Where school vouchers go!

Florida charter schools behaving badly

There are two stories about Florida charter schools behaving badly this week and I know what you are thinking. It’s been a slow week.

The first involves charter schools in Pinellas County counseling out poor performers.

A public charter school can't pick and choose which students it wants to keep, Dot Clark (Pinellas County charter school coordinator) said. "Cherry picking" students would allow a school to boost its test scores, attendance rates and other performance measures. "We're asking: Are you doing that? And if so, what's the justification? And it needs to stop." http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/pinellas-investigating-complaints-about-new-charter-school/2140237

The second is about Hillsborough County charter schools charging parents fees.

"There are things called enhancement fees," Attorney Tom Gonzalez said. "And there is a question that is not always clear of the line between when an enhancement fee becomes tuition, and when it is mandatory as opposed to not, when it's billed as opposed to solicited."

The line can seem hazy, he said, "especially since it seems that an awful lot of charters are pushing up against that line as hard as they can and are, in fact, seeking those funds from a variety of sources through an awful lot of coercion." http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-officials-say-charter-schools-walk-fine-line-between-fees-and/2139421

How are charter schools public schools again? The answer is they are not but saying so gives the privatization crowd some cover. What they are is publicly funded private schools designed not to enhance education outcomes but to make a buck.

7 disturbing facts about Common Core

From the Washington Post's Answer Sheet, by Valerie Strauss 

Myth: Common Core tests will be much better than current exams, with many items measuring higher-order skills.
Reality: The new tests will largely consist of the same old multiple-choice questions.
Proponents initially said the new assessments would measure — and help teachers promote — critical thinking. In fact, the exams will remain predominantly multiple choice. Heavy reliance on such items continues to promote rote teaching and learning. Assessments will generally include just one session of short performance tasks per subject. Some short-answer and “essay” questions will appear, just as on many current state tests. Common Core math items are often simple computation tasks buried in complex and sometimes confusing “word problems.” The prominent Gordon Commission of measurement and education experts concluded that Common Core tests are currently “far from what is ultimately needed for either accountability or classroom instructional improvement purposes.”


Myth: Adoption of Common Core exams will end No Child Left Behind testing overkill.
Reality: Under Common Core, there will be many more tests and the same misuses.
The No Child Left Behind law triggered a testing tsunami over the past dozen years, and the Common Core will flood classrooms with even more tests. Both consortia keep mandatory annual English/language arts (ELA) and math testing in grades 3-8, as with NCLB. However, the tests will be longer than current state exams. PARCC will test reading and math in three high school grades instead of one; SBAC moves reading and math tests from 10th grade to 11th. In PARCC states, high schoolers will also take a speaking and listening test. PARCC also offers “formative” tests for kindergarten through second grade. Both consortia produce and encourage additional interim testing two to three times a year. As with NCLB, Common Core tests will be used improperly to make high-stakes decisions, including decisions involving high school graduation, teacher evaluation and school accountability.

Myth: New multi-state assessments will save taxpayers money.
Reality: Test costs will increase for most states. Schools will spend even more for computer infrastructure upgrades.
Costs have been a big concern, especially for the five states that dropped out of a testing consortium as of August 2013. PARCC acknowledges that half its member states will spend more than they do for current tests. Georgia pulled out when PARCC announced costs of new, computer-delivered summative math and ELA tests alone totaling $2.5 million more than its existing state assessment budget. States lack resources to upgrade equipment and bandwidth and provide technical support, at a cost likely to exceed that of the tests themselves. One analysis indicates that Race to the Top would provide districts with less than 10 cents on the dollar to defray those expenses plus mandated teacher evaluations.

Myth: New assessment consortia will actually design the tests rather than well-known test manufacturers who have made mistakes in the past.
Reality: The same profit-driven companies,  including Pearson, Educational Testing Service and CTB/McGraw-Hill, are producing the tests. These firms have long histories of mistakes. The multinational Pearson, for example, has been responsible for poor-quality items, scoring errors, computer system crashes and missed deadlines. Still, Pearson shared $23 million in contracts to design the first 18,000 PARCC test items.

Myth: Common Core assessments are designed to meet the needs of all students.
Reality: Not yet. The new tests could put students with disabilities and English-language learners at risk.
Advocates for English-language learners have raised concerns about a lack of appropriate accommodations. A U.S. Education Department’s technical review assessed the consortia’s efforts in July 2013 and issued a stern warning, saying that attempts to accommodate students with disabilities and ELLs need more attention (Gewertz, 2013).

Myth: Common Core “proficiency” is an objective measure of college- and career-readiness.
Reality: Proficiency levels on Common Core tests are subjective, like all performance levels.
Recent disclosures demonstrate that New York state, which last spring gave students a Common Core-aligned test designed by Pearson even before the consortia-developed tests have come out, set passing scores arbitrarily. There is no evidence that these standards or tests are linked to the skills and knowledge students need for their wide range of college and career choices.

Myth: States have to implement the Common Core assessments.
Reality: No, they don’t. 
High-quality assessment improves teaching and learning and provides useful information about schools. Examples of better assessments include well-designed formative assessments, performance assessments that are part of the curriculum (New York Performance Standards Consortium), and portfolios or Learning Records of actual student work. Schools can be evaluated using multiple sources of evidence that includes limited, low-stakes testing, school quality reviews, and samples of ongoing student work.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/04/seven-facts-you-should-know-about-new-common-core-tests/

Google Socrates

From a teacher of severely disabled children at a local high school:

I’m so disgusted with the thought of writing essential questions and scripted higher order questions to people who can't tie their shoes,  I can’t even ask them what they thought about word walls and exit slips.

I think in my lesson plan book I'm going to write: 'Google Socrates'.  

Charter schools are here to make a few people rich not to educate our children.

From the Washington Post's Answer Sheet, By Jeff Bryant

There are undoubtedly wonderful charter schools in existence, and Americans generally have a favorable opinion of charters, but hardly a week goes by without news of a scandal or a study tarnishing their image.

With schools reopening everywhere across the country, the past week or so was no exception in exposing new problems with an idea that was once thought of as acollaborative endeavor between teacher unions and school administrators aimed at serving struggling students, but has now become a heavily funded, well-marketed movement designed to siphon money away from traditional public schools.

Leading off the charter scandal parade was Pennsylvania where an auditor general found that the state’s largest charter school pocketed $1.2 million “in improper lease-reimbursement payments.” The scheme the school was running has become all too familiar to anyone following the nefariousness of some charter school operators.

First, you take a building, “previously owned by one of the charter school’s founders,” according to this Philadelphia Inquirer story, and use municipal bonds to sell it – in this case, for $50.7 million – at very favorable terms to a “related nonprofit organization ‘established for the sole purpose of supporting’ the charter school.” Then “the same individual who was once the charter’s landlord” creates a for-profit management company to run the school. And voila, what was once a public endeavor focused on educating children for the sole purpose of raising the well being of the community becomes a financial bonanza for a few well-placed individuals – one of whom, in this case, just happens to be “a Republican fund-raiser” who served on the governor’s “transition team.”

This Pennsylvania charter was no lone outlaw, as the state auditor noted. “His office had found similar problems at six other charter schools,” the Inquirer story said.

The Aspira Trifecta Scandal

The litany of charter school scandals doesn’t stop there. Philadelphia, a city that is closing neighborhood schools and leaving school children bereft of art and music teachers due to a miserly state budget, is throwing millions – a projected $729 million – at charter schools. A recent report from Philadelphia City Paper revealed that not all of that money spent on charters goes to educating kids.

Once again, a “non-profit,” Aspira Inc. of Pennsylvania, set up to serve the interests of charter schools is playing a shell game with taxpayer money so a few folks get rich. Similar to other charter schemes, “millions of dollars have moved between the network of charter schools, their parent nonprofit, and two property-management entities.”

Four charter schools in the Aspira chain loaned $3.3 million to Aspira “in addition to $1.5 million in lease payments to Aspira and Aspira-controlled property-management entities ACE and ACE/Dougherty, and $6.3 million in administrative fees paid to Aspira in 2012.” What seems pretty clear is that Aspira has used funds from it charters to acquire real estate: The network’s combined real-estate holdings increased from $13.34 million in 2011 to $23.15 million in 2012. But “in the event of a default on that loan,” according to the article, those real estate assets are not “at risk.” Convenient, no?

Where is the school district in this affair? “We cannot conduct even limited financial audits of the parent organization,” according to a district spokesperson quoted in the report. And where is the state? Noted reporter Daniel Denvir in the Philadelphia CityPaper: “The state Auditor General, which has seen its staff reduced by 24 percent in recent years, doesn’t have the capacity to audit all the new charter schools that have opened in the past five years. Only three Philadelphia charter schools have been audited since 2008. Aspira’s five charters are not among them.”

Cyber Scandals

Even when there’s not real estate involved, charter schools in Pennsylvania find a way to make a buck at the expense of school kids. According to an article at The Raw Story, the founder of Pennsylvania’s largest “cyber charter,” that operates exclusively over the internet, “was charged with fraud, for funneling $8 million of the school’s funds into his personal companies and holdings.” The operator, Nicholas Trombetta, “allegedly used the tax payer money to purchase a plane, houses for his mother and girlfriend, and a million dollar Florida condo.”

Looking deeper into the indictment, Crook’s and Liars blogger Karoli found that Trombetta not only headed the Pennsylvania online charter, called PA Cyber, but also set himself up as the CEO of an organization that provided curriculum and other services to online charter schools, including PA Cyber, and he created a “management group” to advise the organization he was CEO of. That’s quite a trifecta.

The list or recent charter school scandals isn’t confined to the Keystone State.

In Texas, a charter school located in Houston was recently accused of funneling of $5.3 million in federal funds to questionable destinations, including ” hotels, cruises and travel packages,” six-figure salaries, and, again, a real estate scheme involving a management company and the charter school.

"Zero Tolerance” For Struggling Students

A scandal of a different kind recently enveloped another charter chain operating in New York City. In an article in the Daily News, reporter Juan Gonzales revealed, “Success Academy, the charter school chain that boasts sky-high student scores on annual state tests, has for years used a “zero tolerance” disciplinary policy to suspend, push out, discharge or demote the very pupils who might lower those scores – children with special needs or behavior problems.”

One school in the Success chain, an elementary school, suspended 22 percent of its students at least once during the 2010-11 school year – “far above the 3% average” of other elementary schools in the district.

According to Gonzales, Success Academy Success Academy chief Eva Moskowitz claimed that higher suspension rates helped achieve “order and civility in the classroom.”

But high suspension rates invariably produce more school dropouts, and many states are now changing school discipline policies to reduce suspensions. Yet charter schools are often left free to determine their own discipline policies, despite the students they push out or drop out become the responsibility of other schools – or the criminal justice system.

One charter chain operating in Connecticut, Achievement First, had such high suspension rates – including “shocking numbers” of kindergartners – that a state boardis now reviewing the schools’ practices.

Another charter chain, Democracy Prep, has been condemned by parents of former students for its “zero tolerance” discipline policies.

Innovation For Innovation’s Sake

What’s apparent from all these charter school scandals is that these schools need way more scrutiny and, yes, government regulation. But the charter movement and its ardent backers in state legislatures are adamantly against that. Charters, we’ve been told, “need to be free to innovate.”

Yet for all the “freedom to innovate” that charter schools have, the results of these schools generally fall far short of being, well, innovative.

In Ohio, a state thick with charter school “innovation” for 16 years, “charters statewide performed almost exactly the same on most measures of student achievement as the urban schools they were meant to reform,” according to an article in The Columbus Dispatch. “And when it comes to graduating seniors after four years of high school,” traditional public schools in Ohio’s urban communities “performed better.”

The article, written by Bill Bush, continues, “What started as an experiment in fixing urban education through free-market innovation is now a large part of the problem. Almost 84,000 Ohio students – 87 percent of the state’s charter-school students – attend a charter ranking D or F in meeting state performance standards.”

A National Scandal

Nationwide, the statistics on charter school “innovation” aren’t much better. The most recent comparison of charter school performance to traditional public schools nationwide found that more charter schools are doing better. But a careful analysis of the studyshowed only “a tiny real impact on the part of charter schools.”

Taken into context –  being freed from regulation, having the ability to select the most desirable students, implementing programs designed for test taking, having friends in high places to game the system – charter schools should be kicking the tails of traditional public schools, not barley eking out gains after years of promises and bluster.

Nevertheless, the myth of charter school magic is hard to crack.

In Louisiana, when charter schools recently failed and were closed by the state, they were replaced with … more charter schools. In Tennessee, the worst performing school in the state is a charter … protected by lobbyists. And cyber charters and other online providers in the K-12 sphere notoriously under perform traditional schools … but are being ramped up by policy makers in many states.

All of which denies the ‘first law of the hole’ that the charter movement keeps digging itself – and our nation’s school children – into.

What is the first law of the hole? If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/05/why-charter-schools-need-better-oversight/

Is Ed White high school violating disabled children’s rights?

Three things, Ed White is using City Year corp members instead of certified ESE teachers as in class support facilitators for ESE kids with IEPs that say they need support facilitators.

Next what would have been once considered Varying Exceptionality students are being placed in the Trainably Mentally handicapped classes because they don’t have much of a chance of passing the FCAT becasue if they are in the TMH classrooms they don’t have to take it. The difference between the streetwise kids with learning disabilities and the severely disabled TMH kids is huge.  

Finally the services the TMH kids at Ed White get don’t compare at all to the services the same type of kids get at Palm Avenue. It is like night and day folks, the kids at Palm Avenue want for little and the kids at Ed White are jammed into classes where they receive few services. The TMH kids at Palm Avenue have music, art, P.E., a pace lab with a teacher and classes that top out at 11 or 12. Ed White’s kids are packed into classes as big as 17 and have very little in the way of resources.

If our most vulnerable students aren’t getting what they need I shudder to think what the regular ed kid is getting. 

11 facts about poverty and the havoc it plays on education

From DoSomething.org and an assist from Go Public Schools.com

What is the Poverty Line, anyway? According to the 2011 U.S. Census Bureau, it is a family of four (two adults, two children under 18) that earns less than $23,021.

1. The basic-needs budget for a U.S. family of 4 is $31,080 (rural Nebraska) to $64,656 (Boston, Massachusetts).
2. In 2011, nearly 46.2 million Americans were living in poverty.
3. Children living in poverty have a higher number of absenteeism or leave school all together because they are more likely to have to work or care for family members.
4. Dropout rates of 16 to 24-year-old students who come from low income families are seven times more likely to drop out than those from families with higher incomes.
5. A higher percentage of young adults (31 percent) without a high school diploma live in poverty, compared to the 24 percent of young people who finished high school.
6. 40 percent of children living in poverty aren’t prepared for primary schooling.
7. Children that live below the poverty line are 1.3 times more likely to have developmental delays or learning disabilities than those who don’t live in poverty.
8. By the end of the 4th grade, African-American, Hispanic and low-income students are already two years behind grade level. By the time they reach the 12th grade they are four years behind.
9. The nation’s lowest-performing high schools produce 58 percent of all African-American dropouts and 50 percent of all Hispanic dropouts, compared to 22 percent of all white dropouts.
10. Less than 30 percent of students in the bottom quarter of incomes enroll in a four-year school. Among that group – less than half graduate.
11. Less than 30 percent of students in the bottom quarter of incomes enroll in a four-year school. Among that group – less than half graduate.

Poverty by the way is the number one measurable statistic in education. Those that live in it don't do as well as those that don't.

What DOES DTU know about teacher raises?

A couple times a week if you are a member of DTU you get an e-mail from them describing some workshop, training or something else. Strangely not one has been about teacher raises. Well a few weeks back I took to replying to the e-mails asking about the raises. For a while they went ignored but then they finally replied.

We are waiting to identify all teachers who are eligible for the money, including charter teachers so we know how many will share in the pot.

I then asked the following questions: since charter schools don't use the CAST how do we know who is effective and highly effective, the two groups I thought were eligible? If it is a bonus are retired teachers going to get it or if it is a raise are first year teachers going to get it? Will the teachers at the seemingly 20 new charter schools that just opened up be eligible too?

Their answer, don’t know.

I am a proud union member but I have to tell you in times like these I ask myself why. The district has had the money for months and it seems like neither they nor the union are in much of a hurry. Meanwhile Pinellas County just struck a deal to give all their teachers substantial raises including making the starting salary 40,000 dollars.

Who are the job creators?

Duval County Public School teachers want to get something off your chest?

Have a ridiculous amount of kids in your class and nothing for them to do? Still waiting for books or had massive schedule changes two weeks in? Well Khristopher Brooks of the Times Union wants to hear from you.

Khristopher.brooks@jacksonville.com

359-4104 office

323-8322 cell