The number of students who opted out of state tests in Long Island
rose to more than 97,500 this week, according to tallies by test-refusal
advocates—or about half of the students in grades three through eight.
Long
Island Opt Out, which has promoted the movement, said Friday it had
volunteers cull numbers from officials and teachers in 124 districts
this week. The group lacked data for six districts.
The group
said the boycott grew from last spring, when it said 82,492 Long Island
students opted out of at least one of the three days of English language
arts exams. Next week will have three days of math tests. . . .
After Tim and Jed give me an opportunity to talk some about Work Hard, Be Hard, they interview Emily Talmage, one of the former "no excuses" teachers in the book. Check it out here.
Peg with Pen: The Opt Out Irony: Currently it's Spring of 2016 and we are in the thick of Opt Out. Opt out is still surrounded by intense bullying and harassment ...
The KIPP Model is both
unustainable and inhumane in numerous ways that I document in a new book thatexamines inner workings of "no excuses" charter schools. Both
teachers and students are being used, abused, and discarded in order to benefit
a paternalistic corporate ideology that advantages powerful elites at the
expense of the most vulnerable children. Parents should be up in arms.
When teachers with little teacher preparation or child development training and even less understanding of disadvantaged children's needs are commanded by school CEOs to keep children in a psychological lockdown state and laser focused on raising test scores by any means necessary, abused children often result. The abusers are rarely apprehended, and if they are, they are almost never prosecuted. After earlier KIPP abuse incidents this school year in New Orleans and St. Louis, a Denver KIPP is the latest venue for, yet, another bruised and battered KIPP student. It is time for the white elites who support this dehumanizing form of education for the children of the poor to share the liability for this kind of predictable outcome that has become commonplace, even though most incidents go unreported to parents or police. From Channel 9 in Denver:
Part I of this series detailed how Mastery Charter is using the hostile
takeover methods of the corporate world to takeover more Philadelphia Public
Schools each year. But education deals with relationships between human beings,
not the industrial products and natural resources of the corporate world. Thus,
these hostile takeovers aggravate historic class and ethnic tensions (watch the video). Philadelphia schools have
struggled for years with underfunding at the state level; now charters bring
the added disparity in funding between public schools and charters within
Philadelphia. Philadelphia currently has 83 charters. Other charter companies, including KIPP (four
schools), ASPIRA (six schools), and Universal (seven schools) are looking to
expand their enrollment, but Mastery increasingly dominates the charter sector
in Philadelphia. Also, with many independent charters, Philadelphia is ranked
third in the nation for the number of students enrolled in charter schools with
currently roughly 70,000 of Philadelphia’s approximately
200,000 students being enrolled in charters.
Mastery Charter Schools
Mastery currently managesnine elementary schools, eight
middle/high schools in Philadelphia, and six schools (five elementary and one
high school) in Camden, New Jersey, in total, serving over 12,000 students. In its five-year budget plan,announced
March 24th, at the School Reform Commission
(SRC) meeting, the District anticipates an additional enrollment of 10,000 more
charter students in the next five years. Adding to the District's problems, on
February 16, 2016 the
Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the SRC
had overstepped its authority in imposing enrollment caps on charters. That will
probably result in an increase in charter enrollment in existing charter
schools. The SRC also announced on March 24th its intention to add at 10,000
more charter students in the next five years and to close at least three public
schools each year beginning in 2018.
Corporate profiteer Steve Barr is in the news again. Now he is mulling a run at Los Angeles Mayor. Barr calls himself an "educational innovator" despite having no background in either education or pedagogy. While his attempts to "turn around schools" have been epic failures in New Orleans and Los Angeles, his Green Dot Corporate Charter Chain is frequently held up as a measure of his so-called success. Except they're anything but successful.
Green Dot Corporate Charter Schools hold the dubious record of NINE of the lowest fifty average SAT scores in Los Angeles County for 2015. The billionaire backed charter chain, founded by corporate executive Barr and run by hedge fund manager Marco Petruzzi, group of SAT bottom dwellers leads all other charter chains in comprising 18% of the fifty worst. These schools were (lower numbers are worst performing):
4. Animo Locke Charter High School #1 (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1033
12. Animo Watts Charter High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1092
14. Animo Locke Charter High School #2 (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1104
16. Alain Leroy Locke High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1107
19. Animo Ralph Bunche High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1117
25. Animo Locke Technology High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1129
26. Animo Oscar De La Hoya Charter High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1129
34. Animo Jackie Robinson High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1150
50. Animo South Los Angeles Charter (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1180
The privately managed charter chain's marketing slogan is "…all students graduate prepared for college, leadership and life." These dismal SAT scores would seem to indicate otherwise. For context 1500 is considered the minimum threshold for college readiness, while 2052 was the composite average for Freshmen accepted into UCLA in 2013.
Barr has never been able to get his own house together at his lucrative charter chain. Why would we trust him meddling with our public schools?
"Big question on New York State Tests," (April 5) reports that one of the arguments in favor of a robust standardized testing program is to reveal achievement gaps. But we already know which children are doing poorly and we know what to do about it.
Decades of research has revealed that the major cause of the achievement gap is the effects of poverty, including poor nutrition, lack of health care, and little or no access to books: the best teaching in the world will not help if children are hungry, ill, and have nothing to read.
There is no evidence that massive testing closes the achievement gap, and plenty of evidence that improving the economy, or at least protecting children from the effects of poverty, does.
Stephen Krashen
Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/nyregion/big-question-on-new-york-state-tests-how-many-will-opt-out.html?_r=0
Sources The effects of poverty: Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
"There is no evidence massive testing" Nichols, S., Glass, G., and Berliner, D. 2006. High-stakes testing and student achievement: Does accountability increase student learning? Education Policy Archives 14(1). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n1/. OECD. Tienken, C., 2011. Common core standards: An example of data-less decision-making. Journal of Scholarship and Practice. American Association of School Administrators [AASA], 7(4): 3-18. http://www.aasa.org/jsp.aspx.
Improving the economy ....: Baker, K. 2007. Are international tests worth anything? Phi Delta Kappan, 89(2), 101-104; Zhao, Y. 2009. Catching Up or Leading the Way? American Education in the Age of Globalization. ASCD: Alexandria, VA.; Ananat, E., Gassman-Pines, A., Francis, D., and Gibson-Davis, C. 2011. Children left behind: The effects of statewide job less on student acbievement. NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) Working Paper No. 17104, JEL No. 12,16. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17104
At least protect: Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2). Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Libraries Unlimited (second edition).
Following NPE's very late “call” for “a national opt,” it is not surprising to see
the history of the opt out movement already being revised to give credit to education’s
“American Idol,” Diane Ravitch.John
Thompson writes at Huffington Post,
Three cheers for the
Opt Out movement! When the history of the collapse of data-driven,
competition-driven school improvement is written, the parents and students of
the grassroots Opt Out uprising will get much - or most - of the credit for
driving a stake through the heart of the testing vampire.
Of course, leaders
like Diane Ravitch will be justifiably credited for guiding embattled educators
through the dark days of the corporate reform era. . . .
Hearing this
speed-of-light revisionism, however, from historian, John Thompson, is both
surprising and disappointing.John is
clearly not too young to remember
that "during the dark[est] days of corporate education reform,” the few good
guys like Susan Ohanian, Gerald Bracey, Kathy Emery, and David Berliner were doing
their best to counter the propaganda by “crisis mongers” and voucher/charter
advocates like Diane Ravitch and Paul Peterson, who were, at the same time,
wining and dining at the Hoover Institute and Manhattan Institute with other
doyens of corporate education reform. At a Manhattan Institute
soiree in 2000 that featured all the corporate ed rock stars, Ravitch waved
off the dire warnings about school privatization that were being offered by
Bracey and others:
"Vouchers and charters will not destroy public
education. This is an incredible and fantastic fear. There are more than 45
million children in public schools. There are about 12,000 receiving vouchers.
There are 350,000 in charter schools. This is like an elephant complaining
about the mosquito on its shoulder, saying that that the mosquito is going to
destroy it. Why are people so frightened of such an insignificant prospect? It
is hard to understand the hysteria stirred by the fear of choice with regard to
the public schools."
Apparently, Ravitch could not
foresee, or chose to ignore, the deadly virus that the little mosquito
carried.Regardless of whether her
innacurate assessment of the threat was due to bad judgment or the kind of
stealth duplicity that had earned her a reputation when she was working for GHW
Bush, today 18 states have approved school voucher laws and two and half
million children are enrolled in charters, with millions more planned as a
result of the new federal legislation that Ravitch and her new NEA/AFT patrons supported
in 2015.Of the 90,000+ public schools
in the U. S. when Ravitch made that statement above, 7,000 of them are now
charter schools.Quite the mosquito, it
turns out.
If Ravitch’s judgment could
be relied upon to represent the best interests of children, teachers, and
parents, it would matter not if she got credit for a movement that she came to
four years after it began and only after it had reached national proportions.Sadly, however, her judgment cannot be relied
upon, as she has shown with her full-throated support for the ESEA
reauthorization, ESSA, which will set back education policy by at least a half
century, according to civil rights lawyer, Gary Orfield.
However, Ravitch can be
trusted to maintain a blind loyalty to AFT and NEA misleaders, who have an
established history of selling their members down the river repeatedly, with
support for NCLB testing, charter schools, and value-added teacher evaluation. It would seem that Ravitch wants everyone
under her tent, even if there are well-known arsonists in the crowd.
Ravitch’s epiphany that she
had been wrong for so many years about corporate education reform came only
after it had dawned on most educators, policymakers, and a sizable percentage
of the general public that NCLB was an unsustainable privatization charade from
the beginning.Her quiet contrition and
guarded confessions expressed in her two books after 2009 earned her the hero status
that she enjoys today as someone who saw the errors of her ways and came over
from the dark side.For teachers it is
thrilling to hear, especially from a conservative, that they were right all
along about matters felt so deeply.
No, Ravitch is not the hero
of the Opt Out movement, and she deserves credit only for coming four years
late to the party that others worked their guts out to make happen.I would suggest that the historian, John
Thompson, dig a little deeper into the history of the opt out movement before he adds another
jewel to the Ravitch crown.
“This increasingly well-rooted network provides the Gulen Movement with daily access to the minds of over 45,000 students, and yearly access to hundreds of millions of hard-earned tax dollars.” — Sharon Higgins
The largest chain of charter schools in the United States is that of those associated with the secretive Gülenist religious cult. With financial might sufficient to buy off politicians, and the political clout to push legislation, Gülen charters, like all charter schools, are the inevitable result of what happens after putting public money into private hands. Gülen is just one of many cults dominating the corporate charter school industry. Charter schools are symptomatic of the privatization of the public commons.
After years of being able to remain in obscurity while silencing their opposition, the Gülenist Network is beginning to find itself under ever increasing scrutiny. The Turkish government hired Amsterdam & Partners LLP to investigate. Their findings are even more shocking than many Gülen observers expected. Additionally, a full length documentary film entitled KILLING ED has been released, which outlines the shadowy Gülenist Network’s pervasive involvement with privately managed charter schools.
While some of lucrative charter school industry's top profiteers have been brought in to attempt damage control, there remains hope that this story of corruption, greed, and indoctrination will begin to reach an ever widening circle of people.
Please find below Amsterdam & Partners LLP’s press release, press conference video, and trailer for KILLING ED. Stopping the charter school industry must become one of our top priorities if we value public education as a society.
State of California Urged to Investigate Gülen-linked Magnolia Charter Schools
By Editor | Published: February 16, 2016
The following press release was distributed to media on Tuesday, February 16, 2016:
LOS ANGELES, February 16, 2016 – A formal complaint has been issued under the California Uniform Complaint Procedure (“UCP”) urging the California Department of Education to conduct a full investigation into the financial practices of the Magnolia Public Schools charter school network, which currently operates 11 active charter schools in California.
The UCP Complaint – brought by the law firm Amsterdam & Partners LLP, in conjunction with interested California taxpayers Dr. José Moreno and Tina Andres – notes that a 2015 audit conducted by the California State Auditor discovered widespread accounting impropriety and raised numerous other important questions about Magnolia’s financial practices. Notable among them is Magnolia’s connection to the global organization of charter schools and businesses headed by Turkish national Fethullah Gülen, a reclusive Islamic cleric who resides in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
“The State Auditor was unable to verify the propriety of a staggering 69% of financial transactions from a sampling at the Magnolia schools, but it did identify large contracts from Magnolia to affiliated vendors, and revealed that Magnolia has improperly spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on immigration lawyers to import teachers from Turkey,” said Robert Amsterdam, founding partner of Amsterdam & Partners LLP. “Although Magnolia’s CEO and Superintendent insists that there is no connection between Magnolia and the Gülen Organization, we respectfully direct the California authorities to Magnolia’s financial ties to the Pacifica Institute in Irvine, and to the similarities between Magnolia’s operating profile and that of other known Gülen Organization charter schools.”
Tina Andres, one of the individual Complainants, said, “Magnolia’s misuse of public funds is intolerable. They use our tax dollars to pay for visas to hire Turkish teachers, while there are plenty of talented and highly qualified teachers looking for positions in our area.”
Magnolia has submitted multiple new charter school applications valued at more than $48 million each. The UCP Complaint asserts that the volume of negative findings of the California State Auditor from a mere sampling of Magnolia’s transactions and vendor agreements should have spurred a comprehensive investigation into the Magnolia charter school network, and that the State of California owes a fiduciary duty to California taxpayers to probe further.
The UCP Complaint was delivered to the California Department of Education, as well as to various stakeholders concerned about the issue. It is available for viewing at http://magnoliacomplaint.com, where supporters may also sign a petition urging the California Department of Education to initiate the requested investigation
Dr. José Moreno is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Chicano & Latino Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and a former President of the Board of Education for the Anaheim City School District. He has four children currently attending public schools in Anaheim, where Magnolia is seeking to expand. Tina Andres is a veteran public school teacher in the Santa Ana Unified School District, which hosts a Magnolia school. She has two children attending public schools in the district, one of which is a charter school.
Amsterdam & Partners LLP – an international law firm with offices in London and Washington, DC – acts for the Republic of Turkey, and is conducting a global investigation into the alleged illegal activities of the Gülen Organization. Additional information about Amsterdam & Partners LLP is available at www.amsterdamandpartners.com.
Gülen Charter Schools Investigation Press Conference
Robert Amsterdam, lawyer at Amsterdam & Partners LLP, holds press conference updating the public on the latest developments and upcoming legal suits relating to alleged illegal conduct by the U.S. charter school network controlled by controversial Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen.
Documentary film exposing charter schools and the Gülenist Network
KILLING ED is a new documentary feature film that exposes a shocking truth: that one of the largest networks of taxpayer-funded charter schools in the U.S. are a worst-case-scenario—operated with questionable academic, labor, and H1-B visa standards by members of the “Gülen Movement” – a rapidly expanding, global Islamic group whose leader, Fethullah Gülen, lives in seclusion in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.
Of the 11 Memphis schools that have been in the ASD the longest, all 11
are still in the bottom 10 percent — including three in the bottom 1
percent. But one school — KIPP Memphis Preparatory Middle — sits just
below the 10th percentile mark. --Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 31, 2016
If KIPP Memphis Preparatory Middle sits just below the 10th percentile mark, another Memphis KIPP school remains far below that. The KIPP Memphis University Middle School has been in bottom five percent of schools for the past three years (click image to enlarge):
When ASD was created with Race to the Top money in 2011, the charter industry promoters promised that the bottom five percent of Tennessee schools entering the Achievement School District would be catapulted into the top 25 percent of state schools within 5 years. We are now in year 5, and we see what an outrageous lie that was to begin with. We can also see what the Gates Foundation has delivered since it came to Memphis (Shelby County) in 2009 with $90 million to begin the corporatization and teacher deprofessionalization process.
From the Commercial Appeal:
Of the 168 schools that make up the bottom 10 percent in academic performance in the state, 56 percent are located in Shelby County, according to new data acquired by The Commercial Appeal this week.
Those 95 schools include 54 in the bottom 5 percent — a designation with legal ramifications that allows the state's Achievement School District to take over.
The Tennessee Department of Education issues its official priority list of bottom 5 percent schools every three years, with the next edition set for the summer of 2017. The bottom 10 percent list, provided to the newspaper by the state, is an unofficial warning to local districts about schools that are struggling and could soon be eligible for state takeover.
Of the 95 schools, 11 are under the ASD, 13 are charters and the remaining 71 are operated by SCS. A school had to have at least two year's worth of data to make the list, which is why several ASD schools new to the district are not represented. Some schools may have closed last year but still had two years' worth of data that was included.
Shelby County Schools Chief of Academics Heidi Ramirez said it's no surprise that so many schools in the bottom 10 percent in the state are located in Shelby County.
"I hope it is a call to action for folks to recognize that as much great work as we're doing in Shelby County Schools, on the resource trajectory we are on, we need additional supports to accelerate progress," Ramirez said. The district is already facing an $86 million budget gap for next year.
The 10-percent list also offers glimpses at early successes and struggles from both the ASD and the SCS Innovation Zone turnaround programs, created with Race to the Top federal funding and now kept alive through state and philanthropic dollars. Both have phased priority schools into their programs since the 2012-13 school year....
The 