Charter School Crime and Corruption Blotter

Let's see, down in Florida, the State Senate is trying to enact some accountability measures for the 358 charter schools that drain off a half-billion dollars a year in public education funds:

. . . .Gaetz said the proposals were spurred by a series of Orlando Sentinel articles published earlier this year in which the newspaper found that 43 percent of the state's charters went ungraded -- a number that remains constant today. In Florida, where grades are used to target public schools needing improvement, the ungraded charters often have avoided sanctions designed to boost their performance.

Only about 20 percent of traditional public schools go ungraded.

On financial matters, the newspaper found that more than half of charters had a deficit during the 2005 budget year. About a quarter could not cover their expenses. At nearly half the schools, board members and employees had business dealings with their charters, such as school officials leasing buildings to the charter. Nearly one in 10 spent more on administration than the classroom. . . . .

And over in DC, former charter kingpin, Brenda Belton, got her orange jumpsuit yesterday as her 3 year prize for stealing $800,000 from the children of DC:

A former District of Columbia charter school executive has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison for stealing more than $800,000 earmarked for students.

Brenda Belton was responsible for monitoring 17 charter schools for Washington’s board of education from 2003 to 2006. . . .

And out in Ohio, the state is looking for $2.55 million handed over to start 33 charters that never opened:

Ohio charter school operators were given $2.55 million in state and federal planning grants to start 33 schools that were never opened _ nearly 10 percent of the 352 grants that have been issued by the state, state records showed.

The $2.55 million doesn't include planning funds given to schools that opened and later closed, The Columbus Dispatch reported on Sunday.

The Ohio Department of Education is trying to recover $1.56 million from 19 schools that either misspent start-up grants or were unable to document how the money was spent, the newspaper said. About $3,600 has so far been repaid. . . .

Diane Ravitch and the Suppression of the Sandia Report

Ever heard of A Nation at Risk? Of course you have--it proved the public schools are going to hell in a handbasket. How about the Sandia Report? No? That's okay--the vast majority of the American people have never heard of it, either.

One of the chief reasons why, as pointed out in this trip down memory lane by Jerry Bracey, has everything to do the crucial role played by ideological chameleon and conservative revisionist, Diane Ravitch. You see, Sandia challenged many of scary conclusions in A Nation at Risk that were being used to justify the new "accountability" and the push for school vouchers.

As we now wait for the day that the Bush thugs are finally sent packing from Washington, Ravitch is busy trying to bore her way into the naive and ahistorical brains of unsuspecting liberals, where she can once again plant her poisonous and monstrous eggs. Her target right now is Deb Meier--we'll see how far she gets.

From Huffington Post:

In Ian McEwan's exquisite little novel, Atonement (now also a film), a young girl tells a lie that produces disastrous consequences over many years although she herself becomes quite celebrated as an adult. I thought of Atonement when I read in Deb Meier's blog to Diane Ravitch, "While you and I are both feeling a little weary about how politics has distorted schooling...." Hah! Ravitch quarterbacked much of the distortion and needs to atone for her role in the suppression of "Perspectives on Education in America," better known simply as "The Sandia Report."

The draft of The Sandia report closed with "There are many problems in American public schools, but there is no system-wide crisis." This was too positive for Ravitch, then assistant secretary education in the now defunct Office for Educational Research and Improvement, and Secretaries of Education and Energy, Lamar Alexander and James Watkins.

Almost precisely 17 years ago, Lee Bray, the Sandia vice president who had overseen the analysis flew up to Denver to show me the 156 page report. I had written an Education Week commentary arguing that the SAT decline had been much smaller than people thought (in fact, I was only riffing off the College Board's own panel which had produced On Further Examination). Bray said he had a lot of data on other indicators that corroborated my conclusions. He did.

Bob Huelskamp, one of the three engineers who authored the report returned some three months later to present it to me and some administrators in the Cherry Creek School District. I said we should take all of the data I had collected (substantially more by then than when I wrote the SAT piece) and the Sandia data and publish them all in one place. Huelskamp said, "We can't. We've got internal political problems."

I think it is inherent among engineers to practice understatement. What had actually happened was that the Sandia group had gone to Washington and presented the report to department of energy and department of education staff and some Congressmen. At the end, David Kearns, former CEO of Xerox and then Deputy Secretary of Education said, "You bury this or I'll bury you." Ravitch has denied Kearns said this. Huelskamp has affirmed it. An article in Education Week said only that "administration officials, particularly Mr. Kearns, reacted angrily at the meeting." The article also contained allegations of suppression and denials of such ("Report Questioning 'Crisis' in Education Triggers an Uproar," October 9, 1991).

The engineers did get buried, being forbidden at one point to leave New Mexico to talk about their findings. "Dead wrong" was how Secretary of Energy James Watkins (Energy funds Sandia) described the report in the September 30, 1991 issue of the Albuquerque Journal. "It is a call for complacency when just the opposite is required," he said. (It amazes me that each time someone points out that the educational sky is not actually falling, those who say it is lose all capacity for logic and accuse that the non-Chicken Littles of being messengers of complacency. In a badly argued, extremely simplistic Washington Post op-ed, Ravitch pinned that label on me and the Sandia engineers, along with Iris Rotberg, then of the National Science Foundation ("U. S. Schools: The Bad News Is Right," November 17, 1991); typical distorting sentence: "[Critics] say it is not fair to compare ourselves to countries like Japan and Korea because they value education and we do not").

Ravitch denied at an AERA meeting that the report was being suppressed. The official story was that it was undergoing peer review by the U. S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation and that it was not ready for publication. It is to NCES' Emerson Elliott's and NSF's Peter House' everlasting shame that they agreed to have their agencies collude in this political charade and signed dishonest letters to Ravitch about what the reviews had shown. It was, of course, insulting and unprecedented that a report from one agency be peer-reviewed by other agencies.

Five years after Lee Bray retired, I called him. He was not enthusiastic about reopening old wounds, but when I asked him directly if the report had been suppressed he said, "Yes, it was definitely suppressed."

The Education Week article on The Sandia Report closed with the prediction that "Administration officials will use a lengthy review process to bury the report." Indeed, it was never published. It appeared in print only when Jim Raths of the University of Delaware and then an editor at the Journal of Educational Research made it the entirety of the May/June 1993 issue of that small journal. Because nearly 20 years have passed, most people don't know either of the report or the suppression that followed. But that act of suppression sits like Banquo's ghost at the banquet table, seen, in this case, not only by Macbeth, but by to those of us who witnessed the murder.

Charter Schools: No Oversight to Be Seen

Accountability for public schools? Required.

Accountability for the corporate charter schools? Gets in the way of innovation.

Here is a nice piece on the tip of the iceberg that we can see. If public school administrators even suggested that public schools operate with such obvious lack of oversight, they would be run out on town on a rail.

What will it take to wake up the electorate? More insightful pieces like this one by Emily Alpert:

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007 | Spending scandals brought down Children's Conservation Academy, a City Heights charter school shuttered in 2007, only two years after it opened. A year earlier, A. Phillip Randolph Leadership Academy dissolved, with questions swirling around its finances. Its closure echoed that of Jola Community Charter School, a girls' charter that sunk two months after opening in 2005.

These schools and two other closed charters owe more than $300,000 to San Diego Unified School District in unpaid fees and property taxes. None have repaid the district. School staff doubts they ever will.

Charter schools are intended to enjoy greater flexibility, but also greater accountability, a trade-off meant to spur creativity and experimentation. School districts can revoke a school's charter or refuse to renew it if the school strays from its charter, a document that lays out the expectations and governance of each unique school.

But while charters can be snuffed, ending experiments gone wrong, the closures aren't painless. In San Diego, shuttered charters still owe thousands to the school district and the state in unpaid fees. Public schools rarely recover those funds unless a charter director is prosecuted for a crime, such as fraud, and forced to repay the district. Ordinary debts go unpaid.

Nor does closure -- or the threat of it -- guarantee accountability, critics say. When fiscal problems crop up, district staffers say they lack the power to halt misspending, and don't learn about issues until it's too late. Closure is both a last resort, they say, and their only resort.

"Nobody's monitoring charter schools that closely," said Andrea Niehaus, the district's director of audits and investigations. She recently asked to hire another auditor for her seven-person office, to specialize in charter schools. "They don't keep the same documents. We can't even see how they're taking attendance -- and that's how schools are funded. We have no way of knowing."

"It's very disturbing," Niehaus said. "I don't see anyone doing any real oversight."

Closures also have an emotional cost. Shut-downs are sometimes abrupt, with little advance notice for parents, stranded children, and even teachers, who scramble to find jobs long after most schools have hired. When Randolph Leadership Academy in San Diego dissolved, some graduates found their diplomas had gone void because the school never sought accreditation, said Peter Rivera, program manager in the district's Office of School Choice. Others couldn't retrieve transcripts to prove they had attended. . . .

Read the rest here.

Dear Mr. President

Don't Mess With Texas Crackpots

Expect Texas to lead the way back to the age before science. You remember, the Dark Ages.

From the NY Times:

HOUSTON, Dec. 2 — After 27 years as a science teacher and 9 years as the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer said she did not think she had to remain “neutral” about teaching the theory of evolution.

“It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law,” said Ms. Comer, citing the state’s science curriculum.

But now Ms. Comer, 56, of Austin, is out of a job, after forwarding an e-mail message on a talk about evolution and creationism — “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” according to a dismissal letter last month that accused her of various instances of “misconduct and insubordination” and of siding against creationism and the doctrine that life is the product of “intelligent design.”

Her departure, which has stirred dismay among science professionals since it became public last week, is a prelude to an expected battle early next year over rewriting the state’s science education standards, which include the teaching of evolution. . . .

Children on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown

When John Locke observed the behavior of the homeless street urchins of 17th Century London, he noted their vigor, ruddy cheeks, and energy as they ran around barefoot and thinly clad, even in winter. Based on his observations, Locke recommended that middle class family shod their young boys in leaky shoes, thin pants, and to keep their rooms icy at night in order to make them as tough as the street children. What Locke could not have known from his limited Experience is that he had been observing the lucky and uniquely hardy street children, the fortunate minority who had not yet died from flu, hunger, pneumonia, and exposure.

All of this is simply to suggest that when we see the Caitlins and Seths appearing to thrive on the cut-throat non-stop resume building treadmill, where individual branding and constant test tutoring are required to claw out a path into Yale, stop and think about all the less hardy children who succumbed to the pressure or who believe that they are failures for not getting into one of the Only 20 Worth Going To. Maybe we should do something more attuned to requirements for mental and physical health.

A reminder from Karen Kisslinger at Huffington Post:

. . . . We can keep the challenge, excellence and the creativity in eduction and life without making ourselves and our children sick and overwhelmed. As it is, the student aristocrats of the American educational scene are those who just happen to have the constitution, genes and endurance to withstand workload and time pressures and the frequently denatured and toxic food supply. Other brilliant, creative, interesting people dwindle in the face of the demands they face, and we often don't get to see them thrive on their own, perhaps less busy or better nourished, terms. They are more likely to end up diagnosed.

Recently I went in to talk to the Head of a private school where I teach. I suggested to her that we might implement a four year Stress Reduction Skills program, which the students could put on their "resume" for college application. I suggested that colleges would look favorably on students who had been committed, over the course of their high school career, to learning relaxation and stress reduction skills other than binge drinking, binge eating and marijuana use. Taking fewer course would be an option for the stress reduction "track", and I suggested that this could be seen as a positive stress-less decision as opposed to a sign of less commitment and rigor in academics.

My suggestion was greeted with the kind of look government officials must often give when they say something needs to be evaluated for needs assessment and perhaps become the subject of a commission or special report before any changes could actually be made. That's a "BIG" idea she said, implying to me that it might be too big to take on at the moment....and there was a distinct implication that any one school might be vulnerable in being the first to implement such a program before others did to. That is: "If I relax first you might 'get ahead' of me."

So, I'm suggesting that we all agree together to relax more, which, as I teach my students, means we'll be able to do things BETTER, MORE PRODUCTIVELY AND WITH MORE FOCUS AND AWARENESS. Skill for relaxation and for acquiring positive traits of consciousness such as generosity and compassion need to be taken as seriously as other skills learned during the course of young people's education.

The Educational Genocide, Close Up

From the SF Chronicle:

My school, Noralto Elementary School in Sacramento, is being torn apart, thanks to No Child Left Behind.

Of the 664 students at my school, 450 of them are English language learners. They come mainly from underprivileged families, and rely on our school as a pillar in their lives. Many parents are unable to provide the academic support our students need, and nearly all our students struggle with language barriers. Consequently, the vast majority of them are reading below grade level. Fortunately, the staff is full of passionate teachers who care deeply about these children.

When students arrive at our school from Mexico, Thailand and Laos, they have to learn to speak the language before they can begin to read. Additionally, students arriving directly from Thailand and Laos must first master the English letters before they can even begin to blend the sounds. Can you expect these children to be reading at a fourth- or fifth-grade level by the end of the year? Certainly not. Have the teachers failed because they have not achieved such a miracle? Yes, according to our president and his No Child Left Behind act.

Every year, No Child raises the standards higher, and schools scramble to meet them. Last year, the Annual Yearly Progress score requirement was 24.4 percent for English Language Arts (reading and writing). My school's was 27.9 percent - above the required percentage - but one significant subgroup, our Asian American population, scored only 22.8 percent.

So, once again, we did not meet the goal. Failing to meet the goal two years in a row labels a school Program Improvement. If you are such a school for five years, No Child can come in and wipe the slate clean, getting rid of all the teachers and replacing them with new, "more qualified" teachers - teachers who evidently possess mystical powers to teach English to nonnative speakers in the blink of an eye.

What is extremely frustrating for Noralto is that our administrators and teachers have been working harder than ever, and our scores have steadily improved since the inception of No Child in 2002, when our reading scores were only 14.3 percent. However, the government continues to take punitive action, and labels us as a "failing" school.

My school is in its fourth year of Program Improvement. Next year, the imposed goal is 35.2 percent - a goal we cannot hope to meet - and it will continue to leap every year until it reaches the 100 percent mark in 2014.

This means that my school and thousands like it have "failed," despite desperate efforts to provide quality education for all students. For us, this means that all nontenured teachers will probably be fired at the end of this year, and all permanent teachers could be "involuntarily reassigned" elsewhere in the district. And, sadly, our students and families will be faced with new teachers who will have no connection with them, the school, the community or each other.

How is this better for children? How does it make any sense? The reality of No Child is that it is sucking the joy out of education. A teacher's job is to breathe life into education and to get children to love learning. Creating rigorous testing is simply creating an oppressive educational system in which music, computers, physical education, science and social studies are gradually fading into nonexistence as the panicked push for language arts and math becomes a nationwide obsession.

"Good" teachers are the ones who teach to the test, rather than those who employ creativity, excitement and a positive learning environment. At my school, a specialist has created a rigorous "bell-to-bell" schedule, in which each minute of our day is mapped out. We are told what and how to teach, what to put on our walls, and what interventions to provide. All assemblies and field trips have been banned.

As a bonus, No Child is up for reauthorization in Congress, with the additional stipulation of merit pay. This dictates that teachers' salaries will be contingent upon test scores. The immediate effect of this act, if it goes through, is that all the best teachers will flee to the best schools, leaving the children who need the most help with the teachers least able to supply it. Then, truly, we will be leaving our children behind.

Alyson Beahm is a teacher at Noralto Elementary School in Sacramento. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Fenty-Rhee Move Forward With Stealth Privatization Plan

From WaPo:

. . . . In addition to Bunker Hill, the schools on the closure list are: M.M. Washington Career High School and special education center; Bertie Backus Middle; John Burroughs, J.F. Cook and Slowe elementary schools; and either Young Elementary or Brown Middle -- two adjacent schools that will be combined at one location into a pre-K to eighth-grade school.

The total reported student enrollment in those schools is 1,555 students. But the school by school picture is the most telling. For example, Slowe Elementary has seen its enrollment decline by 64 percent in the past five years; this year there were 83 students enrolled in the school as of October in a building with a capacity for 451 students. A charter school, Mary McLeod Bethune, has about 80 students at Slowe this year under a one-year lease with the school system.

And there could be more space-sharing agreements. With the release of the closure proposal, Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso and his staff are following up on a survey they circulated this year to charter schools that solicited preferences for D.C. school buildings. Fenty (D) pledged last week that school buildings left vacant by closures would not be sold, but he did not indicate how the buildings might be used. . . .

Does the Washington Post or anyone else in DC have any doubt that the Fenty-Rhee plan is to hand over the closed public schools to charter school corporations to control and govern, the MacSchool franchises that will offer the politicians a 20% discount by slashing programs and salaries, while offering nothing in terms of learning to recommend them over the public schools that will be shuttered? Will parents and teachers allow this privatization venture to get a foothold? Will the corporate media of the Washinton Post bother to pretend to present the facts???

Global Warming? Sorry, It's Not on the Test

At a time when the future of half the animal species on Earth hangs by a thread and the future of humanity, itself, is precariously balanced, can it be that we will let our educational mission be diverted by a handful of paid for politicians who continue to blame the schools for their own failure to act on issues outside the schools, and thus sink the next generation deeper in the ignorance they are suffocating from now?

Is there anything but a lack of moral courage to keep us from doing the work that is required?

And if the schools offer only to hold our children prisoner while Mother Earth melts, then it is time to empty the schools, rescue our children, and reclaim our future.

A little reminder of the situation from the Houston Chronicle:

AUSTIN — At a time of heightened concern over global warming and depleting ocean life, U.S. schoolchildren are not being taught some of the most basic environmental lessons, experts say.

While students are doing better at math and reading, watchdogs and teachers say the overwhelming focus on those core academic areas has left them surprisingly unaware of their own surroundings.

As Congress grapples to rewrite the six-year-old No Child Left Behind law, the science gap has become part of the debate.

"Young people are graduating from high school totally environmentally illiterate," said Brian A. Day, executive director of the North American Association for Environmental Education. "They neither know nor know how to find out how to address challenges, whether with lifestyle changes or public policy issues."

A recent study titled "Environmental Literacy in America" reports that as states focus more on standards and accountability testing, the amount of environmental education being taught in schools has "leveled off and may even be in decline for the first time in three decades."

The decline couldn't come at a worse time, critics say.

"We're at a time where, because of things like climate change — with more and more evidence that the climate is changing — all these issues are becoming increasingly acute, so we need to engage young people in addressing these issues, so we need to educate young people," said Delicia Reynolds, legislative counsel for U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., a sponsor of environmental education legislation in Congress known as No Child Left Inside. . . .

The Test-Textbook Cartel

What is that worthless thirty pounds that cost a hundred dollars in your child's backpack? Why, that is the latest tool developed by the education industrial complex to make the vast majority of children equally stupid around the world, or shall we say, as educationally flat as the EEG readings from Margaret Spellings' frontal lobes. But the children of the oligarchs and their guardians? No, no, they are still reading real books, so civilization is safe.

A sobering piece from the Guardian:

Exam boards are to review the way school textbooks are endorsed after leading authors complained that they are being leant on to write more simplistic texts to win the multi-million pound contracts.

Textbook writers today claim that they are being told to write books which encourage "parrot-learning" to get pupils through exams at the sacrifice of wider critical thinking and learning.

There is widespread concern that children are reading fewer books, losing confidence in reading and enjoying it less after an international study this week found that England had slipped to 19th of 45 countries and provinces in reading skills, down from third five years ago.

The Society of Authors says that in the competition to get an exam board's seal of approval and gain popularity in schools, publishers are producing increasingly narrow textbooks. Elizabeth Haylett, secretary of the society's educational writers group, said: "The textbooks that are being used are being reduced to answer books for the exams. There's no opportunity for children to read beyond the test. They are learning parrot-fashion."

One author of a science textbook, who asked not to be named, was told to write a factually incorrect answer because the mistake had been made in the curriculum and the book had to match. The guidelines say that examining bodies can endorse textbooks but not any one exclusively - schools have to be given options. Publishers cannot explicitly reference where the books' authors have been involved in the exam or curriculum design.

Sue Palmer worked in educational publishing from 1980 until four years ago when she left to write the book Toxic Childhood, which was highly critical of the government's testing regime. She said the guidelines were not being followed.

"It's a cartel - people are writing the exam and then the textbook. The long-term effect is it just becomes a tick list of learning."

Graham Taylor, of the Educational Publishers Council, said: "The idea that a textbook might be tailored to an exam curriculum is logical. Schools want to buy books which will help pupils. It's the schools making the decision and the publishers following."

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of Schools and College Leaders, said: "Schools want good textbooks geared to the exam syllabus. There's nothing wrong with that but it has gone too far. The textbook should open up new areas of study as well as connecting with the syllabus."

A spokesman for the Joint Council for Qualifications, which represents the major exam boards, said: "Members of JCQ will be meeting next week to review the code of practice."

The educational publishing industry is worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Pearson, the largest educational publisher, projected profits of £491m last year.