U.S. ED Gives Billions More for Segregation Than Diversity

After incentivizing segregation with billions in spending for charter schools over the past 7 years, Obama's 2017 proposed budget gives a one-time pittance ($120 million) in comparison to encourage socioeconomic diversity in schools.

Part C of the new states rights version of ESEA "includes federal funding for charter schools, which would increase the annual commitment from $253 million in 2015 to $300 million by 2020."  All of that comes on top of the $157 million that Arne Duncan arranged as his parting gift to the charter industry last September.

Beware the Corporate Media Spin on the Obama Adminstration's Change of Course on Standardized Testing

By Ken Derstine @ Defend Public Education!

October 25, 2015

Latest link update at the end of the article is October 29, 2015

On October 24, 2015 the Obama administration announced a shift of its education policy when it announced a change in the Department of Education’s position on standardized testing. As reported by Kate Zernike in The New York Times, 

Specifically, the administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to “reduce over-testing” as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools.

This is being promoted in the corporate media as a dramatic shift in the Obama administrations support for standardized testing. It should be greeted with a high degree of skepticism and caution, however. The over two-decade siege on public education codified into education policy by No Child Left Behind followed by Race to the Top is not going to suddenly be scaled down in one day. There are too many corporate interests, such as Pearson, the Gates Foundation and others, which have made standardized testing the center of their method of privatizing public education, for the corporate agenda to be given up.

According to The New York Times article, the change in policy was prompted by a new survey from the Council of Great City Schools. The Council is made up of 68 large school districts with enrollment of over 35,000 students.

In its press release, Student Assessments in Public Schools Not Strategic, Often Redundant, The Council says,

The average student in America’s big-city public schools will take roughly 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and high school graduation, a new study shows.

The average of roughly eight standardized tests per year consumes between 20 and 25 hours each school year and frequently produces overlapping results. There were about 401 test titles being used in the nation’s largest urban school systems in the 2014-15 school year and students sat over 6,500 times for tests across the 66 school systems studies, the research found.

The two year study, believed to be the most comprehensive ever undertaken to ascertain the true extent of mandatory testing in the nation’s schools, was conducted by the Council of Great City Schools at the request of its board of directors, which wanted a full picture of the testing practices in its big-city school systems. The Council’s board requested the inventory in 2013 to better inform the public debate and to shape needed reforms.

The Council of Great City Schools met with Obama on March 16, 2015. In its press release the Obama administration gave an outline of the policy which it announced October 24, 2015.

The October 24^th announcement comes at a time when a bipartisan Congressional conference committee is trying to come up with a revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The rewrite is getting lost in the chaos on Capitol Hill and this must be factored in as the reason for this announcement now. The Republicans would like a bill that would implement competency-based learning and online education based on an ALEC-inspired return to state control of education. The Democrats, on the other hand, had been promoting an increase in standardized testing as a continuation of the neoliberal education agenda started by President Bill Clinton, and disguised as the next civil rights issue.

In its press release, the Council of Great City Schools concludes,

The Council released preliminary recommendations with the report that call for retaining current annual tests in core subjects but eliminating tests that are either redundant or low quality.

In addition, the Council announced that it will launch a commission of researchers, school leaders, teachers and parents to develop “a more thoughtful approach to assessing the academic needs of urban schoolchildren.” Casserly indicated that commission chairs would be named in the next two weeks.

Since the Obama administration is responding to the Council’s report (and it may be coordinating this report to promote its agenda), this must be carefully watched to see if the Council is taking an independent stand in defense of public schools or if this is a fine-tuning of the neoliberal agenda for privatizing public schools. Who they put on the commission they are forming will tell us a lot about the course they and the Obama administration are taking.

As David Greene points out,

If, according to the Council of great city Schools, the average amount of time devoted to taking mandated tests during the 2014-15 school year was 2.34 percent of school time for the average 8th grader—the grade with the most mandated testing time, what indeed is the Pres offering? A real reduction of .34%?

A real reduction of .34 percent? Seriously?

Two percent is 20 hours of instruction time given to standardized testing.

As always, the corporate media plays a crucial role in framing people’s perception of these developments. The New York Times article announcing the changes in the Obama administrations policy on standardized testing is a case in point. Nowhere in the article is the growing Opt Out movement mentioned as a factor. Nowhere to be found are teachers, or the huge education blogging community that has been at the forefront of opposition to corporate education reform, or university professors who have been increasingly speaking out about market-driven education policies.   

Instead we get comments from corporate supporters of standardized testing like Michel Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a strong promoter of charter schools and the Common Core. After years of peddling standardized tests, an obviously prepared-with-talking-points Petrilli said,

There’s plenty of agreement that there’s too much testing going on.” But, he added, “we have to be careful, as with anything federal, that it doesn’t lead to unintended consequences.

The biggest mischaracterization of the “mounting bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s schools” in the New York Times article, however, is the nature of the opposition to standardized testing. The reporter says,

Teachers’ unions, which had led the opposition on the left to the amount of testing, declared the reversal of sorts a victory. “Parents, students, educators, your voice matters and was heard,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

This is corporate media spin of the nature of the grassroots opposition to standardized testing and Common Core. This opposition is not coming from the leadership of the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association. Though Randi Weingarten makes milk-toast statements about standardized testing and Common Core to play her role as spokeswoman for teachers for the corporate media, behind the scenes her role is quite different. Far from being “left”, she collaborates with the right-wing, anti-public education American Enterprise Institute and promotes the Gates and Broad agenda of corporate education reform. See these posts on Defend Public Education! for detailed reporting on how she has been collaborating with these interests to promote standardized testing and using those tests for teacher evaluation.

The Broad Foundation and the Unions

Talking to the Choir: AEI panels discuss their attack on public education

Turning “Collaboration” Into a Bad Word

Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist – Part 1

Randi Weingarten: Sleight of Hand Artist – Part 2

There can be no doubt that it is the grassroots opposition to standardized testing and Common Core that has led to this change of tactics on standardized testing by the Obama administration. Hundreds of parent organizations in schools across the country have been garnering increasing support for opting out of standardized tests and for a return to community control of schools. Rank-and-file teachers through such organizations as United Opt Out and BATs, have been organizing independently to fight the disastrous impact of corporate education reform.

We must be abolitionists when it comes to standardized testing. There can be no more talk about “reducing the amount of testing.” The Obama administration has adopted this characterization by some of the opponents of corporate education reform to defuse the Opt Out movement. It is promoting the same corporate agenda it always has.  

Standardized testing is NOT to the benefit of students, parents, or teachers. They get no information from standardized tests that is useful to the student in improving their education. The students and teachers never see what students got right or wrong on a test and what should be remediated in their education. The sole purpose of corporate standardized tests is to rank students and schools in order to advance a privatization of public schools agenda.

Also see:

Peg with Pen: U.S. Dept. of Ed. and Educational WarfarePeg with Pen – October 29, 2015

Jesse Hagopian on the Obama Administration’s Change of View on testing
Diane Ravitch’s blog – October 29, 2015

U.S. student performance slips on national test
The Washington Post – October 28, 2015

NAEP: Further Evidence of Reformy Failure
Curmudgucation – October 28, 2015

“Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute has gone so far as to call the new NAEP scores “heartbreak”.

For Whom the Bell Tolls; It Tolls For Rhee
Gary Rubinstein’s blog – October 28, 2015

The flip side of testing madness. ‘You will test only 2% of the time.’
Mike Klonsky’s blog – October 27, 2015

The Correct Number of Standardized Tests
Curmudgucation – October 26, 2015

Standardized Tests are a Form of Racial Profiling
Common Dreams – October 26, 2015

“Test refusal is refusing racial profiling and saying yes to dignity and anti-racist, humanizing schooling.”

Where did the Obama administration’s 2 percent cap on standardized tests come from? Valerie Strauss says you won’t believe it.
The Answer Sheet @ The Washington Post – October 26, 2015

Hillary Clinton Endorses Obama’s Reductions In School Testing Wrought By No Child Left Behind Education Law She Voted For
International Business Times - October 26. 2015

What will Obama’s new testing plan mean for American students?
PBS NewHour – October 25
An interview with NYT reporter Kate Zernike whose NYT article was quoted in the above post.

Adding Value to the Worthless?

Why Embrace 19^th Century Assessments for the 21^st Century?

Guest Commentary by Stephen Stollmack

Public education is part of the conceptual framework of this country. Most accept the basic format of a homeroom teacher keeping the younger children all or most of the day, phasing into different teachers, each one responsible for one of the menu of subjects laid out for every child based on his or her age.  Most probably recognize that their children are facing an environment much different from the one they grew up – with ‘high-stakes testing, on-line classes, entirely new Standards for developing classroom modules based on significant advances in the knowledge-base for most every subject and increases in class sizes due to budget cuts and the list goes on and on.  At the same time, college costs are going through the roof while we are hearing that approximately 25% of college graduates can’t find full-time jobs. Even parents who are aware of these changes are unsure of how education needs to change to ‘keep up with these times.’  

High dropout rates, budget cuts, and pressures being exerted by the government (to convince parents that the corporate owned or controlled school model is better) all combine to make taking sides difficult.  Further, with their jobs demanding more and more time and effort, most parents find it hard to keep informed on complex education issues, such as:  implications for teaching of what science has recently uncovered about how humans learn; the arguments for and against privatization; where to draw the line against further increases in class-size; the pros and cons of basing teacher pay and job security on how their students answered some multiple choice questions; or the use of computerized online course modules with technical assistants to replace teachers.  

Making all these issues more difficult is the fact, as stated by Robert Freeman,[1] that we still have not resolved the struggle between the two dominant education models:

One model views schools as a process of cultural birth, of bringing forth a new generation of children who will carry on - replicate - the culture. The other model views schools as a machine, an industrial process not unlike an assembly line. Its purpose is to mass produce "factors of production" -- well trained obedient inputs that can be used in the manufacture of wealth.

The government (at federal, state and district levels) is exerting pressures on schools to accept the latter model -- the Industrial Model view.  One’s judgment, among these two models, depends on how one views the future. For example, information that robots are going to do most of the ‘work’ (even diagnostic tasks) in the future has to affect how you feel about which education model is more appropriate.  With the cost of College being so high, people with moderate to low incomes have to consider whether the expense is worth it especially when the Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that most new jobs will not require a college degree.[2] One has to wonder; ‘what kind of jobs are they thinking about for the next generation of HS graduates and what will the future job market look like?’

The view (of the future) that I see includes:  

·       Further consolidation of companies which produce and distribute the goods (we feel to be essential for our lives) into internationally centered production and distribution centers;[3]

·       Growth of Human Resource (HR) management companies that ‘mine’ and manage the stream of HS and College graduates (directing them -- according to their grades and test scores -- to one or the conglomerates they contract with); these HR companies will also link to and network Post Secondary Schools with districts that feed them HS graduates and they will grow based on their reputation for obtaining and interpreting student test score data from state and district run databases (such as those being ‘rolled out’ by the about forty some Race-to-the-top (RttT) grant states).

·       Centralized multi-national banks with the conversion of all currency into a unified credit system;

·       Databases maintained by every state populated with test scores, classes taken, grades, health records, DNA profiles, incarceration and arrest records, and psychological and socioeconomic data for each student;

·       More and more collusion between the private sector and local school districts.

All this suggests how difficult it is to guess what our president is thinking about by supporting all this testing on one hand while admonishing teachers not to ‘teach to the test’ on the other. 

I have puzzled over this question for months going through periods where I would rant at his image and swear that I was not going to vote for him.  But I kept coming back to the feeling that he was a good person who must identify with the terrible plight of young black and brown k-12 students, who obviously (by virtue of his warnings of about not teaching to the test) knew that too much testing and the use of test results to evaluate teachers, at the very least, has and will continue to foster cheating, deterioration of student views of the value of their education, to high levels of tension and a to a general reduction in the likelihood of producing graduates capable of rational and logical problem-solving thinking or the confidence to voice or logically test their own intuitive solutions. 

Then I began to think that maybe he sees testing as a chance to level the playing field at least to the point where it might be easier (for the more challenged kids) to move on to the next level (relying on rote memory rather than the ability to reason, abstract and interpret relationships into the future or to different settings) and let the ones who want and can do better find their own way.  I tried but I could not put the words together and I kept falling into traps, and ending up questioning whether or not I was showing signs of ‘racist’ beliefs.

Then I read Deborah Meier’s December 26, 2012 piece[4] quoting material she had written 31-years ago:

“The task of returning testing to its proper place will be difficult….Our belief in democracy–that normal every day people can make sense of their world and learn to make decisions about it– is at stake…There…is arising a renewed interest in educational tracking…and in new legislative proposals to support private education… All these anti-egalitarian trends….are nourished by the renewed focus on testing.”

This wonderful quote continues:

“To the ideologues of the New Right, the focus on testing appears correct and proper, since the free play of market forces ‘naturally’ produces inequality.”

I repeated to myself; “free play of market forces ‘naturally’ produces inequality.”  

It sounded so ‘spot on’.  But then I asked myself, ‘would the ‘new right’ even have considered not endorsing a methodology for measuring teacher performance based on the fact that it might be detrimental to students’ mental growth?’ I don’t think so.  I think that most successful business people attribute their success to in-born capabilities more than to their teachers.  Furthermore, people who belong to organization like the BRT (Business Roundtable) must know that 25% of our college graduates can’t find jobs and be afraid, that even our better students will be getting beat out by those from other countries.  So, this suggests that they would favor reforms that they thought would make the upper half of the ‘bell-shaped’ curve score even higher and forget those at the lower end.  But this argument is also flawed because, in reality, they probably had no clue as to how more testing was going to affect the average student’s ability or apparent intelligence. Support for increased testing simply grew among business leaders because they viewed schools as production units in an industrial system; since they were putting so much money into the system, they wanted proof that those hired to produce the product were doing a good job. 

But, what opinions might Obama have formed while he was rising to power? Did he see an education system that had already been found guilty, in the court of public opinion, of producing an internationally inferior product and did he see the problem as the schools’ apparent inability to get rid of ‘bad’ teachers?  Surely, he would have seen that most of those scoring at the bottom of the ‘Bell-shaped’ curve (and dropping out) were from inner city black and brown families and he probably would have thought that anything that gave minority children a better chance of graduating would be acceptable (for starters) even if it did risk a little regression towards the mean in terms of, say, mental growth or the amount of material learned (if one could measure either).  But, I don’t think this is a good reason to blame him; he is not the problem. 

OK, at first, Obama probably sucked up the BRT-sponsored rhetoric and the themes in movies like ‘Waiting for Superman’ and assumed that the problem was caused by bad teachers and the unions that were protecting them but he also had to have been thinking of the disastrous situations black teenagers were finding themselves in, with approximately half of them either jobless (dropped out or not) or in the military with some sort of a criminal record.  He also had to see how unpopular NCLB sanctions were with states. So, when he saw the problems NCLB were causing, he jumped in with a discretionary funded program which gave states a chance to avoid NCLB sanctions in exchange for them to agree to upgrade their standards and change their tests to reflect those standards. One has to admit, this was a brilliant strategy. Unfortunately, the program also includes the ‘value added’ method for evaluating teacher, principal, and school performance. Anyway, he went for it whole hog and I give him credit for doing that because it jolted a lot of people up off of their chairs and deepened the radicalization of others. 

The value-added methodology is full of invalid assumptions, relies on data that are unreliable and force ‘teaching to the test’ as a survival tactic for teachers. The problem is that our economy forces us to view schools as production facilities.  The Industrial Revolution has entered a new phase which emphasizes the efficient capture and deployment of human resources.  The expansion of student-test data may be seen as necessary for performing cost-benefit analyses on decisions as to whether or not to retain a teacher, but the measure they intend on using is riddled with invalid assumptions and based on unreliable data.  Among a multitude of other problems is the fact that testing kills curiosity, causes a lot of tension and does not build up children’s confidence in trying out and defending an answer, traits that are among those most sought after by companies in their new employees.

---

[1] Competing Models for Public Education: Which Model is Best? by Robert Freeman

[2] http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2009/11/art5full.pdf, p. 88

[3] While it is reported that 147 firms control 40% of transnational entities -- http://thevictorychronicles.com/2011/08/27/study-shows-powerful-corporations-really-do-control-the-worlds-finances/, a recent study done by the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy -- http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/dec/30/eric-cantor/cantor-says-small-businesses-create-70-percent-us-/ --said that “60 to 80 percent of all new jobs (in the USA) come from small businesses.” This suggests that those who decide to invest in post-secondary education (and, particularly those intending to go for advanced degrees) would be wise to begin their job searches by getting to know which of the 147 hire in your intended study area and where in the world they operate.

[4] http://deborahmeier.com/2012/12/26/weve-been-there-before/

Obama Pushes Apartheid Charter Movement in Georgia Over the Top

My first year of teaching was in Georgia in 1971, one year after the end of segregation in Washington County, where I would teach Title I English at TJ Elder Jr. High School.  The personnel director (before people became human resources) wore a white suit and white patent leather loafers, and he grinned widely as he told me that he was glad to welcome another young white family to Sandersville.

The head of the little English department at Elder was a little blue-haired woman who leaned against the door frame as I dug around the book room looking for something, I didn't know what, that would be good for my students, who were almost all black, since the year before private Baptist academies had sprung up all over Georgia to keep the white children away the black ones.  The department chair told me I shouldn't be worrying too much about choosing books that would work, for as she said, smiling sweetly, "after all, Mr. Horn, a nigra is a nigra and there's nothing you are going to do about that."

Now forty years later the white folks have another resegregation strategy that involves academies, too, but this time around they are paid for with public dollars, run mainly by corporations, are all white OR all black, and supported by America's first African-American president.  What would Vonnegut say if were alive today?

The big referendum in Georgia sailed right through last week, due primarily to some bombardment of ads on Black Radio paid for by the oligarchs and featuring a mash-up of supportive remarks for charter schools by Barack Obama.

The story is here, the ad below:

"A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty." Really?

Using some of those Harvard econometrics from Raj Chetty, Obama precedes the ridiculous "escape from poverty" contention with this emerging statisti-meme:

We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.

Even if this speculation could be practically demonstrated, which it can't, here's what it would mean.

So divide the $250,000 by 25 kids to a classroom (next year you can add 5 students to this number), then divide that by 45 years (next year add 5 years to that number), and you get a grand total of $222 per year per child.  An "escape from poverty"?  That won't even buy you an annual subway ride from the Bronx to Manhattan, much less an escape from poverty.

By the way, $222 is what Newt Romney made every 5 minutes last year from his interest income of $22 million. So yes, Mr. President, do say more about income inequality and how teachers offer an escape from poverty.  We're all listening.

Feds Continue to Shovel Money to Charter Scams and Encourage High Poverty Quotas

If you have ever wondered why fewer than 1 in 5 charter schools (17 percent to be exact) in the U. S.  has higher test scores than the public schools that are being replaced by these segregated charters, look no further than the unattended and unregulated open money pits that corporatists inside the U. S. Department of Education have made available to any scam artist with the chutzpah to put together a fraudulent charter school grant application. 

You can bet that when Public School Enemy #1, Chris Christie, has his hatchet man, Cerf, reject a charter school application in New Jersey that it must smell worse than a boat ride on Newark Bay.  And yet that has not stopped Duncan's boys at ED from approving a charter grant to the same smelly application that Cerf rejected, to the tune of $600,000.

And how did this get by the "heavy-handed Federal watchdogs" that Newt Romney is always crying about? Because there aren't any, not at ED, at least.  The people who read and grade the federal charter applications are private contractors who can't look at any evidence beyond what is in the application, even if the evidence is printed in the New York Times--as it is today.

What the private contractor consultants at ED are looking for is to see if applicants are following the guidance (aka bribery directives) provided by ED, which will earn applicants bonus points on their applications.  For instance, the highest point value for established "high-quality" charters who want to open new ones goes to those that can demonstrate that more than 60 percent of their students are low income:   

. . . . In order to receive preference under these competitive preference priorities, the applicant must identify the priority or priorities that it believes it meets and provide documentation supporting its claims.

These priorities are:

Competitive Preference Priority 1—Low-Income Demographic (10 Points)

To meet this priority, an applicant must demonstrate that at least 60 percent of all students in the charter schools it currently operates or manages are individuals from low-income families (as defined in this notice). . . .

Now you don't have to be a James Coleman scholar to understand that social capital is real, and that social capital does not accrue when the majority of the school population is poor, and that social capital does accrue in socioeconomically integrated schools where the percentage of poor children within a school population is kept under 40 percent poor, or no more than 50 percent at most.  

So that, in fact, the Obama Administration is rewarding the containment and miseducation of children because corporate know-nothings inside his Ed Department do not know James Coleman from Gary Coleman.  Federal policy, in fact, is incentivizing the least academically and socially effective mix of children one could ever conceive, and in doing so, it is rewarding the least effective segregating learning environments through its own stunning levels of disregard, ignorance, and apathy.

Here's the nightmare story from New Jersey, well-documented as always by Michael Winerip, NYTimes:

In the last couple of years, Sharon Akman, a real estate agent, applied to the state of New Jersey three times to open a new charter school in the Highland Park area, to be called Tikun Olam Hebrew Language Charter High School.

Each time, she was rejected.

Then on Oct. 6, one week after the state’s most recent rejection, the United States Education Department announced that it had approved a $600,000 grant to finance Ms. Akman’s proposed charter.

It would have taken federal officials just a few phone calls to determine that there were many good reasons for the state to have rejected Ms. Akman’s applications.

For one thing, they have been full of misrepresentations.

Ms. Akman, who declined to comment for this column, writes that the charter school would be located in St. Mary of Mount Virgin Church in New Brunswick, even though the bishop of the Diocese of Metuchen, Paul G. Bootkoski, has repeatedly said that the building is not available.

Ms. Akman’s documents list community supporters of the school, including Jun Choi, a former mayor of Edison, and the directors of the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, who have written in e-mails made public that they are not supporters.

The application says there is a need for a Hebrew charter in the Highland Park-Edison-New Brunswick area, even though there are many Jewish private schools close by and, as Ms. Akman has told state reviewers, no community survey has been done.

The application says that the families served by the New Brunswick schools, which are predominantly black and Hispanic, support the Hebrew charter, even though school leaders and the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter do not.

Since March 2010, community volunteers from Highland Park, Edison and New Brunswick have been battling to stop the school from opening, arguing that it would drain resources from traditional public schools in order to provide a free Jewish education that should be the responsibility of private schools.

For each child who leaves a district to attend a charter, the charter receives 90 percent of the district’s per-pupil spending allotment. In modest-size communities like Highland Park, with a district of 1,500 students, that can take a substantial bite out of a school budget.

What has been so frustrating to opponents is that despite repeated distortions in the Tikun Olam applications, the charter still may open in September.

How could federal oversight be so lax?

Part of the answer is that charter schools are a top priority for the Obama administration, making federal officials predisposed to support them.

And part of the answer, as Justin Hamilton, an Education Department spokesman, explained in an e-mail, is that federal officials see their oversight role as limited. The department hires private consultants to rate the quality of a charter applicant, but those consultants “cannot use information not included in the grant application,” he said.

In other words, if Ms. Akman writes that Assemblyman Peter J. Barnes III supports the charter, the federal consultants are not permitted to interview Mr. Barnes, who would have been happy to tell them that he does not.

This prohibition against using outside information is intended to ensure that no special measures are taken to either favor or hinder an applicant, although what it really invites is fiction writing.

Mr. Hamilton points out that the federal grant does not take effect unless the state approves Ms. Akman’s application. The federal role, he said, is to “operate as a funding source for applicants proposing to open high-quality start-up charter schools,” although it is hard to imagine why an applicant would propose a low-quality charter school. 

An applicant with a $600,000 pledge in her pocket may be seen in a new light by state officials. In mid-October, Ms. Akman wrote to the state’s acting education commissioner, Christopher D. Cerf, requesting assistance in winning approval for her fourth application. “We were just granted a substantial federal charter school grant,” she wrote him, and would “love to have a meeting to better strategize and prepare for our reapplication.”

How Mr. Cerf responded is not known. E-mails between Ms. Akman and Mr. Cerf’s office were released after a request under the state’s Open Public Records Act. While Ms. Akman’s string of e-mails was made public, responses from Mr. Cerf’s office were redacted.

What we do know is that in mid-October Ms. Akman made her fourth try, as 1 of 42 applicants statewide.
And in December, the state made its first cuts, leaving 17 applicants — including Tikun Olam.

Next week state officials are to announce which are approved. If Tikun Olam is successful, the school plans to open in September with 100 students.

Ms. Akman has repeatedly refused to talk to reporters. She did not respond to a dozen e-mails and voice mail messages left at the real estate office where she works, Century 21 J. J. Laufer in Highland Park. When I called the personal cellphone number she listed on the state application, a woman answered. “Who’s calling?” she asked, and when I explained that I was a reporter, she said, “I’ll tell them you called, thank you,” and hung up.

While I have independently confirmed the facts in this column, a lot of the distortions were first dug up by Darcie Cimarusti, an opponent of the charter school. She is an interior designer and educator with four children in Highland Park schools who is now a stay-at-home mom, and she has devoted an extraordinary amount of her time to stopping the charter.

“Since May this has become my full-time job,” she said. “Some weeks, far more than 40 hours a week.” She has been joined by several dozen community volunteers.

All over the state, volunteers, mainly women, have been working to keep charter schools out. Mostly they’re from prosperous suburbs with high-quality public schools: Livingston, Millburn-Short Hills, Maplewood, Teaneck, Cherry Hill.

Even so, it is an uphill battle against an education establishment that includes Democrats (President Obama) and Republicans (Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey) with strong financial backing (the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations).

A spokesman for the state’s Education Department, Justin Barra, said in an e-mail that in the next review round for charter applications, representatives of Tikun Olam would be brought in for “an intensive in-person interview.” As for possible misrepresentations, he said: “Several individuals in the public comment process have raised concerns about potential inaccurate statements in the application. We will investigate these concerns.”

In New Jersey, there is no limit to the number of times a group can modify its application and reapply for a charter, and Tikun Olam does not hold the record. “We do have applicants that have submitted more than four times,” Mr. Barra said.

Mr. Hamilton, the federal spokesman, said that if the Education Department “becomes aware of material factual misrepresentations,” it could terminate the grant.

An investigation would not require much digging. The list of public officials who supposedly support the Tikun Olam charter — but in interviews have said they really do not — is in the first paragraph on Page 18 of the federal application.

Right after that, in Paragraph 2, the charter supporters provide some of the translations of the Hebrew words “tikun olam,” including “perfecting the world.”

Three Kinds of Charter Schools: Largely Segregated, Intensely Segregated, and Apartheid

If a charter school in the leafy suburbs of Georgia or North Carolina offers no federal breakfast or lunch program and no transportation for kids, can poor parents choose this school for their children who will, otherwise, not have breakfast, lunch, or a ride to and from school?

If a charter school in Memphis or Minneapolis offers, as the only option to a crumbling public school, a chain gang charter that mimics the total compliance KIPP behavioral and cultural neutering programs, can middle class parents ever be expected to choose to enroll their Seths and Caitlins there?

So no, the new segregation via charter school in America is not accomplish through legal mandates but by willful and transparent discriminatory and racist measures that emanate from a corporate welfare educational caste system.  All under the rotted banner of "choice" and all of it embraced by an economically-engineered Congress and Administration bought and paid for by the corporations and hedge funders who have devised this proto-fascist system of apartheid that threatens the foundations of the Republic. 

Even as Duncan's NCLB waiver fiasco offers new opportunities for Team Obama to use some of their bribe money to "incent" schools toward diversity, not a nickel is provided.  Just as there was not a nickel provided to encourage diversity under the $3 billion plus of RTTT, even as applications without removal of charter caps were thrown in the trash. 


In the excellent piece of reporting below by John Hechinger, notice Russlyn Ali's comments that capture Team Obama's Ostrich Approach to civil rights enforcement: "there is no evidence of discrimination."  Really? 

So how is Team Obama countering the new awareness of segregation by charter school?  They trot out Arne with "voluntary guidelines," but only after the completion of the largest federal incentive in history for the return to Jim Crow schools.  Yes, Arne, I am beginning to understand why you say that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. 

By John Hechinger - Dec 22, 2011 

At Dugsi Academy, a public school in St. Paul, Minnesota, girls wearing traditional Muslim headscarves and flowing ankle-length skirts study Arabic and Somali. The charter school educates “East African children in the Twin Cities,” its website says. Every student is black.

At Twin Cities German Immersion School, another St. Paul charter, children gather under a map of “Deutschland,” study with interns from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and learn to dance the waltz. Ninety percent of its students are white.

Six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, segregation is growing because of charter schools, privately run public schools that educate 1.8 million U.S. children. While charter-school leaders say programs targeting ethnic groups enrich education, they are isolating low-achievers and damaging diversity, said Myron Orfield, a lawyer and demographer.

“It feels like the Deep South in the days of Jim Crow segregation,” said Orfield, who directs the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race & Poverty. “When you see an all-white school and an all-black school in the same neighborhood in this day and age, it’s shocking.”

Charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers studied 40 states, the District of Columbia, and 39 metropolitan areas. In particular, higher percentages of charter-school students attend what the report called “racially isolated” schools, where 90 percent or more students are from disadvantaged minority groups.

Charter-School Birthplace

In Minnesota, the birthplace of the U.S. charter-school movement, the divide is more than black and white.

St. Paul’s Hmong College Prep Academy, 99 percent Asian- American in the past school year, immerses students “in the rich heritage that defines Hmong culture.” Its Academia Cesar Chavez School -- 93 percent Hispanic -- promises bilingual education “by advocating Latino cultural values in an environment of familia and community.”

Minneapolis’s Four Directions Charter School, 94 percent Native American, black and Hispanic, promotes “lifelong learning for American Indian students.”

Charter schools, which select children through lotteries, are open to all who apply, said Abdulkadir Osman, Dugsi’s executive director.

“Some people call it segregation,” Osman said. “This is the parent’s choice. They can go anywhere they want. We are offering families something unique.”

Nobody ‘Forced’

That’s a “significant difference” between Minnesota charters and segregated schools in the 1950s South, said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at Macalester College in St. Paul.

“Nobody is being forced to go to these schools,” said Nathan, who helped write Minnesota’s 1991 charter-school law.

Ever since Horace Mann crusaded for free universal education in the 19th century, public schools have been hailed as the U.S. institutions that bring together people of disparate backgrounds.

The atomization of charter schools coincides with growing U.S. diversity. Americans of other races will outnumber whites by 2042, the Census Bureau projects.

Even after a divided Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that schools couldn’t consider race in making pupil assignments to integrate schools, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy urged districts to find other ways to fight “de facto resegregation” and “racial isolation.”

“The nation’s schools strive to teach that our strength comes from people of different races, creeds, and cultures uniting in commitment to the freedom of all,” Kennedy wrote.

Diverse Workplaces

Citing Kennedy’s words, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder this month called for schools -- including charters -- to combat growing segregation.

Along with breeding “educational inequity,” racially- divided schools deny children the experiences they need to succeed in an increasingly diverse workplace, Duncan said in announcing voluntary guidelines for schools.

Charter schools may specialize in serving a single culture as long as they have open admissions, and there’s no evidence of discrimination, said Russlynn Ali, assistant education secretary for civil rights.

The education department is encouraging charter schools to promote diversity. Charters could expand recruiting and consider lotteries that give extra weight to disadvantaged groups, such as families living in low-income neighborhoods or children who speak English as a second language, Ali said in a phone interview.

Immigrant Magnet

Minnesota, 85 percent white, is a case study of the nation’s growing diversity. Since the 1970s, Minneapolis and St. Paul have become a magnet for Hmong refugees, who fought alongside Americans in the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, Somalis sought refuge from civil war.

St. Paul, where the nation’s first charter school opened in 1992, is 16 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic and 15 percent Asian-American, according to the U.S Census Bureau.

Charter schools should be similarly diverse, recommended a 1988 report that provided the groundwork for Minnesota’s charter-school law.

“We envision the creation of schools which, by design, would invite a dynamic mix of students by race and ability levels,” the Citizens League, a St. Paul-based nonprofit public-policy group, wrote in the report.

‘Great Failure’

Instead, in the 2009-2010 school year, three quarters of the Minneapolis and St. Paul region’s 127 charter schools were “highly segregated,” according to the University of Minnesota Law School’s race institute. Forty-four percent of schools were 80 percent or more non-white, and 32 percent, mostly white.

“It’s been a great failure that the most segregated schools in Minnesota are charter schools,” said Mindy Greiling, a state representative who lobbied for the charter-school law when she was a member of a suburban school board in the 1980s. “It breaks my heart.”

Segregation is typical nationwide. Seventy percent of black charter-school students across the country attended “racially isolated” schools, twice as many as the share in traditional public schools, according to the report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

Half of all Latino charter-school students went to these intensely segregated schools, the study found. In the West and the South, the two most racially diverse regions of the country, “charters serve as havens for white flight from public schools,” the report said.

Hmong Roots

They also serve as havens for minority students who need extra help, said leaders of Minnesota charter schools.
Christianna Hang, founder of Hmong College Prep Academy, said she designed the school so children, mostly first- generation Americans, didn’t feel adrift in public schools as she did when she arrived in the U.S. in 1980.

In the Hmong academy’s central hallway, a tapestry depicts families living in Laos, fleeing the Vietnam War and arriving in America. The school’s roughly 700 students, in grades kindergarten through 12th grade, learn Hmong.

“I came here for my parents as much as for me,” said Mai Chee Xiong, a 17-year-old senior. “I was very Americanized. I wanted to be able to speak with them in our language, and I wanted to understand my roots.”

In the 2009-2010 school year, 26 percent of Hmong Academy students met or exceeded standards on state math exams, while 30 percent did so in reading. About half passed those tests in the St. Paul Public School District.

Harvard Banners

To raise expectations, classrooms adopt colleges, hanging banners from Harvard University, Yale University and Dartmouth College over their doors.

“If we don’t do something to help these kids, they will get lost,” Hang said. “If they drop out of school, they will never become productive citizens, and there’s no way they will achieve the American dream.”

Dugsi Academy, the school for East Africans, and Twin Cities German Immersion School make for some of St. Paul’s sharpest contrasts.

Until this school year, the two schools were neighbors, across a busy commercial thoroughfare in a racially diverse neighborhood. At different times of the day, the kids used a city playground in front of the German school for recess. Dugsi has since moved three miles away, across a highway from the Hmong academy.

The German Immersion School is a bright, airy former factory with exposed brick and high ceilings.

Fluent German

“Eva, was ist das?” kindergarten teacher Elena Heindl asked one morning earlier this month as she pointed a red flashlight to letters, eliciting the name of each one in German.

To succeed at the school, students must be fluent in German to enroll, unless they enter before second or third grade, Julie Elias, a parent, told prospective families on a tour this month.

“You can’t just move into the neighborhood if you want to go to our school,” Elias said. The school is legally required to take anyone picked in its lottery, though it counsels parents against enrolling in older grades without German knowledge, said Annika Fjelstad, its director.

The school, which includes many families with one parent who speaks German or that have German relatives, holds special events at the Germanic-American Institute in a $1.3 million St. Paul house with a ballroom. Children like to call the institute “our school’s mansion,” said Chris Weimholt, another parent giving the tour.

No Buses

In the 2009-2010 school year, 87 percent of children at the German school passed state math tests and 84 percent did so in reading, according to the Minnesota Department of Education. Fifteen percent qualify for the federal free or reduced lunch program, compared with 71 percent in St. Paul. The school doesn’t offer bus transportation, so most parents drive, often carpooling, Elias said.

The language requirement and lack of transportation prevents poor families from attending, said Greiling, the state legislator, who has toured the school.

“A regular public school could never have that kind of bar,” she said. “It seems an odd thing that this would be legal.”

The German program doesn’t have buses because they would cost $100,000 a year, too heavy a burden for an expanding school of 274 that wants to maintain classes of 20 students, Fjelstad said. An immersion school can’t take kids who aren’t fluent after early grades, she said.

In February, the school formed an “inclusivity” task force to find ways to make the school more reflective of the community, Fjelstad said. The school will try to improve recruiting through its relationship with community organizations, such as a neighboring YMCA, she said.

International View

The school offers a different kind of diversity, said Weimholt, a nurse whose grandfather emigrated from Germany after World War I. “It doesn’t look diverse by skin color. But families straddle two different continents. The school truly has an international perspective.”

So does Dugsi Academy. Children learn Arabic and Somali along with English and traditional academic subjects. A caller last month heard no English on a school voice mail.

One morning in late November, a sixth-grade social-studies class discussed immigration with 28-year-old Khaleefah Abdallah, who himself fled Somalia 12 years ago. The boys wore jeans and sweatshirts. The girls sported hijabs, or traditional Muslim head coverings with skirts or long pants.

‘Melting Pot’

Abdallah asked his class about the idea of the American “melting pot:” immigrants assimilating into U.S. culture. He suggested another metaphor, a “salad bowl,” where people from different backgrounds mix while retaining their own identity.

“I agree with the salad bowl,” Fadumo Ahmed, 12, dressed in a black hijab and sneakers with pink laces, told the class. “We all come from different places, but we still want to keep our culture.”

Students shared stories of the challenge of co-existing in mainstream America.

Ahmed Hassan, 12, complained about a boy on a city playground who made fun of the long traditional robe he wore one Friday.

“He told me it looked like a skirt,” Hassan said. Abdallah told the class that, under the U.S. constitution, Americans have the freedom to express themselves through their clothing.

Test Scores

Dugsi, a low-slung red-brick building in an office park, has about 300 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Almost all qualify for federal free or reduced lunches, according to the state. Only 19 percent passed state math exams in the 2009-2010 school year, while 40 percent did so in reading.

The school’s test scores reflect families’ backgrounds. said Osman, the Dugsi director and a former employee of the U.S. Embassy in Somalia, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1993. Parents work as cab drivers, nurses and grocers, Osman said. Many had no formal schooling.

It would be better if one day Somali students could go to school with children from other backgrounds, Osman said.
“That’s the beauty of America -- Latinos, Caucasians, African-Americans and Native Americans, all together in the same building, eating lunch and in the same classrooms,” Osman said. “It would be something wonderful. That’s what I’m thinking of for my own kids and grandchildren.”

To contact the reporter on this story: John Hechinger in Boston at jhechinger@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net