SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
private schools
In 'Abandonment of Public Education,' Louisiana to Allow Tax Dollars to Pay for Private Schools
"We must build and maintain a public education system that serves all children," said one Democratic lawmaker.
May 18, 2024
After an aggressive push by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, the Louisiana Senate advanced a bill this week that would allow public funds to be used for private school tuition—sending what one Democrat called an "abandonment" of the state's public schools to the state House, where it is expected to pass.
The state Senate approved the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise (LA GATOR) Scholarship Program in a vote of 25-15 on Thursday, with just four Republicans joining the Democratic Party in opposing the bill.
The program would allow the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to create "education savings accounts" (ESAs), which would give families state tax dollars to pay for private school tuition, uniforms, and other expenses.
The grants would first be available to low-income families and special education students, but in the program's third year the ESAs are set to be available to all Louisiana families.
The legislation was briefly shelved this week over concerns about its cost, but Landry, backed by right-wing groups and donors, used television ads to push his party to support the ESAs.
Landry went as far as suggesting lawmakers could revise the state constitution to end a restriction mandating that certain public funds are set aside for K-12 public schools. He called on the state Senate to hold a special convention to do so, in order to unlock funding for the $520 million yearly cost of the LA GATOR program.
Moments before the Senate voted on Thursday, state Sen. Royce Duplessis (D-5) said the bill was "nothing short of an abandonment of public education."
"We as a state are making the decision and taking the step to say that it's too hard, it's too complex" to fund public schools, said Duplessis.
Landry told the Louisiana Illuminator that the success of the bill was "a big win for the kids of Louisiana," but local school board members, teachers, and superintendents lobbied Republicans ahead of the vote to protect funding for public schools, where a majority of students in the state are educated.
"These universal voucher bills are a step in the wrong direction," Larry Carter, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, told Public News Service earlier this month. "We've seen in other states around the country, like Arizona and Ohio, where these bills have been passed, [schools are] now facing a budget crisis, and we're hoping that we cannot go down that same road."
"If we're cutting that funding stream, Louisiana students will have fewer nurses and counselors, less options for after school programs, and certainly limited access to field trips and AP courses that help prepare them for their next step in life," he added.
Louisiana-based journalist Dayne Sherman said the LA Gator program will provide a lesson in "how to starve your local Louisiana public school, Clownfish-style."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Do Unions Belong in the Fight Against Corporate School Reform?
Aug 21, 2016
In the fight for public education, the forces of standardization and privatization are running scared.
They've faced more pushback in the last few years - especially in the last few months - than in a decade.
The Opt Out movement increases exponentially every year. Teach for America is having trouble getting recruits. Pearson's stock is plummeting. The NAACP and Black Lives Matter have both come out strongly against increasing charter schools.
They want you to believe that the corporate vultures preying on our public schools are really just misunderstood philanthropists.
So what's a corporate education reformer to do?
Answer: Change the narrative.
They can't control the facts, so instead they try to control the story being told about the facts.
It's a classic propaganda technique. As Malcolm X put it:
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
Their story goes like this - yes, there is a battle going on over public education. But the two sides fighting aren't who you think they are.
The fight for public schools isn't between grassroots communities and well-funded AstroTurf organizations, they say. Despite the evidence of your eyes, the fight isn't between charter school sycophants and standardized test companies, on the one hand, and parents, students and teachers on the other.
No. It's actually between people who really care about children and those nasty, yucky unions.
It's nonsense, of course. Pure spin.
They want you to believe that the corporate vultures preying on our public schools are really just misunderstood philanthropists. And those demanding a fair shake for their own children and communities are really just paid shills from a monolithic and uncaring bureaucracy.
In essence, they want you to believe two things:
1) Despite profiting off the system and zero evidence supporting the efficacy of corporate school policies, they're motivated purely by empathy.
2) Unions are evil by definition and they pervert everything they touch.
Put simply, unions are not perfect, but they are not evil. In fact, they are essential to the health of public education.
I'm not going to bother with the first claim here. There is an inherent bias from those who wish to change the laws so they can more easily profit off of schools without actually helping students learn and in fact exist at the expense of that learning. If you can't see through the propaganda wing of the Walmart corporation, the Broad Foundation and Big Daddy Bill Gates, you probably won't be very receptive to anything else I have to say.
Instead I will focus on the second claim, because it is the more pernicious of the two.
Put simply, unions are not perfect, but they are not evil. In fact, they are essential to the health of public education.
Many progressives are upset with teachers unions because of the current Presidential election. Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary election without what many would consider adequately polling rank and file members. For better or worse, the endorsements were top-down affairs reflecting the preference of union leaders.
That's not how unions are supposed to work. And it's having consequences for the way both members and non-members view teachers unions.
Critics infer from this that unions don't represent membership. They are de facto arms of the waiting Clinton administration and the neoliberal agenda.
There may be some truth to this, but it does not represent the whole picture. Not nearly.
Unions are like any other democratic organization. The larger the association, the further from the grassroots the decision making body.
In the mammoth national unions, decisions are made by representatives most removed from our schools. They probably were teachers or support staff at some point in the past, but that may be ancient history. Now they are professional leaders and therefore at a remove from the grassroots.
By contrast, in our local chapters, leaders are most often working classroom teachers. Decisions are made by those still meeting students' needs on a day-to-day basis. As such, they retain an authenticity and expertise that may be more cloudy in the large bureaucracies.
This isn't to say the national unions are by definition unconcerned with the needs of teachers and students. I'm sure that most of the NEA and AFT leadership who decided to endorse Clinton did it because they honestly believe doing so will help public education. And - who knows - they may be right. But what they forgot in this case was the democratic process they were tasked with preserving. As such, they may have to pay a price for their hubris when their terms are up.
In most cases, the leaders of national teachers unions are at too much of a remove to see what is best for our schools. And they usually know that. It is up to the rank and file to tell them what to do, and that's what happens every year at representative assemblies through various caucuses made up of work-a-day members. And if leaders overstep their authority it is members' duty to hold them accountable at election time.
So even though the national organizations are most likely to go astray, they often don't. Usually even these giants are trying to improve the situation in our public schools.
Opposition to privatization and standardization policies doesn't come from the leadership of the NEA and AFT. It comes from the grassroots.
However, it can't be denied that the most intense and passionate activism happens a bit closer to where the rubber hits the road. It's those local chapters that are there everyday and make the most difference. They are the heart and soul of unionism.
So when corporate education reformers sneeringly deprecate their opponents as mere unions, they're glossing over an important distinction. Opposition to privatization and standardization policies doesn't come from the leadership of the NEA and AFT. It comes from the grassroots. This is not a top down initiative. It is bottom up.
This is how it's always been. There is no political organization directing the fight to save public education. The Democrats certainly aren't overly concerned with reigning in charter schools. It was grassroots Democrats - some of whom are also union members - who worked to rewrite the party platform to do so. The Clinton campaign is not directing anyone to opt out of standardized testing. However, voters are demanding that Clinton be receptive to their needs - and some of them are union members.
There is no great union conspiracy to fight these policies. It's called public opinion, and it's changing.
That's what scares the standardizers and privatizers. They've had free run of the store for almost two decades and now the public is waking up.
They're desperately trying to paint this as a union movement when it's not. Unions are involved, but they aren't alone. And moreover, their involvement is not necessarily an impediment.
The biggest lie to have resonated with the public is this notion that teachers unions are only concerned with shielding bad teachers from justice. This is demonstrably untrue.
The needs of the community and the needs of teachers are the same.
Both want excellent public schools.
Both want the best for our students.
Both want academic policies that will help students learn - not help corporations cash in.
And both groups want good teachers in the classroom - not bad ones!
The biggest lie to have resonated with the public is this notion that teachers unions are only concerned with shielding bad teachers from justice. This is demonstrably untrue.
Unions fight to make sure teachers get due process, but they also fight to make sure bad teachers are shown the door.
In fact, in districts with strong unions, MORE bad teachers are fired - not less, according to a new study by economics Prof. Eunice Han from the University of Utah.
The study entitled The Myth of Unions' Overprotection of Bad Teachers concludes that when unions are strong and successfully bargain for higher salaries, they have an incentive to help ensure ineffective teachers don't receive tenure. In short, it costs too much to keep bad teachers on staff. It is in the interests of the collective bargaining unit to ensure those unfit to teach move along.
Moreover, Han also concludes that strong unions actually help reduce the dropout rate. It just makes sense. When you treat people like the professionals they are, when you give them autonomy and respect, they're free to concentrate more energy into their jobs than fighting to keep those jobs.
But unions stand in direct opposition to the efforts of corporate vultures trying to swoop in and profit off of public education. Teachers provide a valuable service to students. If your goal is to reduce the cost of that service no matter how much that reduces its value to students, you need a weak labor force. You need the ability to reduce salary so you can claim the savings as profit.
THAT'S why corporate education reformers hate teachers and their unions. We make it nearly impossible to swipe school budgets into their own pockets.
So do unions belong in the fight against corporate education reform?
Answer: Heck yeah! In fact, they are essential to it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Landmark Look at US Charter System Reveals Waste, Fraud, 'Ghost Schools'
'The bottom-line is taxpayers know far too little about how much their federal tax dollars are being used to fund charters,' says Center for Media and Democracy
Oct 21, 2015
A year-long investigation by the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy has revealed a severe dearth of public information about how federal and state taxes are being spent to fuel the charter school industry in the U.S.
"Unlike truly public schools that have to account for prospective and past spending in public budgets provided to democratically elected school boards, charter spending of tax monies is too often a black hole."
--Center for Media and Democracy
According to the report released Wednesday--Charter School Black Hole (pdf)--no one even knew how much the federal government had spent on its program designed to boost the charter sector until CMD started poking around. Now, after filing close to 50 open records requests and reviewing more than two decades of federal authorizations and appropriations, the national watchdog group has calculated that sum to be a whopping $3.7 billion.
Furthermore, how those billions were spent was equally difficult to discern.
"What is even more troubling is how difficult it is to find essential information on how some charters have spent federal and state tax dollars, even as governments continue to increase funding for charters while slashing funds for traditional public schools," reads the report. "Unlike truly public schools that have to account for prospective and past spending in public budgets provided to democratically elected school boards, charter spending of tax monies is too often a black hole."
The study attributes this lack of accountability "to the way the charter industry has been built by proponents, favoring 'flexibility' over rules."
"That flexibility has allowed an epidemic of fraud, waste, and mismanagement that would not be tolerated in public schools," CMD states, noting that charters "are often policed--if they are really policed at all--by charter proponents, both within government agencies and within private entities tasked with oversight."
In fact, that oversight is so spotty that CMD's investigation turned up dozens of "ghost" schools, where federal grants were awarded to charters that never even opened.
"The bottom line is taxpayers know far too little about how much their federal tax dollars are being used to fund charters," said CMD executive director Lisa Graves on Wednesday, "and there is far too little information provided by states about how tax monies are being spent by charters or by for-profit firms they are tied to."
Noting that "neither the federal government nor the states require charters to publish that information on their websites and neither the federal or state governments we examined publish that information themselves," Graves continued: "Even aside from serious questions about academic performance by charters--especially online charters--the lack of real accountability remains a real problem for kids and families, as more and more people and corporations have sought to get a piece of the pie, a revenue stream from taxpayer money, to operate or assist charters."
Among the report's most damning findings:
- In 2011 and 2012, $3.7 million in federal taxpayer money was awarded to 25 Michigan "ghost" schools that never even opened to students.
- In California, more than $4.7 million in federal taxpayer money was handed out to create charter schools that closed within a few years.
- In Ohio, out of the 88 schools created by planning and implementation grants under the federal "Charter School Program" (CSP) for state education agencies between 2008 and 2013, at least 15 closed within a few years; a further seven schools never even opened. These charters received more than $4 million in federal taxpayer money.
And despite that track record, the report reveals, Ohio landed the most significant one-year grant "by far" in the 2015 competition for federal funding--$32.6 million--thanks in part to a glowing endorsement from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), which CMD notes had previously referred to the charter system in Ohio as "broken."
This supports the report's assertion that "[i]n the current structure, the U.S. Department of Education hears only from proponents of the charter school grant application and in this closed loop--unsurprisingly--it approves money to a state like Ohio based on formal submissions that praise it, in spite of numerous failures."
After providing detailed assessments of the flow of charter money in 12 states (California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, New York, Utah, Washington, and Indiana, plus the District of Columbia), CMD makes five recommendations that encourage transparency at both the federal and state levels and at every stage in the charter-funding process.
"In sum, securing information from the states about how charter spending and how they have handled charter oversight has proven to be a difficult process filled with substantial obstruction of efforts to get key facts," the report concludes. "Perhaps the reluctance to provide information is understandable--although not acceptable--given what the evidence shows about widespread failure of critical oversight over how Americans' tax dollars are being spent by charter schools."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Lessons To Be Learned From New Orleans-Style Education Reform
Jun 26, 2015
As the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, you can count on seeing a lot of glowing stories about the great education progress made in New Orleans since a natural disaster killed nearly 2,000 people, emptied a beloved city, and gave public school reformers what they always wanted: a "clean slate" to have their way unencumbered by the messiness of school boards, local politics, and the voices of teachers and parents.
It really was the "best thing that could have happened," to use Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's now infamous quote, if you were a fan of creating something that would have little to no consequence for your family.
You'll also hear many more politicians and pundits touting the NOLA model of education reform for school districts everywhere else.
You should be very suspicious of this marketing campaign.
Advocates for the NOLA model claim it has gotten "results," but what passes for results is subject to a mad game of interpreting data in a way to make a case rather that to reveal any real truth. Reform advocates like to say they've created a better system, but it is a system that seems void of democracy and deaf to the voices of teachers, parents, and students who have to live with the system. And to those people who initially backed the plan for NOLA school reform - but who demurred from becoming blatant propagandists for it - there now appears to be a sense of frustration and disappointment with a realization that there's a long way to go before this product should go to market.
A Top Down "Solution"
First, a refresher ...
After Katrina, as NPR reported recently, "an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed," and in "a series of quick decisions," all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city's schools were handed over to a state entity called the "Recovery School District" which is governed by unelected officials. Only a "few elite schools were ... allowed to maintain their selective admissions schools."
One reason this action was able to take place so quickly is because it was planned in the immediate aftermath of the storm while the city was in complete disarray. As an article in The Times-Picayune reports, a "lost bit of history" recently surfaced revealing a hidden chain of events that sealed the fate of New Orleans public schools.
After the storm, Mayor Ray Nagin was reluctant to open schools "anytime soon," and the state education department told local school officials there would be no state funding available for locally run schools.
This essentially made charter schools the only early option, which Sen. Mary Landrieu could help make possible with federal funds. The U.S. Department of Education had money to start charter schools, but nothing to reopen traditional schools. So, the School Board opened the first charter schools, and by the beginning of 2006, "the structure that still holds today was set," with an elite group of selected admission schools, privately operated independent charter schools, and the vast remainder of schools operated by the state-run Recovery School District, which would convert those schools to charter management.
What's wrong with this of course is that the people of New Orleans - especially those most chronically disempowered and underserved - had little voice in the remaking of their schools and are still virtually without democratic representation in their schools today.
As NOLA public school parent activist Karran Harper Royal explains, in an interview with the journal Rethinking Schools, "I'm no defender of the status quo; before Katrina we had problems, but there were also successes. Having an elected school board created ways for the public to participate. When Katrina hit, I was serving on the search committee for a new superintendent. For years I served on the disciplinary review committee. ... Charters purport to give parents and teachers greater power ... But you have little real voice."
This is where advocates for the NOLA education model interrupt to say, "But this is about the kids ... Look at the results!"
Data Obscura
In addition to the glowing rhetoric about "progress" in New Orleans since the storm, you should get ready to be hit by an onslaught of data, lots and lots of data, "proving" the case.
But engaging in an analytic discussion about that data can be like arguing with your teenager about whether or not he cleaned his room - it depends on how you look at it.
On any given day in the ongoing narrative about New Orleans schools, you see a headline "New Orleans school changes worked" alongside another "The New Orleans Model: Praised But Unproven." Often such contrasting articles will make their case using the very same statistics.
When you get past the headlines though, you find you're lost in a maze of evidence that could lead to multiple conclusions. For instance, in the article praising what's happened in New Orleans, you learn that some of that "progress" in NOLA RSD is associated with student demographics in the city have changed, significant amounts of critical data have been left out, and huge gaps in achievement between low-income kids and their more well-to-do peers remain.
The second, more skeptical appraisal finds "there are positive signs," but at the expense of some really disturbing outcomes, including a recent report that "found one-third of principals acknowledged trying to exclude certain students and woo others to boost test scores."
Engaging with a NOLA RSD official, as I have, can be an excruciating exercise in disassembling a Rube Goldberg contraption to see if you can refit the parts into something that goes straight from point A to B.
For instance, claims about increases in percentages of students on grade level in NOLA RSD have to be held in light of the fact the state changed the formula and scale for measuring grade level performance from 2012-2013, which artificially inflated the district's performance. Declarations about the schools scoring better on state A-F report cards should be recast with the understanding that State Superintendent John White changed the scoring system to help engineer that "improvement."
Classroom teacher and historian John Thompson goes through this frustrating exercise as well on the popular blogsite Alexander Russo's This Week in Education. Responding to an article "How New Orleans Made Charter Schools Work" for Washington Monthly, Thompson calls out the article's claims that charter schools in the district receive less per student funding. Turn out, what they failed to include in their calculation is the "additional $3,500 per student funding provided for post-Katrina schools."
Even a statistic as seemingly simple as high school graduation rates becomes a slippery eel in the hands of NOLA-style reform propagandist, as researcher Adam Johnson found when he looked into the matter. On his blog, he painstakingly recounts his personal quest to find the source of an often-cited "fact" that NOLA RSD graduation rates improved 50 percent, from 54.4 percent to 77.8 percent, from 2004-2013. His search led him to the discovery that "graduation rates date back to 2005 only." The 54 percent is a complete fabrication that got passed around, like in a game of telephone, from a dubious source through a series of politicians and media folks wanting to tell their version of the New Orleans story.
Louisiana schoolteacher and author Mercedes Schneider took this search further. She finds, that the "50 percent improvement in graduation rate," based on the erroneous pre-Katrina metric, masks the fact New Orleans RSD graduation rates experienced a steep drop between 2011-12 and 2012-13. Further, the gap between graduation rates for NOLA RSD and Louisiana in general is widening.
Don't Buy It
In the Politico article cited above, reporter Caitlin Emma finds, "Mayors and governors from Nevada to Tennessee have sought to replicate the New Orleans model by converting struggling public schools into privately run charters."
The latest state to buy the NOLA snake oil is Georgia, where Governor Nathan Deal has pushed through an initiative to create a new state agency to take over struggling school districts and do to them what Louisiana did to New Orleans. An op-ed in a Georgia news outlet sounds a word of caution about this.
J. Celeste Lay, an associate professor of political science at Tulane University, explains that the great sucking sound you hear from NOLA is the siphoning up of public tax dollars into private pockets. "The principal at my nearby charter school makes over $300,000 per year, a 246 percent increase from her salary before the school was chartered. For-profit management companies charge schools 15-20 percent of school revenue. Taxpayer dollars go into hefty administrator salaries and corporate profits instead of reducing class sizes, upgrading facilities, or recruiting and maintaining high-quality teachers."
And about those "great results?" "The average ACT score of NOLA RSD's class of 2014 was 15.7," she notes, "far lower than the minimum entrance requirements at LSU and other public universities. Reform advocates tout growth in these scores, but such growth is neither entirely linear nor significant."
"Education reform in New Orleans," she concludes, "provides more of a model of what not to do."
Other cautious observers of the NOLA model highlight the pitfalls of a top-down takeover model that too often leaves the interest of poor and working-class families behind.
Speaking at a recent conclave for researchers and policy mavens focused on the New Orleans education story, Marquette University professor and school choice advocate Howard Fuller remarks (on video) that the "positive things" that have happened have "happened at a cost." The "cost" he describes includes a general sense of community disempowerment in which parents and kids feel they lack control over some decisions being made about their education destinies. "There's no uniform opinion," he states, about what has been accomplished in New Orleans and how the schools district should go forward from here.
Another school choice advocate and former New Orleans charter school operator, Professor Andre Perry, who had some involvement in forming the New Orleans school district we see today, is harsher in his assessment. In an interview with freelance writer and education commentator Jennifer Berkshire, he says, "The improvements - and I do think there are some improvements - are so marginal when you consider the investment ... And by the way, the improvements may not even necessarily be because of the reforms."
Perry also sees the "many nefarious ways" that advocates for the NOLA model present their case for closing gaps and showing gains, and he questions whether those statistical measures are over-emphasized compared to other important values - including community empowerment, democratic engagement, inclusion, and racial diversity.
His conclusion is, "You don't ever want to oversell something ... When you're constantly saying 'now is better than the past,' or 'now is worse for the future,' it's just not a helpful argument if you're really sincere about making change."
So what are the lessons to be learned from New Orleans style education reform?
- When even the most ardent school choice advocates are disappointed with what's been accomplished in the American school system offering the ultimate in choice, you have to be skeptical about making choice a remedy for education problems.
- When you realize the many ways statistics such as test score results, school grades, and graduation rates can be bent and distorted to make an ideological argument, you have to wonder whether those data points are adequate, even worthwhile, measures of something as complex as children's educational development.
- When you see a way of doing school impressed on a community by strident outsiders, you have to be concerned whether the cost of usurping democracy is worth whatever gains are being promised.
- And when someone comes to your community to sell you on the education reform model created for New Orleans, don't buy it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
As WalMart Writes Checks, Critics Blast Teach for America
Critics blast non-profit as 'pipeline' for pro-corporate policies like charter schools and privatization
Aug 05, 2013
The education non-profit Teach for America has been under increasing fire recently as critics and alumni accuse the organization of misappropriating their original mission by backing the policies of the "corporate education agenda" that promote privatization, the expansion of charter schools and the undermining of teachers unions.
These criticisms come amidst news last week that Wal-Mart owners, the Walton Family--key backers of charter school expansion and the effort to end teacher protections--donated $20 million to the nonprofit for "recruitment, training and professional development," bringing their total support for TFA to over $100 million since 1993.
"The Walton Family Foundation's support for Teach for America is driven by the organization's proven ability to create a pipeline of outstanding education reform leaders," said Ed Kirby, deputy director of the Walton Family Foundation's K-12 Education Reform effort, in a statement released last week.
"The foundation is expanding its investment in Teach For America because of the organization's ability to produce leaders who are helping to transform public education in the US," the statement continues.
Recruiting recent college graduates from many of the nation's most prestigious universities, the organization requires a two-year commitment from its student-teachers. Though the majority of recruits have no education degree or experience, the nonprofit boasts an "intensive" five weeks of training before dropping these fledgling educators in the nation's neediest urban and rural schools.
Touting such alumni as StudentsFirst founder and former Chancellor of Washington, D.C. public schools Michelle Rhee, LAUSD Board member Steve Zimmer, and KIPP charter school founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, TFA prides itself on introducing individuals to the policy side of the public education debate.
As the Washington Post's education columnist Valerie Strauss explains, "TFA is not looking for young people who want to be teachers, but rather, people it believes will have 'important' jobs later in life who can advocate for public education. That's why TFA recruits are asked to give only a two-year commitment to teaching."
"TFA is a self-perpetuating organization," adds Jacobin writer Kenzo Shibata. "Teach for two years, burn out, go to law school, become a policy maker, make policies that expand TFA."
In a Los Angeles Times article published Saturday, reporter Howard Blume notes the high correlation between the number of TFA hires in states such as California, Alabama, North Carolina, and Louisiana, and the dominance of efforts to embrace charter school expansion, limiting the protections on veteran teachers and teachers' unions.
In Chicago--where the school board recently voted to shutter 49 of the city's public schools eliminating jobs for over a thousand teachers--the Board of Education voted to increase its payment to TFA from $600,000 to nearly $1.6 million, and to add up to 325 new TFA recruits to Chicago Public School classrooms, in addition to 270 second year "teacher interns," the Chicago Sun Times reports.
"While TFA uses the rhetoric of justice and equity, these reforms in fact stifle democratic processes and are used to justify budget cuts and the takeover of public institutions by privately funded and privately run companies." -Valerie Strauss
After Hurricane Katrina, when Louisiana state officials laid off more than 7,000 employees and took over 102 of 117 city schools converting them to nonunion charters, Teach for America provided a large share of the replacements.
"I don't think this could have happened without TFA," boasted Georgia State University assistant professor Kristen Buras. "You need these on-the-ground organizations that are going to assist the state with these reforms."
This year, approximately 375 New Orleans teachers are members of TFA, up from 85 just a few years ago.
"While TFA uses the rhetoric of justice and equity, these reforms in fact stifle democratic processes and are used to justify budget cuts and the takeover of public institutions by privately funded and privately run companies," added Strauss.
For just one example, this video from the organization's own website, where TFA alumnus turned Colorado State Senator Michael Johnston employs the language of the civil rights era to justify passage of Colorado's high-stakes teacher accountability law: Though the chorus of criticisms against the organization has grown, it was not until last month that the first coordinated effort to "put the breaks" on TFA took place when roughly one hundred students, parents, academics and teachers, some affiliated and others not with the organization, gathered in Chicago for a symposium entitled, "Organizing Resistance to Teach for America and its Role in Privatization."
"The desire to make the world a better place is something that Teach for America taps into," said TFA alumna Terrenda White, a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University.
"When did my willingness to teach in urban communities become translated to this very specific political agenda? It's not what I believe in."
Keep ReadingShow Less
NCLB Tutoring Fraud Part of Larger Pattern of Privateering
May 02, 2012
If there are any educational historians around in a hundred years to examine the records from this generation of corporate reform efforts to privateer public schools into corporate revenue streams, No Child Left Behind will stand out, no doubt, as one of the most useful tools in their arsenal. To those less disposed to celebrate the demise of democratic institutions, NCLB has, thus far anyway, proved itself as the most expensive, toxic, and damaging federal education policy in the nation's history. 
Based on the ideologically-driven faux science of the National Reading Panel, NCLB created Reading First, which poured $7,000,000,000 into phonics-based direct instruction (parrot learning) reading efforts that set a course for ineffective, unbalanced literacy programs for years to come in the early grades. The U.S. Dept. of Education's own study in 2008 tersely concluded that "Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two, or three" (p. xv). Why? Could it have something to do with the fact that reading instruction was aimed as much at behavioral control as it was reading, and children spent an inordinate amount of time being tested on how many nonsense syllables they could recognize in 60 seconds--something called decoding and DIBELS testing?
What did children get out that kind of reading-in-a-straightjacket experience? Again from the Federal study: "Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on decoding among first grade students in one school year (spring 2007). The impact was equivalent to an effect of 0.17 standard deviations" (p. xv). Not bad for $7 billion.
In another study from ED, the only literacy method that got positive results in all four domains of reading literacy was Reading Recovery, a balanced program that had been demonized as "whole language" and essentially eliminated from consideration by the Reading First officials who were deciding who would get the Reading First grants.
Another example of waste and fraud occurred when more public billions were allocated for NCLB tutoring, or supplemental services (see here, here, here, and here) with the greatest beneficiaries being the privateer tutoring companies that operated for over five years without any federal oversight or evaluation studies to determine the effect of their overpriced tutoring on student achievement. When school vouchers were finally stripped out of the NCLB bill prior to passage, advocates of privatization settled for charters and tutoring as the road to more privatization, while hoping for vouchers to be passed in future reauthorizations of NCLB. Quoting from Elizabeth Debray's book:
. . . Senator Gregg saw another advantage to supplemental services. As one aide who preferred anonymity recalled about the meeting with Republican Senate committee members right before the committee voted: "Gregg was explaining why they should vote for the bill . . . and he said: 'Well, the supplemental services are a foot under the door for vouchers. They're going to show that these schools aren't working properly, and we'll finally be able to show that the schools aren't doing well. The assessments are going to prove the same thing.'"
Supplemental services operated for 5 years without any oversight whatsoever. When they finally got around to it, ED's own research found that
--Private providers accounted for 88 percent of all state-approved providers in May 2008, an increase from 60 percent in May 2003.--Expenditures for Title I supplemental educational services varied, $192 million to $375 million per year.--By 2007, only eight states had databases containing student achievement and participation information that would permit rigorous evaluations of achievement effects of providers on a statewide basis.
So today's story in the New York Daily News comes as no surprise. It simply provides another bit of evidence that historians will collect into their massive database that will contain the voluminous records of corruption, deception, thievery, and dehumanization of public education that occurred in our era, all under the bogus banner of accountability and high standards.
Test-prep firm Princeton Review swindled the federal government out of millions by falsely claiming it tutored needy city kids, the Manhattan U.S. attorney charges.
From 2006 to 2010, Princeton Review was reimbursed for tutoring services that were either faked or inflated, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office filed a civil fraud suit Tuesday.
"The Princeton Review and its employees were supposed to tutor needy students, not cheat a federal program," said Bharara, who didn't specify how much money is involved.
During those years, city education officials paid Princeton Review $38 million for tutoring funded by the federal government under No Child Left Behind, the suit says.
During that time, Princeton Review staffers submitted phony attendance forms and invoices for thousands of hours of instruction, the suit claims.
Bharara said staffers changed hundreds of kids' absent marks to present -- in one case falsely signing in a student named Dontae as "Donate."
The company billed for sessions with kids who were on vacation and gave some site managers bonuses of up to $9,600 for reporting high daily attendance, the suit says. . . .
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More Stories
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy