Latest from the Ownership Society

The greed mongers

"In K-12 education, we submit, greed can be good, albeit ugly." --Fordham's Finn & Hess

Conservative think-tankers like Rick Hess are critical of Arne Duncan's i3 reform plan because, they complain, there's not enough room for for-profit companies to feed their bottom lines in the ed reform biz.

According to Hess:

 Their selfish pursuit of profit gives them cause to be more aggressive about expansion, more nimble about abandoning failed efforts and seeking new niches, and more energetic about rooting out inefficiency.

Hess frets that giant text book and test publishers will be at a disadvantage when up against non-profits like ETS, as they try to out-wiggle each other to the DOE's feeding troth. Don't worry Rick. I'm sure Pearson will find their way in.

How they do it in Philly

People often ask me how how, or if, you can make any money as a charter school operator? Here's how they do it in Philly.

Over half a million bucks in undocumented expenses, and the school's board votes to approve them? Hey, can I get a job there?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Colorado Gov. Ritter on Race to Top

It was like the Olympic Games, and we were an American skater with a Soviet judge from the 1980s,” (NYT)

Joel Shatzky: Educating for Democracy

Henry Ford explained that he gave his employees high wages so that they could afford to buy his products; Wal-mart reverses the process by paying such low wages that its employees can only afford to buy its products. (Huffington)

Howard Blume: An L.A. high school struggles to turn around

Last month, the Los Angeles Board of Education could have turned over the job of improving Jefferson to an outside operator. Instead, it chose a plan created by Jefferson's teachers. With new authority, staffers at Jefferson have taken on the crucial test of whether they can fix one of the most historically troubled, low-achieving campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. (L.A. Times)

 

Fremont H.S. teachers say, enough is enough

Detroit--New Orleans without the flood

Democracy Now! reports that the closures of 45 schools to be replaced by 75 privately-run charters is actually a move to privatize the entire public school system. Private foundations are ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars to fund school reform, but the public has little to no say in how the money is spent.

The foundations are not only going to be providing money to start new schools, they’re also setting up an accountability network. They will be deciding what constitutes a good school to be closed or to be opened. So that is totally taken out of the realm of the public sphere where parents and community members decide on a type of education that is necessary for the city, and foundations and folks who are not necessarily considering those voices are deciding what is good education. (Nate Walker, former Detroit school teacher and member of the school development team at the Boggs Educational Center. The Boggs Center is developing a plan to open its own neighborhood-based school next year.)

What ever happened to pay-for-grades schemes in N.Y & Chicago

Disappearing Act

2008 was the year of pay-for-grades. Remember? It was the hottest idea, heavily touted by the Ownership Society entrupreneurial crowd and headline news in the mass media. Joel Klein spent $40 million on his market worshiping scheme in N.Y. schools. But a new study shows the program was a flop and is quietly being dropped. Accountability? Never with these guys. Exxon-Mobile pushed the program in Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington. While in Chicago, Arne Duncan hailed the plan as a "leveling of the playing field." It didn't and now, the plan that made national headlines in 2008, has dropped off the radar screen.

Oh, and BTW, it's 2010. Where did Renaissance 2010 go?

Academic freedom "a core principle..."

Unless of course, it causes "controversy"

CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- The University of Wyoming has canceled a speech by former 1960s radical William Ayers after it raised a slew of objections from citizens and politicians. Ayers -- an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago-- was scheduled to speak next Monday on the Laramie campus about social justice issues and education. He was invited by the UW Social Justice Research Center.

In a statement released by the university, UW President Tom Buchanan thanked the center for reconsidering its invitation to Ayers. Buchanan says academic freedom is a core principle of higher education, but he says the visit by Ayers would have adversely impacted the public's confidence in the university. He noted that the Ayers invitation had caused intense controversy.
-- Associated Press

Storm brewing in New Orleans

Arne Duncan has back-tracked, sorta, from his claim that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that happened to New Orleans education. But the post-Katrina two-tiered school system he endorses, continues under another former Chicago schools CEO, Paul Vallas.

It's a system that is drawing more and more heat from the city's disenfranchised. Yesterday a crowd openly hostile to Recovery School District Superintendent Vallas, used a state board of education meeting to raise concerns about whether charters are leaving the most vulnerable children behind.

When Vallas stated at Monday's meeting at Joseph S. Clark High School,  that charters are doing "a heck of a job" educating public school students, the mostly African-American audience responded with jeers. Many parents expressed fears that many charters are practicing selective enrollment policies.

"Charters don't want anything to do with our children. They're sending them away," said Brenda Valteau, who identified herself as a 1961 graduate of George Washington Carver High School. "We're losing our young people to the streets." (Times Picyune)

It's hard to lose something you were so involved and invested in"

Interview with a Green Dot Animo Justice student and a teacher

I spoke with a teacher and a student from Green Dot's Animo Justice Charter High School, to gather material for a larger piece I'm working on. Green Dot founder, Steve Barr, had earlier told me that the school has been marked for closing by Green Dot's board of directors, on recommendation from the management team, on grounds that it's not cost effective to run the school with 450 students and that the school has been the "lowest performer" among a cohort of Green Dot schools.. The announcement has led to ongoing student protests and an angry response from parents.

Ismael is a 17 year-old senior at Animo Justice and vice-president of the senior class. He's on his way to college in the fall and doesn't have to worry about where he will attend high school next year. But he still sounds angry and frustrated about the closing of his school and was a participant in the student sit-in.

"I was one of the students who built this school from the beginning. I felt like it was my school," Ismael said. "They should have consulted with us and our parents and not just told us they were closing our school. If they told us earlier, maybe we could have come up with some alternatives."

On of the things that angered Ismael the most was that, "the CEO didn't even come to tell us face-to-face, but sent someone else to tell us the school was closing."

When I asked Ismael his thoughts on Animo Justice's "low performance." He responded with praise for Green Dot's teachers and pointed out that the school had been moved three times in three years and had a string of principals. "It's true that our scores should be better, but we aren't a bad school. We could improve if we were given the support we need."

One of Ismael's favorites is science teacher Judy Riemenschneider, who is in her third year at the school. Judy told me that she chose to teach at Green Dot because she wanted a small-school environment, teachers being involved in decision-making, and a union contract. But like Ismael, she was dismayed at the lack of consultation with teachers, parents and students over the decision to close Animo Justice.

"The biggest issue for me was lack of input by teachers, parents and teachers on the decision to close the school. Green Dot says that we are critical to the decision making process. But things don’t happen overnight. By involving people in advance we could have worked to resolve the situation."

While students and teachers have been told they will all be placed at other Green Dot schools, Riemenschneider is not so sure:

"Animo students are guaranteed a spot. There’s a process in place. But they’re laying off teachers from Locke [Green Dot's other cohort]. They’re going to lose some teachers. We'll all be notified on April first who will be lay-ed off and who will stay. So to say that we will all have jobs is somewhat misleading."

When I asked her about the school's dwindling enrollment and lagging performance, she responded:

"We came together. We built the school. But how can a school stay enrolled if you move around so much and have 3 principals in three years? And with all that instability, how do you make an accurate assessment of the school's progress?"

She pointed out that Animo Justice was now competing for students with a rapidly multiplying group of charters. There are now six others in the neighborhood around Jefferson High.

"But I’m passionate about this community we've built. It's hard to lose something you were so involved and invested in," she said.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

L.A. Supt. Ray Cortines as he cuts more days from school year

"Our people will be asked to do more with less." (L.A. Times )

Herman Brewer, acting president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League

"These folks who have known nothing but prosperity are now in shock because all of a sudden the crisis they have generally associated with poor communities -- with the city of Chicago -- has hit them," Brewer said. "Our funding formula has created disparities so acute, people are starting to see it now." ("Layoffs could top 20,000 in school districts" Sun-Times)

FairTest's Lisa Guisbond & Monty Neill

George W. Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, often said we need to give state tests every year, because otherwise we would have no way of knowing if students were falling behind. But that’s hogwash, as any teacher, student or parent could have told her.In the classroom of any reasonably competent teacher, student progress is being evaluated constantly, each time he or she looks at classroom work, not to mention frequent quizzes, papers, projects, and discussions. (The Answer Sheet)

Dumb & a moron, both...

Look, down here there are these groups from the far left. Whatever we do, they want to make it look like we are dumb morons. They're very effective, dadgummit. Jefferson's name was taken out of a list of Enlightenment philosophers in world history because he didn't fit the period of the Enlightenment. (Texas school board member Don McLeroy in Globe & Mail)

Taking the fall for Duncan & Daley

Pickens kept pal Arne's secret VIP list

David Pickens was the guy who kept former Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan's clout list. The list was used to pressure selective-enrollment-school principals into accepting the otherwise ineligible children of VIP's through the back door. Pickens was the buffer between Duncan/Daley and the schools. He was the one who had to deliver the list to the principals. Daley's nephew, Patrick Daley Thompson, was a middle-man in the process and knee-deep in the scandal.  But after Tribune reporter Azam Ahmed, broke the story, Pickens, who is African-American and one of the few black educators in the top rungs of the CPS bureaucracy, knew he would have to take the fall for the untouchable Duncan.

Friday, he resigned quietly. So far, Duncan has let his faithful assistant and childhood friend go under the bus without so much as a peep. Such is the culture at CPS under mayoral control and now the culture at the DOE under Duncan. 

"David was a very honest and loyal lieutenant to Arne Duncan," said Bill Gerstein, a high school principal and longtime friend of Pickens. "He was loyal to a fault and honest to a fault. In organizations, oftentimes the people who do the work and follow through on initiatives — they're the first ones to go."

Before arriving at the central office, Pickens was a seventh- and eighth-grade math teacher and basketball coach at Price Elementary in the Kenwood neighborhood. He was nominated for a Golden Apple Award in 1999 for exemplary services. Pickens was given many tough assignments throughout his tenure with Duncan, including oversight of school closings. Administrators and teachers sometimes referred to Pickens as "Dr. Death" because his presence might signal a school's demise. (Tribune)

Inside Chicago's school "Renaissance"

As the week ends...

I hope Chicagoans are taking note of this bombshell decision by N.Y. State Supreme Court Justice Joan Lobis. Lobis ruled Bloomberg/Klein's closure of 19 neighborhood schools “null and void.”

Arne Duncan is supposed to announce first round winners today in the Race To The Top. I predict Baylor & Kentucky.

The next time someone tells you there's no money for schools, show them this headline. 

But my favorite Friday headline has to be: Drunk Man Arrested For Trying To Resuscitate Dead Possum.  

Have a nice weekend.

Balancing the budget with teachers' pensions

Like thieves in the night, Illinois Gov. Quinn and machine-boss Mike Madigan, heisted more than $100 billion from the teachers' pension fund Wednesday. Not only that, but the Chicago Civic Committee, calling the heist, "reform," wants more.

"This bill is a small step in the right direction but it doesn't begin to solve the state's urgent fiscal problems," said R. Eden Martin, president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. "The only way to achieve significant cost reductions now is to reform retirement benefits for current state employees prospectively and new hires moving forward."

 Question: Why hardly a peep from the leaders of the state's teacher unions?

More of Rhee's mess to clean up for Anita Dunn

Is she really worried about firing bad teachers?

Here's another problem for Anita Dunn, Michelle Rhee's new million-dollar PR flack.

Supt. Rhee debased the more than 200 D.C. teachers she fired recently, even implying that many of them were rapists and child molesters. Of course her charges turned out to be fabrications and Rhee was forced to recant. Rhee has also been among those yelling the loudest about how difficult unions have made it is to fire bad teachers.

If that's not a big enough mess for Dunn to clean up, how about the fact that Rhee has, at the same time, pushed hard for a voucher system to pay for Catholic school tuition in the District. She has also helped bail out failed Archdioscese schools by making many of them non-union charter schools.

The front-page story in yesterday's NYT revealed that hundreds and possibly thousands of children have actually been sexually abused and molested in U.S. Catholic schools--with full knowledge of church leaders, who covered up the crimes and treated them with a wink and a nod. In one Wisconsin school alone, a priest, Lawrence Murphy, was found to have molested some 200 deaf students. When the abuse was reported to higher ups, Murphy was simply transferred to another school where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in Milwaukee. You may recall that Milwaukee was the nation's first school district to allow vouchers to be used for parochial school tuition.

It seems that Rhee is not as concerned about firing bad teachers as she claims to be. It is also worth noting that conservative think-tankers like Fordham's Mike Petrilli and Andy Smarick have also taken up the Catholic school voucher/charter cause without a word of concern for the "difficulties" of firing bad teachers.

Dunn has  her work cut out for her.

Inside Chicago's school "Renaissance"

Duncan/Daley's 2-tiered school system

"We didn't want to advertise what we were doing because we didn't want a bunch of people calling." —David Pickens, former top aide to Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan's favorite slogan this year is, "education is the civil rights issue of our generation." But the current investigation by Chicago's Inspector General, who interviewed Duncan, shows that what the former schools CEO and current secretary of education means by "civil rights" is special back-door admissions for the children of the clout-heavy, into the city's selective enrollment high schools. If you're not connected, it's crumbling, overcrowded, and under-resourced schools for your kids. It seems that Duncan kept a list of clout heavy parents, politicians and possible campaign donors, which he had delivered to magnet school principals.

John Kass in the Tribune:

Does anyone actually believe that political insiders weren't favored at the expense of deserving kids? No. But today, I'm not going to rip on Daley. Instead, let's focus on his brilliance, in creating Chicago's two-tiered public school system. It bound the professional class to him and maintained him in power. The mayor knows how it works. He etched it into Chicago's civic infrastructure years ago, when he took over the public schools.

 More from the Sun-Times:

Daley Tuesday defended the log, which reflected calls about placing kids in a variety of schools, including some offering greater safety. "People are calling," Daley said. "What do you do, just say, 'No?' Arne Duncan said you have to say something." 

 Reason #330 why mayoral control of the schools is a bad idea.

School closings, the new face of reform

As school districts struggle with state budget shortfalls, school closings and mass teacher firings have become the new face of school reform. Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, where an entire faculty and staff were fired, became the poster child for Arne Duncan's so-called Race to the Top, complete with threats to school districts nationwide that only compliance could save them from de-funding.

The latest to comply is Oklahoma City where the school board plans to RIF 75 of 155 teachers at U.S. Grant High School strictly on the basis of flat student standardized test scores.

From NewsOK:  

The reform plan would remove half the staff and the principal if the principal had been there for more than two years. Under the same federal guidelines — and in pursuit of the same grant dollars — a school board in Rhode Island last month announced that every teacher at the failing Central Falls High School would be fired, causing the community to protest.

Green Dot's board

Here's a list of Green Dot board members who made the decision to close the Animo Justice school.

• Steve Barr – Founder & Chair Emeritus, Green Dot Public Schools
• Shane Martin – Chairman of the Board, Dean of Loyola Marymount Graduate School of Education
• Charisse Bremond-Weaver – President & CEO, Brotherhood Crusade
• Oscar De La Hoya – Professional Boxer, Philanthropist and Businessman
• Glenn Dryfoos – Senior Vice President - Business Affairs, Univision Communications
• Susan Estrich – Professor, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
• Abigail Garcia – President, Asociacion de Maestros Unidos
• Mike Garcia – President, Service Employees International Union Local 1877
• Richard Leib – Executive Vice President, Liquid Environmental Solutions
• Noah Mamet – President, Mamet & Associates
• Pam Rector – Director of the Center for Service and Action, Loyola Marymount
• Richard Schaefer – Chief Executive Officer, Golden Boy Promotions
• Jeff Shell – President, Comcast Programming, Comcast Communications
• Timothy Watkins – President and CEO, Watts Labor Community Action Committee
• Ted Mitchell – Chief Executive Officer, NewSchools Venture Fund
• Don Shalvey – Ed.D. Senior Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Small Schools and Choice Revisited

From Deb Meier

Dear friends,

Sigh! It's not the first time I've noted how even my good ideas can be "corrupted" for quite different purposes than intended. It's the story of many of the political ideals I still hold to. Small schools were a tool, not an end. So was the idea of requiring a super-majority in the Senate a way to prevent the majority from railroading the minority. So too, I guess, is democracy itself. We can all bemoan it at times. Continue to read on my blog........

GREEN DOT'S PROMISE TURNED INTO A LIE

Green Dot founder Steve Barr originally offered some hope to a struggling L.A. community. He promised a viable alternative to the large, under-resourced, often violent, traditional neighborhood high schools, run by an incompetent, demoralized, stultifying bureaucracy. He also promised that Green Dot, unlike the dozens of other market-driven, privately-managed charter school chains, currently favored under Duncan's Race To The Top reform strategy, would empower teachers and respect their rights, codified in a new, model, union contract.

But this morning, it is clear to hundreds of students, teachers and parents who bought into Barr's promise, that Green Dot is no different and in many ways worse, than any of the other of the new breed of privateer charter school operators who trade in the hopes and dreams of children and their parents for a better future.

Green Dot's money man Marco Petruzzi announced yesterday that the company's Amino "Justice" School is closing and that its students and teachers will be dispersed around the city. To Petruzzi & Co., it was strictly a bottom-line decision. The school wasn't making its enrollment quotas and despite tens of millions in corporate donations as well as huge Broad and Gates Foundation grants, it was running at a deficit. Rather than carry it as a loss-leader, Green Dot's unelected, unaccountable corporate board decided not to throw good money after bad.

The announcement sparked a sit-in by some 400 Amino students and outrage from parents and teachers.

"We had no idea that closing was even a possibility, and then we received the information on Friday morning," said Judy Riemenschneider, who teaches chemistry and environmental science. The ultimatum is at odds with Green Dot's principles, which call for teacher input into critical decisions, she said.

Animo Justice senior class president Eduardo Campos, 17, credits the school for his ambition to graduate and go to college and also for developing student leadership skills. "We built the school from scratch," Campos said. "We chose the name of the school and the colors. And now all of that is being taken away." (L.A. Times)