPA. | Fred Klonsky

Buyer’s remorse. NEA and edTPA. | Fred Klonsky:

Buyer’s remorse. NEA and edTPA





In our continuing discussion of the expansion of edTPA as a licensure process for teachers entering the profession, I reprinted the original supporting position of the National Education Association.
The American Federation of Teachers position of opposition was also posted on this site.
I then was blasted by a series of twittering academics for every imaginable sin. Since I don’t have a PhD after my name and thousands read this blog, my views on this topic are suspect.
For some in the academic world it is always better to publish in journals read by dozens than on blogs read by thousands.
That is why I had to laugh when I read this summer’s review of edTPA published by the very same NEA in its research journal, Thought and Action.
Its circulation is limited, so it should have some credibility.
It’s authors are Deborah Greenblatt, a Ph.D. candidate in urban education at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York with a concentration in educational policy and leadership and Kate E. O’Hara, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Education at New York Institute of Technology.
Neither are bloggers to my knowledge.
As states across the country continue their implementation of the edTPA, a complex and high-stakes certification requirement for teacher certification, there are important lessons for educators and education advocates to learn from New York State’s implementation. As Linda Darling-Hammond, developer and promoter of the edTPA, cautioned at the 2014 American Educational Research Association 
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10 Years After Katrina, New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Has Proven a Failure - In These Times

10 Years After Katrina, New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Has Proven a Failure - In These Times:

10 Years After Katrina, New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Has Proven a Failure
Test scores tell one story, and residents tell another. A three-month investigation by In These Times reveals the cracks in the education reform narrative.


On Sept. 24, 2005, in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, a school bus is submerged in post-Katrina flooding. Half of the city's public school infrastructure was damaged beyond repair. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)


Ninth grade was nothing like what Darrius Jones expected. Jones, 14, imagined that with high school would come more independence. Instead, he felt like he was being treated like a kid. “You had to sit a certain way,” he recalls. “You couldn’t lean, or have your chair back.” Jones says he stepped out of line once—an actual line on the floor of the hallway, which students were supposed to follow—and was sent to detention.
It was the beginning of the 2012 school year, and Jones was in the first class of students at Carver Collegiate Academy, a brand-new charter school in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. Like a public school, it is funded by taxpayers and open to anyone. But as a charter, it is managed independently by a board of directors that can do its own hiring and firing, write its own policies and teach according to its own philosophy. In the case of Carver Collegiate, that philosophy is one of “no excuses”—strict rules and swift discipline.
Carver is part of New Orleans’ Recovery School District (RSD), the first all-charter school district in the nation. In the chaos after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana opted to completely overhaul the city’s failing public schools by putting them on the open market. Ten years later, cities and states around the country have embarked on their own charter-school experiments and are watching New Orleans closely, laser-focused on outcomes.
Test scores have improved, according to two major reports that examine academic achievement over the past nine years. On Katrina’s 10th anniversary, RSD is being held up as a national model. The graduation rate has risen from 56 percent to 73 percent. Last year, 63 percent of students in grades 3-8 scored basic or above on state standardized tests, up from 33 percent. 
But by other measures, the RSD suffers. In These Times received an advance copy of research conducted for the Network for Public Education (NPE) by University of Arizona researchers Francesca Lรณpez and Amy Olson. The study compared charters in Louisiana, the majority of which are in New Orleans, to Louisiana public schools, controlling for factors like race, ethnicity, poverty and whether students qualified for special education. On eighth-grade reading and math tests, charter-school students performed worse than their public-school counterparts by enormous margins—2 to 3 standard deviations. 
The researchers found that the gap between charter and public school performance in Louisiana was the largest of any state in the country. And Louisiana’s overall scores were the fourth-lowest in the nation.
“You can say until you’re blue in the face that this should be a national model, but this is one of the worst-performing districts in one of the worst-performing states,” says NPE board member Julian Vasquez Heilig, an education professor at California 10 Years After Katrina, New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Has Proven a Failure - In These Times:
Karran Harper Royal was pleased to be invited to join a citizens’ committee in 2006 to plan for the future of New Orleans schools. But she soon became disillusioned, convinced that the state didn’t really want citizen input—it already had a plan and was simply seeking approval.
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Katrina’s ‘Golden Opportunity’: 10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster — FAIR

Katrina’s ‘Golden Opportunity’: 10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster — FAIR:

Katrina’s ‘Golden Opportunity’: 10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster

Arne Duncan, Katherine McQueary, David Brooks, Milton Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, the Koch brothers
Finding the upside of Katrina are clockwise from top left: Arne Duncan, Katherine McQueary, David Brooks, Milton Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell, and Charles and David Koch


Americans love, above all, a narrative. Preferably a moral one, marked by a clear good and evil. For many so-called “school reformers,” the tragedy of Katrina, which marks its ten-year anniversary today, provided that narrative. Its stark before-and-after provided a clear A/B test as to the righteousness of their cause. Before was a “broken school system,” and after is a glossy, privatized education system.
We’ll set aside the fact that this is largely a fantasy. Torture the data enough, and the “New Orleans miracle” can be teased out if one wants it enough. Despite studies and reporting showing otherwise, for the sake of this piece it doesn’t actually matter if radical post-Katrina New Orleans school reform was a “success,” a failure or somewhere in between. What is important is that so many corporatists think this “miracle” was not just an incidental positive but was, all things considered, worth it. Worth the 1,800 people killed and the 100,000 African-Americans permanently ejected from the city.
The most popular examination of this pathology is, of course, from Naomi Klein, who coined the idea of the ”shock doctrine” in her 2007 book of the same name. In it, she explores how Katrina and other manmade and non-manmade disasters are exploited to rush through a radical right wing corporate agenda.
Those who find this a useful model are accused by critics like Malcolm Gladwell of “cynicism”; tragedies happen, they say, and we would be stupid not to exploit them. Here’s a list of those who championed this mode, both immediately after the storm and since. One can decide for themselves if this ideology-mongering was exploitation or good-faith public servants simply responding to crisis:Katrina’s ‘Golden Opportunity’: 10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster — FAIR:

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Louisiana Educator: Another Example of John White Withholding Vital Data: No Common Core Test Results Available for a Long Time

Louisiana Educator: Another Example of John White Withholding Vital Data: No Common Core Test Results Available for a Long Time:

Another Example of John White Withholding Vital Data: No Common Core Test Results Available for a Long Time






This relates to data needed by the members of the Curriculum Standards Review Committee to enable them to properly do their job of revising curriculum standards as mandated by the Legislature.


At the first meeting of the Curriculum Standards Review committee, several members of the committee proposed my suggestion that the committee receive an item analysis of the PARCC-like tests given this Spring. This was the first time that Common Core standards were tested on all of our 3 through 8th grade students. This item analysis would have been vital to help identify problem areas in the standards. No other comparable measure of the appropriateness of the standards for Louisiana students exists. The Chairperson of the committee, Dr Sanford, agreed to request both an item analysis and the raw cut scores for each such test.

The following is the response she got from the Louisiana Department of Education:

Dr Sanford states:
"I requested the results of the Spring accountability testing to be shared with the committee.  This is the official response which I have been given."

"As has been communicated in previous communications<http://www.louisianabelieves.com/resources/classroom-support-toolbox/district-support-toolbox/district-planning>, the department is not able to release PARCC results until late fall/early winter. At this time PARCC has not released any data to states for release. A series of PARCC states have released data but they are not PARCC results. Those states (Massachusetts and New York) required students to take both the PARCC test and their state assessments. The results they have released are their local state assessment results. All PARCC states will have access to results at the same time and will release at that time. For a reminder of all release dates and resources for last year's current results and this year's assessment resources please review previous LDE communications<http://www.louisianabelieves.com/resources/classroom-support-toolbox/district-support-toolbox/district-planning>." 

Dr Sanford goes on to state the following:Louisiana Educator: Another Example of John White Withholding Vital Data: No Common Core Test Results Available for a Long Time:
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Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Revised AP curriculum is racist to the core

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Revised AP curriculum is racist to the core:

Revised AP curriculum is racist to the core




According to the revisions, "there was a debate among European leaders about how non-Europeans should be treated." Wow! What an interesting debate. I wonder who won?


I just finished reading the "revised" AP U.S. History framework which is supposed to offer top high school students a more "evenhanded" understanding of our nation's past. But the revisions amount to little more than a cover-up and an excuse for slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, colonialism and the white supremacist ideology that justified it.

It seems that the powerful College Board has become little more than a propaganda machine for right-wing pols and academics. One can only imagine what the "right" answers are on the AP U.S. History exam. I feel sorry for the teachers that are forced to teach this crap.

Here are two examples of the latest revisions from Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Revised AP curriculum is racist to the core:
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NYC Public School Parents: Ghosts of NYC past return to haunt the news: the Rise and Fall of Amplify

NYC Public School Parents: Ghosts of NYC past return to haunt the news: the Rise and Fall of Amplify:

Ghosts of NYC past return to haunt the news: the Rise and Fall of Amplify



Many ghosts from Tweed and NYC’s education past have re-appeared in the news the past few weeks, some of them popping up in unusual places. 

Former Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who succeeded Joel Klein and Cathy Black, was recently appointed the state monitor of E. Ramapo school board.  This board is controlled by Orthodox Jews who do not send their kids to the public schools and have been accused of raiding public funds to support their religious schools.

Our former Deputy Superintendent, Chris Cerf, who left DOE in 2010 to become State Education Commissioner of NJ, followed by a brief detour at Joel Klein’s Amplify, was appointed the Superintendent of Newark public schools, replacing another former DOE educrat, Cami Anderson. 
While Walcott has little power and Cerf has quite a lot, they both will presumably take orders from the autocrats who appointed them – in the case of Walcott, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, and in the case of Cerf, Gov. Christie.  

Walcott has to decide whether to recommend that members of E. Ramapo’s elected school board be removed for diverting public funds to private schools.  Cerf has to decide whether to give power back to Newark’s elected school board, which has been impotent for twenty years (!!) while watching state appointees run their schools.   

After a public meeting where Walcott was introduced to angry E. Ramapo public school parents, whose pleas to rescue their schools have been mostly ignored by the state, he noted that he is suited to the job, as “I have a lot of experience being yelled at.”  This is surely true given the NYC Public School Parents: Ghosts of NYC past return to haunt the news: the Rise and Fall of Amplify:


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Principal known as Emanuel critic reprimanded by mayor's school board - Chicago Tribune

Principal known as Emanuel critic reprimanded by mayor's school board - Chicago Tribune:

Principal known as Emanuel critic reprimanded by mayor's school board



Troy LaRaviere

Blaine Elementary School Principal Troy LaRaviere, who this week excoriated Chicago Public Schools during a panel discussion on the district’s finances, was the target of a “warning resolution” that board members quietly approved Aug. 26, 2015. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)


A Lakeview school principal who's a frequent critic of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's education policies has been formally reprimanded by the Chicago Board of Education — a move that could eventually lead to his dismissal.

Blaine Elementary School Principal Troy LaRaviere, who this week excoriated Chicago Public Schools during a panel discussion on the district's finances, was the target of a "warning resolution" that board members quietly approved Wednesday.

Reached Thursday, LaRaviere said the school board action was partly linked to his opposition to a controversial standardized test launched last spring. The board's public rebuke came months after LaRaviere served as an education adviser and outspoken supporter of Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, who challenged Emanuel for mayor.



LaRaviere said the sanction was the result of "someone putting pressure on somebody to make an example of the principal that was at the school that seemed to be most effective at getting kids to opt out."

The warning resolution posted on the board's website Thursday doesn't detail what spurred the action, instead offering boilerplate language the district uses in these types of cases.

The document stated that LaRaviere "has engaged in unsatisfactory conduct" and that "dismissal charges" could follow "if said conduct is not corrected immediately, and maintained thereafter in a satisfactory fashion following receipt of the warning resolution."



CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey said the district does not comment on personnel issues. Such warning resolutions are regularly approved by the board for a variety of infractions. On Wednesday, two other employees received them.Principal known as Emanuel critic reprimanded by mayor's school board - Chicago Tribune:




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