Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé

I have been blogging regularly about the impact of market-based education reform upon American education for seven years. I began this blog on January 25, 2013, following numerous months of responding in the comments sections of news articles often promoting the glories of test-based grading of schools and teachers and of fashioning the traditional, community school as enemy and publicly-funded private school vouchers and privately-operated charter schools as savior.

In early 2012, I learned that the governor I helped re-elect, Bobby Jindal, had decided that Louisiana teachers were the enemy; that he had both the 2012 Louisiana legislature and the 2012 state ed board in his pocket to push test-centric ed reform onto Louisiana’s K12 classrooms, and that local news outlets refused to publish articles challenging Jindal’s war on Louisiana public education.

And so, in addition to teaching full time, I began researching and writing about the corporate-ed-reform assault on…

I’ve often thought, over these past eight years of following the politics of education, that one day this saga will make a great book. What I didn’t expect was that that one day would be today.

In ‘Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools’ (Knopf 2020, $27.95), education historian Diane Ravitch does the thing that she is best in the country at — taking a complex period of history in education and finding a way to turn it into a story with twists and turns worthy of great literature.

This book is like a sequel not to ‘Reign Of Error’ (2013) or even ‘The Death And Life Of The Great American School System’ (2010), but instead to the first book I had ever read by her, ‘Left Back: A Century Of Failed School Reforms’ (2000). In that book, as she does in…

Two of the best education bloggers in the nation weighed in on the nature and purpose of the new “National Parents Union,” which proudly announced that it would give parents’ “voice” in opposition to the teachers’ unions.

Peter Greene asks, “Do You Smell Astroturf?” 

He provides a detailed history of the well-established “ed reform” credentials of its founders, as well as a scathing letter by a parent who previously founded the New York City Parents Union, and found that she was pushed aside by the Walton-funded newcomers. He notes: I have heard the argument over and over and over again that philanthropist money and Walton and Gates and Broad and Jobs money is necessary to counterbalance the vast financial resources of the unions, but the union is a bb gun in a field of howitzers.

And quite by coincidence, Steven Singer wrote about the “National Parent Union” and issued an…

In this post, Jan Resseger reviews my new book SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

Jan is an expert on the damage imposed by so-called “reformers.” Several years ago, when I was in Cleveland, she took me on a tour of devastated neighborhoods. Ohio legislators and local leaders responded to growing poverty by creating charters and vouchers and tearing down empty houses. The city center was filled with empty stores and neighborhoods had gaping holes where houses once stood. According to federal data, the enrollment in Cleveland public schools is 100% poor. Talk about a mismatch between problems and “solutions!”

Resseger begins:

In her new book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, Diane Ravitch summarizes, defines, and humanizes the widespread attack that has threatened public education across the United States in…

Why do the Disrupters continue to insist that charter schools will “save poor kids from failing schools,” when the evidence continues to accumulate that this is simply not true.

According to the latest state data for Indiana, the graduation rate is about 87%, with variations among different groups of students.

For charter schools, the graduation rate is 40%. 

Indiana’s high school graduation rate dipped slightly in 2019, with the rate of students needing waivers from the state to earn a diploma, noticeably higher than previous years. 

The state graduation rate has hovered around 87 percent since 2016, but a higher rate of students needed a waiver to get a diploma in 2019 – students get one if they don’t pass their final state exams..

Schools graduated black, English Language Learner (ELL) and special education students at the lowest rates among student groups, at 78, 77 and 71 percent, respectively.

State…

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about Superintendent Joe Roy, a champion for students and public schools. I add him now to the honor roll of the blog.

The Network for Public Education has issued two reports documenting waste, fraud, and lack of oversight in the federal Charter Schools Program. The CSP was created by the Clinton administration in 1994 at a time when there were few charters; it was intended to give aid to start-ups. Over the years it has evolved into a slush fund for rapacious corporate charter chains and for the advocacy groups that lobby for more charter funding.

In response to the NPE reports, the charter industry attacked them as cherry-picking, inaccurate, and union-funded, none of which is true.

Recently Betsy DeVos attacked NPE and its critique of the $440 million CSP program that is in her sole control.

NPE executive director Carol Burris responded to the critics by using the data offered by DeVos herself. DeVos’s numbers demonstrate that the NPE reports underestimated the number of charter schools that never opened (“ghost schools”)…

There are many ways in which nonprofit charters make a profit. Most involve complex real estate transactions and such things as “triple net leases” which are hard for the public to understand. Such deals often involve a charter operator owning or leasing the real estate and renting it to the charter school at exorbitant rates, with the public footing the bill.

Michael Kohlhaas has discovered another ingenious way that allegedly nonprofit charter operators extract money from their operations. 

He describes the case of a charter operator in Los Angeles who sold his “receivables” soon after getting his charter.

Kohlhaas writes:

The idea is very simple. A charter school has guaranteed future income in the form of payments from the state. They sell those payments to a finance company at a discount.

The finance company also charges a transaction fee. So for instance, if a charter has enrollment worth $1,000,000 they…

Last spring, the Network for Public Education published a report on waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program. The report, called Asleep At the Wheel, documented the Department of Education’s failure to monitor the veracity or feasibility of applications for the program or to follow up on what happened to the money spent to launch new charter schools. It found that nearly $1 billion of federal dollars had been wasted on charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening.

Today, NPE released a new report that delves into what happened with federal money from the Charter Schools Program in the states. The findings were even more concerning than last spring’s report.
The new report is called Still Asleep At the Wheel.

An excerpt:

This report, Still Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in a Pileup of Fraud and…

Valerie Strauss reviews “Still Asleep at the Wheel” here.

She begins:

“More than 35 percent of charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars, according to a new report from an advocacy group that reviewed records of nearly 5,000 schools.

“The state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

“The report, titled “Still Asleep at the Wheel,” said that 537 “ghost schools” never opened but received a total of more than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding. That was more than 11 percent of all the schools that received funding from CSP, which began giving grants in 1995.

”In Michigan, where the billionaire DeVos has been instrumental over several decades in creating a charter school sector, 72 charters that received…