Laura McIntyre began educating her nine children more than a decade ago inside a vacant office at an El Paso motorcycle dealership she ran with her husband and other relatives. Now the family is embroiled in a legal battle the Texas Supreme Court hears Monday that could have broad implications on the nation’s booming home-school ranks. The McIntyres are accused of failing to teach their children educational basics because they were waiting to be transported to heaven with the second coming of Jesus Christ. At issue: Where do religious liberty and parental rights to educate one’s children stop and obligations to ensure home-schooled students ever actually learn something begin? “Parents should be allowed to decide how to educate their children, not whether to educate their children,” said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education. Like other Texas home-school parents, Laura and Michael McIntyre weren’t required to register with state or local education officials. They also didn’t have to teach state-approved curriculums or give standardized tests. But problems began when the dealership’s co-owner and Michael’s twin brother, Tracy, reported never seeing the children reading, working on math, using computers or doing much of anything educational except singing and playing instruments. He said he heard one of them say learning was unnecessary since “they were going to be raptured.”
It appears that Texas lives by the motto, “If you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you should start breeding them for stupidity.”
It was, in the vernacular of corporate America, a win-win: a bond that paid for preschool for underprivileged children in Utah while also making money for investors. Goldman Sachs announced last month that its investment in a Utah preschool program had helped 109 “at-risk” kindergartners avoid special education. The investment also resulted in a $260,000 payout for the Wall Street firm, the first of many payments that is expected from the investment. Gov. Gary R. Herbert of Utah hailed the program as a model for a new way of financing public projects. Such so-called social impact bonds are a new kind of public-private partnership, promising financing from Wall Street and imposing a goal on local governments. Yet since the Utah results were disclosed, questions have emerged about whether the program achieved the success that was claimed. Nine early-education experts who reviewed the program for The New York Times quickly identified a number of irregularities in how the program’s success was measured, which seem to have led Goldman and the state to significantly overstate the effect that the investment had achieved in helping young children avoid special education. Goldman said its investment had helped almost 99 percent of the Utah children it was tracking avoid special education in kindergarten. The bank received a payment for each of those children. The big problem, researchers say, is that even well-funded preschool programs — and the Utah program was not well funded — have been found to reduce the number of students needing special education by, at most, 50 percent. Most programs yield a reduction of closer to 10 or 20 percent. The program’s unusual success — and the payments to Goldman that were in direct proportion to that success — were based on what researchers say was a faulty assumption that many of the children in the program would have needed special education without the preschool, despite there being little evidence or previous research to indicate that this was the case.
When one takes a a central government function, like education, and hands it to Corporate America, corruption invariably results, whether it is military contractors, intelligence outsourced to private firms, or new House Speaker Paul Ryan.
First, let me say, read the comments on his post. They are a wealth of information as well.
Second, as is my wont, let me run the numbers:
The top 15 luminaries at this institution earn a total of $3,928,000.00, with the 15th most highly paid getting $145,000.00 a year.
There are 200 teaching staff, none of whom make $145,000.00 a year, or their names would be on the tax records used at LGM.
Assuming that they each average $100,000.00 a year, this means $20,000,000.00 spent on teaching staff, which means that 14% of the teaching budget is spent on such notables as the , “Vice President of Campus Environment ,” “Associate Assistant Vice President/Dean”, “Vice President of Institutional Advancement, ” and “Associate Vice President and Chief of Staff”.
According to the comments, almost all the teacher are adjuncts, so that number is probably less than $60K, it’s primarily a liberal arts institution, which would mean that of these people have get the ⅓ of what is spent on instructors.
When you further consider that it is likely that each of these bits of administrative deadwood have 5 flunkies working directly for them on average (and my guess would be that there are at least 10 working for both the marketing and alumni development chiefs) , and that each of them earn $30K a year, and this goes up to more than 50% of the teacher budget.
Note from the comments also, “It is telling that she refers to customers rather than students.”
A major problem with higher education, and higher education costs, is the explosion of overpaid and under-worked administrators.
Another one is that, particularly at the top schools, there is monopolistic collusion as to prices and aid awards, allowing prices to skyrocket.
Instead, we have people talking about climbing walls for students, and those palatial some new dorms.†
College is a microcosm of society, where an unproductive and parasitic managerial class suck the marrow out of business, the economy, society, and the “customer”.
*Product – What product or products should we offer? Price – How should our products be priced? Place – Where should we offer our products for sale? Promotion – What’s the compelling story we tell about our product and where do we tell the story to get people to buy our product? †In fact, the high end student amenities are predicted by monopoly theory. Once monopolists stop competing on price, they jack up prices and compete on bling.
From the time Folake Ogundiran’s daughter started kindergarten at a Success Academy charter school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the girl struggled to adjust to its strict rules. She racked up demerits for not following directions or not keeping her hands folded in her lap. Sometimes, after being chastised, she threw tantrums. She was repeatedly suspended for screaming, throwing pencils, running away from school staff members or refusing to go to another classroom for a timeout. One day last December, the school’s principal, Candido Brown, called Ms. Ogundiran and said her daughter, then 6, was having a bad day. Mr. Brown warned that if she continued to do things that were defiant and unsafe — including, he said, pushing or kicking, moving chairs or tables, or refusing to go to another classroom — he would have to call 911, Ms. Ogundiran recalled. Already feeling that her daughter was treated unfairly, she went to the school and withdrew her on the spot. Success Academy, the high-performing charter school network in New York City, has long been dogged by accusations that its remarkable accomplishments are due, in part, to a practice of weeding out weak or difficult students. The network has always denied it. But documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with 10 current and former Success employees at five schools suggest that some administrators in the network have singled out children they would like to see leave. Nine of the students on the list later withdrew from the school. Some of their parents said in interviews that while their children attended Success, their lives were upended by repeated suspensions and frequent demands that they pick up their children early or meet with school or network staff members. Four of the parents said that school or network employees told them explicitly that the school, whose oldest students are now in the third grade, was not right for their children and that they should go elsewhere. The current and former employees said they had observed similar practices at other Success schools. According to those employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their relationships with people still at the network, school leaders and network staff members explicitly talked about suspending students or calling parents into frequent meetings as ways to force parents to fall in line or prompt them to withdraw their children. ……… Suspensions at Success, which typically last one or two days, are frequent compared with traditional public schools. In the 2012-13 school year, the most recent one for which state data is available, Success schools suspended between 4 percent and 23 percent of their students at least once, with most suspending more than 10 percent. According to the most recent statistics from the city’s Education Department, from 2013-14, traditional public schools suspended 3 percent of students that academic year. ……… At Success Academy Fort Greene, the same day that Ms. Ogundiran heard from the principal, her daughter’s name was one of 16 placed on a list drawn up at his direction and shared by school leaders. The heading on the list was “Got to Go.” ……… The notes also appear to allude to the possibility of getting one child on the “Got to Go” list classified as a 12:1:1 special education student. Those students are entitled to classrooms limited to 12 students, with one teacher and one aide, so Success Academy, which offers only five such classes in a network serving 11,000 students, might not be able to meet the needs of every 12:1:1 student. Ms. Fleischman, the education manager, warned her colleagues in a follow-up email that the goal should not have been put in an email and that, in any case, a 12:1:1 classification “does not guarantee a withdrawal.” Asked this month about that remark, she said that she was saying only that the parent of a 12:1:1 student would not be required to take the student out, and was not alluding to any effort to ensure the child would leave.
I would also argue that it s a violation of anti-retaliation laws, and I would further argue that the parent, or an enterprising prosecutor, might also consider racketeering as icing on the cake:
Anyone who has reported on campus sexual assault knows that school administrations rarely respond, even when they feel unfairly maligned, because they fear violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA. Passed in 1974, FERPA is a federal law that bans the release of students’ personal information without their consent. “Schools are not supposed to talk about their students, even when the media is saying, ‘Hey, I can’t believe you did this,’ ” says Derek W. Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law who specializes in education law. “And sometimes that means the media doesn’t get the story straight, but it does protect the student.” That’s why it was so surprising when Eva Moskowitz, the high-profile head of Success Academy, a network of New York City charter schools, responded to a negative PBS story by releasing the disciplinary record of an ex-student featured in it. Black says this was probably illegal, and it has left the student’s mother, Fatima Geidi, furious and frantic with worry over her 10-year-old son’s reputation. “For a grown woman, an adult, to attack a child is disgusting,” Geidi told me. “There’s no other way around it.” The skirmish began on Oct. 12, when PBS NewsHour ran a segment titled “Is Kindergarten Too Young to Suspend a Student?” It came as a national backlash has been building against overly strict discipline in public schools, particularly toward very young students. Last year, the Obama administration urged schools to abandon so called zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, warning administrators nationwide that it would investigate racial disparities in student punishment. Shortly before the PBS NewsHour piece ran, a report from the Center for American Progress documented that students are being suspended and expelled as early as preschool. “[I]t is clear that what were intended to be last resort and occasional disciplinary tools have become wildly overused and disproportionately applied to children of color, resulting in dramatically negative long-term effects,” the report said. ……… The NewsHour segment focused on the suspension of kindergarteners at Success Academy schools, which are known both for their high test scores and their highly structured environments, with a code of conduct running six pages. According to PBS reporter John Merrow, at one Success Academy charter with 203 kindergartners and first-graders, there were 44 out-of-school suspensions in a single year. Merrow spoke with nearly a dozen families, but only Fatima Geidi and her son, Jamir, agreed to go on camera. Jamir, who left Success Academy last year because he and his mother couldn’t tolerate the frequent suspensions, described some of the infractions that got him in trouble: “I would always have to keep my shirt tucked in. And let’s say I wasn’t wearing black shoes, and I was wearing red shoes. Then that would be an infraction.” Viewers didn’t get the impression that these were the only reasons the boy, now 10, was disciplined. Fatima Geidi, said that even at his new school, where Jamir hasn’t been suspended, he’s had “meltdowns” and “outbursts.” Still, the segment made it seem as though Success Academy throws kids out for petty misbehavior. Moskowitz herself said that a single incidence of using “sexually explicit language” would get a 5-year-old suspended. ……… But Moskowitz didn’t just object to the numbers. She wanted to combat the allegation that Success Academy suspends kids without good reason. And so she made Jamir Geidi’s record public, posting a letter to PBS on the Success Academies website that listed 19 specific incidents of misconduct, some of them violent, along with long excerpts of teacher reports on Jamir’s behavior. (Her letter referred to Jamir as “John Doe,” but since he was the only student named in the PBS segment, there was no question about who she was talking about.) Fatima Geidi disputes some of these examples as either false or exaggerated. Whether or not they happened the way Moskowitz claims, Black says that in revealing them, she likely broke the law. “A student’s records themselves are private, as well as the contents,” he says. “If those are going to be disclosed to outside third parties, they clearly have to have consent.” With the help of Leonie Haimson, co-founder of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, Fatima Geidi sent Moskowitz a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that her son’s information be taken down. “I’ve seen violations of FERPA, but not in such an obvious, egregious way,” Haimson told me. “Not in a press release sent to the media and posted online. I have not seen this level of violation.” Moskowitz is unapologetic. In a letter to Geidi, she wrote, “The First Amendment limits a person’s ability to use privacy rights to prevent others from speaking. When somebody chooses to make statements to the press, they waive their privacy rights on the topics they have discussed, particularly when, as here, those statements are inaccurate.” ……… Whatever you think about the dispute among Fatima Geidi, Merrow, and Moskowitz, however, Jamir Geidi is 10 years old. A document describing him as frighteningly violent now appears in the first page of his Google results. If that’s OK, it doesn’t just hurt him and his mother. It sends a message to any current or former Success Academy parent who might take public issue with Moskowitz’s methods. Fatima Geidi, “was the only parent whom PBS contacted who was brave enough to speak out” under her own name, says Haimson of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “One reason why parents are very afraid—and teachers are afraid too—is they knew they risked the kind of tactics that Eva Moskowitz used against Fatima’s child.” FERPA is supposed to protect such children. We’ll see if it does.
Moskowitz’s argument is bullsh%$.
She is forbidden by law from releasing specific student records.
She can contest the News Hour report, and she can say that the school was justified in its disciplinary actions, but she cannot release student records without specific approval of the parents.
That is the law. (there is an exemption for military recruiters, but that’s another story)
It is this sense of impunity and lawlessness that permeates the charter school movement, and this should not be supported by taxpayer money.
After 6 years of failure, and complaints from teachers, poor and minority have complained that the Obama administration’s support of relentlessly mindless testing and a corporate for profit model for public schools.
Well, now that the protests are reaching into white school districts, Obama finally has to pay attention to parents and teachers, as opposed to listening to corrupt grifter and banksters who are determined to make their fortunes off of public education money:
Faced with mounting and bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s public schools, the Obama administration declared Saturday that the push had gone too far, acknowledged its own role in the proliferation of tests, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful. Specifically, the administration called for a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to “reduce over-testing” as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools. “I still have no question that we need to check at least once a year to make sure our kids are on track or identify areas where they need support,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, who has announced that he will leave office in December. “But I can’t tell you how many conversations I’m in with educators who are understandably stressed and concerned about an overemphasis on testing in some places and how much time testing and test prep are taking from instruction.” ……… As a new generation of tests tied to the Common Core was rolled out last spring, several states abandoned plans to use the tests, while others renounced the Common Core, or rebranded it as a new set of local standards. And some parents, mostly in suburban areas, had their children opt out of the tests.
(emphasis mine)
That last bit is exactly the same racist tripe that Duncan used 2 years ago, when he stated his mystification over the the fact hat there were white suburban parents were opposing his ruining the public schools.
I don’t think that either Duncan or Obama understand why white people are finally turning on their educational vision, but I do think that they understand the political reality.
Black people, brown people, and teachers they could ignore, but once it was white folks, they were forced to at least pretend to listen.
The South Carolina Sheriff’s deputy captured on video forcefully removing a student from class has been fired, the local sheriff said Wednesday, less than a week after the incident at Spring Valley High School first came to the public’s attention. Richland County Senior Deputy Ben Fields was already suspended after videos of him flipping and tossing a black female student across a classroom went viral online. Fields was told of his firing late Wednesday morning “What he should not have done is throw the student,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said. “Police officers make mistakes too. They’re human and they need to be held accountable, and that’s what we’ve done with Deputy Ben Fields.” Lott said he wouldn’t describe Fields as remorseful, but rather sorry it all happened.
……… Fields said in during his deposition for a federal lawsuit filed against him that he is a competitive power lifter, saying it is a “sport,” where you “try to lift as much as you can at one time.” In his deposition, Fields says he does not take steroids, but has not been tested for steroids in the past. He said he has taken supplements, including Creatin, to help build muscles.
(emphasis mine)
Yeah. We believe him when he says that he’s not juicing. (not)
If his behavior had not been caught on video, this steroid addled loon would still be abusing school children.
H/T Atrios, who also pithily notes both that the not-for-profit schools are hip deep in this sh%$ as well.
He further notes that law professors are overpaid, and that the suggestion that they would make money hand over fist if they went back to the private sector is specious.
If you do the math, associates are expected to Bill about 1800 hours a year, which given the rule of thumb that you need to work somewhere between 1⅓ and 1½ hours for each billable hour is a soul destroying work environment.
Do the math. That is 48-54 hours a week, year in and year out.
The people who are teaching future lawyers are doing so because they don’t want that life.
This is why you have so many top flight lawyers are so eager to become judges.
This begs the question: how do you get your newly minted college kid to visit occasionally, particularly when they live in the greatest city in the world.
Hundreds of students at the University of Texas at Austin will protest a new law that will allow more guns on campus not with signs or sit-ins, but by “strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks.”
Their mantra? #CocksNotGlocks
Jessica Jin, who set up the “Campus (DILDO) Carry” event on Facebook, invokes the argument that allowing more guns on campus will make students safe is a fallacy. She’s urging students to send campus leaders that message by strapping on the plastic phalluses.
‘You’re carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I’m carrying a HUGE DILDO,'” Jin says in the group’s description. “Just about as effective at protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play.”
More than 330 people had signed up to participate by Saturday morning. The “strap in” will occur on Aug. 24, 2016, the first day of next year’s fall semester.
The event was created the same day one student was killed and another wounded in a shooting at Texas Southern University, and just days after other deadly shootings on campuses in Oregon and Arizona.
Pro-campus carry advocates have said allowing concealed handguns on campus will enable people to defend themselves in the event of a live shooter, while those against it say it makes little difference and could even add to the chaos.
It’s nice that some things never change in Austin, but this protest is not going to make a difference.
A fight that broke out between two groups of students at Northern Arizona University’s Flagstaff campus left one person dead and three hospitalized after one of the students opened fire on the others. The shooter has been identified as Steven Jones, an 18-year-old freshman at the school, who has been taken into custody by campus police, according to NAU police chief Greg Fowler. Colin Brough has been identified by the school as the student who was killed in the incident, and Nicholas Prato, Kyle Zientek and Nicholas Piring were named as the individuals who were shot but are being treated at Flagstaff Medical Center. Brough and the three young men who were injured were all members of the Delta Chi Fraternity, according fraternity rep Justin Sherman.
Well, Ben Carson said that he would meet with the families of “The Next One”, so get your running shoes on.
It now appears that Obama is replacing a man dedicated to a corporate for profit takeover of education with a man who actually ran schools on based on that all of the least savory aspects of blueprint.
In particular, it appears that he is a big fan of expulsions and suspensions to get low scoring children out of his charter schools.
If you read the news reports following the announcement of John King as our new Secretary of Education, you’d think he had run some of the most successful schools in the country. Here, for example, is Vox:
1) He’s the founder of a successful charter school chain Unlike Duncan, King has been a classroom teacher: He taught for three years, two of them in a charter school, after getting his master’s degree in teaching from Columbia University. In 1999, he became co-director of Roxbury Prep, a Boston charter school renowned for getting high test scores despite serving an exclusively low-income black and Latino student body. King, the New York Times wrote in 2011, was instrumental in designing the charter school’s curriculum and disciplinary structure — including required school uniforms and rules against talking in the hallways. [emphasis mine]
John King, hand-picked by President Obama to lead our nation’s schools, took the lead in designing Roxbury Prep’s discipline policies. How has that played out?
These are the latest out-of-school suspension rates for school districts in the Boston area, from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.* Roxbury Prep not only has the second highest suspension rate in greater Boston; it’s the second largest in the state. The only school with a higher suspension rate is City On Hill; guess who used to teach there (p.12)? This isn’t at all a surprise; as the Boston Globe reported in 2014, Roxbury Prep had previously held the top spot with a suspension rate in 2012-13 of nearly 60 percent. Later on, Roxbury moved under the umbrella of Uncommon Schools, a charter management organization with schools in New York and New Jersey as well as Massachusetts. John King, consequently, rose to become Managing Director for the entire Uncommon chain. Soon, the high suspension rates that were a hallmark of Roxbury Prep became common in all of Uncommon’s schools. In Brooklyn, for example, Uncommon runs several charters; here are their relative suspension rates, as reported by the NY State Education Department: ……… High suspension rates are not good for students. You know who says so? The very USDOE John King is now going to lead: ……… Recently, King defended the “no excuses” discipline found in Uncommon Schools to noted education scholar Pedro Noguera:
I’m not against charter schools, let me be clear, I’m in favor of any good school that’s good for kids. But some of the charter schools that are being held up as a model believe that their goal is to regiment, to completely control their students. To control how they sit, control their eye contact, control their movements in the hallway. Many of them have silence in the hallway and no talking in the lunch room. John King, the new commissioner of education of New York state, is held up as a real reformer because he founded a very successful charter school in Boston called Roxbury Prep and went on to found a network the called Uncommon Schools. And I would say that academically this school is far out-performing many public schools that are serving the same population of kids. So I would acknowledge that they are doing a much better job. I would also acknowledge that the model they use does not appeal to me. I’ve visited this school, and I noticed that children are not allowed to talk in the hall, and they get punished for the most minor infraction. And when I talked with John King afterwards, I said, “I’ve never seen a school that serves affluent children where they’re not allowed to talk in the hall.” And he said, “Well, that might be true, but this is the model that works for us, we’ve found that this is the model that our kids need.”
So I asked him, “Are you preparing these kids to be leaders or followers? Because leaders get to talk in the hall. They get to talk over lunch, they get to go to the bathroom, and people can trust them. They don’t need surveillance and police officers in the bathroom.” And he looked at me like I was talking Latin, because his mindset is that these children couldn’t do that. [emphasis mine]
Apparently, John King believes that schools can and should have high suspension rates — in contradiction to the stated policies of the department he will now lead. From what I read, King will not be officially nominated, serving as the “acting” secretary for the remainder of Obama’s term. That’s a damn shame. I would have dearly loved to have had a senator bring all this up. I would have loved to hear King explain whether he supports current USDOE policy on suspensions and, if so, how he can align that with his own career history as a school leader.
One of the commenters on this post explains the real dynamics here:
Of course the suspension rates are high: one reason the favored charter chains (KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon schools, et.al.) receive the subsidies and media promotion they do is because they insist on their schools being a cross between prison, boot camp and a behavior-modification Skinner Box for Those Children.
You know Those Children, don’t you? They are ones who must be conditioned and trained, rather than educated (notwithstanding all the false, insipid talk about “scholars”), the ones society has seen as dangerous since they were toddlers, and which these schools are determined to neuter, emotionally and culturally, before trying to re-make them as passive, unquestioning vessels of future labor productivity.
Needless to say, Those Children are subjected to authoritarian, repressive school environments that King and his ilk would never in a million years subject their own children to, as seen when it was revealed that he sent his own young children to a Montessori school that doesn’t use Common Core (though, naturally, he lied about that).
On a more practical basis, high suspension rates are a way for the schools to grease the skids for removing Those Children who might undermine their precious test scores, thereby threatening the false “miracle school” narratives they peddle.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans to step down from his Cabinet position by the end of the year, leaving the Obama administration more than a year before the president’s term will end. “He’s done more to bring our educational system, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 21st century than anyone else,” President Obama said as he announced Duncan’s resignation at the White House on Friday afternoon. “America will be better off for what he has done.”
OK, as is made clear by Obama’s statements, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
As anti-public education and anti-teacher as he has been, it is clear that he has been executing a pro-Wall Street, anti-Teacher, and anti-Student* agenda at Obama’s behest.
Still, I am sure that he will get a 7 figure jackpot at the end of the rainbow.
*As I have asked many times, “Is there anything that big finance can’t make destructive and evil?”† †If the goal is to involve Wall Street in a public service, the effect will harm that service. QED.
Webster’s defines “tag” as “a game in which the player who is it chases others and tries to touch one of them who then becomes it.” Wikipedia explains that the game, also known in Britain as “it, tip you’re it” is “a playground game that involves one or more players chasing other players in an attempt to ‘tag’ or touch them, usually with their hands.” So is the game of “tag” still “tag” if tagging is banned? That is the question for the Mercer County School District in Washington state and for some unhappy parents. It all started with a social media report earlier this week when a group of parents, responding to what they had heard was a ban on the game of tag in elementary schools, formed a group called “Support ‘tag’ at Recess.” It was their impression that there was indeed a ban and the word soon spread to the news media. ……… A spokesman for the school district seemed to reinforce the impression with a statement:
“The Mercer Island School District and school teams have recently revisited expectations for student behavior to address student safety. This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students. “School staffs are working with students in the classroom to ensure that there are many alternative games available at recess and during unsupervised play, so that our kids can still have fun, be with their friends, move their bodies and give their brains a break.”
“Good grief, our kids need some unstructured playtime,” mom Kelsey Joyce told the TV station. “It’s a game that practically everyone has played – but if you go to public school on Mercer Island, keep your hands to yourself. “I totally survived tag,” said Joyce. “I even survived red rover, believe it or not.”
It’s a pity that the article that goes along with it, which I am not linking to, is a piece of crap generated by Campbell Brown’s corporate whoring AstroTurf “educational” organization, where the entire thing is a screed about how liberals really should support education by and for Wall Street Charter Schools, because it means that a few brown faces in those schools.
It’s an intellectually bankrupt piece, and willfully obtuse, as Matt Bruening (the link above) so ably notes:
You see, we know very well how to integrate schools along class and racial lines. It’s called busing and we used to do it. Yet, isn’t it weird that Williams never writes about busing? Isn’t it weird that you hardly hear a peep out of that entire gang about busing? Why don’t they advocate for explicit integration through busing instead of these charter schools which may or may not even have a desegregating effect (and even where it does, not nearly to the same degree as busing would). Isn’t it awfully convenient that these folks say they definitely care about school integration and inequality but refuse to advocate for the most effective solution for it? When pressed on this, one of the responses you will hear is that they don’t see practically (speaking in political terms) how we can get busing. But why would people oppose busing, one has to wonder. Is it because they don’t want to send their kids to school with poors and blacks? But wait, isn’t that the same reason they don’t like charters? Isn’t the opposition the same to both things? Why advocate one thing that runs up against a brick wall due to racism and dislike of the poor but not another thing that runs up against the same brick wall? There are two basic answers here. The first is that the charters don’t promise integration (and in many cases brag about how segregated they are, e.g. KIPP gleaming about how uniformly poor and black their schools are). So the reformers sidestep the hurdle of the racist affluent white liberal by basically giving in entirely to their desire for segregation, which charters don’t threaten that much if at all. The second is that practicality is defined here in terms of what you might call the Left Wing of the Fundable. You can get money to push for charter schools and privatization and breaking teacher/public unions (all things the education reformers push, including right now Students First pushing a SCOTUS case that aims to eliminate all public sector union security, not just for teachers). You can get a fellowship at a think tank to push for those types of things. They are thus practical in the sense that there are enough rich people and institutions with somewhat mixed interests that are willing to pony up the money necessary to push them through our hilariously undemocratic political system and to fund a healthy number of advocate jobs. The same money doesn’t exist for busing advocacy. So who then is really the intrepid supporter for integration in all of this, I am left to ask. Is the education reformer who dare not say a peep about busing because it’s outside of the Left Wing of the Fundable and too radically integrationist the real no-nonsense advocate willing to say what needs to be said? I don’t think so.
The title has some real truth to it: Far too many liberals call for problems to be fixed, and then recoil in horror when they discover that this involves the smallest sacrifice on their part (i.e. busing and cross district money transfers), but the rest of the article, which is so ably Fisked by Mr. Bruening, is bovine scatology.
But UI may not seem like such an attractive alternative these days. As the Yes Men performed at the press conference, the Iowa Board of Regents was in the final stages of selecting the next UI president. In a very unusual arrangement, the regents chose not to renew previous president Sally Mason’s contract two years ago; since then, she had been working “at will” on a day-to-day basis. If some observers worried that this arrangement would render her a tool of the regents, those fears were confirmed when Mason endorsed an ill-conceived regents funding plan that would significantly cut UI’s budget, infuriating many on campus.
Now, Mason is out: Eight days after the Yes Men’s visit, the Iowa Board of Regents unanimously voted former IBM and Boston Market executive Bruce Harreld as UI’s next president, despite Harreld having no university administrative background. He did work as an adjunct senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, but that’s the extent of his college workplace experience.
On the résumé Harreld submitted to the regents, he listed his current job as the managing principal for the Colorado-based Executing Strategy, LLC. This company “confidentially (advises) several public, private and military organizations on leadership, organic growth and strategic renewal.” However, that business doesn’t exist. The Colorado secretary of state has no record of a company of that name.
On Sept. 1, during a public forum that was part of Harreld’s on-campus interview and visit, I asked Harreld to explain this discrepancy. He replied that Executing Strategy was a company name he previously used and that he accidentally listed it in his current work history.
“Shame on me,” Harreld said. “I too quickly pulled it from out of my head and put it on the résumé. There is no Colorado corporation. I live in Colorado. That’s my post office box.”
His résumé also neglected to list the co-authors on his publications, attributing them solely to Harreld. The only part of his résumé that didn’t contain a glaring error was Page 3, which consisted almost entirely of personal information such as “Four adult children who all have advanced degrees” and “Elder, Presbyterian Church.” Given Harreld’s business background, one would think he would have taken more care with his résumé when applying to be the president of a major university.
Harreld’s public forum did not go well, to put it mildly. His rambling 35-minute presentation contained little more than vague generalizations and repeated catchphrases such as taking UI from “great to greater.” At times he rolled his eyes and looked exasperated while facing questions from students, staff, and faculty. When a UI staff member asked him what initiatives he might have planned to improve workplace morale, he replied, “I don’t know that I have any. Now what? Staff? I dunno. … What more would you like me to say?” Harreld then ended this exchange with an abrupt, “No, I’m done. OK? If you don’t mind.”
Is there anyone out there who believes that this guy was hired for anything but political payback?
New statistics show that average SAT scores countrywide have dropped to their lowest level since the college admissions exam was redesigned in 2005, continuing a 10-year trend that education advocates say illustrates the failures of test-driven schooling.
According to the College Board, which reported the statistics on Thursday, the average SAT score for the class of 2015 was 1490 out of a possible 2400, with points declining on all three sections of the test—reading, math, and writing.
That raises an alarm for the The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), an education advocacy group, which said the latest SAT numbers highlight the failings of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and other standards-based scholastic achievement measures.
Bob Schaeffer, FairTest public education director, said in response to the latest statistics, “Test-and-punish policies, such as ‘No Child Left Behind’ have clearly failed to improve college readiness or narrow racial gaps, as measured by the SAT,” adding that other standardized admissions exams like the ACT and the National Assessment for Education Progress show similar trends.
I would note that Obama, and His Evil Minions™, in particularly the perfidious Arne Duncan, have been even more aggressive in pushing relentless testing and corporatized education and breaking the teachers unions than their predecessors, so don’t expect this study to make any difference in policy.
Basically, they said that the structure of charter schools, public funds but no public review or public accountability, violate the state constitution:
The Washington State Supreme Court, in a late Friday surprise, delivered a ruling that the state’s voter-passed, billionaire-backed charter school initiative is unconstitutional. The high court’s 6-3 ruling found that the independently organized schools do not pass muster as common public schools and therefore cannot receive public funding. “We hold that provisions of Initiative 1240 that designate and treat charter schools as common schools violate article IX, Section 2 of our state Constitution and are void,” Chief Justice Barbara Madsen wrote in the majority opinion. “This includes the Act’s funding provision, which attempts to tap into and shift a portion of moneys allocated for common schools to the new charter schools authorized by the Act. Because the provisions designating and funding charter schools as common schools are integral to the Act, such void provisions are not severable …” ……… I-1240 passed by a 1 percent margin in 2012, after charter schools had previously been rejected three times by Washington voters. Ninety-eight percent of its $10 million-plus war chest came from just 21 individuals. Bill Gates put up $3 million, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton gave $1.7 million, Vulcan Inc. (Paul Allen’s development company) was good for $1.6 million, and liberal entrepreneur Nick Hanauer donated $1 million. The father of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave $500,000. ……… In another telling passage from Madsen’s opinion, the court stated: “Under the Act (I-1240), charter schools are devoid of local control from their inception to their daily operations.” “The Supreme Court has affirmed what we’ve said all along — charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funds,” said Kim Mead, president of the Washington Education Association.
……… So, find ways to rewrite the law so that charter money can stay in its own little lock box in its own big silo. This seems a bit overthought and overwrought. The court’s decision, as I understand it, is based on the idea that charter schools cannot receive “common school” public funds because they are not overseen by an elected school board. And if that’s the case, charters can fix this very easily. Are you paying attention, charter operators? I have your solution right here. Just submit to being overseen by an elected school board. Act like the public schools you claim to be. Make your finances and operation completely transparent to the public. And allow yourselves to be overseen by an elected school board instead of a collection of individuals who are not answerable to the voters or the taxpayers. I mean– what’s more important to you? Providing a strong educational alternative for those 1,200 students, or holding on your ability to do whatever you want without having to answer to the public? Is it so important to you that you not be accountable to the public that you would rather engage in time consuming rewrites of state law, or even just close your doors, rather than let yourself submit to transparent and open oversight by a group of citizens elected by the very taxpayers whose money you use to run your school?
We already know that charter schools are prone to overpaying their founders, forcing kids out who would bring down their test scores through abuse of the disciplinary process, and ignoring federal law on disabilities, so adding oversight to ensure that contracts, discipline, and special education policies is not a bad idea.
The impetus for charter schools have come from two sources, those people determined to destroy teachers unions because they hate unions, and the financial types who see a profit center funded by the general public.
Neither of these groups can tolerate the idea of transparency or due process, because it makes it too difficult for them to accomplish their nefarious goals.
