This collection has been created to raise awareness about concerns related to the privatization of public education. The page also serves as a research tool to organize online content. The grey funnel shaped icon at the top (in the 'Desktop View' mode) allows for searching by keyword (i.e. entering K12 Inc, KIPP, TFA, Walton, Rocketship, ALEC, Koch, or 'discipline', etc.) will yield specific subsets of articles relevant to each keyword). For posts related to TFA, see http://bit.ly/TFA_Files. For posts related to Rocketship, see http://bit.ly/Rocketship_Files. For posts related to KIPP, see http://bit.ly/KIPP_Files, and for posts related to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), see http://bit.ly/ALEC_Files. Readers are encouraged to explore additional links for further information beyond the text provided on the page. [ [Note: Views presented on this page are re-shared from external websites. The content may not necessarily represent the views nor official position of the curator nor employer of the curator.] For critical perspectives on the next wave of privatization poised to take over public services, see the page on Social Impact Bonds and 'Pay For Success' programs: http://bit.ly/sibgamble. For additional education updates, see http://EduResearcher.com [Links to external site]
"In the News: A number of news items in recent weeks show how powerful money-brokers work inside and outside the law in their war on public education in the United States.
(1) In the State of Washington, a State Supreme Court Judge up for reelection sided with a 6-to-3 court majority in a ruling that declared a state law directing tax dollars to independently run charter schools unconstitutional. To remake the court in their image hundreds of thousands of pro-charter Bill Gates and Paul Allen “Microsoft money” was donated to support his opponents campaign. Fortunately Washington voters rejected the charter judge, this time.
(2) Federal authorities charged seven leaders of the Platinum Partners hedge fund with fraud for operating what was alleged to be a “Ponzi scheme.” They kept the fund afloat by continually using money from new investors to pay off older investors who wanted out. Mark Nordlicht, founder and the chief investment officer for Platinum, also dabbles in operating low-cost religious schools that would benefit from the Trump-Amway DeVos voucher give-away
(3) The New York Times Business pages featured Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Holdings in an article they called “Hedge Fund Math: Heads or Tails, They Win.” It seems that even when his hedge fund performs poorly, Ackman always takes a profitable slice of the pie. According to the Los Angeles Times, Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation has poured millions of dollars into promoting charter schools in their city. Ackman, through his foundation, is also a major donor to private schools and to Teach for America.
(4) Old friends at New York’s Success Academy Charter Network are under investigation by the city’s Comptroller for lax financial oversight, poor record keeping, understating administrative costs, and for billing the Department of Education for special education services they did not provide to students. The charter schools transferred money earmarked for the education of the students to the governing charter network and could not adequately account for what happened to $25 million worth of computers, desks, whiteboards, and other supplies.
(5) Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, writing in the Washington Post, documented the salaries charter school magnets pat themselves. KIPP co-founder David Levin received a compensation package of nearly $475,000 from the KIPP Foundation in 2014. Co-founder Mike Feinberg received $219,596 from KIPP Inc., and another $221,461 from the KIPP Foundation. Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz paid herself $600,000 in 2014 as the CEO of forty-one charter schools. The online for-profit charter company K12 paid its CEO $650,000 in salary plus a series of bonuses that brought his total compensation package to over a million dollars.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics the “total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States amounted to $620 billion in 2012-13, or $12,296 per public school student.” If American schools were an independent country, they would have the 21st largest economy in the world. This is a very big financial pie, certainly big enough to make hedge fund managers drool.
The question is, how would hedge funds profit from the Trump-“Amway” DeVos voucher plan if school dollars follow each student?
The two biggest expenses in running a school are teacher salaries and benefits and the cost of building and maintaining school buildings. The key to making a profit is hiring low-paid poorly trained non-union transient teachers who follow scripted test-aligned lessons, finagling free space in existing schools so the public picks up the cost of the facility, and attracting public dollars.
Let’s take a hypothetical small school in an average American community with a hundred students. Each of those kids is worth about $15,000, so the hundred students would be worth $1.5 million. Not a large amount for hedge funds, but not an insignificant amount for normal human beings.
The average beginning teacher’s salary in the United States is about $40,000 a year. With benefits figured at an additional 50% it would bring their cost to $60,000 per teacher. More experienced and better educated teachers cost significantly more. Average salary is about $60,000 a year and the benefits package would bring cost closer to $100,000 because it now includes higher pension payments.
If our hypothetical school had five beginning teachers for their 100 kids, the cost for teachers would be about $300,000, but if they had a very experienced staff the cost would be closer $500,000. Hiring inexperienced transient teachers alone frees up $200,000 to pay corporate administrators and investors.
But if our charter network operated ten small schools with a thousand students, its gross would be $15 million and the benefit of hiring inexperienced transient teachers alone would be $2 million.
Now if our charter network operated a hundred small schools with ten thousand students we are starting to talk about real money. Its gross would be $150 million and the benefit of hiring inexperienced transient teachers alone would be $20 million.
Michigan, Betsy DeVos’ home state, has 1.5 million children attending public elementary and secondary schools and spends about $11,000 per student. If charter networks operated all of Michigan’s schools, we are talking about $16.5 billion. Now that is real money! The charter network could stash away profits of $5.5 billion just my having high teacher turnover.
But that’s not the only way the hedge fund charter networks and private schools will make money. Inexperienced teachers need scripted lessons, staff development, and supervision, so the hedge fund schools can outsource these activities to subsidiary companies. They can also buy books, tests, supplies, computer software and hardware, and guidance services from their own companies and award maintenance contracts to themselves.
This is how the great philanthropists that run the hedge funds can make money if they succeed in privatizing education in the United States."
By Lisa Graves and Dustin Beilke "Charter schools are big business, even when they are run by "non-profits" that pay no taxes on the revenue they receive from public taxes or other sources.
Take KIPP, which describes itself as a "national network of public schools."
KIPP (an acronym for the phrase "knowledge is power program") operates like a franchise with the KIPP Foundation as the franchisor and the individual charters as franchisees that are all separate non-profits that describe themselves as "public schools."
But how public are KIPP public schools?
Not as public as real or traditional public schools.
New documents discovered on the U.S. Department of Education's website reveal that KIPP has claimed that information about its revenues and other significant matters is "proprietary" and should be redacted from materials it provides to that agency to justify the expenditure of federal tax dollars, before its application is made publicly available.
So what does a so-called public school like KIPP want to keep the public from knowing?"...
"Last September, Gene Demby, a writer with NPR's Code Switch team, penned an essay mourning the loss of public schools in his native Philadelphia. The elementary and middle schools he'd attended as a kid had closed in recent years and were eventually replaced by charters.
"Our schools are signposts in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our communities," Demby said.
As more public schools shutter—Philadelphia has shut down more than 30 of them since 2012, while hard-hit cities such as Detroit haveclosed 204 since 2002—that story increasingly revolves charter schools. And a new study raises intriguing questions about how these schools discipline students and how such rules disproportionately affect black children and students with disabilities.
And while charter schools encompass a broad range of teaching styles—some follow the Montessori model or have an ethnocentric focus, for example—many in urban areas follow a "no excuses" philosophy.
This approach borrows heavily from a "zero tolerance" policing ideology that emphasizes cracking down on minor offenses, including by searching the pockets of teenagers living in low-income neighborhoods for drugs and weapons, to prevent major crimes such as drug dealing down the road.
"No Excuses"
In a classroom setting, this translates into a belief that the smallest infractions, such as passing a note during class, is to be met with an immediate consequence. Depending on the offense, that can escalate from being asked to stand up for the rest of the class to being sent home on an "out-of-school suspension." Schools such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Success Academy, and Uncommon Schools, among others, use various parts of "no excuses" ideology.
"If you don't tuck in your shirt, if you space out for a minute and don't track your teacher with your eyes, if your binder is messy, you lose points," one former KIPP student told me in 2014 of his middle school experience.
"If you lose enough points, you are not allowed to go on field trips or be a part of graduation ceremony. My homeroom teacher was really young and didn't know how to control the classroom. She kicked me out a lot and I was sent home a lot. Some of us called it the Kids in the Public Prison Program," he said.
A famous example of "no excuses" charter school is the Roxbury Preparatory Charter School near Boston that was founded by Secretary of Education John King Jr. in 1999. Roxbury Prep became the highest-performing urban public school in Massachusetts, according to NPR. It is these high test scores—more than any other measure—that charter school advocates cite as a strong argument for replacing traditional schools.
Discipline data
But as more "no excuses" charter schools open, a growing number of critics have been raising serious concerns: Do charters truly admit all students—such as kids who face great challenges like severe disabilities or recent immigrants who don't speak English—like traditional schools do? And do some charters engage in practices that artificially raise kids' test scores?
Yesterday, the UCLA's Center for Civil Rights Remedies published a study that for the first time looked at discipline data for 5,250 charter schools and 95,000 public schools. The study, "Charter Schools, Civil Rights and School Discipline: A Comprehensive Review," focused on how often students were sent home on detention (or "out-of-school suspensions," in education jargon) during the 2011-12 academic year.
Researchers have found that being suspended is a strong indicator that a student will eventually drop out. And students who drop out are much more likely to end up in prison, becoming part of the "school to prison pipeline." This issue disproportionately affects black students (in charter and noncharter schools), who are suspended at a rate three times greater than white students.
Here are the most significant findings in the report:
Suspensions are falling, but there is a disturbing trend. The good news is that early data suggests suspension rates have been declining in many districts since 2012, thanks in part to a recent push by the federal government and various advocates to encourage schools to consider alternative discipline approaches grounded in strong research.
That said, there were troubling exceptions in two states, the authors write. Last year, charters in Connecticut suspended and expelled higher percentages of students in preschools and elementary schools (14 percent) than the public schools did (3 percent). And in Massachusetts, data from 2015 showed that charter schools made up a disproportionate share of the state's highest-suspending schools. Secretary of Education John King's Roxbury Prep had the highest suspension rate of all charter schools in the state: 40 percent of all students and 58 percent of its students with disabilities were suspended in 2014. (Nationally in all schools, that number was 10 percent and 18 percent, respectively, in the 2011-12 academic year.)
Charter schools suspended higher percentages of black students and students with disabilities than traditional schools did. The overall difference between suspension rates in charters versus traditional schools isn't huge: In the 2011-12 academic year, charters suspended 7.8 percent of all students, compared with 6.7 percent for noncharters. But these gaps increase when you look at who is getting suspended: In charter schools, black students and students with disabilities were suspended at higher percentages in all grades than their peers in traditional schools. In middle and high schools, 12 percent more students with disabilities and 2.5 percent more black students were suspended in charters compared with noncharters.
What the authors of the report found especially worrisome was that close to half of all black students at middle and high school charter schools went to one of the 270 schools that was highly segregated (80 percent black) and where the suspension rate for black students was extremely high: 25 percent. Even more disconcerting, 235 charter schools suspended more than 50 percent of their enrolled students with disabilities, the researchers wrote.
The patterns among some charter schools of having high test scores and very high suspension rates prompted the authors of the report to conclude, "Although beyond the scope of this report, the possibility certainly exists that some charter schools are artificially boosting their test scores or graduation rates by using harsh discipline to discourage lower-achieving youth from continuing to attend."
Charter schools may benefit from another advantage that potentially boosts test scores: so-called "selection bias." Many scholars have pointed out, the report says, that since charter schools require parents to apply for a charter or enter lotteries, the schools typically attract more students who have engaged parents, or who are higher achieving or better behaved. A 2015 study by the University of California-Berkeley showed that in fact students who entered charter schools in Los Angeles were already higher achieving, as measured by their standardized test scores, than their peers in traditional schools.
Charter schools teach fewer students with disabilities and fewer kids who are learning to speak English. While the report found that charter schools enroll higher percentages of black students and poor students than traditional schools, the researchers also found that charters tend to have smaller percentages of students with learning disabilities (ranging from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism to kids in wheelchairs) and kids just learning to speak English. Yet students who live in poverty are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and to be learning English, so researchers were surprised to find that these two groups were underrepresented at charters. This data raised additional concerns with the study authors about enrollment and suspension policies in charter schools.
Many charter schools don't suspend a lot of students, and some "no excuses" followers are reforming their discipline tactics.The report found that among middle schools and high schools, only 332 schools were classified as "high-suspending" (meaning these schools suspended more than 25 percent of any group). With elementary grades, the 240 high-suspending charter schools were far outnumbered by the 486 lower-suspending schools (those with a suspension rate around 10 percent or less).
And while some charter schools such as the widely known Success Academy have publicly defended their suspension policies, others like KIPP are embracing reform. Just last month, many KIPP school leaders at a national meeting attended sessions on the "restorative justice" approach to school discipline—which uses misbehavior and conflict as opportunities for self-reflection and learning with the help of a trained coach—as an alternative to "zero tolerance" discipline. And California and Connecticut have recently prohibited the use of suspensions for minor infractions for young students in all schools in those states.
The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act now requires that states include many measures in their school grading formulas—not just standardized test scores—including "school climate" indicators such as suspensions.
"Currently, half of all states do not report discipline data broken up by race and disability to the public on their state site, even though every state is required to do so every year," Daniel J. Losen, one of the authors of the report and the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, told Mother Jones.
As Demby reflected in his essay on the past and future of public education, "It's no accident that local schools are battlegrounds for so many of our most heated, pitched battles over race and place in America." There are big questions embedded in how we decide to educate kids and how we allocate public resources to schools, he added. "Who gets to go to the best of them?" he asked.
“No excuses” charter schools have become a prominent feature of modern school reform. What exactly are they? This is how Joan Goodman, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the school’s Teach For America program, defined them in this post:
These schools start with the belief that there’s no reason for the large academic gaps that exist between poor minority students and more privileged children. They argue that if we just used better methods, demanded more, had higher expectations, enforced these higher expectations through very rigorous and uniform teaching methods and a very uniform and scripted curriculum geared to being successful on high-stakes tests, we can minimize or even eradicate these large gaps, high rates of drop outs and the academic failures of these children. To reach these objectives, these schools have developed very elaborate behavioral regimes that they insist all children follow, starting in kindergarten. Submission, obedience, and self-control are very large values. They want kids to submit. You can’t really do this kind of instruction if you don’t have very submissive children who are capable of high levels of inhibition and do whatever they’re told.
Here is an open letter from Ramon Griffin, the former dean of students at a New Orleans “no excuses” charter school, who urges teachers and staff at such schools to question the model’s social and emotional costs on young people. Griffin was also a charter school teacher and a juvenile probation and detention officer. He is currently working on his doctorate in educational administration at Michigan State University. Contact him at griff519@msu.edu, or visit his website.
This appeared on the website of Jennifer Berkshire, freelance journalist and public education advocate who worked for six years editing a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts. She gave me permission to run this post. Here is Ramon Griffin’s open letter to teachers and staff of no-excuses charter schools:
Dear You:
You were selected to teach at your school because of your intelligence, spunk, tenacity, vigor and, most of all, your passion for public education. You are a risk-taker. You have a can-do attitude with swag to match. You believe that every child has the capacity to achieve academically and are committing your life to ensuring that you affect change in every student you encounter. Your dedication to ensuring that traditionally marginalized students receive a first-class education is commendable. But do you know how much power you hold? Do you truly understand the “no excuses” school culture that you are part of? Do you know the psychological and emotional costs that the “no excuses” model has on students of color? Furthermore, do you care to know?
Two years ago, I wrote a blog post entitled “Colonizing the Black Natives: Reflections from a former New Orleans Charter School Dean of Students.” I started the piece by asking if some charters’ practices were new forms of colonial hegemony. It is vital to add that while I was employed at the school, this thought never crossed my mind. My writings were taken by some charter management administrators and staff as an “attack” instead of an opportunity critically engage and refine, deconstruct and reconstruct practices that are doing more harm than good. This time around, I’m hoping to encourage teachers and staff at “no excuses” charter schools to acknowledge what is transpiring in their schools so that we can begin to push back against these practices and transform our schools.
I’ll start by offering a few examples of my own. When I chased young black ladies to see if their nails were polished, or if they had added a different color streak to their hair, or when I followed young men to make sure that their hair wasn’t styled naturally, I could have been critically engaging my administrative peers on why these practices were the law at our school—and how exactly they contributed to getting students into and through college.
When my school punished young people for not having items school leaders knew their families couldn’t afford, I could have been pushing back against policies that effectively punished students for being poor.
When we pulled students out of their classrooms for countless hours for minor infractions even as we drilled them constantly on the importance of instruction time, we could have been taking our own advice.
Or when we suspended students from school for numerous days, we could have been providing alternatives that disciplined them but kept them in school.
I recently spoke on a panel in Nashville about the psychological and emotional costs that “no excuses” school cultures have on students of color. Afterwards, I was approached by a young white male who told me that he couldn’t understand why parents of color complained about “no excuses” school cultures when they’d chosen to enroll their children in the schools. But the idea that parents should not complain because they purposely enrolled their children in these schools is flawed.
Parents, whether they’re in Nashville or New Orleans, desire that their children attend schools that will provide them a rigorous and first-class education. They’re sold a school culture “package” that claims to bring out the best in every student, challenging them to be creative, take risks and think critically. Yet too often, once the package is unwrapped and a culture of compliance is unveiled, students and families feel that they have been sold a dream.
Is it realistic to expect parents to inherently grasp the psychological and emotional costs of the “no excuses” model when many of the teachers and school disciplinarians who enforce these policies don’t have a deep understanding of their effects either? In my experience, staff members are trained to follow the rules regarding discipline and school culture without questioning school leaders about why rules and practices exist in the first place. The idea of critically engaging administrators at these schools seems to intimidate staff, who fear potential backlash for speaking out against culture and disciplinary practices they don’t agree with. They don’t know how to push back critically and meaningfully without being disciplined or even losing their jobs.
Whatever the reason, the lack of inquiry by and pushback from highly educated professionals regarding the questionable socialization practices and disciplinary policies of “no excuses” schools is striking. Even more astonishing is that the same things young people of color are punished for in these schools, their teachers were probably raised and encouraged to value. As students themselves, they were probably given the opportunity to be critical, to take risks, to disagree, to not conform, to ask for clarity, to push back, to show emotion and to be relentless about finding their own truth.
Many of these educators are no doubt raising their own children to do similar things. But as teachers and staff at “no excuses” charter schools, they are trained to instill the opposite values in youth of color, even punishing students for being critical or showing emotion. Why? I ask this question, not as a researcher or as a doctoral student, but as a colleague who has navigated the same terrain that you are currently treading. I understand—trust me. I am truly concerned that we are not asking the right questions. Why has “no excuses” been celebrated, packaged and sold to people of color as the prescription for educational and career excellence? Why is it “no excuses” for some and not for all?
Ask yourself if you would allow your own children to be treated the way that some of your students are being treated. If the answer is “no,” then there is no excuse for complying with rules and policies you’d never tolerate where your own children or loved ones are concerned. Your students are young people, not robots. They are human children and sometimes their circumstances do warrant exceptions to the rules. Sometimes their excuses are legitimate.
For example, a student who shows up out of uniform because he doesn’t have a washer/dryer at home has a legitimate excuse.
A kid whose family has been transient and is currently homeless has a legitimate excuse to not be in proper uniform. The school should be aware of the situation and at least attempt to provide clothing for the young person.
A kid who has three younger siblings he has to care for, clean up, help with homework, protect and teach because they live with their elderly grandmother who was thrust into legal guardianship because his mother was abusive and they never met their father has a legitimate excuse.
A kid who has witnessed his mother being shot by his father has a legitimate excuse to not want to walk on a line, talk to anybody or participate in class.
A kid who hasn’t eaten a nutritious meal in weeks, but makes it to school every day has a legitimate excuse to feel tired, to not want to participate in an activity or to look at an adult in the eye while shaking their hand. But what happens at most “no excuses” schools is that students get detention or worse because there are no excuses.
Is this what John Dewey meant when he described school as “the social center” of the community and as a site for building a democratic society? Are “no excuses” schools preparing citizens, training workers or preparing individuals to compete for social positions? If the answers to these questions aren’t clear, it may be time to seriously re-evaluate the goals of your school.
Lastly, I believe that it is time for a thorough examination of the psychological and emotional impact of “no excuses” policies and school cultures. It is time for everyone involved to start asking some critical questions. Stop being fearful. Let your voices be heard.
Ask questions, push back, critically engage, and transform your school and your workplace."...
There's a revolving door between the private sector and what's left of the public. Take for example this week's hiring by the nearly-collapsed Philadelphia Public Schools, of TFA alum Kendra-Lee Rosati as director of recruitment -- whatever that it. Rosati will pull down $90K to start in this newly-created slot in the bureaucracy.
Rosati's last job was in Oklahoma with Teach for America, where her title was managing director of talent strategy and people experience, according to her Facebook page. She's also worked with KIPP Charter Schools as director of growth strategy from September 2012 until last July. Don't you love her job titles? It like her patrons told her, "call yourself whatever", when she printed her new business cards.
Remember, Philly schools have been decimated this past year, with dozens of school closings in black and Latino communities, thousands of teachers and staff (including nearly every school counselor) being fired, while private schools, privately-run charter schools and prisons being fed millions in public funds, diverted from public schools in Gov. Corbett's state budget."...
By Chad Sommer, January 6th, 2014 on Edushyster.com. (Photo credit by Sarah Jane Rhee of loveandstrugglephotos.com).
(Selected quotes)... "TFA and the privately managed, non-union charter schools that its corps members often staff are adored by the corporate class. Elites shower both TFA and charter schools with private contributions from their own tax-exempt foundations, as well as taxpayer dollars funneled by their courtiers in Washington and statehouses across the country. Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, The Walton Foundation (Walmart), The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Eli Broad Foundation, and a small army of billionaire hedge fund managers are just a few representatives of the corporate class that bankrolls TFA and the various networks of privately managed (but taxpayer funded) charter schools. Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA is even married to the president of KIPP, one of the country’s largest networks of charter schools.
In Chicago, where I participated in TFA, the organization maintains its own extremely close partnerships with privately managed charter schools. Their relationships are so close, in fact, that earlier this year, after the Chicago Public School system closed forty-nine traditional, unionized public schools, claiming the schools were “underutilized,” it was revealed that TFA was working behind the scenes with a number of privately-managed, non-union charter school operators to open fifty-two new charter schools in Chicago over the next five years.
The alliance between TFA and charter schools is cemented by an arrangement that few people know about outside of the organization. The teacher placement policy of TFA explicitly states in bold letters, “It is our policy that corps members accept the first position offered to them.” The effective result of this policy means that corps members have no bargaining position to negotiate wages or benefits, meaning that whatever offer a school makes, the corps member must accept it. TFA provides a rather benign explanation for this arrangement, claiming that it allows for the quick and efficient placement of hundreds of corps members into teaching positions in each market. However, in practice, this mandate is a lynchpin of the corporate class’ privatization plan for education."...
By Julian Vasquez Heilig: "I am not of the ilk that charters are all bad news (See all of Cloaking Inequity’s post on charter schools here). As I have mentioned previously, I am a charter school parent, currently serve on a charter school board, and was an instructor at an Aspire charter school. I realize that I have prominent friends and allies that are 100% anti-charter. I am okay with those feelings because I have serious concerns with equity in the charter movement.
Here in the Lone Star State I am unsure if there is a community more enamored with charters than San Antonio. This love affair has been spurred by millions of dollars in donations by the Brackenridge Foundation and other venture philanthropist involved in “Choose to Succeed.” Previously on Cloaking Inequity I have taken aim at corporate charter chains that are invading San Antonio and other communities because of my concerns with their equity for low-SES students (See Great Hearts, BASIS, and KIPP). In fact, I began Cloaking Inequity so that I could respond to a KIPP press release criticizing our peer-reviewed study about the attrition of African American students from charters in Texas (“Work Hard, Be Nice?”: A Response to KIPP).
ABSTRACT from Journal of Education Policy - "In this paper, we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA’s key role in developing and connecting personnel, political support, and financial backing for charter reform. Next we examine how the networks unfold at a local level by zooming in on a case study of New Orleans. By mapping out these connections, we hope to provide a foundation for further investigation of how this network affects policies."...
For main journal publication page, click on title or image above. For pdf of article, email authors of the manuscript or curator of this collection.
"The KIPP Model is both unustainable and inhumane in numerous ways that I document in a new book that examines inner workings of "no excuses" charter schools. Both teachers and students are being used, abused, and discarded in order to benefit a paternalistic corporate ideology that advantages powerful elites at the expense of the most vulnerable children. Parents should be up in arms.
When teachers with little teacher preparation or child development training and even less understanding of disadvantaged children's needs are commanded by school CEOs to keep children in a psychological lockdown state and laser focused on raising test scores by any means necessary, abused children often result. The abusers are rarely apprehended, and if they are, they are almost never prosecuted.
After earlier KIPP abuse incidents this school year in New Orleans and St. Louis, a Denver KIPP is the latest venue for, yet, another bruised and battered KIPP student. It is time for the white elites who support this dehumanizing form of education for the children of the poor to share the liability for this kind of predictable outcome that has become commonplace, even though most incidents go unreported to parents or police.
Wow! Check out the fancy website for National School Choice Week. It’s polished, it’s colorful; it features kids of all races with bright smiling faces. They even have their own dance! The videos are tearjerkers, reminiscent, in emotional value, of the highly touted documentary film, Waiting for Superman, which propelled school choice advocates into the national conversation back in 2010.
I must confess that when I first watched that movie, seeing the tears of kids who lost the charter lottery and were doomed to attend terrible public schools hit me right in the gut. It struck me as so unfair that they’d have to miss out on… hold on a second.
Something didn’t feel quite right. Was I being manipulated? Why did those kids and their parents have to gather in an auditorium to be publicly devastated by not being selected for their choice school, anyway? Wouldn’t a letter or email have done the trick?
Turns out, I was totally taken in by a slick, well-made film that played a bit loose with the facts about school choice. Given how much Americans love the idea of choice, I’m sure I’m not the only one. So in honor of National School Choice Week, here are a few actual facts about charter schools you may want to consider before jumping on the bandwagon.
1. There are no data that support the idea that charter schools are superior to public schools. Even using data from the high-stakes tests school choice folks admire so much. According to Data First, an initiative of the Center for Public Education, on math assessments 17% of kids in charter schools perform significantly better than their peers in public schools. But 37% perform significantly worse. For the rest (46%), scores were comparable. According to a national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), “less than one hundredth of one percent (<0.01 percent) of the variation in test performance in reading is explainable by charter school enrollment.” Not exactly proof of a winning formula, no matter how you slice it.
2. Unlike public schools, charters can pick and choose their students. Children with special needs are not chosen. Children with behavior problems are expelled. According to Julian Vasquez Heilig, “KIPP and other charters faced a federal lawsuit in New Orleans for not serving special populations and/or doing so poorly.” According to Diane Ravitch in her book, The Myth of the Charter School, some charter schools “counsel out” or expel students just before state testing day. Lower-performing students tend to mysteriously drop out. Throws that “better performing” 17% into serious question, doesn’t it?
3. Children who are better resourced with more family support are the winners in the school choice game. Children from disorganized families don’t even enter the lottery. Children with significant special needs are not well served in charter schools that lack the appropriate resources. The privatization of our schools puts public schools at a huge disadvantage, stranding the least advantaged and disabled in underfunded, under-resourced schools. Much like Lady Liberty, public schools welcome all who end up on their shores:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me….”
Just don’t send them to a charter school.
4. It’s family income, stupid. Ravitch and many others have pointed out numerous studies linking income and test scores. One study demonstrates how SAT scores favor students from wealthy families. Another study at Washington State University confirms the correlation between parental income and ACT and SAT scores, while a different article on the widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poorshows how the gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, though good teachers are important and account for 10-20% of student achievement scores, University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber has shown that nonschool factors such as family income account for 60% of achievement. That’s a mighty high percentage to try to overcome with uniforms and sustained eye-contact.
5. Public schools, in some communities, are doing just fine. The idea that our schools are falling behind and our students will not be able to compete globally is, according to a number of education experts, off base. Diane Ravitch, among others, has written that the notion that American students’ scores on international tests have declined is a myth. A recent article by Ken Bernstein highlights the point that poverty is the real issue, noting that, “US schools with less than 25% of their children in poverty perform as well as any nation [on international comparisons], and those with 10% or less of their children in poverty outperform Finland.” And The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss agrees:
“It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do.”
Again: it’s the poverty. And privatizing schools won’t cure it.
Circling back to that fancy website with its cute dance, I want to encourage us to be more critical in our evaluations of what is good for our children. Yes, it makes charter schools and voucher programs look shiny, happy and successful. But it’s worth remembering that School Choice Week is basically a giant commercial, paid for by a huge list of corporate sponsors. It’s pushing a product. Like all ads, I know it is a misrepresentation designed to make me want it. But just because I can buy it, doesn’t make it worth having. And I’m not buying."...
Some public schools do the same and worse but have a catch 31 free government its not a crime on the book to hold them accountable criminally for their actions no matter how long. Just to say not all Charter Schools or Public Schools are the same
"Julian Vasquez Heilig joined the show State of Education on 1.2.2016 to discuss Teach For America on 1030 AM KVOI The Voice. Anonymous parent of a Teach For America corps member also joined the show.
Topics and questions addressed: * How much taxpayer money does Teach For America spend? * Do Teach For America teachers stay in the classroom? * How much money do the Walmart heirs spend on Teach For America? * Should Teach For America privately control the provision of teachers for communities? * Why do Teach For America alums go into politics and political jobs? * A parent talks about the "caring and wonderful" but "floundering" Teach For America teachers in her daughter's school. * Parent discusses going from "excitement" to "devastation" about her daughter's participation in Teach For America. * Could charters in Chicago, Louisiana and other cities survive without the temporary labor provided by Teach For America? * Parent discussed the "militaristic" approach of the KIPP charter school that her daughter (TFA) taught in. * Do charter schools actually perform better than traditional public schools? * Caller asked whether it would be a better idea for kids to teach kids instead of teachers teaching kids. * Does Teach For America punish corp members and alums (backlash) for speaking out?"...
By Jim Horn "You have heard about KIPP's padded cells for kindergartners and KIPP school leaders putting garbage cans on children's heads and making them bark like dogs, and you've heard about children forced to sit on the floor for days until they have earned desks, but now comes, yet, another KIPP abuse strategy.
On VIB (Visitor in Building) days, at least one KIPP school puts up to 30 problem students in the empty basement for hours until the visiting investors, dignitaries, or politicians have left the building. Also during this time, no class changes occur, even though visits might last three hours. Children are, in essence, in lockdown mode in their classrooms so that no infraction or non-compliant behavior during class change may be seen by outsiders.
During a recent interview with a former KIPP teacher, we had this exchange:
TEACHER: . . . my experience was so different from my close friends who were employed at different KIPP schools. But the people that were at my specific school seemed to have a similar experience to me, which is terrible. But I have, like I said, I have a lot of close friends that are still involved in KIPP. . . . but I think that there’s a lot swept under the rug as far as things that also aren’t so great.
JH: And what do you see as swept under the rug?
TEACHER: You know, there’s just cultural things like, I can only speak to what I experienced in my day-to-day, and so that was a lot of yelling, a lot of berating students, a lot of, you know, physically confronting students.
We used to have a special schedule when we had visitors in the building. For instance, sometimes we’d have, you know, investors or big-wigs walking through the building. And so we would have a separate schedule where we would pick out all the behavior issue kids and take them down into the basement for the duration of the visitors’ visit, to kind of keep them out of the way. So you know, that’s one very, like, clear example of sweeping something under the rug.
JH: Can you tell me how that worked?
TEACHER: Yeah. So in the morning, we would receive an email or a special schedule that said VIB schedule, Visitor in Building schedule. And it would basically list all of the students that needed to be in the basement area, and it would tell us the specific times that they were supposed to be there. And we would also, for instance, we would not transition from class to class if there was a visitor, because the transitions from class to class would sometimes be, you know, kids are kids, and so they would sometimes not listen, or they would run, or whatever the case is. And our administration didn’t want the visitors to see anything less than perfection. And so we would hold students in the classroom when normally they’d be transitioning from class to class. So the visitors didn’t get the impression that the school was anything less than very well managed.
INTERVIEWER: Right. So what was in the basement? What did the students do in the basement?
TEACHER: That’s a great question. I never, fortunately I guess, was never in charge of managing those students. But in the basement, what was down there was just, you know, there was basically nothing. I mean, there was a carpeted area. And I don’t know what they did down there, to be honest.
JH: And how many students were sent down there?
TEACHER: I believe our school had about 300 students when I was there. And it probably, you know, less than 30.
JH: And these students were selected how? Based on what?
TEACHER: From my impression, it was that they were, based on their behavior. So if they were a student that acted out frequently, they would be sent down into the basement for the duration of the visitor’s stay.
JH: OK, so these were called Visitor in Building days? VIB?
TEACHER: Yeah, VIB schedule.
JH: OK. And what was the longest time that you remember staying in a class, that you weren’t allowed to switch?
TEACHER: Two or three hours, depending on the visitors and how long they would be there."...
ABSTRACT from Journal of Education Policy - "In this paper, we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA’s key role in developing and connecting personnel, political support, and financial backing for charter reform. Next we examine how the networks unfold at a local level by zooming in on a case study of New Orleans. By mapping out these connections, we hope to provide a foundation for further investigation of how this network affects policies."...
For main journal publication page, click on title or image above. For pdf of article, email authors of the manuscript or curator of this collection.
"A tiny padded room at KIPP Star Washington Heights Elementary School was a real-life nightmare for two young boys who were repeatedly detained in the tot cells, the Daily News has learned.
The students, who were enrolled in kindergarten and first grade at the highly regarded charter school, were both removed by their parents in the past two weeks after they suffered anxiety attacks as a result of their confinement.
“He was crying hysterically,” said Teneka Hall, 28, a full-time Washington Heights mom whose son, Xavier, was rushed to the hospital after he panicked and wet himself while he was holed up in the padded room. “It’s no way to treat a child.”
The school’s so-called “calm-down” room is small, about the size of a walk-in closet, said Hall, who visited it with her son at the start of the school year. It’s empty, but for a soft mat lining the floor and a single light on the ceiling."
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