A new report reveals massive waste, fraud, and corruption in the charter industry, where private corporations control public funds with minimal oversight or accountability.
A new report released today reveals that fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.
“Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud And Abuse,” authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, echoes a warning from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General. The report draws upon news reports, criminal complaints and more to detail how, in just 15 of the 42 states that have charter schools, charter operators have used school funds illegally to buy personal luxuries for themselves, support their other businesses, and more.
The report also includes recommendations for policymakers on how…
Over on Mercedes Schneider’s Blog, she tackles and criticizes Bill Gates view of the Common Core State Standards.
“Bill defines standards as a ‘list of what kids are supposed to know’ at each grade level.”
But Mercedes, Bill Gates is correct in his thinking—for computer programs stored on hard drives—not children. After all, in his Microsoft world where he’s the Emperor, if he pays programmers to write a computer program, the finished product better work or else, right? And the Emperor did pay more than $2 billion to create the Common Core standards and convince the states to accept them.
Bill Gates must honestly think that teachers are incompetent when the same process doesn’t work between teachers (the Emperor must see teachers as programmers) and children (as programmed computer hard drives) who don’t know the standards on the Common Core curriculum program that Gates paid for.
I wonder if Emperor Gates knows that a child’s brain doesn’t work like a computer program on a hard drive, because children don’t all live in the same environment with equal and supportive parents. In fact, teachers don’t teach the same way and every child’s DNA is different along with how they learn.
For the Gates’ list of Common Core Standards to work, every child would have to grow up in a similar common environment with parents who love reading, start reading to and with their child by at least age three and support teachers every step of the way from pre-school to graduation; from high school and beyond. Every child would also have to have an equally efficient short and long term memory (the same hard drive),and there could not be any learning disabilities to get in the way. This common environment would also include the same nutritious, brain food diet for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with no sugary sodas—only safe-to-drink water.
No parent could be abusive in any way—a drug addict, an alcoholic, a chronic gambler, illiterate and every family would have to earn a livable wage—meaning no poverty.
In addition, every parent would have to attend parent conferences with their children’s teachers and keep an eye on grades so if any grade fell below a C, the parent would call the same day and schedule an appointment with the teacher to find out why it happened and what they could do to fix the problem since failing grades are usually caused by children who—for instance—don’t pay attention, hate to read, don’t work in class, have lousy diets, don’t get enough sleep, watch too much TV, play too many video games, don’t cooperate, cause disruptions in class, don’t ask questions or seldom if ever read outside of class or do homework.
Learn from a 15-Year-Old how dangerous Emperor Bill Gates really is!
Emperor Gates, unlike a computer programmer, the greatest teacher can’t update a child’s memory with a patch to make sure the child learns your list of Common Core standards—that is if the child learned and remembered what the teacher taught in the first place.
For the Gates’ “Common Core list” to work, every child would have to arrive at school equally eager and willing to learn what teachers teach, and every parent would have to consider Amy Chua, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” as a role model and not an abusive, tiger parent—and that ain’t going to happen in the United States.
I have a question for Emperor Gates:
Since when did the electorate agree that you should use your great wealth to decide how this country should educate the 49 million+ children who attend public schools while ignoring the 7.4+ million who attend private schools?
I want to ask President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan the same question. I thought the Constitution—the law of the land—written by the Founding Fathers of the United States made this sort of thing a crime.
In conclusion: It seems that every week—this has been going on for years—a new update arrives from Microsoft to patch something wrong with Microsoft’s operating system. Considering these constant flaws that keep appearing in programs written by Microsoft programmers, Emperor Bill Gates should be the last person to advise the Obama White House how fix the unbroken public schools that really only need him and the other fake education reformers to butt out. The best people to patch anything in the public schools are teachers supported by everyone else, because that’s they were trained for, and that’s what Finland does.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Prologue: What if, following the end of slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, formerly enslaved black and brown people created an amazing resurgence of economic, educational and political successes? (They did). Would the elite in power squelch that budding success with New Jim Crow laws? And, what if to counter the gross systemic and violent inequities created by Jim Crow, decades later people fought back and demanded Civil Rights bills which included non- discriminatory hiring practices and desegregation in public spaces including public schools? What if those new Civil Rights policies led to a rising black and brown middle class, and opportunities for success? What if, decades later, there were a powerful elite who wished to re-segregate society and roll back the clock to a time of profound inequality that served to the advantage of a privileged few? How would the elite in power find ways around those Civil Rights anti-discriminatory…
This week marks the beginning of testing week in Tennessee. All week long students will be taking the annual TCAP assessments. These tests will establish their worth, their teacher’s worth, their school’s worth, their state’s worth, their countrie’s worth, and… well you get the picture. These tests are so important that people feel the need to create pep rallies, special festivals and even video’s to relieve some of the pressure. Initially I saw the one above on the Tennessee Department of Education web site but before writing this post I perused YouTube and probably found 100 more.
That’s over a hundred video’s dedicated to celebrating a test. Yes, I said test, not a school, not books, not learning in general. They celebrate a test. Think of all the resources that went into producing those pieces that could have been applied to actual learning, not to mention the creativity wasted. Some of them are…
It’s easy to manipulate facts. The fake Ed reforms do it all the time to make the public schools look bad, and even some public schools cherry pick facts to look good. Technically what both sides share with the public are not lies, but they don’t paint a holistic and/or honest picture either.
For instance, I checked several on-line accountability school report cards for the high school (I will not provide the links or name of that school here) where I taught for the last 16 years of the thirty I was a classroom teacher (1975 – 2005).
For instance, that high school reported that the 2012 graduation rate was more than 89% for the 449 (from a class of 502) seniors who graduated on time that year. That’s way above the national average of 78.2% for 2010 (the highest national average on-time graduation rate in U.S. history), and the reported average for California that was even better that year at 78.5% (reported by the L. A. Times).
Why do so many Americans earn their high school diploma between the age of 18 and 25?
The high school’s accountability report card that’s posted on-line shows for 2011-12 that there were:
545 students in 9th grade
631in 10th
581 in 11th (This is the year most students turn 16 and by law they may drop out of school—did you notice the 8% drop from 10th grade and an additional 14% drop by the end of 12th grade)
502 in 12th grade.
But nowhere is there any information about how large the 2012 graduating class was four years earlier in 9th grade. To discover that, I had to find the on-line accountability report card for 2008-09, and I did. When you know a school’s name, Google is great—most of the time.
During the 2008-09 school year, there were 659 students in 9th grade, but four years later only 502 were still there. Where did the other 157 go? Did they move, drop dead, drop out, transfer to other schools? Why isn’t there an explanation? 659 students started as 9th graders in the class of 2012 but only 449 graduated—that’s an almost 32% drop.
It probably would have been more realistic to say: The on-time graduation rate for 2012 was 68.2% when taking into account the number of students who started in 9th grade four years earlier. Then there should be an explanation of what happened to the other 210 kids, but that might not look good for the school district. Instead, administrators at the district level probably went through the figures—with legal advice to make sure they weren’t breaking any laws—and cherry picked facts that end up looking better than the holistic story.
And of course the fake Ed reformers never mention how many adults in the U.S. have earned a high school degree or its equivalent by age 25. For 2013, that number was 88.15%.
The reality is that everyone doesn’t learn at the same speed; doesn’t mature at the same pace, and better late is better than never.
Instead, the fake Ed reformers that include President Obama and the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have mandated through Race to the Top legislation that every child must be college ready by age 17/18 and if they aren’t those schools and their teachers will be crucified in the media and labeled as failures in a world where no country has ever achieved that goal in recorded history.
But how can anyone place blame for those 157 kids who vanished, because you can’t teach a kid who isn’t there and you can’t stop them from leaving if they want to go?
There’s also another fact that the fake Ed reformers don’t report holistically. You will hear them shouting that the US has a high school dropout epidemic but nowhere will they say that in 1970, the high school dropout rate was 14.6%, but by 2011 it had fallen to 7% according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Recent on-time graduation rates by race (did you know that the on-time high school graduation rate in the U.S. in 1900 was 6.4% and by 1950, it was 59%):
Asian: 93.5% (by age 25 to 29 that number reaches 96%)
White: 83% (95%)
Black: 66.1% (89%)
Hispanic: 71.4% (75%)
Does that look like an epidemic?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
It will take only a few minutes to read this post and less than an hour to watch the five videos. The question is: If you’re an American, are you willing to give up that much time to learn about the threats against your democracy and the loss of the freedoms you take for granted? In fact, you don’t have to give up an entire hour in one sitting. You could read the Blog post and watch the first video, and then return to watch the second, etc., spread over several days.
“A new report shows that top CEOs were paid 331 times more than the average US worker in 2013. At the same time, the poorest fifth of Americans paid an average tax rate of 11 percent while the richest one percent contributed half that rate at state and local levels. In this essay, Bill reflects on the forces…
In May 2009
, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and former State Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This CCSS MOU would become “Appendix B” for the US Department of Education’s (USDOE’s) Race to the Top (RTTT) program.
In June 2009, the National Governors Association (NGA), in conjunction with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, announced that 46 states were already signed on for what would become CCSS.
The formal document, the CCSS MOU, outlines in detail the different groups of individuals and what their roles would be in “developing” CCSS.
The document signed by Jindal and Pastorek in May 2009– the CCSS MOU that would become RTTT Appendix B– is the same document I wrote about in this post.
The CCSS MOU makes it clear that the chief decision makers for CCSS were the individuals on the…
Watch the trailer for the longer documentary that sets the record straight. Then if you want to learn more, please watch the full length version (scroll down to find it).
SECOND:
Then there’s “Fact-checking Waiting for Superman” that appeared at the Huffington Post.
Fact-checking Waiting for ‘Superman’: Documentary or Urban Myth?
“We simply cannot trust the corporate oligarchy currently making policies for our schools to create a fair evaluation system, including those who backed Waiting for ‘Superman‘, given their proclivity to misuse and distort data, as shown by the inaccurate figures cited in the film.”
“Rather than a documentary, perhaps the movie (Waiting for Superman) should be re-categorized, with an appropriate disclaimer, as an urban myth.”
Full length version of “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman”
FOURTH: Recently I had a debate with an individual, an acquaintance, who believed the schools were broken and the only way to fix them was to take away all teacher legal, due process rights so any teacher could be fired without due process. That way, the schools would be able to remove so-called incompetent teachers without the burden of proof.
That’s why I suggest you also read: The Myth of Teacher Tenure published by The Washington Post
“School districts consistently win the vast majority of the court decisions concerning the involuntary cessation of a teacher’s employment based on incompetency. In a comprehensive canvassing of court decisions based on teacher evaluation for competency, I found that the defendant districts prevailed in more than a 3-to-1 ratio, and that there was no significant difference between the outcomes for nontenured as compared to tenured teachers.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
It is a peculiar, dark and unhinged world in which we dwell and it seems to grow more so all the time. Consider the extraordinary case of Vergara v. California, now winding down and awaiting a judgment. Here we have nine students, bankrolled by Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur David Welch, co-founder of Infinera, and founder of the advocate group StudentsMatter, suing the state of California. The suit claims that teacher tenure laws have denied them their civil rights.
Yes, for those who have not been following the case, you read that correctly.
The claim is that tenure laws — which merely insure that a teacher who has already passed through a probationary period of at least three years has the right to a hearing or due process before he or she is fired — are denying the nine students, a multicultural lot who…
Chili went over the public education cliff the United States is headed for and now, decades later, is climbing the cliff with goals to reverse the damage.
The following post was written by Mario Waissbluth, President of Educación 2020 Foundation, a Chilean citizen’s movement founded in 2008. Its latest reform proposals (in Spanish) are called “La Reforma Educativa que Chile Necesita”, and were published in April 2013. A book on this subject (in Spanish) is also available. These proposals were mostly adopted by and included in the educational program of the recently elected government of Michelle Bachelet, and are starting to be implemented now.
Valentina Quiroga (32) was one of the student founders of this organization and is now Undersecretary of Education.
Although Educación 2020 remains as a fully independent movement, the positions stated thereon are in many ways similar to those of the current government.
Chile: Dismantling the most pro-market education system in the world
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 