Florida Charter School Corruption

Probably later than sooner the American public will come to learn of the great waste of tax dollars for the unproven experiment of unmonitored charter schools, which are more often than not worse than the public schools they were intended to replace. In the meantime, how many billions will be soaked up by crooks of all political and religious persuasions? And when school boards are giving it away, why should the thieves bother to call it stealing?

From the Sun-Sentinel:

Charter-school teachers have been banking bonuses while also collecting other bonus checks under the criticized Merit Award Program, School Board members learned Monday.

Conversion-charter schools have spent more than $1 million of the Lake County School District's general funds since 2005 to award bonuses that other district employees can't receive, district chief financial officer Carol MacLeod told School Board members at a workshop.

They've also been reaping the benefits as the district pays for new computers and chips in for the schools' transportation costs. All these things as the schools maintain "significant" unrestricted fund balances, MacLeod said.

"We sit between 4 to 6 percent on a really, really good year," MacLeod said of the district's typical fund balances.

But Lake's conversion charters -- which include Lake Technical Center, Mascotte Elementary, Minneola Elementary, Round Lake Elementary and Spring Creek Elementary -- have unrestricted fund balances of up to almost 30 percent, MacLeod said.

"There are a lot of additional costs to this district in providing conversion charter schools," MacLeod told board members.

For example, the school district spent almost $1.2 million for the schools' participation in districtwide computer-lease programs from 2004 and 2007, MacLeod said, all without asking for reimbursement from the conversion charters.

The district also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help pay for Spring Creek's transportation costs.

"We're just eating this," MacLeod said.

The observations were part of a follow-up report of a recent charter-school audit and a presentation on charter-school inequities.

According to the May 2007 audit prepared by RSM McGladrey, the monthly financial reports from charter schools were not formally tracked or monitored properly. District officials have since worked to fix the problem, but they don't have any authority to make sure charter schools turn in their reports on time, MacLeod said. . . .

Houston's Miracle School Libraries, Not

Part of the collateral damage from the test-scores-at-any-price school deformation movement can be seen in the neglect of school library programs, where children have historically developed the love for books and reading. From the Houston Chronicle:

Seventy percent of the Houston Independent School District's libraries have collections that are so small or so old, the state considers them below standard.

And HISD isn't the only local district struggling to meet state guidelines. Others, including fast-growing Cypress-Fairbanks, also are missing the mark, sometimes because they can't stock their shelves fast enough to keep up with the influx of students.

While HISD has made significant improvements in the past decade, its library collections still are an average of 14 years old, with 17 items per student, according to a report compiling data for 232 of the district's almost 300 campuses.

Thirty-four more schools have no libraries and at least 18 others, including Holland and Ryan middle schools, didn't provide data, according to the report.

And the district employs only 163 certified librarians, leaving other facilities in the hands of teachers, clerks, or, in several cases, unstaffed, officials said. . . .

The Militarization of Chicago Schools and Beyond

George Schmidt has been writing in his brave tabloid, Substance, for some time about the growing influence of the military in the public schools of Chicago. Now the mainstream media is starting to notice, and with Congress lifting the cap on such programs, the urban military school offers an unprecedented opportunity for Washington to develop a steady stream of trained recruitment targets for continuing war plans and other follies of empire.

These new military schools are mostly black and brown, and poor, you understand. Who needs a draft when you can starve potential recruits into the Army? Last week 6,000 people showed up in Cleveland to apply for 300 Walmart jobs. And in Chicago, itself?

In Illinois recently, Masten said, 25,000 and 15,000 people applied at two Wal-Mart stores in the Chicago area, and neither of those is a large Supercenter.

Here's another clip on the school militarization from AFP:

CHICAGO (AFP) — Dozens of teens dressed in uniforms provided by the US Marines stand at attention in the gym of a Chicago public high school as a drill sergeant goes through a list of the day's do's and don'ts.

Bring your books to class. Come for extra help if you need it. And wear your uniform with pride.

"Young men, you think you can get a haircut and say I'm done for two or three weeks. WRONG," Sgt. Major Thomas Smith Jr. intones.

"Young ladies. There's been no problem with your uniforms but there is a problem with your ties. Again, I will go through it again. Wear your ties when you come to my class."

One in 10 public high school students in Chicago wears a military uniform to school and takes classes -- including how to shoot a gun properly -- from retired veterans.

That number is expected to rise as junior military reserve programs expand across the country now that a congressional cap of 3,500 units has been lifted from the nearly century-old scheme.

Proponents of the junior reserve programs say they provide stability and a sense of purpose for troubled youth and help to instill values such as leadership and responsibility.

But opponents say the programs divert critical resources from crumbling public schools and lead to a militarization of US society. . . .

America's Prison-Industrial Complex

From Common Dreams:

. . . .The United States does not provide a level playing field for all children and does not protect all young lives equally, says a recent report by the Children’s Defense Fund. Poor children and children of color, in particular, “already are in the pipeline to prison before taking a single step or uttering a word,” the report states. Many youth in juvenile detention facilities have never been on the track to college or a successful life. “They were not derailed from the right track; they never got on it,” the organization says.

Much of the problem is due to poverty, and children of color are more likely to be afflicted. One-quarter of Latino children and one-third of black children are poor. Black children are more than three times as likely as white children to be born into poverty, and are more than four times as likely to live in extreme poverty, according to the report.

For millions of poor children - failed by their families and by the child-welfare and juvenile-justice systems - a life of prison awaits them. Prison is the only universally guaranteed program for children in America, the study notes, as America increasingly criminalizes its youth and spends nearly three times as much per prisoner as it does per student - this in a country with 2.3 million prisoners, the world’s largest inmate population, more prisoners than in China, a nation that has four times as many people as the United States.

And those who are incarcerated are disproportionately of color, products of a society that has neglected and marginalized them. Children of color are more likely to be placed in programs for mental retardation and in foster care, and are more likely to be suspended from school, or left back a grade or to drop out. And youth of color, 39 percent of the juvenile population, are 60 percent of incarcerated juveniles, according to the report.

A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime. A Latino boy has a one in six chance. Today, as a result of unfair drug laws and draconian sentencing, failing schools, and a lack of opportunity, 580,000 black men - many of them fathers - are doing time in state and federal prisons, while only 40,000 graduate from college each year, an astonishing statistic.

All of this comes down to a lack of commitment by our society, misplaced priorities and squandered resources. The Children’s Defense Fund makes a number of recommendations for dismantling the cradle-to-prison pipeline, including full funding of Head Start, making sure that children can read by the fourth grade, ensuring health insurance for all pregnant women, eradicating child poverty by 2015, eliminating hunger, and providing jobs with a living wage.

The money is available. These and other recommendations are estimated to cost around $75 billion, with $55 billion to eradicate child poverty, the Children’s Defense Fund says. Repealing the tax cuts for the top 1 percent richest people would provide $57 billion. And, to put things in perspective, the war in Iraq has cost more than $450 billion through 2007, about $100 billion a year. . . .

Aqua Dots Coated with Deadly Chemicals

When American capital decided to turn its back on the American production worker by shipping manufacturing jobs to China, they probably didn't suspect that their greed would lead so quickly to toxic toys and antifreeze toothpaste on American store shelves.

What kind of health disaster will be required before our government steps in to protect citizens? What other poisons are we ingesting from the thousands of imported toxic products because our corporate socialist system is too corrupt to do anything about it?

From Raw Story:

. . . . Though anticipated to be among the holiday's biggest-selling toys, Aqua Dots were recalled in the United States on Nov. 7 after tests showed they are coated with an industrial chemical that, when ingested, metabolizes into the "date-rape" drug gamma hydroxy butyrate.

The bead-like toy could cause breathing problems, loss of consciousness, seizures, drowsiness, coma and death if ingested. Nine children in the United States and three children in Australia have become sick.

Aqua Dots was heavily advertised in holiday fliers because of the toy's popularity, said Waugh. The Toys "R" Us circular distributed Sunday advertised the beads with a photo on page 2 under the heading "Girls Gift Sale."

Lifting the Rock on Pennsylania Charter Schools

It took a lawsuit that went all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but the public still has a right to know about the sweet deals that charter schools are cutting all over the state. It remains, however, a sad state of affairs when the job of public oversight has to be done by reporters curious enough to go to court to get an answer to a question about these corporate welfare outfits pretending to do the work of schools.

When did the the right to steal from the public treasury become a virtue reserved for the practitioners of crony capitalism? If the charterizers such as Rotherham encountered such secrecy and foot-dragging among public school administrators, they would be calling for criminal investigations.

A Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision has, for the first time, established that charter schools must release information requested under the state's Right-to-Know law, according to a lawyer in the case.

The decision, handed down Tuesday said a Chester charter school must hand over its management contract and other financial documents to a Delaware County newspaper.

In 2005, Matthew Zager, a reporter for the Delaware County Daily Times, filed a Right-to-Know law request with Vahan Gureghian, head of the management company that operates the Chester Community Charter School. Zager asked for an auditor's report, financial statements, and the school's management agreement with the corporation that had managed the charter before 2002.

The request was denied by Danielle Gureghian, Vahan Gureghian's wife and a lawyer for his management company. She said the management firm was a private company and not subject to the Right-to-Know law.

Delaware County Common Pleas Court, Commonwealth Court, and the Supreme Court all rejected that argument. "Charter schools are not exempt from the statutes that are applicable to public schools," the Supreme Court said in its ruling. . . .

Reading the Revolutionary Overreaching by Michelle Rhee

After six years of NCLB's guaranteed failure plan, the public schools in America's largest urban school systems are ripe for the ultimate reform: the shifting of control to corporations that will make private decisions on the use of public dollars to carry out the en masse cognitive lynchings against black children behind the privacy screens set up by by no public oversight and the relinquishing of civic responsibility.

The most aggressive and egregious of these strategized privatization steamrollers is rolling in the nation's capital, where the diminutive, smiling Michelle Rhee has been put out front to announce the demise of tenure laws, the end of due process in hiring and firing, and the shift of civic responsibility and democratic control to a couple of hand-picked contractors who will be put in charge of the future with absolutely no evidence that they can produce better educational results than what we have now.

And what has prepared Michelle Rhee for such responsibility? Look at her resume, and you will see that, even though she has no experience to recommend her bold (reckless) moves, she has resources at her disposal: Joel Klein, Margaret Spellings, Kati Haycock, and Wendy Kopp.

What a team! Political ruthlessness and stupidity egged on by moral superiority and an implacable denial of reality.

If you missed the chilling John Merrow report last week on Little Michelle's big adventure, check it out here.

And here is an astute reading of the situation by Marc Fisher in WaPo:

Uh-oh, here we go again. Not even a year into D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's ambitious effort to remake the city's school, it's time once more for a trip into the fantasy land of fixing the schools by handing them over to untested, unimpressive private companies.

Rhee is talking about giving 27 of the District's many dozens of failing schools to some of the companies that contract with school systems to take over and revamp exceedingly bad schools. The track record of such companies is fair to poor. Studies looking at how those companies have performed tend to conclude that the success of the privatized school is heavily dependent on the abilities of the principal and other school leaders, as well as the amount of community support there is for the concept and its execution. In other words, what makes a school work is pretty much the same whether it's a traditional public school or a privatized school.

The attraction of the privatization route is that it's dramatic, and if there's anything Mayor Adrian Fenty and Rhee are all about in their school reform movement, it's being dramatic. The other appeal of privatization is that it's a quick fix, a way to circumvent the failed administration of the D.C. public schools. That's a real appeal, especially given the rising skepticism that Rhee will prevail in her far more ambitious and important effort to win permission to clean house in the DCPS headquarters. Perhaps she is anticipating failure in that effort, which would leave privatization as one of the few remaining ways to pull some schools out from under the cynics and incompetents who toil at the system's central office.

One of the leading companies under consideration to take over some D.C. schools is apparently St. Hope Academy, which is controlled by former NBA star Kevin Johnson. The company's record at its schools in California is not exactly stellar, and it has a somewhat checkered history both as a school operator and as a real estate developer and manager.

In Philadelphia, where an embrace of private management for public schools has led to what some academics call a public-private hybrid school system, the results of the changed structure of public education has been pretty much as mixed as anywhere else. As with charter schools, the bottom line is determined by the creativity and smarts of the school operator, rather than by the very concept of privatization. Some people do this well, most do not. That's par for the course in any kind of school governance. So privatization is neither panacea nor disaster.

But it is folly to assume that the D.C. school system will be rigorous or honest enough to choose the very best of operators if it does go down the road to privatization. The record through decades of experiments with D.C. schools is that almost any charlatan can come along and get a piece of the D.C. system to play with. The charter school system in the District has had a disturbing number of operators who seemed to be in the game primarily to make money or try out some bizarre and ill-planned educational concept. The good charters do exist, but they are hardly the majority of the schools in that chunk of the system.

As the Post's Theola Labbe and Dion Haynes report, No Child Left Behind gives school systems these options for dealing with failing schools: Bring in private firms to manage the schools; convert them to charters; keep them under the system's control but replace the principals and teachers; allow the state -- or in Washington, the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education -- to seize the schools; or devise something else.

In the District, there are really only three options, since handing over a school to the "state" is a farce, seeing as how there is no state. Privatization and conversion to charters are paths of last resort; the system should at least make an effort to remake its worst schools with all-new staffs.

Everything Rhee has said since arriving on the scene has raised hopes that the system would cleanse itself and try to manage its schools in a less centralized, more independent and creative manner. To talk of privatization now is to deflate hopes across the city. The chancellor should be focused on building political support for her plan to clear out the central headquarters, not to give away schools before she's even tried to fix them.

NC Declares Too Much Testing

Do you think? Huh.

RALEIGH - A state commission agreed today on a draft report saying “there is too much time spent on testing” and that several exams should be eliminated or no longer counted in the state’s testing program.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on Testing and Accountability agreed to recommend to the state Board of Education that the fourth-, seventh- and 10th-grade writing tests and the eighth-grade computer skills tests be eliminated. . . .

Who Needs Human Capital When You Have the Virtual Eve?

When the ed industry really gets ramped up, it won't take them long to find many economic advantages of virtual teachers, compared to the old fashioned off-shoring of jobs to countries that pay in pennies. Virtual tutors work for free, and they never depart from the script like some of those sentimental and strong-willed fleshy types. Sounds like, hey, the Garden of Eden?

A virtual teacher who is able to respond to children's moods is being hailed as a critical tool in the expanding long-distance learning market.

Massey researchers have developed the near-human animated teacher, called Eve, and say the development has drawn the attention of scientists across the computing world.

An attractive blonde, the 3D image is designed to teach maths one-on-one to 8-year-olds.

Eve is what is known in the information sciences as an intelligent or affective tutoring system, that can adapt its response to the emotional state of people by interaction through a computer system.

Linked to a child via computer, the animated character or virtual tutor can tell if the child is frustrated, angry or confused by the on-screen teaching session and can adapt the tutoring session appropriately.

Eve can ask questions, give feedback, discuss questions and solutions and show emotion.

To develop the software, the Massey team observed children and their interactions with teachers and captured them on thousands of images. . . .

What Is Left Behind

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Let us give thanks for an improved chance now of killing NCLB in the coming year. It is still important to let your Congress know that we are eager for them to stop the educational genocide in the new year.

I am taking a week off from blogging to get some things done and some other things not overdone. In the meantime, my extended mantra:

What Is Left Behind

As NCLB’s reauthorization or expiration takes center stage in Washington, American citizens who care about the future of our public schools and our democracy must be heard. Our shared future is not an abstract political possibility but, rather, one that breathes in every son or daughter, every niece or nephew, every grandson or granddaughter, every neighbor’s child, and every one of our own students who enters the schoolhouse door.

While Secretary Spellings and legislators from both parties stubbornly proclaim that NCLB is working—despite of all the empirical evidence indicating otherwise—and as politicians boast that no child is being left behind, let us pause to consider what has been jettisoned. Let us take a moment to think about what has been left behind, what has been dumped, what has been pushed out the door because there is no longer space or time for it in the school day.

Now if your school still has some of these things, I say congratulations. At the same time, however, I say beware. Beware, because the unattainable goal of 100% proficiency that is the bedrock of NCLB makes it most likely that over the next seven years, your school will join the 30% of schools today where these crucial elements of school have already been left behind.

As American citizens deeply concerned about the health of our democratic republic, we are, of course, concerned and horrified that the social studies have been left behind. In Florida and other states, social studies teachers, afraid of losing their jobs, are lobbying for social studies to be tested, so that their work will survive.

The emphasis on math and reading tests has meant less geography, civics, and government, which leaves children ignorant of how public decisions are made or where their community fits into state, national, and global contexts—or even that there is a context beyond their street and TV screens. Children are left, in effect, stranded on lonely islands of ignorance, without the impetus or skills to have their voices heard in ways that make the world listen.

History, too, has been left behind, making it assured that this next generation will grow up more likely to be swayed by the mistakes and misdeeds of the past to which they remain clueless. What is a democratic republic and where did it come from? Sorry, that’s not on the test, either.

And economics? While children in wealthy communities, the ones without AYP worries yet, play stock market games and learn about hedge funds, the economic education of children in schools under the testing gun consists of collecting “Scholar Dollars” that they trade in for bags of Skittles, a pittance of pay for a meaningless labor whose significance remains a mystery to them.

Health and physical education have been left behind, too, leaving children out of shape and subject to diseases associated with obesity and inactivity. At the same time, children are left in the dark about the importance of healthy foods, fresh fruits and vegetables, the kinds of foods that are scarce in the small stores of poor neighborhoods. And left behind, too, is information about the hazards of a never-ending diet of Taco Bell and McDonalds—because that's not on the test, either.

Art and music have been left behind, leaving in their crossing wakes an imagination gap, a creativity gap, and expression gap, an aesthetic gap, a souls gap. We can add these gaps to the achievement gap that parallels a widening economic gap – despite years and years of increased testing and accountability in those schools where the economic gaps are at their deepest points.

Diversity of thought has been left behind. What remains in failing schools and the ones teetering on the testing bubble are collections of remote and desiccated facts that represent not even a single culture, but rather, an anti-culture that has essentially eradicated cultural values as a discussable issue.

Science has been left behind, too, and thus the primary tool for understanding how the modern world is organized. Where science survives, it is where it is tested, and the kind of science that remains is the kind that can be fit into a multiple-choice format, not the kind that exercises children’s ability to think, solve problems, conduct experiments, and make good decisions.

Literature has been left behind, and with it the love of reading and books and the curiosity that is spawned and kept alive by the life of the imagination. Stories are now substituted by the measured mouthing of nonsense syllables and the framing of comprehension responses that the children who utter them do not understand.

Recess has been left behind in a third of all American elementary schools, and as the percentage of failing schools increases, we may expect that number to rise. Play, itself, then becomes left behind, and along with it one of the most useful skills of all—to think as if, what if, as in what if life were somehow different than, or what if there were a choice beyond a, b, c, or d?

Nap time has been left behind in kindergarten and even in pre-K, as teachers focus on replacing dream time with skill practice time for a future of testing.

Field trips, holidays, and assemblies have been left behind unless they can be used for test preparation, or unless they come after the test, those short precious weeks when smiles may be seen to return to teachers’ lips and to students’ eyes.

The love of the teacher for her craft has been left behind in so many schools, replaced by the burdensome regimen of the pacing guide and the production schedule and the script. And time for teacher-led discussion, exploration, reflection? There is only time for teachers to learn their lines, trying to become good actors in a very bad play where the audience is compelled to participate. And time to weigh the results of the practice tests in order to get ready for the real tests.

Left behind, too, are teacher autonomy and professional discretion. Now whole hallways of fourth grade classes are on the same page of the same scripted lesson at the same moment that any supervisor should walk by, supervisors who are identically trained to look for the same manifestations of sameness, from bulletin boards to hand signals to the distance that children are trained to maintain from one another as they march to lunch, with their arms holding together their imaginary straightjackets.

Most troubling, however, of all that has been left behind is the teacher’s nurturing care, the teacher whose advocacy for and sensitivity to every child’s fragile humanity has been a trademark of what it means to be the teacher of children. With the current laser focus on avoiding test failure, even as expectations become higher with each passing year, the child who cannot do more than a child can do now becomes viewed as the stumbling block to a success that is increasingly elusive.

Instead, then, of being viewed as the reasons we have schools to begin with, the needful child who is, indeed, behind, becomes the obstacle to a proficiency that becomes further and further out of reach. When this occurs, as it surely does every time teachers and principals fall prey to the pressure, children become the burden that must be reluctantly borne, obstacles to a success that their own disability, poverty, or language issues complicate— and that even the best teacher can never compensate for.

Students, then, come to be seen as complicit in creating the failure that, in fact, no one, teacher or student, can remedy, because there is a monstrous system that has made child failure and, thus, school failure inevitable, a monstrous system that has traded and treated this generation of children as a means to attain a political end—a political end that, in fact, threatens our future as a free people who are able to think, to solve problems, to care, to imagine, to understand, to have empathy, to participate, to grow, to live.

So as you listen to the growing debate this fall in Washington, please do not leave your political responsibility behind and your good sense with it. Go online tonight and order the Linda Perlstein book, Tested. . .. Read it and, as you do so, keep in mind that the horror that she so ably describes occurred in a school that is considered a success, a “lighthouse school.” Think, then, of what it must be like in the thirty percent of American schools that are now labeled failures.

Recently, a quote by Cal State professor, Art Costa showed up on one of internet discussion groups, a quote that is horribly relevant today: "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."

Call and write and visit your school boards and your Congressional delegation. Remind them what you value and what you believe to be significant for now and for our future, and what you know that now and finally must to be left behind.

Jim Horn
Monmouth University
September 2007