WV Charter School Company Robs Kids of Education, Puts Taxpayer$ Money in CEO’s Wallet

In an entry entitled “Denis Smith Warns West Virginians About Charter Schools” published today (Sunday, January 9, 2022, 9:00AM), in the introductory portion of that entry, Research Professor of Education and historian Dr. Diane Ravitch, PhD, wrote that,

“Denis Smith was a teacher and an administrator in West Virginia. He moved to Ohio where he worked in the State Education Department. His last position before retiring was in the office of charter schools (misleadingly called “community schools” in Ohio, even when they operate for profit).”

Dr. Diane Ravitch, PhD

Dr. Ravitch also wrote that “the link works but doesn’t permit me to copy any print.”

She was referring to a guest Opinion-Editorial authored by Denis Smith which was published January 3, 2022 in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, which is WV’s largest newspaper, about a recent state judicial ruling, that attempts by K12 Inc., a Wall $treet-traded, private, for-profit charter school management company, to create a publicly-unaccountable school district inside a school district that only they could control, was illegal under state law. He further opined about the miasmatic mess that the state’s legislators had created with their charter school law.

Nationally, there is an almost overwhelming abundance of complaints from coast-to-coast about the total costs and losses, not all of which are monetary, that have come directly from the charter school “movement,” which is, at its core, a private profiteering effort funded by public tax dollars, regardless whether the charter school is for-profit, or not-for-profit. No more, no less. It is, in essence, an unaccountable system which owes fealty to corporate owners, not to the taxpayers who fund them. For additional information, see:
https://NetworkForPublicEducation.org/chartered-for-profit/

As a courtesy to her, to her readers, and to others, the Op-Ed to which she referred is

A Phenomenal Public Education Success Story

Dr. Diane Ravitch, PhD, is a Research Professor of Education at New York University, a historian of education, and author. She is an unashamedly ardent advocate of taxpayer funded public education, primarily at the K-12 level, and is the Founder and President of the Network for Public Education (NPE) — “an advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve and strengthen public schools for both current and future generations of students.” From 1991 to 1993, she was Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Additional biographical details about her may be found on her professional website linked here.

She also maintains a blog — DianeRavitch.net — separate from her professional website, where she contributes regularly, opining primarily upon matters of education.

Seniors at Downtown Magnets High School gather inside the College Center for an information session with UC Irvine. (image by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The following entry is one of her most recent observations, and shares excerpted portions of a human interest news feature sharing greatly encouraging findings of phenomenal successes and accomplishments of a taxpayer-funded public school in Los Angeles, California — Downtown Magnets High School.

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Los Angeles Times:
The “Unentitled Kids”: California’s New Generation of College-Bound Stars

by Diane Ravitch
January 5, 2022
https://wp.me/p2odLa-veH

Teresa Watanabe wrote a wonderful story about kids in a public school in Los Angeles who are college-bound, despite their demographic profiles. They don’t have college-educated parents or SAT tutors. What they do have is a school — the Downtown Magnets High School — where the professionals are dedicated to their success. Read about this school and ask yourself why Bill Gates is not trying to replicate it? Why is it not a model for Michael Bloomberg or Reed Hastings or the Waltons? Why do the billionaires insist, as Bloomberg said recently, that public education is “broken”? Despite their investing hundreds of millions to destroy public schools like the one in this story, they are still performing miracles every day.

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They represent the new generation of students reshaping the face of higher education in California: young people with lower family incomes, less parental education and far more racial and ethnic diversity than college applicants of the past. And Downtown Magnets, a small and highly diverse campus of 911 students just north of the Los Angeles Civic Center, is in the vanguard of the change.

Last year, 97% of the school’s seniors were accepted to college, and most enrolled. Among them, 71% of those who applied to a UC campus were admitted, including 19 of the 56 applicants to UC Berkeley — a higher admission rate than at elite Los Angeles private schools such as Harvard-Westlake and Marlborough.

This month, the Downtown Magnets applicants include Nick Saballos, whose Nicaraguan father never finished high school and works for minimum wage as a parking valet but is proud of his son’s passion for astrophysics.

There’s Emily Cruz, who had a rough time focusing on school while being expected to help her Guatemalan immigrant mother with household duties. Emily is determined to become a lawyer or a philosopher.

Kenji Horigome emigrated to Los Angeles from Japan in fourth grade speaking no English, with a single mother who works as a Koreatown restaurant server. Kenji has become a top student and may join the military, in part for the financial aid the GI Bill would provide.

“The main thing my kids lack is a sense of entitlement,” said Lynda McGee, the school’s longtime college counselor. “That’s my biggest enemy: The fact that my students are humble and think they don’t deserve what they actually deserve. It’s more of a mental problem than an academic one.”

What the students do have is a close-knit school community, passionate educators and parents willing to take the extra step to send them to a magnet school located, for many, outside their neighborhoods.

Downtown Magnets High School Seniors Patricia DeLeon, 17, LEFT, and Kiana Portillo, 17, talk with college counselor Lynda McGee at the College Center at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles. (image by Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Principal Sarah Usmani leads a staff mindful of creating a campus environment both nurturing and academically rigorous; she has

How To Improve American Education

It will be interesting to see if Diane Ravitch picks up on this OpEd by David Brooks of the New York Times.

America’s educational model is lacking… and severely so.

Common Core is not the answer, nor is more testing.

And charter schools – private, often for-profit enterprises that siphon away tax dollars from public schools, funneling them to the charter schools’ owners and investors – are definitely out of the question.

Following WWII, the United States Army essentially rebuilt Japan and Germany, and gave to them most marvelous gifts, which were the essential building blocks for a new and transformed educational system, government, social reforms, and national economy.

It’s worth noting that, while “in Japan, the head of the occupation, General Douglas MacArthur, broke up the zaibatsu, the big conglomerates that were blamed for supporting the Japanese militarists, and introduced a range of reforms, from a new school curriculum to a democratic constitution, that were designed to turn Japan into a peaceable democratic nation,” America has fallen into the trap Dwight David Eisenhower warned about in his Farewell Address – building an economy based upon a “military industrial complex.”

It’s not as if there are no global models in other nations which have been successful, thereby forcing America to be stuck, constantly reinventing the wheel.

But America is the ONLY nation in the world which refuses to transfer to the metric system. Even the National Institute of Standards and Technologies has written that, “The United States is now the only industrialized country in the world that does not use the metric system as its predominant system of measurement.”

To be certain, global metrics such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which is administered to 15-year-olds every three years and “assesses the extent to which they have acquired the key knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society,” and focuses upon the core scholastic “subjects of reading, mathematics and science,” including a subject area which changes with every administration, such as “global competence,” which was included in the last survey, are important.

This critique should not be misinterpreted to demean taxpayer-funded public schools, but rather, be viewed as an internal objective criticism.

There’s little, if any, disagreement in principle that teachers should be left to teach, and to operate schools, instead of politicians – from whatever political party happens to be popular at the time. Furthermore, there’s just as little, or less, disagreement that teachers, who are our, or any society’s most influential members upon generations yet to come, should be paid significantly more than they already are. And the most disgraceful event of it all, is the macabre shadow of death which hangs over students’ and teachers’ heads, and burdens not their shoulders, but their minds and hearts, by not knowing, and wondering if at anytime they could be the next victims of a mass shooting.

What is particularly disconcerting to many observers from within, and without – regardless of their city, or state – is the abundant evidence of inequity in teaching support, which includes materials used to teach – such as textbooks, computers, and other necessary items – but also recognizes the often-horrific inequities naturally arising from those schools and districts which have more money, including physical plant conditions, even though they may be in relatively close proximity to each other.

In this era of tax-cutting, it’s difficult to imagine a school, or any government-funded endeavor to thrive with fewer resources, and reduced operational capabilities. And NO ONE wants to talk about increasing taxes, much less an even more efficient use of the existing resources which doesn’t involve fiscal reductions.

Education is forever. It is the only theft-proof thing known to humankind, and once you have it, you have it forever. Any advanced society should recognize and acknowledge that often-overlooked fact, and spare no expenses by investing not only in youth in K-12, but in technical and higher education, and continuing education for adults, as well. This speaks to the very heart of the matter of some political aspirants’ ideals for education. And, they are right.

Equally important, is a sense of public service, an inherent desire to “give back” to society of the talents, knowledge, skills and abilities one has. Of the untold numbers of people with whom I’ve ever mentioned this idea, no one, literally, no one, has ever derided it, nor said it was bad: Mandatory Public Service in much the same fashion as our Military Service Members.

Imagine the tremendous good it would do for our nation, and for the participants, if, following high school, they were to have 2, or 3 years of paid public service in some, or any capacity of their choosing, in and through which they would serve their local communities, state, or nation, and be compensated similarly as our Service Members, with wages/salary up to pay grade E-4, healthcare, housing & clothing allowances, 30 days paid vacation (leave) annually, educational benefits, and if that income was forever tax-free. Yes, FOREVER. A base income of $28,536 per annum is nothing to sneeze at, especially if all other expenses such as healthcare, housing, food, and clothing are paid for, and educational benefits are similarly guaranteed. The combined total compensation would average at least $50,000 to $60,000 annually, or even slightly more. And, it would ALL be tax-free, forever.

And to be certain, there’s always a cost – and it’s not always pecuniary. It’s up to us to decide if we are worth such an investment of time, resources, and money in ourselves. If we’re up for the challenge to better ourselves by the practice of such disciplines, but more importantly, our nation, by looking to the future of the generations yet to come.

The “finer points” of criticism of the state of public education in America could include a lack of mandatory foreign language learning, dearth of artistic/creative curricula such as visual arts, music, and dance/acting, and the money to fund it, but the intellectual and social growth which comes from the exposure to, and involvement in such programmes. (I simply couldn’t resist using the British spelling! ;-))

In short, like every coach of winning teams criticizes, encourages, and trains their athletes, so too should educators practice critique of their profession, and should be open to changes which benefit students, and educators alike – regardless from where they originate.

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nytimes.com

Opinion – This Is How Scandinavia Got Great

By David Brooks

6-7 minutes

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Opinion|This Is How Scandinavia Got Great

The power of educating the whole person.

• Feb. 13, 2020

People admiring the annual cherry tree blossoms in Stockholm.Credit…Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Almost everybody admires the Nordic model. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have high economic productivity, high social equality, high social trust and high levels of personal happiness.

Progressives say it’s because they have generous welfare states. Some libertarians point out that these countries score high on nearly every measure of free market openness. Immigration restrictionists note that until recently they were ethnically homogeneous societies.

But Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy.

The 19th-century Nordic elites did something we haven’t been able to do in this country recently. They realized that

Everything Old Is New Again

Diane Ravitch is a name known to some, to few, and to many.

It depends upon what circles one travels in to determine who knows whom.

If it’s educational circles, then one is certainly well aware of her stature and renown. One wouldn’t suppose that bricklayers, stonemasons, heavy equipment operators, or welders would recognize her name. But, they could. One never knows.

However, Ms. Ravitch is a well-respected, and highly-regarded education historian, policy analyst, and author, who also blogs on her personal website DianeRavitch.net, and for many years, has advocated for improvements in Public Education.

She was appointed by POTUSes Clinton and George W. Bush to public service, served as Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991-93 to Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander. From there, she was appointed membership to the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and served in that capacity from 1997-2004. She earned her PhD from Columbia University, and undergraduate from Wellesley College.

And ardent education reformer who opposes Common Core and the seemingly incessant testing to which students are subjected, she has said that the only sure way to stop corporations’ efforts to undermine taxpayer-funded Public Education is to “build a political movement so united and clear in its purpose, that it would be heard in every state Capitol, and even in Washington, D.C.”

Caricature of James Russell Lowell, by Théobald Chartran published in Vanity Fair, 21 August 1880.

Whereas formerly, she supported the school voucher system, she now opposes it, and in her 2010 book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” which NPR described as a “terrific and timely book,” she explains why she did so, citing an abundance of “new evidence.”

In a January 22, 2020 entry in her blog, she recently posted a poem from late American poet

Southerners Still Want Segregated Schools Because Hatred Runs Deep In The South

Following is an excerpt to a soul-searching article about the resegregation of schools in the South. 

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, racial discrimination was prohibited in any federally funded program. But in 1964, there was very limited federal aid to schools. However, in 1965, Congress passed the Elementary and Zsecondary Education Act, and there was quite a lot of federal money for schools that enrolled poor children. The Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare took the Brown decision seriously. Top officials in the Lyndon B. Johnson told Southern districts that they would lose federal funding unless they presented real data on the racial distribution of students and faculty. 

So did the federal courts. Southern districts, governors, and legislators offered “school choice” proposals. They were a farce. Federal officials rejected them. Federal courts rejected them. 

Within ten years after the passage of ESEA, the South had more integrated public schools than any other region. 

But then the great rollback began. With more conservative justices on the federal courts, the zeal to follow through on the promise of the Brown decision faded. The Department of Education, created in 1980, never had the energy and focus of the LBJ officials. 

The authors of this article write:

“As we continue our “anti-dumbass” campaign to champion and improve Southern public schools for all students, we maintain our focus on the influence poverty, race, and racism continue to play in schools. Within the current political and cultural climate, there looms a growing sense of separation, where private interests replace democratic interests and the rich and powerful profit while the poor and underserved continue to struggle. You might think we were living in the 1930s or 1940s. This is, however, 2017, and the resegregation of public schools is increasing at an alarming rate. 

“As parents and proud Southerners we constantly ask ourselves,

Reasons to Oppose Common Core from the Left & Right

Once, I supported Common Core.

Now, I do not.

Read on to understand why.

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Everything you need to know about Common Core — Ravitch

By Valerie Strauss January 18, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/18/everything-you-need-to-know-about-common-core-ravitch/

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who has become the leader of the movement against corporate-influenced school reform, gave this speech to the Modern Language Association on Jan. 11 about the past, present and future of the Common Core State Standards.

Here’s her speech:

As an organization of teachers and scholars devoted to the study of language and literature, MLA should be deeply involved in the debate about the Common Core standards.

The Common Core standards were developed in 2009 and released in 2010. Within a matter of months, they had been endorsed by 45 states and the District of Columbia. At present, publishers are aligning their materials with the Common Core, technology companies are creating software and curriculum aligned with the Common Core, and two federally-funded consortia have created online tests of the Common Core.

What are the Common Core standards? Who produced them? Why are they controversial? How did their adoption happen so quickly?

As scholars of the humanities, you are well aware that every historical event is subject to interpretation. There are different ways to answer the questions I just posed. Originally, this session was designed to be a discussion between me and David Coleman, who is generally acknowledged as the architect of the Common Core standards. Some months ago, we both agreed on the date and format. But Mr. Coleman, now president of the College Board, discovered that he had a conflicting meeting and could not be here.

So, unfortunately, you will hear only my narrative, not his, which would be quite different. I have no doubt that you will have no difficulty getting access to his version of the narrative, which is the same as Secretary Arne Duncan’s.

He would tell you that the standards were created by the states, that they were widely and quickly embraced because so many educators wanted common standards for teaching language, literature, and mathematics. But he would not be able to explain why so many educators and parents are now opposed to the standards and are reacting angrily to the testing that accompanies them.

I will try to do that.

I will begin by setting the context for the development of the standards.

They arrive at a time when American public education and its teachers are under attack. Never have public schools been as subject to upheaval, assault, and chaos as they are today. Unlike modern corporations, which extol creative disruption, schools need stability, not constant turnover and change. Yet for the past dozen years, ill-advised federal and state policies have rained down on students, teachers, principals, and schools.

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top have combined to impose a punitive regime of standardized testing on the schools. NCLB was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law in 2002. NCLB law required schools to test every child in grades 3-8 every year; by 2014, said the law, every child must be “proficient” or schools would face escalating sanctions. The ultimate sanction for failure to raise test scores was firing the staff and closing the school.

Because the stakes were so high, NCLB encouraged teachers to teach to the test. In many schools, the curriculum was narrowed; the only subjects that mattered were reading and mathematics. What was not tested—the arts, history, civics, literature, geography, science, physical education—didn’t count. Some states, like New York, gamed the system by dropping the passing mark each year, giving the impression that its students were making phenomenal progress when they were not. Some districts, like Atlanta, El Paso, and the District of Columbia, were caught up in cheating scandals. In response to this relentless pressure, test scores rose, but not as much as they had before the adoption of NCLB.

Then along came the Obama administration, with its signature program called Race to the Top. In response to the economic crisis of 2008, Congress gave the U.S. Department of Education $5 billion to promote “reform.” Secretary Duncan launched a competition for states called “Race to the Top.” If states wanted any part of that money, they had to agree to certain conditions. They had to agree to evaluate teachers to a significant degree by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores; they had to agree to increase the number of privately managed charter schools; they had to agree to adopt “college and career ready standards,” which were understood to be the not-yet-finished Common Core standards; they had to agree to “turnaround” low-performing schools by such tactics as firing the principal and part or all of the school staff; and they had to agree to collect unprecedented amounts of personally identifiable information about every student and store it in a data warehouse. It became an article of faith in Washington and in state capitols, with the help of propagandistic films like “Waiting for Superman,” that if students had low scores, it must be the fault of bad teachers. Poverty, we heard again and again from people like Bill Gates, Joel Klein, and Michelle Rhee, was just an excuse for bad teachers, who should be fired without delay or due process.

These two federal programs, which both rely heavily on standardized testing, has produced a massive demoralization of educators; an unprecedented exodus of experienced educators, who were replaced in many districts by young, inexperienced, low-wage teachers; the closure of many public schools, especially in poor and minority districts; the opening of thousands of privately managed charters; an increase in low-quality for-profit charter schools and low-quality online charter schools; a widespread attack on teachers’ due process rights and collective bargaining rights; the near-collapse of public education in urban districts like Detroit and Philadelphia, as public schools are replaced by privately managed charter schools; a burgeoning educational-industrial complex of testing corporations, charter chains, and technology companies that view public education as an emerging market. Hedge funds, entrepreneurs, and real estate investment corporations invest enthusiastically in this emerging market, encouraged by federal tax credits, lavish fees, and the prospect of huge profits from taxpayer dollars. Celebrities, tennis stars, basketball stars, and football stars are opening their own name-brand schools with public dollars, even though they know nothing about education.

No other nation in the world has inflicted so many changes or imposed so many mandates on its teachers and public schools as we have in the past dozen years. No other nation tests every student every year as we do. Our students are the most over-tested in the world. No other nation—at least no high-performing nation—judges the quality of teachers by the test scores of their students. Most researchers agree that this methodology is fundamentally flawed, that it is inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable, that the highest ratings will go to teachers with the most affluent students and the lowest ratings will go to teachers of English learners, teachers of students with disabilities, and teachers in high-poverty schools. Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Education wants every state and every district to do it. Because of these federal programs, our schools have become obsessed with standardized testing, and have turned over to the testing corporations the responsibility for rating, ranking, and labeling our students, our teachers, and our schools.

The Pearson Corporation has become