The @Network4pubEd leads a coalition of more than 50!! grassroots organizations calling for 5 principles that should be acknowledged in the selection of the next US Secretary of Education. I am honored to have served as a founding board member of NPE since 2013.
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A blistering new report from the Network for Public Education (NPE) documents how the federal government, through the U.S. Department of Education, wastes hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on grants awarded to charter schools that never open or quickly close. The Department of Education is also funding charter schools that blatantly discriminate in their discipline, curricular, and enrollment practices.
The Washington Post broke the news here this morning
Now do your part.
Tell Congress: Stop funding the broken U.S. DOE Charter Schools Program.
Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride, estimates that the federal Charter Schools Program, over its history, has awarded over $4 billion in seed money to charter schools. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federally grant-awarded charters is 39%.
Here is a quick summary of what NPE found.
Hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars have been awarded to charter schools that never opened or opened and then shut down. In some cases, schools have received federal funding even before securing their charter.
The CSP’s grant approval process appears to be based on the application alone, with no attempt to verify the information presented. Schools have been approved for grants despite serious concerns noted by reviewers.
Grants have been awarded to charter schools that establish barriers to enrollment, discouraging or denying access to certain students.
Recommendations by the Office of the Inspector General have been largely ignored or not sufficiently addressed.
The department does not conduct sufficient oversight of grants to State Entities or State Education Agencies, despite repeated indications that the states are failing to monitor outcomes or offer full transparency on their subgrants.
The CSP’s grants to charter management organizations are beset with problems including conflicts of interest and profiteering.
Under the current administration, while Congressional funding for the CSP rises, the quality of the applications and awardees has further declined.
Send your letter to Congress today and say, “No more!”
Then share the report: http://networkforpubliceducation.org/asleepatthewheel/
And this action: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/cut-the-us-doe-charter-schools-program/
At a time when Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump propose slashing funding for public education, it is outrageous that this wasteful giveaway to schools that may not ever exist is increased to half a billion dollars a year.
This post was directly excerpted from the NPE press release. Full Disclosure: I serve as one of the founding governing board members of NPE.
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You are someone who understands the vital role that public education plays in democracy. You understand that a patchwork quilt of for-profit charters, charter chains, online schools, and vouchers schools cannot work in a democracy. You understand that public schools will be starved and become the “dumping ground” for children no one wants.Which brings us to Betsy DeVos, who has made it clear that only the “free market” matters, not quality. She claims to be on a mission from God. That is extremism we cannot have at the helm of our education system.
“You may have thought you were going to discourage us, but instead you have encouraged us. The more you push us back, the more we will fight to go forward. The more you try to oppress us, the more you will inspire us.”
No one exemplifies this movement better than the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who was the Network for Public Education 2016 conference keynote speaker today in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rev. Barber is the current president of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the National NAACP chair of the Legislative Political Action Committee, and the founder of Moral Mondays.
You can read about the history of Moral Mondays in this great piece in the Nation.
The Moral Monday protests transformed North Carolina politics in 2013, building a multiracial, multi-issue movement centered around social justice such as the South hadn’t seen since the 1960s. “We have come to say to the extremists, who ignore the common good and have chosen the low road, your actions have worked in reverse,” said Reverend William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and the leader of the Moral Monday movement, in his boisterous keynote speech. “You may have thought you were going to discourage us, but instead you have encouraged us. The more you push us back, the more we will fight to go forward. The more you try to oppress us, the more you will inspire us.”
Rev. Barber’s activism is not limited to North Carolina. He is fast becoming a powerful national advocate for public education. Will he be the next Martin Luther King Jr.? This is readily apparent in his recent blog post for The Hill, where he calls on Congress to “fix the high stakes testing regime that has failed.” Make sure to read his post and share it widely. Here is an excerpt:
When Congress enacted the ESEA in 1965, everyone knew education opportunities for black children were radically unequal to the opportunities for white students. Now, 50 years later, these gaps persist and are widening–despite the law’s promise to level the playing field for the nation’s most vulnerable students.
The last time Congress reauthorized ESEA, they and President George W. Bush established high-stakes testing, labeling, and policies that punish schools if kids flunked the tests. Tests don’t teach. Nurturing creative adults who know how to draw out individual children are what education is about. We don’t send our kids to school to become skilled test takers. We pay our taxes and send our kids to public schools because we need future corporate CEOs, cardiologists and aerodynamic engineers, university presidents and school principals, urban planners and architects. Our sons and daughters can’t reach these heights when accountability in our education system hinges on standardized test scores, not cultivating intellectual opportunity—the real measure of education. Standardized tests can tell us only so much. Educators know that annual multi-dimensional assessments that tell us whether a child is falling behind, whether she or he needs intervention and support the school can’t provide, or if a youngster is on track to graduate are the tools they need—not a single number.
Congress has a chance to fix the high stakes testing regime that has failed. Congress has the chance to deliver on its promise of educational opportunities for all students, especially the nation’s most vulnerable ones, which is the purpose of ESEA. Congress has the chance to repair the breach caused by sins and systems of slavery and segregation.
NPE President Diane Ravitch has called Rev. Barber “a major national figure in the civil rights movement.” Below you can hear his eloquent plea in Raleigh for justice and decency in our time.
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Once when I was in high school, a friend handed me a plate of chocolate chip cookies. They looked delicious! But just as I was about to eat one, she snatched them back. They looked great on the outside, she told me, but they tasted terrible. She had left out a key ingredient—sugar.
This story is exactly how I think about the numerous state education report cards making the rounds. Instead of filling you with great, inspiring information, most of these glossy, colorful reports are misleading and ideological. They are basically not worth consuming.
One of the mechanisms so-called education “reformers” have used to promote their top-down, privatization agenda for public education is the state-by-state education report card. Organizations such as Students First, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Education Next have recently released report cards for each of the fifty states.
What’s wrong with these state report cards? Most state-by-state ratings focus primarily on outcomes, such as state standardized test scores, and basically ignore educational inputs—the ingredients—that make public education successful. These report cards are obsessed with accountability systems that look like bold education “reform,” but that favor top-down, private control of public schools, with dubious results for kids.
Take just two examples.
Students First, an organization started by the controversial District of Columbia education reformer Michelle Rhee, issued report cards giving positive ratings to states if they allowed for parent trigger. Parent trigger is a policy that allows parents (in any given year) to vote to turn over a school and all of its public property to a corporation with a simple majority vote. The Students First report also gave states favorable ratings for prioritizing states’ and mayor’s’ ability to take over school districts. Top-down hostile takeovers of schools by states and mayors have a long and documented history of underwhelming performance and failure.
The state education reports issued by ALEC, a prominent corporate lobbying group that promotes neoliberal model legislation across public policy issues, prioritized “innovative educational practices necessary for transformational change.” They gave states positive ratings if they allowed the use of public dollars for private school choice (i.e. tax credits, vouchers, education savings accounts).
Several decades of peer-reviewed charter school and voucher research have demonstrated that choice is not a panacea. In fact, school choice has in many ways enhanced this country’s unfortunate and problematic “separate and unequal” system of schools for many vulnerable students by failing to serve those with special needs and intensifying segregation. ALEC’s report card also prioritized corporate-run online charter schools—research about whichdocuments a dismal performance.
But here’s the sugar in this story.
To counter these kinds of biases in state education report cards, the Board of Directors from the Network for Public Education (NPE), an educational grassroots organization founded by Diane Ravitch, designed a new report card focused on how well a state is “acting as a responsible guardian of public schools.”
NPE’s report cards evaluates all 50 states and the District of Columbia according to six research-based criteria: support of high-stakes testing, professionalization of teaching, resistance to privatization, equity in school finance, spending taxpayer resources wisely and student chance for success.
The bad news is that most states are not doing very well. NPE were tough graders as no state received more than a “C”. However, the new NPE report card isn’t distracting us with a pleasing facade covering up a lack of what’s important.
Understanding that the closing of the achievement gap in our nation considerably slowed during the No Child Left Behind era of testing and accountability, NPE did not prioritize performance on standardized exams for students or high-stakes testing evaluating teacher performance.
Contrary to previous report cards, NPE agreed with the American Educational Research Association and rewarded states with demanding certification requirements, lower attrition, higher pay, and the support of teachers with certification and experience.
Instead of an emphasis on top-down, private control, and privatization, NPE’s report card rewarded states that protect neighborhood community schools and disallow the use of public money for private and religious schools.
NPE’s report also gave “high grades to states that implemented the most adequate and equitable funding” across communities. Equitable funding in the Student First report cards, in contrast, means that charter schools received funding priority—including resources for facilities that corporations or individuals would ultimately own even though the property was purchased by the public (as is the case in Arizona).
NPE’s report card prioritized investments in community-based solutions, including Pre-K and class size reduction—reforms that make the gold standard in the research literature in terms of student success.
The NPE report card also included measures of child poverty and school segregation across states—“chance for success” metrics that neither ALEC nor Students First included in recent report cards.
The Network for Public Education’s report card is an important correction to the previous, flawed reports. It evaluates states according to how well they are supporting their schools, using measures based on ingredients that we know are important to a good public education.
Julian Vasquez Heilig is the Westcoast Regional Progressive Education Fellow.
– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/pss/most-state-education-report-cards-miss-critical-ingredients#sthash.21UQbqKy.dpuf
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