DC Charter School Board senior manager suspended for being a gun toting white supremacist who promotes raping feminists.

Courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Until today, John Goldman was a Senior Manager of Finance, Analysis and Strategy for the Washington, DC Public Charter School Board. But today Goldman was suspended pending investigation after photos surfaced of him at parties with known neonazis and white supremacists as the pseudonymous "Jack Murphy," self-proclaimed liberal-turned-conservative in the age of Trump. 

"Murphy," it seems, was a foe of Richard Spencer. Still it appears they share some fundamental beliefs, though Murphy/Goldman claims he was a Democrat who now has a man-crush on Trump. Apparently former Democrats can be white supremacist men's rights advocates too! 

John Goldman has now admitted that his online alter ego is "Jack Murphy," but remains unapologetic about his stated beliefs and why he holds them.

By the way here are some of this stated beliefs:  

"Men have a natural tendency towards dominance and women to passivity and submission," Murphy wrote in 2015. "For a feminist who has rejected polarity and embraced sameness, this presents a paradox. The cognitive dissonance between her chosen dogma and the urge to get choked during sex is painful."

This is the argument for his central premise, which is simple: "Rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape." 

But he is quick to qualify this by claiming that all feminists need is a man who loves her to rape her but not in a totally evil "illegal alien" rapey way, but a loving rape. Consensual, even.

"Loving, consensual rape" is a new one on me.

But wait, there's more: 

"However, the tragedy of a young girl getting raped in the bathroom at school just might be what turns the attention of limousine liberals from the brainwashing narrative of the Democrats and towards a more sane approach to immigration," "Murphy" wrote in a Medium post last year. 

"Let’s just hope it will only take one, and not an epidemic of heinous crime to finally get those suburban soccer moms out of their denial and into the real world," he continued.

Yeah, anybody else picking up on a rapey theme here?

There is of course more, but this is all I can stomach to post on my blog.

Keep in mind this guy worked for the Washington, DC "school board."

The mind reels.

For profit charter schools charge taxpayers for students who do not show up for classes.

Charter schools touted by @BetsyDeVos lure at-risk students and when they stop coming, the state keeps paying. https://t.co/iB0FOeQHxC

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) October 5, 2017

Courtesy of USA Today:

Last school year, Ohio’s cash-strapped education department paid Capital High $1.4 million in taxpayer dollars to teach students on the verge of dropping out. But on a Thursday in May, the storefront charter school run by for-profit EdisonLearning was mostly empty. 

In one room, vacant chairs faced 25 blank computer monitors. Three students sat in a science lab down the hall, and another nine in an unlit classroom, including one youth who sprawled out, head down, sleeping. 

Only three of the more than 170 students on Capital’s rolls attended class the required five hours that day, records obtained by ProPublica show. Almost two-thirds of the school’s students never showed up; others left early. Nearly a third of the roster failed to attend class all week.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has championed charters and for-profit education, contending in Congressional testimony that school choice can lower absenteeism and dropout rates. But at schools like Capital, a ProPublica-USA Today investigation found, the drop-outs rarely drop in—and if they do, they don’t stay long. Such schools aggressively recruit as many students as possible, and sometimes count them even after they stop showing up, a practice that can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for empty desks.

If Betsy DeVos has her way this will be how ALL of the country's educational needs will be met.

They will just continue charging the American people for an education that nobody shows up to receive.

You ever wonder how they create more Republicans?

THIS is how they create more Republicans. 

Public education activist Diane Ravitch says that John Oliver is being harassed over his expose on charter schools.

I am going to share Ravitch's post in its entirety since she really wants everybody to see it: 

As readers of this blog know, deregulation of charters leads to fraud, graft, and abuse. On this site, I have documented scores of examples of fraudsters and grifters who take advantage of weak (or no) oversight to enrich themselves and to strand children in bad schools. 

A few days ago, John Oliver ran an excellent segment about charter schools and the fraud associated with them. He barely scratched the surface. Charter supporters are furious and are saying that he “hurt” children, he savaged children, etc. (This is a familiar tactic; when I criticized the improbable test scores in New York City almost a decade ago, I was told that I was “hurting children and their teachers” by questioning the validity of the dramatic rise in scores.) 

Fraud is a feature of deregulation, not a bug. When no one is looking, some people steal. Not everyone steals, but many do. That is why Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and California are scamming taxpayers. No one is demanding accountability. Politicians get paid off by charter friends, then cripple any effort to oversee them Ohio and Michigan spend $1 billion a year to subsidize charter schools, which are lower-performing than public schools. 

The corporate reformers and privatizers are bombarding John Oliver with tweets and messages attacking his show. 

Please let him know you support him. 

Please take the time to contact John Oliver by writing him at management@avalonuk.com. 

And tweet him @iamjohnoliver. 

Don’t let the charter industry intimidate him.

I did not realize that Oliver was receiving such blowback, though to be honest I probably should have.

I have already sent my tweet in support of his work and I encourage you to do the same.

John Oliver is doing the work that many journalists are just not doing, so he needs to know that what he does is both necessary and appreciated.

For those who may have somehow missed this segment on charter schools, here you go.

Yeah, I see how that could have panicked the private charter school folks.

And that is a good thing.

John Oliver takes on charter schools.

Courtesy of The Inquirer:

Last Week Tonight host John Oliver turned his attention to charter schools and their shortcomings on Sunday night, using Pennsylvania laws and Philadelphia schools as examples of why he believes the institutions are something of gamble when it comes to education. 

“Charter schools unite both sides of the aisle more quickly than when a wedding DJ throws on ‘Hey Ya,’ ” Oliver said to kick off his piece, further noting that the first charters emerged 25 years ago as a way to explore new approaches to education. 

Now, about 6,700 such schools exist in the United States. But, as Oliver pointed out Sunday, “around the country, there have been charter schools so flawed, they don’t make it through the school year.”

It is certainly no secret here that I have absolutely no use for charter schools, and believe that if that money were kept in local school districts that public education could be vastly improved.

Interestingly enough Oliver did not bother to get into comparisons of which is better, charter schools or public schools, and instead just dives into the problems with charter school themselves.

Which as it turns out is pretty damning.

Diane Ravitch explains exactly why education is in crisis here in America.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

It has become conventional wisdom that “education is in crisis.” I have been asked about this question by many interviewers. They say something like: “Do you think American education is in crisis? What is the cause of the crisis?” And I answer, “Yes, there is a crisis, but it is not the one you have read about. The crisis in education today is an existential threat to the survival of public education. The threat comes from those who unfairly blame the school for social conditions, and then create a false narrative of failure. The real threat is privatization and the loss of a fundamental democratic institution.” 

As we have seen again and again, the corporate education industry is eager to break into U.S. public education and turn it into a free marketplace, where they can monetize the schools and be assured of government subsidization. On the whole, these privatized institutions do not produce higher test scores than regular public schools, except for those that cherry-pick their students and exclude the neediest and lowest performing students. The promotion of privatization by philanthropies, by the U.S. Department of Education, by right-wing governors (and a few Democratic governors like Cuomo of New York and Malloy of Connecticut), by the hedge fund industry, and by a burgeoning education equities industry poses a danger to our democracy. In some communities, public schools verge on bankruptcy as charters drain their resources and their best students. Nationwide, charter schools have paved the way for vouchers by making “school choice” non-controversial. 

Yes, education is in crisis. The profession of teaching is threatened by the financial powerhouse Teach for America, which sells the bizarre idea that amateurs are more successful than experienced teachers. TFA — and the belief in amateurism — has also facilitated the passage of legislation to strip teachers of basic rights to due process and of salaries tied to experience and credentials. 

Education is in crisis because of the explosion of testing and the embrace by government of test scores as both the means and the end of education. The scores are treated as a measure of teacher effectiveness and school effectiveness, when they are in fact a measure of the family income of the students enrolled in the school. The worst consequence of the romance with standardized testing is that children are ranked, sorted, and assigned a value based on scores that are not necessarily scientific or objective. Children thus become instruments, tools, objects, rather than unique human beings, each with his or her own potential. 

Education is in crisis because of the calculated effort to turn it into a business with a bottom line. Schools are closed and opened as though they were chain stores, not community institutions. Teachers are fired based on flawed measures. Disruption is considered a strategy rather than misguided and inhumane policy. Children and educators alike are simply data points, to be manipulated by economists, statisticians, entrepreneurs, and dabblers in policy. Education has lost its way, lost its purpose, lost its definition. Where once it was about enlightening and empowering young minds with knowledge, exploring new worlds, learning about science and history, and unleashing the imagination of each child, it has become a scripted process of producing test scores that can supply data. 

Education is in crisis. And we must organize to resist, to push back, to fight the mechanization of learning, and the standardization of children.

Typically blogging etiquette suggests that I simply sample a portion of what somebody has written, link to the source, and then add my own thoughts and possibly other links as I feel necessary.

However as I read through Diane Ravitch's post I found that all of her points were important to share, and that I could really not add anything more relevant than what she had already written.

Therefore I share this post in its entirety, and if Diane Ravitch takes offense I will reluctantly take it down.

However considering her passion for getting this information out I doubt that will happen.

Hillary Clinton's take on charter schools is definitely worth your time to read.

Courtesy of The Washington Post:  

Most charter schools — I don’t want to say every one — but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they do, thankfully, take everybody, and then they don’t get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child’s education. 

So I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system — not outside of it — but within it because I am still a firm believer that the public school system is one of the real pillars of our democracy and it is a path for opportunity. 

But I am also fully aware that there are a lot of substandard public schools. But part of the reason for that is that policymakers and local politicians will not fund schools in poor areas that take care of poor children to the level that they need to be. And you can get me going on this…. I mean, the corridor of shame right here in South Carolina, you get on there and you can see schools that are literally falling apart. I’ve been in some of those schools. I have seen the terrible physical conditions. That is an outrage. It is a rebuke to who we are as Americans to send any child to a school that you wouldn’t send your own child to. 

And so we’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure that public schools serve people, but that doesn’t mean we don’t also provide options within the system so that parents can find what they think might work best for their kid.

The Post goes on to say that Clinton was a one time advocate for charter schools, even praising them in her book "It Takes a Village."

However I don't think that this is another example of Hillary flip flopping, as much as it is an example of her views changing in response to new information.

When Hillary wrote her book in 1996, the charter school movement was really just taking off and a lot of people believed that it would help to improve public schools when new experimental techniques used in charter schools were then applied to schools everywhere.

Montessori schools are a good example of that.

However when George W. Bush used charter schools to help pressure and undermine public education that changed everything.

After all you are better able to demonstrate testing proficiency when you can weed out those with learning disabilities or disruptive behaviors.

Public schools do not have that option, nor should they. Therefore by comparison their test scores were considered sub-par, and they received a smaller allotment of money which could have been used to make improvements in their classrooms.

Clearly Hillary sees that and her opinions on supporting public schools are music to my ears.

Investigation into Michigan charter schools finds much waste of taxpayer money and more than a little fraud.

Courtesy of Electablog: 

This week, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a scathing report on charter schools in 12 states which have received federal funding. The report, titled Charter School Black Hole shows that Michigan charter schools received $34,997,658 between 2010-2015 under the federal Charter School Program (CSP). 139 of the 297 charters (as of 2014, the number is up to 302 now) in Michigan were subsidized in part by federal tax dollars in the past five years.

Here is just a little of what the investigation found:

Since the inception of charters in the state, more than 100 charters have closed (108). Many of them have closed due to lack of “academic viability” (poor results) while other have closed due to lack of “financial viability” (such as inadequate enrollment) and some for both or other failings. The total amount these schools have received is not known, but they certainly consumed well over $1 million in federal CSP grants before shuttering.

And it gets even worse:

Perhaps one of the most surprising takeaways from the federal information available about how taxpayer money is being spent or wasted is the existence of “ghost” schools that never opened. Out of the charters that were approved for CSP funds by the Michigan Department of Education in 2011 and 2012, twenty-five never opened. CMD learned this through its FOIA. 

The organizations behind these proposed charter schools were approved for a total of nearly $3.7 million in federal tax funds in “pre-planning” and “planning” grants, and they were received nearly $1.7 million, according to state expenditure reports CMD reviewed.

So millions of dollars of tax payer money, that COULD have gone toward improving public schools in Michigan, is wasted on funding school that either were NEVER going to open, or opened and then quickly closed.

And people wonder why our public schools are suffering.

Washington Supreme Court rules that charter schools are unconstitutional.

Courtesy of The Seattle Times:  

After nearly a year of deliberation, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late Friday afternoon that charter schools are unconstitutional. 

The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.

In the ruling, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen wrote that charter schools aren’t “common schools” because they’re governed by appointed rather than elected boards. 

Therefore, “money that is dedicated to common schools is unconstitutionally diverted to charter schools,” Madsen wrote.

Education policy analyst and public school advocate Diane Ravitch had this to say about the ruling:  

This is a big win for parents and public schools.

I would agree and further state that I hope this is the first of many such decisions that put a stop to charter school programs that drain money and resources from the public schools while resisting any oversight from the same public whose tax money they are taking.

Listen I understand that there are some poorly run public schools in this country, and that parents really want alternatives.

But I also understand that there is a very determined anti-public education movement that uses charter schools and homeschooling as a way to undermine public schools, and their motives have far more to do with their religious faiths and ideology than they do with improving educational opportunities.

Make no mistake, public education and public school teachers are under constant fire in America and charter schools are the Trojan horse the opponents are using to get past our defenses.

(H/T Common Dreams)

Alabama governor appoints man to the Board of Education who never attended public schools and claims his children will never attend one either. Sounds reasonable.

Matthew Brown

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

What message is a governor sending to the public with an appointment like this? 

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has tapped someone to your state’s Board of Education who never attended public schools, publicly declared that his children never will either, and actively supported a successful effort to defeat a vote on a school tax in a divisive campaign in his home county? 

Bentley, a Republican, named Matthew Brown, a 28-year-old design engineer at the Baldwin County Highway Department, to the Alabama State Board of Education. Brown graduated in 2007 from Pensacola Christian College and attended Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, graduating in 2011. 

Bentley hasn’t been what you’d call a friend to public schools, given his support for tax credits, vouchers and charter schools. This year he signed into law legislation that amended the 2013 Alabama Accountability Act and that diverts up to $30 million a year from the Education Trust Fund for “opportunity scholarships” (vouchers). He also recently signed a law allowing charter schools to open in Alabama and giving a new state commission the right to overturn a local school district’s rejection of specific charter applications. 

So it looks like Alabama is going to challenge Kansas and Texas for the most screwed up state education system in the country.

Bold move Alabama, if successful perhaps someday students can read about your efforts to undermine their education in textbooks.

Wait, what am I saying? If successful future students will have to have the textbooks read to them by somebody who went to school in another state.

Republican, dumbing down future voters in order to stay in office since....well since forever.

This is an actual passage, from an actual "science" book, for an actual high school class.

As you may imagine this is from a Christian publishing company, whose textbooks are sold to home school programs and Christian schools.

This is also the kind of textbook which are sometimes paid for with tax dollars for placement in charter and private school across the country.

And if the Republicans have their way, we will see many more just like it.

We need to stand up and fight for our children's education.

New report blows the lid off of charter school fraud and mismanagement.

Courtesy of Salon:  

The report, co-authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, makes the point that the problem of charter school waste, fraud and abuse, which it focuses on, is just one symptom of the underlying problem: inadequate regulation of charter schools. But it’s a massive symptom, which has so far received only fragmentary coverage.

The report takes its title from a section of a report to Congress by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General, a report that took note of “a steady increase in the number of charter school complaints” and warned that state level agencies were failing “to provide adequate oversight needed to ensure that Federal funds [were] properly used and accounted for.” The report found that “charter operator fraud and mismanagement is endemic to the vast majority of states that have passed a charter school law.” It organized the abuse into six basic categories, each of which is treated in its own section: 

• Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain; • School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses; 
• Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger; 
• Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided; 
• Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and, 
• Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, under the first category, crooked charter school officials displayed a wide range of lavish, compulsive or tawdry tastes. Examples include: 

• Joel Pourier, former CEO of Oh Day Aki Heart Charter School in Minnesota, who embezzled $1.38 million from 2003 to 2008. He used the money on houses, cars, and trips to strip clubs. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Star Tribune, the school “lacked funds for field trips, supplies, computers and textbooks.” 

• Nicholas Trombetta, founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School is accused of diverting funds from it for his private purchases. He allegedly bought houses, a Florida Condominium and a $300,000 plane, hid income from the IRS, formed businesses that billed even though they had done no work, and took $550,000 in kickbacks for a laptop computer contract. 

• A regular financial audit in 2009 of the Langston Hughes Academy in New Orleans uncovered theft of $660,000 by Kelly Thompson, the school’s business manager. Thompson admitted that from shortly after she assumed the position until she was fired 15 months later, she diverted funds to herself in order to support her gambling in local casinos. 

Others spent their stolen money on everything from a pair of jet skis for $18,000 to combined receipts of $228 for cigarettes and beer, to over $30,000 on personal items from Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Coach and Tommy Hilfiger. But the real damage came from the theft of resources for children’s future. 

“Our school system exists to serve students and enrich communities,” said Sabrina Stevens, executive director of Integrity in Education. “School funding is too scarce as it is; we can hardly afford to waste the resources we do have on people who would prioritize exotic vacations over school supplies or food for children. We also can’t continue to rely on the media or isolated whistle-blowers to identify these problems. We need to have rules in place that can systematically weed out incompetent or unscrupulous charter operators before they pose a risk to students and taxpayers.”

Republicans are always going on about how everything is better when done by the private sector, however if the purpose of providing a service is to make money, then the possibility that fraud will occur is virtually a guarantee. 

In the meantime these schools rob funds from public education, thereby undermining its ability to educate our children, and providing the evidence of failure that the conservatives then use to justify the further cutting of funding and the promotion of more charter and private schools.

 Do you see what the Republicans did here?

They attack education, offer reforms that make it much worse, insist on vouchers to send children to private and charter schools in response, which sends taxpayer money away from public schools and toward private ones, which eventually reduces the number of public school teachers, thereby draining money from the teacher's union (NEA), and removing the influence of an organization that often backs, and funds, progressive candidates.

Of course this in turn makes it easier for conservatives to win seats, and further cut funding from public education.

In other words NONE of this push by conservatives has anything to do with education, and EVERYTHING to do with political power and influence.

Data reveals that Chicago charter schools expel students at an alarming rate. Hey, got to keep those test scores high.

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:  

As it continues to modify strict disciplinary policies in an effort to keep students in the classroom, Chicago Public Schools on Tuesday released data showing privately run charter schools expel students at a vastly higher rate than the rest of the district. 

The data reveal that during the last school year, 307 students were kicked out of charter schools, which have a total enrollment of about 50,000. In district-run schools, there were 182 kids expelled out of a student body of more than 353,000. 

That means charters expelled 61 of every 10,000 students while the district-run schools expelled just 5 of every 10,000 students. 

It's the first time the district has released student suspension data for every school and also the first time it has released data on expulsions for charters. For charter critics, the numbers will buttress long-standing complaints that the privately run operations push out troubled students, allowing their schools to record stronger academic performances.

Sure must be easy to keep those test scores high when you can kick all of the disruptive or academically challenged kids to the curb whenever they threaten to bring them down.

In public schools expelling children is the last resort, and there are all kinds of modifications made to a struggling students education plan, or behavioral plan to help them to be successful.

I know I have helped to develop these, and implement these.

To put it bluntly, if I had been a student in a charter school it is highly likely that I would have been expelled in the tenth grade. If not before.

Instead I graduated with honors, and was considered a leader in my school.

You cannot turn behaviors around, and help make successful those who are a challenge, if your bottom line is a dollar sign.

The troubling history of school vouchers, and why our public schools are NOT failing.

Courtesy of Yes Magazine:

To truly understand how we came to believe our educational system is broken, we need a history lesson. Rewind to 1980—when Milton Friedman, the high priest of laissez-faire economics, partnered with PBS to produce a ten-part television series called Free to Choose. He devoted one episode to the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones. 

You could make a strong argument that the current campaign against public schools started with that single TV episode. To make the case for vouchers, free-market conservatives, corporate strategists, and opportunistic politicians looked for any way to build a myth that public schools were failing, that teachers (and of course their unions) were at fault, and that the cure was vouchers and privatization. 

Jonathan Kozol, the author and tireless advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.” 

Armed with Friedman’s ideas, President Reagan began calling for vouchers. In 1983, his National Commission on Excellence in Education issued “A Nation At Risk,” a report that declared, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” 

It also said, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” 

For a document that’s had such lasting impact, “A Nation At Risk” is remarkably free of facts and solid data. Not so the Sandia Report, a little-known follow-up study commissioned by Admiral James Watkins, Reagan’s secretary of energy; it discovered that the falling test scores which caused such an uproar were really a matter of an expansion in the number of students taking the tests. In truth, standardized-test scores were going up for every economic and ethnic segment of students—it’s just that, as more and more students began taking these tests over the 20-year period of the study, this more representative sample of America’s youth better reflected the true national average. It wasn’t a teacher problem. It was a statistical misread. 

The government never officially released the Sandia Report. It languished in peer-review purgatory until the Journal of Educational Research published it in 1993. Despite its hyperbole (or perhaps because of it), “A Nation At Risk” became a timely cudgel for the larger privatization movement. With Reagan and Friedman, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist, preaching that salvation would come once most government services were turned over to private entrepreneurs, the privatizers began proselytizing to get government out of everything from the post office to the public schools. 

Corporations recognized privatization as a euphemism for profits. “Our schools are failing” became the slogan for those who wanted public-treasury vouchers to move money into private schools. These cries continue today.

There is very little that angers me as much as listening to people bad mouth teachers.

When I was struggling in school with behavioral problems and lack of motivation, the intervention of teachers saved my life. That is a debt I will spend a life time repaying.

In my day teachers were on par with firefighters in public trust and admiration, and today they are vilified at every turn by those who want to undermine our education system, destroy teacher's unions, and sabotage secular education.

By the way it is no surprise that all of this happened on Regan's watch. In fact it appears likely it was all part of his plan to return America back to its "Christian roots." Even if those did not really exist in the first place.

This from Salon: 

(Frank) Schaeffer himself developed the theme in his most influential call to action, “A Christian Manifesto,” a 1981 book that (Jerry) Falwell described as “probably the most important piece of literature in America today.” As in his other recent works, Schaeffer stressed the inevitability of an authoritarian takeover if Bible-believing Christians remained indifferent to politics and failed to take a stand. He believed that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 might represent a window of opportunity to reassert Christian values. But he also warned that the power of relativistic secular humanism was so strong in the government, in the courts, and in the schools that it soon might be necessary for Christians to resist through civil disobedience—and even with violence—much as the United States had resisted British tyranny at the time of the American Revolution. Christianity and secular humanism, he emphasized, were opposites. “These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other,” he declared. “It is not too strong to say that we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in the struggle.”

It is no secret that many of the applications for charter schools are submitted by religious groups hoping to insert Christianity into the daily lesson plans of their students. (We have already seen that on display in Texas charter schools.)

The scariest thing in the world for a group that relies on ignorance and reliance on faith, is a fully funded public education system that teaches critical thinking skills and confidence in logic.

Newly elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio demonstrates how to effectively deal with charter schools.

Courtesy Watchdog:  

After New York City spent years building a thriving charter school community, Bill Phillips, president of Northeast Charter Schools Network, says Mayor Bill de Blasio is showing how to take it down, . 

“If New York City has been a national model for growing charters, I think Mayor de Blasio is laying out a blueprint for killing charter expansion,” said Phillips, whose school network serves New York and Connecticut. “This is clearly a blueprint: Do everything on your power to take away access to buildings. Facilities are almost always one of the major challenges for charters across the country.” 

In New York City, 70,000 students attend charter schools and more than 50,000 are on waiting lists. 

During his campaign, de Blasio clearly voiced his intention to charge rent to charter schools co-locating with district schools, sparking a protest involving about 20,000 charter school supporters. 

Between the high cost of New York City real estate and a desire to keep actual school sizes relatively small, it’s common for districts to run multiple schools out of the same building. About 10 percent of co-locating schools are charters, Phillips said. 

About three-quarters of New York City’s charter school students attend co-locating schools. 

Last week, de Blasio’s administration pulled $210 million allotted for new charter school buildings and directed it to expanding preschool programs. He’s placed a moratorium on new charter school co-locations. And schools slated to open soon with co-locations approved by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg may see that approval taken away.

The idea of expanding charter schools is simply a conservative plan for taking funding away from public schools and undercutting education in this country. 

In fact Alaska Governor Sean Parnell is so dedicated to the sabotage that he actually suggested that Alaska amend its constitution which specifically forbids the use of public funds for religious or private schools.

Thankfully so far Alaskans have given him the middle finger over this, but I have little doubt that he will continue to undermine public schools, along with his Republican cohorts, at every opportunity.

Mayor de Blasio's approach is exactly the one that every other pro-education politician needs to adopt. The way to help educate our children is to properly fund public schools and allow teachers to teach without constantly evaluating them and threatening their jobs.

I swear I am sick and tired of watching teachers getting attacked over and over again by people who clearly care nothing about eduction or the needs of our children.

President of Britain's Association for Science Education says that Creationism is indoctrination and should not be taught in public nor private schools. Oh, can we get one of her in this country?

Courtesy of the Guardian:  

Teaching pupils about creationism in science lessons is "indoctrination", according to Professor Alice Roberts. The TV presenter and new president of the Association for Science Education called for new laws banning all schools, including those in the private sector, from teaching the topic alongside evolution. 

The new national curriculum for primary schools, due to be introduced this September, contains a clear requirement for pupils to be taught about evolution. But the curriculum only applies to state schools, not private schools. Academies and free schools can choose not to follow it. 

In an interview with the Times Educational Supplement (TES), Prof Roberts, who has presented a number of BBC programmes including The Incredible Human Journey and Origins of Us, said: "There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children's heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded. 

"People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don't agree with that. Science is about questioning things. It's about teaching people to say, 'I don't believe it until we have very strong evidence'."

Okay I may be in love here. 

America desperately needs somebody just like Professor Roberts to take on the religious indoctrination that is taking place in charter schools, home schools, and private schools all over this country.

Sadly for us we do not yet have anybody in an official capacity willing to take on the Creationists in such a courageous manner, for fear of appearing anti-Christian.

That's too bad, because in the interim it is our children and our standing among the world's scientific community that suffers.

Despite the best efforts of educators Creationism is STILL being taught in some Texas schools.

Courtesy of Slate:  

When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies. 

The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.” 

Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state. 

Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014. 

Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public-school classrooms. 

I asked Ken Miller, a co-author of the Miller-Levine Biology textbook published by Pearson and one of the most widely used science textbooks on the market today, to respond to claims about the fossil record and other inaccuracies in the Responsive Ed curriculum. (It’s worth noting that creationists on the Texas State Board of Education recently tried, and failed, to block the approval of Miller’s textbook because it teaches evolution.) 

The curriculum tells students that a “lack of transitional fossils” is a “problem for evolutionists who hold a view of uninterrupted evolution over long periods of time.” 

“The assertion that there are no ‘transitional fossils’ is false,” Miller responded. “We have excellent examples of transitional forms documenting the evolution of amphibians, mammals, and birds, to name some major groups. We also have well-studied transitional forms documenting the evolution of whales, elephants, horses, and humans.” 

Evolution is not a scientific controversy, and there are no competing scientific theories. All of the evidence supports evolution, and the overwhelming majority of scientists accept the evidence for it. 

So despite the fact that the new Texas textbooks approved the teaching of Evolution and rejected Creationism out of hand, these charter schools are finding away around that hurdle, and teaching this garbage anyhow.

Which, in my opinion, is the driving force behind creating charter schools and pushing parents to home school their children in the first place.

Remember keeping a population ignorant, and reliant on faith instead of critical thinking, only benefits those who seek to manipulate public opinion through fear and misinformation.

And exactly which political party does that sound like?

DC's oldest charter school charged with falsifying data concerning disabled students in order to funnel millions into the pockets of operators.

Courtesy of Nonprofit Quarterly:

The burgeoning scandal involving the Options Public Charter School is an all-in-one composite of everything that might go wrong with private, for-profit “educators” trying to make more than a buck from public education under the guise of charter school management. To wit: 

Federal investigators charged that managers of Options diverted millions of dollars to for-profit companies they ran through a Medicaid fraud scheme. The federal investigation is still underway regarding how Options may have exaggerated the number of students with disabilities it enrolled and the services the school provided them in anticipation of federal Medicaid reimbursement. 

Jeremy Williams, a senior official working for the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the entity that oversees charters—and who was responsible for “rooting out financial wrongdoing,” according to the Post—allegedly took $150,000 from the managers of Option Public Charter School to help them “evade oversight and take millions of taxpayer dollars for themselves.” He allegedly funneled inside information to the Options managers, alerting them to “surprise” inspections and other oversight issues. In August, Williams left the board, joining a Virginia-based company he owns, which allegedly received over $100,000 in fees from one of the for-profit companies owned and run by the Options managers. 

A local television news personality, J.C. Hayward of CBS-affiliate WUSA (Channel 9), had an ownership interest in one of the companies contracted to manage Options and was paid $8,500 to attend company board meetings. Hayward was also board chairwoman of Options and signed contracts that provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to Exceptional Education Services (EES), one of the two for-profit companies controlled by the Options managers, in which she was recognized as a part owner, having received 10 percent of the company’s shares. WUSA put Hayward on leave after the allegations about Options arose. 

EES was originally a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit Options, which meant that all EES profits were supposed to go to the school, but in 2012 the Options managers and Hayward transferred EES ownership from Options to themselves personally. 

After the Options managers took full personal ownership of EES, they hired a subcontractor for busing Options students but charged Options a 77 percent markup for the service (a $45,000 markup on top of the subcontractor’s cost of $31,000 a month), plus a $100,000 “ridership bonus.” 

The Options Form 990 for July 1, 2011, through June 30, 2012, indicated that the salary of Options “CEO” Dr. Donna Montgomery was $254,679, a decent salary for a charter school principal. According to the Post, Montgomery allegedly received compensation of $660,000 from Options and EES, plus another $212,000 from the other company the Options executives ran, EEMC. 


And if you think all of THAT was bad, get a load of this comment from the company's lawyer.
 
The lawyer representing the for-profit management company offered the “it’s well known common practice” defense. “These related-party transactions between for-profit management companies and the nonprofit public charter schools are not only appropriate and lawful, but the same arrangements exist with several other public charter schools,” said A. Scott Bolden, though he didn’t identify those other nonprofit charter schools pursuing the Options model.

In other words, EVERYBODY is doing it.

It is no secret that I dislike the concept of charter schools, unless they are located in regions with a serious public school deficit.

They drain tax dollars from public schools, cherry pick the high performing students to inflate their test scores and by comparison make the public schools appear to be performing poorly, and cut corners at every opportunity in order to increase their profit margin.

In other words they are everything that a school is NOT supposed to be.

Any time you put making a profit over providing education, this is going to be the result.

Republicans constantly trumpet the "fact" that private enterprises do a better job of providing services than to government or public entities, but that it really just wishful thinking on their part, and there is little data to back up such a contention.

However on the flip side, we have numerous cases just like this one.

(Original story in the Washington Post.)

Elementary school principal says she was fired for demanding that cafeteria workers stop humiliating students whose lunch accounts were empty.

Courtesy of the Daily Camera: 

Former Peak to Peak elementary principal Noelle Roni said Sunday she was fired by the Lafayette charter school after she demanded that cafeteria workers stop stamping the hands of children – including those who qualified for the free lunch program – when their lunch accounts were empty. 

“As soon as I saw it happening, I was like, ‘No, this is not OK,'” she told the Daily Camera. “The students felt so humiliated, like they had done something wrong. They didn't want to go into the lunchroom any more. It's unethical and disrespectful.” 

Roni's comments, more than two months after her ouster, mark the first time she has addressed the events that she alleges led to her termination. Previously, Roni only had said she was let go in retaliation for "standing up for children's rights and against activities that stigmatized children." 

When asked Sunday about Roni's allegations, Peak to Peak's board of directors said in a written statement that they can't comment on personnel issues, but that “Peak to Peak does not condone or tolerate unlawful retaliation.”

Yeah how dare this professional educator stand up for the children in her school!

What does she think she is some advocate for children or something?

When I worked in public schools no student went hungry. If they did not have the money for lunch, one of us, quite often it was me, would pay of their lunch.

And the cafeteria worker would notify the office if it happened more than once, and they would send a sealed note home with the child, or call the parents to let them know.

I don't know how it is in charter schools, but I can tell you that in my school if anybody had attempted to stamp a child's hand to mark them as unable to pay for lunch they would have been reprimanded by the principal, who absolutely could have counted on being backed up by Carol Comeau our school Superintendent.

This woman deserves to be praised, not punished for taking a stand for her kids.

Two education researchers find that when it comes to providing quality education, public schools still do it best.

Courtesy of the Boston Globe:

Like many in their field, Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, education professors at the University of Illinois, had long taken it as a given that private schools generally outperform public schools. Why would parents shell out thousands of dollars a year in tuition if they weren’t getting more for their money? Moreover, studies in the 1980s and ’90s had apparently settled the matter, showing that private schools produced higher test scores even when accounting for the demographic differences between public and private. 

But more recently, when she was working on a study of math instruction, Sarah Lubienski came across a result she didn’t expect. When she divided the schools she was looking at into public and private categories and controlled for demographics, the schools stacked up quite differently. Public schools seemed to be producing better test scores than private. They were also doing better than charter schools. 

“That,” says her husband and colleague Christopher Lubienski, “is when we started investigating this more intensively.” 

They decided to take a new, in-depth look at nationwide standardized test data. Using results from the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the Lubienskis compared scores from more than 13,000 public, private and charter schools. The private schools did have higher raw scores. But once they controlled for factors like family income, race, and location, they found that public schools were overall getting better results from their students. 

The Lubienskis locate the reason in a surprising place: private-school autonomy. School reform advocates have long argued that more autonomy would allow public schools to innovate, and that letting families choose where to send their kids would force schools to improve their game. But the Lubienskis argue that independence and competition may actually be holding back achievement at private and charter schools. In a new book, “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools,” they outline their findings and walk through the implications. The result may lead education reform advocates to rethink their policies—and parents to question one of their most important decisions.

I don't think it is any secret that I am a huge fan of public schools and have very little confidence in charter, private, or home schooling.

Part of that is because I am somebody who has great confidence in the fact that the public school system has the ability to offer a quality education for EVERYBODY, despite their ethnicity, their financial means, or their geographic location.

I realize of course that education can be impeded by a lack of funds in certain school districts, and that states run by Republicans especially can find their budgets stripped to the bone. But that is a failing not of the system, but of the local political climate.

The public school framework can be highly successful, and with more resources it can easily compete against the alternative schools that have the option of kicking out special needs students, rejecting poorer students, and recruiting the best and brightest in the areas that they serve.

Despite this they really do not do any better, and in fact, according to this study, often much worse.

I think the reason for this competitive edge was best explained by one of the researchers:

A lot of public schools have embraced more state-of-the art approaches that have been really influenced and shaped by experts in the field; for example, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has recommended certain curricular approaches that reflect what we know about how students learn. It’s really apparent when you look at the teaching and the curriculum in the different types of classrooms. The other thing is that public schools have to work under some [legal] requirements, and one of those is they have to hire certified teachers. Teacher certification does make a difference. It’s a good predictor of student achievement.

I do not think there are too many things that piss me off as much as hearing people rag on public school teachers, and that was the case even BEFORE I went to work for the district.

These are people who are dedicated to educating children. Period!

They did not get into the field to get rich, or to use as a springboard to a more lucrative position. They went into the field to make a difference, and the ONLY thing holding them back is the lack of support coming from their communities, the lack of funds, and the political attacks that come their way on an almost consistent basis these days.

These are people to be celebrated, to be supported, to be admired.

They shape our children's future, our country's progress, and our standing in the world.

Don't ever forget that.

Diane Ravitch brilliantly breaks down the "failing schools" paradigm and lays out the true agenda of "education reformers."

Courtesy of Salon:  

Indifferent to history, today’s corporate reformers insist that the public schools are in an unprecedented crisis. They tell us that children must be able to “escape” their “failing public schools.” They claim they are “for the children,” unlike their teachers, who are not for the children. They would have the public believe that children and their teachers are in warring camps. They put “children first” or “students first.” Their policies, they say, will make us competitive and give us “great teachers” and “great schools” in every community. They say they know how to “close the achievement gap,” and they claim to be leading “the civil rights issue of our time.” Their policies, they say, will make our children into “global competitors.” They will protect our national security. They will make America strong again. The corporate reformers play to our anxieties, even rekindling dormant Cold War fears that we may be in jeopardy as a nation if we don’t buy what they are selling. 

The critics want the public to believe that our public schools are a clear and present danger to our society. Unless there is radical change, they say, our society will fall apart. Our economy will disappear. Our national security is in danger. The message is clear: public education threatens all that we hold dear. 

Recognizing that most Americans have a strong attachment to their community schools, the corporate reformers have taken care to describe their aims in pseudo-populist terms. While trying to scare us with warnings of dire peril, they mask their agenda with rhetoric that is soothing and deceptive. Though they speak of “reform,” what they really mean is deregulation and privatization. When they speak of “accountability,” what they really mean is a rigid reliance on standardized testing as both the means and the end of education. When they speak of “effective teachers,” what they mean is teachers whose students produce higher scores on standardized tests every year, not teachers who inspire their students to love learning. When they speak of “innovation,” they mean replacing teachers with technology to cut staffing costs. 

When they speak of “no excuses,” they mean a boot-camp culture where students must obey orders and rules without question. When they speak of “personalized instruction,” they mean putting children in front of computers with algorithms that supposedly adjust content and test questions to the ability level of the student but actually sacrifice human contact with a real teacher. When they speak of “achievement” or “performance,” they mean higher scores on standardized tests. When they speak of “data-driven instruction,” they mean that test scores and graduation rates should be the primary determinant of what is best for children and schools. When they speak of “competition,” they mean deregulated charters and deregulated private schools competing with highly regulated public schools. When they speak of “a successful school,” they refer only to its test scores, not to a school that is the center of its community, with a great orchestra, an enthusiastic chorus, a hardworking chess team, a thriving robotics program, or teachers who have dedicated their lives to helping the students with the highest needs (and often the lowest scores). 

The reformers define the purpose of education as preparation for global competitiveness, higher education, or the workforce. They view students as “human capital” or “assets.” One seldom sees any reference in their literature or public declarations to the importance of developing full persons to assume the responsibilities of citizenship.

Very well said!

I have been beating this drum for almost nine years now.

Those behind school reformation have NO interest in improving schools or helping children, they are all about their version of success, as determined by test results, and making a profit.

I hate the Republican idea that EVERYTHING is better in the hands of the private sector, and education is one of the best examples of why that is simply untrue.

Educating children is a labor of love, not an assembly line job where components are joined together to form a cog prepared to be implanted in a corporate machine.

Children require nurturing, understanding, and patience. Not constant pressure, unreachable expectations, and humiliation for not achieving some arbitrary goal.

The world desperately needs nonconformists. Dreamers, artists, musicians, individuals who may never function at their best in a learning environment focused on high test scores.

But that does not mean they are not worthy of the same attention, and nurturing, that the academic heavyweights are provided. If anything they probably need more.

Public schools understand that, test score factories do not.