Charter Schools Week, Part 1: Ravitch Rewrites Shanker

In some recent email snuggling between hedge fund kingpin and KIPP supporter, Whitney Tilson, and Diane Ravitch, Dr. Ravitch attempted to educate Whitney on some of the early rationale for charter schools. Instead, she muddied the historical waters with a bizarre and inaccurate recollection of some of the early developments.   

Here's a clip from Ravitch's conversation with Tilson, in which Ravitch wistfully considers returning to a time that never was:

I would like to see charter schools return to the original idea proposed in 1988 by Albert Shanker and a professor in Massachusetts named Ray Budde. Charter schools were supposed to be collaborators with public schools, not competitors. Their teachers would belong to the same union as public school teachers. They were supposed to have freedom to innovate and expected to share their innovations with the public schools. At the end of their charter–say, five years or ten years–they would cease to exist and return to the public school district. Shanker thought that charter schools should exist find innovative ways to help the kids who were not making it in public schools, those who had dropped out, those who were unmotivated, those who were turned off by traditional schools. I support that idea. We have strayed very far from the original idea and are moving towards a dual school system, one free to choose its students, the other required to accept all who show up at their doors.

Even though Tilson might certainly appreciate this gloss (since it offers some justification for the chain gang approach), Ravitch ignores the principal reasons that Shanker was initially interested in charters.  

When the idea of independent charter schools arrived on the scene in the late 80s, education policy folks and teachers were excited by the prospect of public school experiments that embrace new organizational structures and educational ideas and strategies that the larger systems might learn from and emulate.  AFT president, Albert Shanker, was particularly interested in the potential of charters to attract economically diverse and ethnically diverse students, much the same way that alternative schools of the 60s had, but with major differences.  

Shanker wanted charters to serve the needs of individual students, yes, but he wanted charters, too, to help to improve the public school systems in ways that that would make schools more humane, integrated, progressive, and effective for students and teachers, alike.  He was not interested in remedial charters for students on the verge of dropping out, as Ravitch claims.

By the early 1990s, however, Shanker had seen the corporate writing on the wall, and he saw charters as the privatization threat that has become full blown over the past two decades--with 7,000 charters today.  Of course, Ravitch and her misleading allies who run the teachers' unions leave out this part of the Shanker history, just as they ignore the historical fact that Shanker was interested in charters as a tool for increasing integration, improving new instructional strategies, and experimenting with organizational structures.

Today "high quality" charters have failed on all three counts, as they are now frozen in place by a rigid segregation model grounded in a behavioral management rigor mortis that has more in common with the 19th Century than the 21st.  

In the kinds of charters that the federal government and Wall Street love to fund, there is penal kind of segregation that operates inside an organizational structure that turns professional teachers into temporary corporate servants to the brutal whims of clueless school CEOs.  

What results are paternalistic indoctrination programs that exploit teachers and the unpaid drudgery of students to raise test scores, thus expanding the "no excuses" apartheid charter schools as the school model of choice for the poor by white philanthropists and Washington's elite.

We clearly see the preference for the "no excuses" KIPP Model in the statements and actions taken by the corporate progressives who run the U. S. Dept. of Education. This will be taken up in Pt. 2, which examines the first charter school program grant program under ESSA, which will be worth $160,000,000. It's not pretty.

Democrats for Neoliberal Education Reform's Gloria J. Romero's Parent Tricker days are numbered

I think about former Senator Gloria Romero comparing Compton educators to "batterers" and wondered whether the writers of those words ever stop to think about the consequences of their prose. — Martha Infante

Photo by Mark Warner (CC BY-SA 2.0)

As the DFER veneer for right-wing "parent trigger" laws wears off, and more and more people see the privatization agenda for what it is, charlatans like Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have been scrambling to hide or minimize their ties to right wing extremists. The good news is that it isn't working, and that aside from shills like Andi Rotherham and Alex Russo even mainstream media journalists are starting to see through what the distinguished Professor Diane Ravitch refers to as the "Parent Tricker." Josh Eidelson's "Parent trigger": The latest tactic for fighting teachers' unions is a good example.

Professor Ravitch has brought the duplicity of parent trigger laws to the fore nationally. Her Mayors Support "Parent Tricker" Law was so powerful, that it elicited a response from none other than Gloria J. Romero herself. We'll get back to that in a moment.

Django's comments under Professor Ravitch's Education Week piece are better than anything I've seen in terms of exposing Romero's lies. They bear reproduction here:

I watched the original parent trigger unfold. Not that it was easy, given that all proceedings were carefully orchestrated to take place during obscure sessions between the Thanksgiving and New Years holidays (to minimize input from school advocates). The trigger was part of California's failed Race to the Top application. It was not written outright by ALEC to the best of my knowledge. But it was drafted largely by Bill Lucia of Ed Voice with a great deal of input from Ben Austin of Parent Revolution. Nearly all of the key testimony in support came from Lucia. I was surprised to learn that Romero claimed authorship as she was unable to respond to many of her colleagues questions, deferring to Lucia.

There may be links between ALEC and EDVoice, they do certainly share the privatization agenda, desire to eliminate local school boards, and strip teachers unions of their rights. The trigger is now model ALEC legislation, but it may not have originated there.

Romero claims to represent parents. I am a California public school parent and I can assure all that she does not speak for me. I would ask her if she is so supportive of parents, why is there no on going role for parent voice leadership in her bill post-trigger?

Activists present at the hearings for charter trigger laws all bear witness to Django's assertion that Romero couldn't answer questions about the law that she now claims she wrote single-handedly with little or no input from any one else. Django's intutions about EdVoice are spot-on, both in terms of their links to ALEC, but also to their role in privatization in general. EdVoice is another astroturf group that works with Eli Broad's EdTrust, the California Charter Schools Association, and their proxy group Families That Can.

Back to Romero's poorly crafted response to Professor Ravitch. It's telling that the piece doesn't appear in a forum considered remotely progressive or even liberal for that matter. Indeed, the American Center for School Choice is a fringe-right organization headed up by John Birch Society types like the infamous John E. Coons. No surprise that Romero has been relegated to such venues, she and her right-wing DFER have lost all credibility with her own political party as evidenced by the fact that Los Angeles Democrats want her to stop pretending. I had some choice words for Romero's Eastside Latina posturing:

Now that her ties to fringe right-wing groups are being exposed, the reactionary former State Senator is trying to revise history. Fact is that the corporate charter trigger is an ALEC template law. Quibbling over whether Ms. Romero penned her version first or not is not unlike saying that George Wallace didn't create Jim Crow. The chronology of the vile trigger laws is unimportant, what is important is how they undermine democratic processes and serve only to grow market share for the lucrative charter-voucher industries.

For all her mendacious blustering about segregationist ideas like 'choice' coming from women of color, the truth is that Ms. Romero's true inspiration comes from her employer and allies, all of whom are wealthy white males, like Whitney Tilson of DFER and Terry Moe of The Hoover Institution.

Much of this is documented in the essay: Peas in a pod: Koret Foundation, The Hoover Institution, and Democrats for Education Reform.

I'll give you credit Ms. Romero, your packaging of the corporate agenda under the guise of "civil rights" seemingly goes over well with the John Birch Society crowd you pander to. Those of us that selflessly volunteer for social justice in those very same communities you claim, see right though your lies and obfuscations.

In the same venue parent activist and journalist Caroline Grannan sums up DFER like only she can:

I know Democrats for Education Reform has "Democrat" in the name. Founder Whitney Tilson has said publicly that this was a ploy to obscure the right-wing goals of the organization.

The fact that DFER and their supporters are scrambling to save face speaks volumes to the hard work activists and social justice writers have done in terms of exposing their agenda, funders, and associations. That said, there's much more work to do. Privatization is far too profitable a project for the privatizers to give up on just because they've sustained a little public relations damage. We need to continue to expose these charlatans and their designs to light. We must defeat the "parent tricker," and all other attacks on the public commons.

Peas in a pod: Koret Foundation, The Hoover Institution, and Democrats for Education Reform

"I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so many are selfish! Here's a hundred and twenty million people, with ninety-five per cent of 'em only thinking of self, instead of turning to and helping the responsible business men to bring back prosperity! All these corrupt and self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate employer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!" ... "Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason so justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations of Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey." — Sinclair Lewis [1]



It's no secret that the malicious types running Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) hold the same ideological positions as the furthest-right think-tanks around. Starting with their founder Whitney Tilson, [2] who channels American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) Andy Smarick at every opportunity, DFER is a bastion of right-wing thought that amounts to an enormous serving of Milton Freidman's free market fantasies finished with a healthy dollop of Ayn Rand's infantile insistence that "Big Business" is "America’s Persecuted Minority."

Much like Eli Broad's economic hit-men (and hit-women) trained at his various residencies and academies, DFER operatives have done astonishing damage to the public commons and undermine democracy at every opportunity. In Democrats for Neoliberal Education Reform I outlined the duplicitous underhanded craftiness DFER Colorado operatives Mike Johnston and his colleagues employed to "railroad the anti-community, anti-teacher, pro-corporate SB-191 through the Colorado Legislature." More importantly, we looked at the language of their own document which gleefully "discuss[es] students as mere commodities to be consumed by the owners of the means of production."

In the past right-wing Democrats like those comprising the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) pretended that they were somehow different than the John Birch Society inspired organizations that informed the DLC's policies. DFER, on the other hand, makes no attempts to mask their muses and ideological allies. Much like Arne Duncan's ballyhooed "education reform" tour with serial bigot (and philanderer) Newt Gingrich, DFER makes no bones about the fact that their natural allies are fringe-right creeps that would put children back to work. [3]

Case in point Gloria J. Romero, DFER California Director, just completed a panel entitled "School Choice, Special Interests and the Education of Our Children" along with arch-reactionaries Terry Moe of The Hoover Institution and Lance Izumi of Koret Foundation. The event, held in "honor" of deceptively named "school choice week," was moderated by teabagger and staunch anti-unionist Lary Sand, who some might recall as having moderated a school privatization event held by Ben Austin, Ben Boychuck, and Bruno Behrend. DFER's Romero, whose hatred of organized labor echoes that of the Brothers Koch, must have been very confortable on a panel with reactionaries whose views up ten years ago were considered extremist even by the mainstream GOP.

Any guesses as to who the panel considered "Special Interests?" It's safe to say that it wasn't The Broad Foundation, The Gates Foundation, or The Walton Family Foundation. Let's look briefly at our ideological peas in a pod.

Terry Moe, who writes with all of the authority of Philip Morris treatise on the health benefits of smoking, is a favorite in the Murdoch, Walton, DeVos, Bradley, Koch, and Scaife circles. The extreme right-wing Hoover Institution (named after the vile president who stood by and did nothing the last time the banksters and Wall Street swindlers crashed the economy) is wont to lionize right-wing monsters (and Milton Freidman acolytes) like the butchering murderer Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet.

Lance Izumi, who spends much of his time writing fallacious fact-frees texts trying to scamboozle middle class parents into accepting "school choice" and distance learning in order to bolster the burgeoning charter and online school sectors, is a senior fellow at the Koret Foundation. Koret, which unabashedly promotes Freidman's discredited ideas while simultaneously celebrating the Nakba, have their — in their own words — "free-market think tank, Pacific Research Institute" based at The Hoover Institution.

Gloria Romero is best known for her obsequious service to the lucrative charter school industry. While a California State Senator, she worked tirelessly to ensure Caprice Young, Jed Wallace, and other charter school tycoons would continue to dine voraciously at the public trough. Among her dubious accomplishments was SB-592 which handed public school property over to private corporations. Romero's most famous betrayal of the working class people of California was her collaboration with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ben Austin to create the vile corporate charter trigger, which allows well funded Charter Management Organizations to increase market share. Since her ignominious defeat in her bid to garner the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction seat on behalf of the California Charter Schools Association, Romero has worked harder to union bust and privatize public schools than all of the teabagger elected governors combined. Her shameless pandering to the right and constant opportunism was best summed up in 2009 by my friend and comrade Alvaro Maldonado when we were still trying to prevent the parent trigger law from passing:

For those harboring illusions about State Senator Gloria Romero, her ideology, and her intentions. Long time immigrant rights activist Alvaro Maldonado, who led the fight against the racist Prop 187, had this to say about State Senator and Privatization Pontiff Gloria Romero:

I just saw her the other day! She use to be a left liberal, now she's just a plain capitalist liberal! Gloria Romero was an 1970's activist turned Democratic politician just like Fabian Nunez. I think, it should be a good lesson to all that those liberals who tie themselves to the Democratic party are almost without exception, turn into promoters for the capitalist system; be they co-opted, sold out, or just believe that there is no alternative (I generally I don't buy the argument on practicality claimed by the "progressive" Democrats... Their excuses generally hide their opportunism). The UFW traditional leadership (Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, etc) gave us years of union and Democratic party opportunism in their stances on many an issue... but thats too long a story to get into on this comment page... it should suffice to be weary of "progressives" keeping close ties to the Democratic party.

On balance, there's no difference between education policies and philosophies of the Koret Foundation, The Hoover Institution, and Democrats for Education Reform — not even a nuanced difference. Indeed, this is why we are seeing more and more events at which the fringe-right is paired with right of center Democrats. This insidious pairing has several consequences, the first of which is that these right wing DFER types try to call their politics, adopted from the far-right, "progressive." They're not, and we must call them out on this each and every time they try to pass them off as such. We must name names, and remind everyone that reactionary ideas of free-markets and competition are the antithesis of equity and social justice.

"One result of 30 years of neoliberalism is the a widespread assumption that if you're unhappy dominating or exploiting your fellow human beings, it must be because you're stupid or incapable." — Mike Marqusee

_____
NOTES

[1] Lewis, Sinclair. It can't happen here; a novel, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1935.

[2] For some prime examples see Tilson's amateurish and spurious "Rebutting Ravitch" diatribe. He regurgitates Freidman/Rand balderdash with statements about how public education is "lacking in market mechanisms." Moreover Tilson's own unsuccessful attempts to rebut Professor Ravitch are augmented with likewise perfidy by some of his political idols; including The Hoover Institution's Chester Finn, arch-reactionary Andy Rotherham, and for good measure other assorted right wingers like Stuart Buck and Jay Greene.

As an aside, Tilson's prose leaves so much to be desired, which isn't too surprising for a child of privilege who went on to grow mummy and daddy's money by shorting housing derivatives. That said, don't the elite colleges these ruling class brats attend teach them to write? Tilson couldn't compose a cogent sentence if his life depended on it.

[3] In this age of standardized bubble tests and Fox News, it's easy to forget that "Child labor wasn't outlawed until the passage of the FLSA in 1938. Also read about Mother Jones 1903 "Children's Crusade," fight to limit child labor to 55 hours a week."

KIPP Indianapolis: Too Connected to Corporate Power to Fail

If you don't know who Whitney Tilson is, he is to KIPP corporate fundraising what Jay Mathews is to KIPP media coverage: he is the go-to guy, connected at every cash-sensitive orifice to the philanthro-oligarchs who are always looking to avoid paying federal and state taxes by giving huge bundles of cash to the segregated and corporatized reform schooling movement, i. e. charter schools.  

In December 2009, Tilson had this to say about his recent visit to KIPP Indianapolis:

. . . a small percentage of our schools don't live up to KIPP's high standards (and they are VERY high).  KIPP Indianapolis was one such school. 

What would the typical school district do with an underperforming school?  We don't have to guess because most big-city school systems (aka, The Blob) have nothing but underperforming schools (I'd bet my last dollar that far less than 1% of inner-city public schools in America perform at even the bottom end of the KIPP scale).  The Blob's first line of defense is denial: if you don't measure the failure, then the failure doesn't exist, right?

KIPP, in contrast, measures every school's performance using a variety of measures, including both state and national tests, and (I hope you're sitting down) not only publicizes the data internally, but posts it on its web site for the world to see (www.kipp.org/reportcard/2008).  If you check out KIPP Indianapolis’s results last year, you’ll see mediocre results.

When The Blob is confronted with evidence of its failure (thank you, NCLB!), the next line of defense is excuses ("we need more money, what can we do with "these" students, etc.").  Often, more money does flow, which simply rewards those responsible for the failure.  It's little wonder that nothing ever changes...

At KIPP Indianapolis, in contrast, there were no excuses but rather genuine accountability.  After last school year, all of the adults at the school had to re-apply for their jobs -- and only five teachers were retained, plus a new School Leader and Assistant School Leader were brought in (Estee Kelly and Emily Pelino, respectively (both TFA alums, by the way)).  Now THAT'S accountability!  I don't know which is more shocking: the fact that this occurred at a public school in America (such dramatic action is almost unheard of), or the fact that such an obvious, common sense process to turn around an underperforming school isn't automatic when ANY school isn't doing its job.

With so much turnover among the teachers, Estee and Emily had a problem: where to find nearly a dozen kick-ass new teachers?  Fortunately, The Blob came to the rescue.  Thanks to budget cuts, a number of Indianapolis public school teachers were laid off.  Guess which ones?  Not the worst teachers -- nope, that would actually put the interests of children ahead of the interests of adults, which almost never happens.  Instead, as usual (the only exception I can think of being Michelle Rhee's courageous actions in DC -- and look at the firestorm that's created!), the layoffs were purely seniority driven, which means that many Teach for America corps members we laid off, many of whom were total rock stars.  KIPP Indianapolis of course grabbed them and they are now kicking butt for KIPP.

And so it goes...

And so it goes, indeed, Mr. Tilson. Despite the butt-kicking rock stars from TFA brought in at the beginning of 2009, and despite the increased heat under the KIPP pressure cooker, things are still in turmoil at KIPP Indianapolis, according to the Mayor's Report issued in October 2010, a year after KIPP's staff cleansing.  In examining the Report, one must wonder, in fact, what it would take to lose a KIPP charter in Indianapolis.

Special Needs Abuse and Neglect

It is beyond obvious that neglect and abuse of special education children cannot get your KIPP charter revoked in Indianapolis.  As unbelievable as it is, the KIPP Indianapolis charter was renewed for three years despite the egregious and ongoing violations already noted, as well as those below. (Click on any chart to enlarge).

The Fourth Year Charter Review (FYCR) determined that KIPP Indianapolis was not fulfilling its legal obligations regarding the proper maintenance of special education files and required considerable improvement.   The review revealed that all twenty-nine special education files reviewed were out of compliance.  The school had problems with timeliness in updating student Individual Education Plans (IEPs), documenting notification of participation by parents in case conferences. 

As a follow up to the FYCR, the Mayor’s Office contracted with external experts to again review the school’s special education files in the school’s fifth year.  At the time of the review, the school could not  produce a master roster of special education files, nor could the school locate all of the student files.  In fact, only six files were presented for review, despite twenty-nine being presented in the previous year.   Reviewers found that in April of the school’s fifth year, a number of students had yet to receive any special education services, despite having IEPs and receiving services at their previous schools.   Each of the six files reviewed were found to be out of compliance, either because IEPs were outdated, testing had not been completed, or case conferences had not been conducted.   Reviewers attributed the serious deficiencies to inadequate staffing and capacity at the school.   Two general education teachers working under emergency permits were tasked with managing the special education program, in addition to their regular, full class load.   The school contracted with an outside vendor to manage compliance in the area of special education, however the two teachers tasked with managing the program internally reported they did not have time or capacity to assist the outside vendor in managing file maintenance, nor could they meet the vendor’s deadlines for providing information.   A member of the board had been assigned to oversee special education compliance in February of the school’s fifth year, despite having only joined the board in January.

A subsequent file review was conducted in the school’s sixth year of operation as a follow up to the previous two reviews.  Twenty-eight files were presented for review.  Reviewers found that case conferences were not being conducted in a timely manner and that files were significantly disorganized – for example many files contained multiple drafts and copies of IEPs, making it difficult to discern which version was the official IEP being used by the school.  Additionally, the initiation and duration of services was not being recorded appropriately in a number of files.  Parental notification was not consistently recorded or documented and in some cases, parents had not yet signed student’s IEPs.   Finally, reviewers found that the files contained student information assumingly meant to be stored in enrollment records, such as birth certificates, transportation forms, free and reduced lunch applications and school cell phone policies.

In their application for renewal, the school’s new board provided evidence that it has engaged in sweeping changes to its program.  It indicated that an outside law firm has been contracted to provide file auditing services, program design and implementation support, and monthly check-ins to ensure program effectiveness.  Additionally, the school has hired a part-time school psychologist to oversee the program internally and improve documentation.  Two full-time special education teachers have also been hired to increase capacity.

The FYCR determined that KIPP Indianapolis was not fulfilling its legal obligations regarding the proper maintenance of special education files and required considerable improvement.  Subsequent reviews have concluded that significant issues continue to exist related to the proper maintenance of special education files. . . .


And despite Whitney Tilson's claim of transparency regarding KIPP test scores, it is obvious that the new rock stars only test in the subjects they choose to test in.  Why didn't they test in Language in 2010?  Let the Report speak (my bolds):

The Mayor’s Office retained a team of experts to again conduct a review in the school’s sixth year of operation.  The sixth year team found while standardized and classroom assessments were used frequently, assessments focused primarily on student recall and on preparation for ISTEP+ examinations.  In its regular oversight of the school, the Mayor’s Office has determined that KIPP Indianapolis failed to properly administer the Northwest Evaluation Association MAP test, as required by the charter agreement.  The school properly administered the test in Reading and Math, however failed to test students in Language.  As explanation, the former school leader stated they were unaware Language was a requirement, despite the school administering all three subjects for the previous five academic years. Therefore, the school was significantly limited in their ability to use student performance data to inform their Language curriculum without the MAP results. 

And how about the deployment of those rock stars brought in to rescue the KIPP brand in Indianapolis?

The Fourth Year Charter Review (FYCR) found that KIPP Indianapolis was approaching the standard of developing an adequate human resources system and deploying its staff effectively. While there was an explicit hiring process, designed by the CEO/Principal, staff were not appropriately certified in the instructional areas they’d been assigned. At the time of the review, KIPP was found to have a sufficient number of staff, deployed effectively and creatively.

Just prior to the fifth year of operation, the majority of staff at KIPP had been terminated or resigned, including the building principal. The school began its fifth year with a newly constituted staff.  Mid-year, the founding CEO resigned and two teachers were promoted to be co-leaders.  The school hired a new business manager, as well.

As a follow up to the FYCR, the Mayor’s Office retained a team of outside experts to evaluate the school’s performance in its fifth year of operation.   Evidence collected during the follow up visit suggested that a high number of staff were assigned to teach in areas for which they were not appropriately licensed.  The Mayor’s Office oversight systems finding that a number of staff were working under emergency permits that were set to expire, with no credible plan to resolve the issue were confirmed by the review team.  Additionally, the team found no process for mentorship of new staff.  In focus groups, teachers reported that human resource issues were the most significant challenge facing the school.  Teachers also reported feeling that professional development activities were inadequate and redundant.   Reviewers concluded that the teacher evaluation system was inconsistent and lacked constructive feedback for staff. 

The Mayor’s Office retained a team of external reviewers to conduct an additional site visit in the school’s sixth year of operation.  The team found that again, the school had experienced significant turnover and began its sixth year with a largely brand new teaching staff.   The majority of teachers hired for the sixth year were members of Teach for America, who the site team noted brought considerable competence and skill to the school.  Additionally, the team found that a formal system for teacher evaluation did not exist within the school.  In regular oversight of the school, the Mayor’s Office determined that teachers in the sixth year were still being assigned to areas for which they were not appropriately licensed.  In some instances, the teachers were permitted to teach without any license or previous experience as a classroom teacher.

And so while Arne Duncan is trying to assure that America's public school teachers are evaluated every year using student test scores, with promotion, tenure and firing on the line, these clowns at KIPP don't even have a teacher evaluation system, even as they administer the state tests only in the subjects they prefer to test.

If you would like a copy of the full report, email me.

Getting a Rise from the Risible: Tilson and Buck Tag Team

Whitney Tilson was so exorcised yesterday by the post I did on David Brooks's lies about KIPP that he has made it the centerpiece of his daily email round-up of all the news that he deems of use to the corporate crusade to segregate and psychologically sterilize brown and black poor kids in corporate welfare charter schools.

Here's Mr. Tilson in his email to fellow hedge fund managers who specialize in tax-sheltered corporate giving to other corporations that are running the corporate charter schools and collecting the tax dollars to run them (what a deal):

. . . . I’ll be curious to see how Ravitch responds to David Brooks critique of her.  So far, her only response that I’m aware of is to tweet a link to Jim Horn’s blog post (http://twitter.com/#!/DianeRavitch/status/87517206040158210) entitled Lies, Damn Lies, and David Brooks, which wins the award for Most Idiotic and Demonstrably False Post of the Year (no wonder Ravitch likes it so much!).  In it, Horn questions whether KIPP students get exposure to:

“chess programs, Shakepeare [note that Horn can’t even spell it correctly], philosophy, or physics in a KIPP school.  Not even chief hedge fund KIPPster propagandist, Whitney Tilson, would make up such an obvious lie.  The amount of argument, on anything, in a KIPP school or one of KIPP's knock-offs, is between negligible and none, and if Shakespeare or philosophy is ever mentioned, it is most likely on one of the thousands of worksheets these children fill out every year.  Has KIPP ever fielded a chess team or dance team?  Not even a mention on any of KIPP's websites, much less in a news article.”

3) Fortunately, I don’t have to rebut this delusional lunacy (hey Jim, why don’t you actually VISIT a KIPP school before writing about them???), as Stuart Buck, on his blog, The Buck Stops Here, does it for me, quickly finding eight separate KIPP web sites that talk about how students are exposed to a rich curriculum, including, chess.  Here are the first three examples Buck cites:

Not a mention of chess or dance on any of KIPP's websites? How about the following:

1. KIPP's mainpage:

After a long day of hard work, KIPPsters enjoy the chance to express themselves in creative ways. Music, art, sports and dance are just a few examples of the programs available in KIPP schools across the country. Many KIPP schools have activities such as basketball, track, lacrosse, step teams and chess clubs. These extracurricular opportunities work together with our academic programs to create a well-rounded experience for our students.

A look inside the music program at KIPP Academy in New York City demonstrates the benefits of KIPP's strong arts curriculum. KIPP Academy students play everything from classical pieces to modern R&B and pop music, and the orchestra has performed across the nation. In New Orleans, KIPP McDonogh 15 has an incredible jazz band, while in Los Angeles KIPP Academy of Opportunity has an extraordinary, high-energy drum line. These KIPP schools exemplify KIPP's commitment that students will work hard while still having fun.

2. From KIPP Delta's website:

On April 17th, engineering students competed in an electric car race in Pensacola, Florida and won. There were many different participants in high school and college level.  Also on April 17th, a group of students competed in the state chess tournament. 

3. Part of a list of activities on the KIPP TEAM (New Jersey) website:

Drumline
Chess Club
Film Club
Yoga Club
Fight Club

An impressive list of five schools out of 100 with at least an example of extracurriculars for KIPPsters "after a long day of hard work," as the KIPP Home Office likes to put it.

Still nothing curricular has turned up on Shakespeare, physics, philosophy, or argument, even with the help of crackerjack grad student, Stuart Buck, who is working on a doctorate with Jay Greene and the scholars of the Walmart-funded Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Buck, too, is a published author, with a book (Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation) that, no doubt, is one of the common readers for the hedge funders' corporate education book club.

Publisher's Weekly entire review (my bolds):

Buck, Arkansas University doctoral fellow in education reform, enters the black-white achievement gap debate with a review of anti-academic attitudes among some black students, who dub school achievement as “acting white”; he finds its roots in “what was lost when schools were desegregated.” Buck fears misinterpretation (“no one should read this section as suggesting that we should go back to segregated schools”) as he delineates the costs of losing the schools as community centers, the concomitant loss of black teachers and principals as “academic role models,” and the detachment of black parents and students. “Desegregation,” he argues, then “set the stage for the 'acting white' criticism to emerge in the school setting,” as black students met hostile receptions from white students and teachers. Buck's proposed solutions are implausible—and almost risible: one, since “humans are tribal,” some students should be in “an all-black environment that includes black teachers and principals,” the other to replace individual grades with “regular interschool competitions, supplemented by small rewards for winners on a group basis.” Overstuffed with evidence showing he “examined literally thousands of sources over the past several years,” the result is a repetitive mélange of education philosophy and anecdotal history. (June)

So Whitney, you are half-way there, pal, in terms of the future Dr. Buck's dream of containing the "tribal" urges within segregated camps where the black and brown can be culturally neutered and behaviorally brainwashed with the "small rewards" from KIPP paychecks. If you guys can just figure out how to replace the white missionary temps from TFA with black ones, you will, indeed, have the final solution.

Finally, if I had a chance, I would tell Mr. Tilson the same thing I told a KIPP cultist who showed up at my presentation at AERA, asking if I had ever been to a KIPP school:  Sir, it did not take a visit to the the WW II concentration camps to understand what was going on there.  But even so, most people chose to look the other way.

RTTT Final Rules Give Ground on Charters While Continuing to Lie About Charters

From William Black at HuffPo:

Tom Frank's book, The Wrecking Crew explains how the Bush administration destroyed effective government and damaged our social fabric and our economy. The Obama administration has chosen to reward two of the worst leaders of Bush's crew -- Geithner and Bernanke -- with promotion and reappointment. Embracing the Wrecking Crew's most destructive members has further damaged the economy and caused increasing political and moral injury to the administration. . . .

The same could be said for Obama's education plan, which picked up right where BushCo. left off, just before the final assault on public schools and teaching, one of few remaining career choices with benefits, retirement plans, and the potential to leave the planet's people a bit better off. In fact, the corporatization of education has accelerated with the installation of Obama and Duncan as the Oligarchs' choice to continue the pillaging of America's educational institutions by corporate interests.

The Race to the Cliff provides almost $5 billion in taxpayer money for bribes that have been set aside to "incent" the crushing of collective bargaining laws, create charter laws where there aren't any, install permanent data surveillance systems in every state, mandate pay-per-score teacher pay plans, and turn over urban schooling to corporate franchises that are modeled after the KIPP dropout factories that so effectively segregate and brainwash the poor and dark-skinned who can survive the chain gang test prep and mind control measures.

Feedback, however, on the parameters for Arne's Big Bribe bucks has been harsh, so much so that the Dunc has backed off on the ramming down of the charter option to the exclusion of other attempts to fix, rather than replace or shut down, low performing schools. This is from the Final Rules on RTTT:

The Department made three noteworthy changes to the selection criteria on turning around the persistently lowest-achieving schools. First, this notice removes the restriction, proposed in the NPP, that permitted the ‘‘transformation’’ model to be used solely as a last resort. Instead, we simply specify that an LEA with more than nine persistently lowest-achieving schools may not use the transformation model for more than 50 percent of its schools (p. 59691).

This would mean, presumably, that a system with fewer than nine low-achieving schools could use the transformation model to "fix" all of them, and thus avoid the draining away of public money by the corporate charter welfare solution being jammed down by the oligarchs, Broad and Gates. There are other changes worth noting. My bolds and italics:

Third, the public comments suggested that there was confusion about the role of charter schools in the Department’s reform agenda. Some commenters concluded that by placing the charter school criterion in the school turnaround section, the Department was advancing charter schools as the chief remedy for addressing the needs of the persistently lowest-achieving schools. While the Department believes that charter schools can be strong partners in school turnaround work, it does not believe that charter schools are the only or preferred solution to turning around struggling schools. In fact, it is the Department’s belief that turning around the persistently lowest-achieving schools is a core competency that every district needs to develop, and that closing bad schools and opening good ones is the job of school district leaders. Notwithstanding research showing that charter schools on average perform similarly to traditional public schools, a growing body of evidence suggests that high-quality charter schools can be powerful forces for increasing student achievement, closing achievement gaps, and spurring educational innovation (59691).. . . .

This last remark continues to ignore the only peer-reviewed national study on charters, the one published by CREDO at Stanford earlier this year, which shows that bad charters outnumber good ones by a margin of 2 to 1. Thirty-seven percent of charters score below the public schools, while only 17 percent score better. In 42 percent of the nation's charters, there is no significant difference in scores. Is this what Duncan's dopes mean by "perform similarly?"

The Black Swans?
And the high quality charters? The real high flyers are the KIPP dropout factories, where the total compliance boot camp system and the psychological brainwashing scatter as many as 50-60 percent of enrollees between 5th and 8th grade--not to mention record attrition rates among teachers that no public system could sustain.

These are the black swans that are displayed for those looking for the solution to urban poverty without doing anything to end poverty. Click on the slide above to see what former hedge fund investor exec, Whitney Tilson, is pumping onto the Web, as noted in previous post by Ken Libby. The KIPP dropout factories have become the sustaining illusion and delusion for the positive psychology hypesters like Broad and Gates and the glassy-eyed drones of Martin Seligman, whose entire urban reform system is built on a house of cards that continues to ignore the grinding poverty that sustains the achievement gaps for the bottom quartile of American children whom we have deemed disposable, all the while turning over their containment and permanent segregation, er, education to the corporate plunderers and leeches who are destroying our Republic.