Doug Livingston of the Beacon-Journal writes that Ohio’s charter schools are notoriously wasteful with taxpayer dollars. And he predicts it will get worse because auditing of charters has been privatized. For some reason, private auditors are far less likely to uncover financial abuses.
“No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.
“A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.
“Since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival .
“And the extent of the misspending could be far higher.
“That’s because Yost and his predecessors, unable to audit all charter…
Back when I was still teaching, one of the history teachers at the high school where I worked took all the data from the most recent California annual standardized tests for our school and compared test gains between veteran teachers who had taught 10 years or more to teachers with less than 10 years of experience in the classroom. He discovered that most of the gains were made by the students of veteran teachers and there was very little or no gains among the teachers with the least experience.
This is one of the most powerful articles I have ever read about the pernicious lies of those who call themselves “reformers.” It should be a cover story in TIME or Newsweek or the front page of the Néw York Times. Someone should send it to Frank Bruni, Nicholas Kristof, David Brooks, the PBS Newshour, and everyone else who opines about education.
Bob Braun slams the editorial board of the Star-Ledger for their consistent, unrelenting defamation of teachers. The editorial board apparently believes that the only good teachers are inexperienced young teachers (think TFA), while any experienced teacher is a slacker who should be fired, “sooner rather than later” (using the infamous phrase quoted in the NY Times by one of the co-authors of the infamous Chetty-Rockoff-Friedman study).
Here are excerpts from Bob Braun’s fiery and brilliant :editorial:
“A recent editorial in The Star-Ledger stated the state administration of…
The corporate reformers like to say that “school choice” is the civil rights issue of our time. This is a view shared by Jeb Bush, the Walton family, Scott Walker, and various other rightwingers whose real goal is to shrink the public sector by privatization and to eliminate unions.
“Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.
“Compared to the private sector, the public sector has offered black and female workers better pay, job stability and more professional and managerial opportunities,” said Jennifer Laird, a sociologist at the University of Washington…
Is Walker competing with Cuomo to see who can be the most destructive governor when it comes to the education of children?
Scott Walker’s Pyrrhic Warfare on Public Education in Wisconsin is a no-win situation—everyone loses except the CEO’s of the corporate Charters that will end up stuffing their bank accounts with the tax payers money when the public schools are gone.
Scott Walker has a plan. It is called “reform,” but in reality it is destruction. He (acting through the legislature) is holding funding for public schools flat (he wanted to cut it); he is increasing funding for charter schools and vouchers; he is imposing draconian budget cuts on the University of Wisconsin system; and he is lowering standards for entry into teaching. One analysis says the voucher expansion proposal would drain $800 million from public schools over a 10-year period.
Tony Evers, the veteran educator who was elected twice as state superintendent of education, says Wisconsin is in a “race to the bottom.”
Wisconsin has decided to reform its teacher licensing standards—by eliminating them! Anyone with any bachlor’s degree can teach any subject, a change inserted into the state budget without hearings.
Even those without a bachelor’s degree are eligible to teach, as Valerie Strauss notes: “That’s not all. The…
On Friday they told us that we were going to be having Common Core tests next week (SBAC or Smarter balanced tests in CA) .
“Make sure to check your room number by the counseling office.”
“Review the practice exam.”
“Get enough sleep.”
But, for what?
What even is this test?
Why is it so important?
Where is all this information going?
Why was I not told by any member of the staff that I could opt out?
There was a letter posted outside the office. It said that anyone could opt out of these tests with parent permission. It said that we as students have a voice. We have rights. That got me curious. I started asking questions. I asked members of my neighborhood their opinions. I asked family, friends, teachers, and searched the internet about these tests. I wanted to share what I learned. I wanted to have a voice, not just be a number from a test.
I heard stories of kids not wanting to go to school because they were so deflated, so stressed and confused. I read about how much time test prep takes. I talked with my friend Suzy who is a 7th grade English and history teacher about how useless some of this data mining seems. “ We have to do 3 [in class essays] every year. I have to grade all of these, put them in the gradebook, give feedback, then input them into a district website to collect data. One extra step for teachers is awful. Why do we do this? What is done with this data? The district has no answer. I calculated that every year, in addition to all other curriculum requirements, we have to score 450 essays per teacher.”
Schools are having precious learning time taken away to administer standardized tests. The Huffington Post states: “Teachers now devote 30 percent of their work time on testing-related tasks, including preparing students, proctoring, and reviewing the results of standardized tests, the National Education Association says.” Not only is time drained, but money is being used to buy computers to administer these tests.
In Suzy’s case, she has to prep students for this one test but won’t necessarily know where the data is going or how it will be used. Last year we took practice tests and some questions were so hard I clicked random answers. I even wrote a poem about how I felt like a robot. I never got my score back. I wonder what would have happened if I wrote “ WHAT IS THE POINT” for an essay question.
Since I don’t see my results, or the specific questions I got wrong, I don’t understand what I could do better or worse on. In addition, we haven’t been provided specific test information, or easy access to reasons why we are taking this test. For example my math teacher told me that our test will be a practice for a later SBAC test. We aren’t even taking the real thing. She told me that the teachers will grade them and it will be good finals prep. I would be taking a practice exam for the test I would take that is actually a test prep for finals? That is a lot of prep.
It’s relatively easy to administer a test then judge students based on their scores. I think part of the problem is that when people fail these tests, their self esteem drops, they think they aren’t good enough, and then they cry when they get home from school. On many occasions I have come from school frustrated and broken out into tears, and I am an honor student in a really privileged area. Imagine what it’s like for our neighbors who don’t have free tutoring and get Ds and think it is all their fault. A test score is such a small part of a person’s intelligence. When these test are being taken, the institutions are saying that the test is what measures how smart a person is, or how good a school is. That is a whole lot of unnecessary pressure.
In addition if these tests are being given to school with low performance ratings and the tests are really difficult, some of these schools may not have the resources to provide test prep or extra help to their students and because they are underfunded, the students, teachers, and schools suffer the consequences.
To an extent, I agree that tests are necessary. People are certified to become nurses and plumbers and teachers by taking a test. But to test on how well a school or student is doing with one test is ridiculous. If you wanted the whole picture then someone could collect my GPA which has my average test scores. You could look at my extra curricular activities, and then asses the school based on multiple variables. But that would probably take too long.
I agree that the new common core method of teaching is pretty rad. I like having explorations in math. It makes me question and have opinions. I like that. I do not like the immense data collection and loads of testing. There is a limit to all of this stress, confusion, and frustration, and that is what we as a community have to figure out and act upon so that education can be fun, and full of wonder like it should be.
Lloyd Lofthouse, the host of this blog, is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
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).
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What Bill Gates is doing with his grants that support corporate education reform in industry wide hostile takeover of the public schools and democracy is no different than the welfare system the United States once had that paid people not to work. Someone should tell Bill Gates that welfare reform under President Clinton ended the cradle to grave welfare industry for individuals even though welfare reform never ended a similar system for corporations.
Bill Gates is creating a co-dependency for corporate education reformers that is no different than being a drug addict addicted to crack cocaine, and crack cocaine addicts have been know to sell their own bodies and children to get their next fix. But what Bill Gates is doing is enabling these addicts to sell our own children to get their next fix.
On its website, the Gates Foundation makes it clear that it often initiates contact with organizations to apply for specific grants and that it does not fund what it does not consider a Gates Foundation “priority.”
The assertiveness of the Gates Foundation in funding its approved version of education reform takes on head-tilting meaning when one considers the organizations that Gates funds “for general operating support.”
That means that the Gates Foundation has decided to that it wants to keep such organizations in business. So, it gives them money to stay afloat, like Dad shelling out an allowance to the kids.
There is no greater opportunity for fiscal dependence on the Gates Foundation than for an organization to receive Gates money for general operating expenses– especially in the case of repeated operating support grants. Note also that the Gates Foundation pays its grants in installments, and it sure can become easy to get used…
Children who grow up in homes devoid of books and magazines with parents/guardians who don’t read even if they can read will always be struggling to catch up and often falling behind no matter what the so-called foolish experts think and force the public schools and teachers to do.
This ignorant and dangerous thinking is pounding a round peg into a square hole that is smaller than the round peg to start with.
Few issues in education seem more important or more universally embraced (from so-called progressive educators to right-wing politicians such as Jeb Bush) than the need to have all children reading on grade level—specifically by that magical third grade:
Five years ago, communities across the country formed a network aimed at getting more of their students reading proficiently by the end of 3rd grade. States, cities, counties, nonprofit organizations, and foundations in 168 communities, spread across 41 states and the District of Columbia, are now a part of that initiative, theCampaign for Grade-Level Reading.
However, advocating that all students must read at grade level—often defined as reading proficiency—rarely acknowledges the foundational problems with those goals: identifying text by a formula claiming “grade level” and then identifying children as readers by association with those readability formulas.
This text, some claim, is a fifth-grade text, and thus children who can “read” that…
Peter Cunningham is in charge of what blogger Anthony Cody terms, “education’s only multi-million-dollar blog,”Education Post. In an interview with another blogger, corporate-reform bee charmer Jennifer Berkshire (“EduShyster”), Cunningham divulges the privatizing-reform origins of Education Post:
When I was asked to create this organization—it wasn’t my idea; I was initially approached by Broad—it was specifically because a lot of reform leaders felt like they were being piled on and that no one would come to their defense. They said somebody just needs to help right the ship here. There was a broad feeling that the anti-reform community was very effective at piling on and that no one was organizing that on our side. There was unequivocally a call to create a community of voices that would rise to the defense of people pushing reform who felt like they were isolated and alone.
The lies are also flowing like a river in the Bay Area near San Francisco between Steve Glazer and Susan Bonilla for a state senate seat. Glazer is the corporate school reform lobby’s candidate and the money is flooding into his campaign from special interests and oligarchs.
Over $5.5 million has been poured into races for the Los Angeles school board., according to Thomas Hines of the LA Daily News. A large portion has gone into attack ads and flat-out lies in two races that put charter supporters against supporters of public education.
“Teachers union-supported groups have spent $82,630 opposing Galatzan’s bid for re-election. A recent flier gives the two-term incumbent an “F” for failing to support students and protect tax dollars – apparently blaming her for a recession that cut revenues prompting layoffs.
“Charter school groups that support Galatzan, meanwhile, have spent $141,211 attacking her opponent, Scott Schmerelson.
“According to the mailers, the retired LAUSD principal and teacher is actually a lobbyist, responsible for trying to convince legislators they should “increase the already bloated salaries and benefits for administrators, taking money out of the classroom.”
“Schmerelson is not a lobbyist. He’s also backed by the…
What is the opposite of Robin Hood who took from the rich and gave to the poor?
The answer is Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidiyar, and multinational publishing company Pearson that have been revealed as parasites sucking what little money people living in extreme poverty have while offering a shoddy, questionable education in return.
Over 100 international organizations signed a statement critical of privatization of education in Kenya and Uganda. They specifically criticized the World Bank for endorsing a for-profit chain of schools called Bridge International Academies. According to the statement released today, “BIA is backed by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidiyar, and multinational publishing company Pearson, among others. It operates in Kenya and Uganda, with plans to invest in Nigeria, India and other countries. It now has close to 120,000 pupils enrolled in more than 400 schools.” The endorsers of the statement believe these countries need free public education with qualified teachers, not for-profit schools with untrained teachers.
The press release, with links, reads as follows:
Over 100 organisations around the world express deep concerns about the World Bank support for privatisation in education
Press release – 14 May 2015
(Nairobi, Kampala, Washington DC, Brussels)
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 