Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig Charter Schools, KIPP, Parent Trigger, School Finance, Vouchers

Top Ten List: Why “choice” demonstrates that money matters

Apologize for the CI hiatus. I have six PhD students that want to graduate, which translates to about 1,000 pages dissertation reading these past few days.

I recently had a conversation with a conservative Harvard-trained attorney last Saturday in Houston. We were discussing Finland (I blogged about Finland a few weeks ago) and her point was that the United States and Finland are not comparable. I noted that Finland was discussed by school reformers because of their turnaround over the past few decades, but you know what, you don’t have to go to Finland to find model schools and for an example that money matters. There are those that are always arguing the meme that “money doesn’t matter” for US schools. What is interesting is that we have to look no further than the “choice” movement for evidence that money DOES matter. Without further ado, a top ten list of evidence from the “choice” movement that money does matter.

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10. Eric Hanushek. Who is he? Here is his Wikipedia’s bio:

Eric Alan Hanushek (born, 1943) is a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is an expert on educational policy, and the economics of education. His research spans both the economics of school policy and the impact education on individuals and on economies… He is perhaps best known for the controversial assertion that “money doesn’t matter”—that is, he says that the amount of money spent in an American school district is not related to the amount of student learning in that district—and he is often called to testify in court about school funding schemes.

Ever wonder what the public schools in Eric Hanushek’s neighborhood spend (Palo Alto) compared to the state of California? Well, it turns out that Palo Alto schools per pupil spending is about 35-40% more than the state average. There are perks to being able to choose to live in a home valued at more than a million and have excellent public schools to choose from…

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9. Magnet Schools. The public school choice that almost everyone is okay with— yet they are not cheap. For example, in Connecticut, magnets received 25% more funding than traditional public schools.

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8. Knowledge is Power Program Charters (KIPP). They know that money matters. In a recent post, I discussed that KIPP has raised approaching a half a billion dollars over the past decade.

In sum, across the nation, since 2003, KIPP has received $308,999,543 from foundations, corporations and individuals. You can see the national spreadsheet here. KIPP in Texas has acquired about 25% of those monies— $75,981,765 from foundations, corporations and individuals. You can see the Texas spreadsheet here.

In my response to KIPP’s critique of our peer-review study of their African American attrition, I stated:

KIPP is incorrect. NEPC also thinks so here. Its hard to argue with publicly available data that they themselves are required to report by law. Per student revenue for KIPP Austin ($17,286) and KIPP Houston ($13,488) relative to Austin ISD ($10,667) and Houston ISD ($10,127) is readily available online each year from the State of Texas. However, considering the current school finance debacle in Texas, where approaching $6 billion was cut from education in the last legislature, in retrospect, I think KIPP should be applauded for spending more on education…

KIPP, a leader in the corporate charter “choice” movement, gets it. Money matters.

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7. Harlem Children’s Zone. The New York Times described the Harlem Children’s Zone:

President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children’s Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.

In recent discussion with Pedro Noguera, he mentioned that the HCZ was spending between $16,000 and $20,000 per kid to provide wrap-around services in their charters. Clearly, to Geoffrey Canada and parents that choose HCZ charters, money matters.

6. Eanes School District. You don’t have to go to an elite Bay Area district, you can see bare inequality in most every town. On either side of the tracks, highway, north versus south… etc. In Austin, different communities are able to provide different resources only miles apart. Bloomberg reported:

The Eanes school district in suburban Austin, Texas, spent $7,921 per student last year. Twenty miles away, the Pflugerville school district, whose population includes far more low-income students, spent about $1,000 less, resulting in lower teacher salaries and more children for every special education teacher.

Maybe you are thinking that $1,000 isn’t much of a disparity… by classroom it could be a disparity of $25,000, between schools $400,000. For a district, well, you get the picture.

Average home price in Pluggerville: $139,000

Average home price in Lakeway (Eanes): $520,000

Okay, maybe this one doesn’t belong here because for people who can’t afford an $500,000 mortgage, Eanes isn’t a choice.

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5. Tom Torkelson, IDEA CEO. Teach For America was so thrilled with their alum, that they gave Torkelson the $10,000 Peter Jennings award. They state on their website:

Tom Torkelson, JoAnn Gama (both Rio Grande Valley Corps ’97), and Jeremy Beard (Los Angeles Corps ’95) were honored in 2009 for their work with IDEA Public Schools, which has achieved extraordinary academic results with low-income rural students in the Rio Grande Valley. Torkelson and Gama founded the network, while Beard led its high-performing Donna campus. Since 2009, Torkelson has continued to serve as CEO of IDEA.

The Monitor reported that the IDEA corporate charters management board gets that money matters, paying CEO Tom Torkelson to the tune of $300,000. There is another $100,000 on the table in benefits and bonuses.

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4. Parent Trigger. In the post Parent trigger laws: Wolves in sheep’s clothing and astroturfing I wrote:

In Texas, Texas Families First has signed up a variety of legislators to support HB300. Who funds Texas Families First? hehehe. Who the heckfire knows… Because if you look up their 990 you only can find that “Citizen Leader Alliance” (which shares the same Houston P.O Box with Texas Families First) has $1.5 million per year at their disposal (Thanks to Sylvia from Austin for hunting down the financial information). Wow. My best guess is that families in Houston (or Texas) have not banded together and saved their pennies to raise those funds in a grassroots fashion because it would be easily trackable online. Which means that probably corporate-minded donors (similar to Parent Revolution) are funding “Texas Families First.” (More on TFF’s ideology later in the week)

On March 26, 2013 at 9:41 am, Jamie Kohlmann Texas Families First CEO wrote in a response to the astroturfing blog post:

First, as for our donors–CLA has had 50 or more contributors from all corners of the state, but we are only one of several organizations supporting HB300 as part of the Texas Families First Coalition.

I responded:

I did some math. $1,500,000/50=$30,000 average. Those are very generous Texas (families?) donors from all corners of the state.

In the post The Teat: Where does parent trigger movement get their $?, I wrote:

Who is paying the bills for the parent trigger movement? Cohn found that since 2009, several corporate minded foundations have poured millions into Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles advocacy group that is in the forefront of the parent-trigger campaign in California and the nation.

Multimillion dollar contributors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($1.6 million); the Laura and John Arnold Foundation ($1.5 million); the Wasserman Foundation($1.5 million); the Broad Foundation ($1.45 million) and the Emerson Collective Education Fund ($1.2 million), founded by Laurence Powell Jobs, the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

But the Walton Family Foundation is by far Parent Revolution’s largest benefactor, contributing 43 percent of the $14.9 million total.

Clearly money matters in the parent trigger movement.

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3. Parent Trigger II. In the parent trigger flimflam, I mean film, Won’t Back Down there is a scene where the union rep takes the lead parent organizer (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) to a gleaming private school and insinuates that they would bribe her by paying the exorbitant tuition for her daughter. What I kept thinking during the scene was why didn’t she have a gleaming school in her neighborhood? Why did the choice of an expensive gleaming private school even need to be on the table? Ask the average parent who chooses to send their child to a private school that has resources that far exceed their neighborhood public schools, money does matter.

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2. Vouchers. Speaking of private schools, there are those that want the public to fund their child’s private school tuition (or with neovouchers, they seek to re-route tax dollars into a “scholarship” account). They argue that since those that can afford private schools have access to them, that we should fund part of the private school tuition. The reason we know that money matters to private schools is that that vouchers typically require add-ons because they rarely cover the entire cost of attending a private school. Some policymakers love the idea of vouchers because they move the responsibility of the cost of educating children from the state budget to the family budget and from the state budget to the budget of church parishioners.

1. Your State Legislature. Recently your legislature cut (X billion) from public education. At the same time, they are considering/already legislated parent trigger, more charters, and vouchers. The same jokers that cut the money are telling us that our inadequately funded schools are inadequate.

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Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig Charter Schools, Parent Trigger, The Teat

The Teat: Where does parent trigger movement get their $?

Today on the Cloaking Inequity series, The Teat, I examine where parent trigger proponents get their $. I had pondered parent trigger— because from the outside looking in it appeared to be a community-based approach led by parents and civil rights activists to address the inequalities that have plagued our schools for generations. Recently we even watched excerpts from the parent trigger flimflam, I mean film, Won’t Back Down in my Critical Policy Analysis course. However, parent trigger is not what it seems in this emotional and slick Hollywood film…I first looked into Texas Families First, the proponents of Texas HB300, the proposed parent trigger bill. I came away with Parent trigger laws: Wolves in sheep’s clothing and astroturfing. The CEO of Texas Families First then replied Parent trigger post blowback from Texas Families First. I also had some spirited discussions on Twitter with civil rights minded parent trigger proponents (i.e. Former California State Sen. Gloria Romero). I crafted a public letter to them Letter to Civil Rights and school “choice” advocate. Recently, Gary Cohn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked for the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and Wall Street Journal published an expose on parent trigger. From whose teat do parent trigger advocates partake? He writes:

At first glance, it is one of the nation’s hottest new education-reform movements, a seemingly populist crusade to empower poor parents and fix failing public schools. But a closer examination reveals that the “parent-trigger” movement is being heavily financed by the conservative Walton Family Foundation, one of the nation’s largest and most strident anti-union organizations, a Frying Pan News investigation has shown.

Who is paying the bills for the parent trigger movement? Cohn found that since 2009, several corporate minded foundations have poured millions into Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles advocacy group that is in the forefront of the parent-trigger campaign in California and the nation.

Multimillion dollar contributors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($1.6 million); the Laura and John Arnold Foundation ($1.5 million); the Wasserman Foundation($1.5 million); the Broad Foundation ($1.45 million) and the Emerson Collective Education Fund ($1.2 million), founded by Laurence Powell Jobs, the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

But the Walton Family Foundation is by far Parent Revolution’s largest benefactor, contributing 43 percent of the $14.9 million total.

See interactive infographic detailing foundation funding.

Do the foundations funding parent trigger have ulterior motives besides parental empowerment?

The Walton Family Foundation, which is run by the family of Walmart founder Sam Walton, is one of the nation’s largest private donors to charter schools. The foundation has also used its money and clout to fund conservative research groups (including the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation) whose analysts have then defended Walmart and its anti-union policies on newspaper opinion pages and in testimony to government committees. In education, it is a strong proponent of the expansion of charter schools, school voucher programs and other efforts to privatize public education. It also gives money to the influential trade publication Education Week to write about parent empowerment issues.

Another large donor to Parent Revolution, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston, Texas, supports charter schools and also has funded conservative efforts to overhaul and limit pensions in California, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch. John Arnold is a billionaire former Enron trader who also founded a successful hedge fund.

The Broad Foundation, founded by Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, and the Gates Foundation, also are big backers of charter schools and other market-driven education reforms, though their overall policies are far less conservative than the Walton Family Foundation.

“Everything the Walton foundation has done over the years is to support privatization and anti-union policies,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, tells Frying Pan News. “They want privatization and Parent Revolution promotes their goals.”

Does the parent trigger movement have any connection to ALEC?

The Walton foundation, for example, wholeheartedly embraces all state parent-trigger laws, whose language stems from model legislation crafted by the American Leadership Exchange Council (ALEC) – a corporate-controlled generator of far-right legislation, including Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground gun law and the recent statute that made Michigan a right-to-work state.

A 2012 Education Week article described how, in 2010, the Heartland Institute, an ultra-conservative Chicago think tank, borrowed Parent Revolution’s new idea and took it to ALEC.

“Heartland put together a parent-trigger policy proposal and presented it to ALEC, whichcreated model legislation, [that,] . . . sometimes with variations, ended up appearing in about 10 to 15 states,” reported Education Week.

What does someone get paid to sellout schools?

The man whose concept of parent triggers so impressed the Heartland Institute is Parent Revolution’s Austin, a former state school board member and Los Angeles deputy mayor under Richard Riordan. Just as Parent Revolution has become the leading player of the parent-trigger movement, so has Austin become Parent Revolution’s national face. As his group’s executive director, Austin received a total compensation of $239,451 in 2011, according to the organization’s latest available tax filing.

What about Michelle Rhee? You knew she had to appear here somewhere.

Michelle Rhee, whose group StudentsFirst is one of the nation’s leading proponents of parent-trigger laws and other efforts to privatize public education, sponsored a series of screenings and hosted panel discussions to promote the film and its message. Panelists included former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Parent Revolution’s Austin.

California became the first state to pass a parent-trigger law in 2010. So what has actually happened with a parent trigger when it was implemented?

So far, however, parent trigger has only been successfully used in one instance – and in that case, a public school is being converted to a charter. It occurred in Adelanto, a blue-collar town tucked onto San Bernardino County’s High Desert. After a bitter, bruising fight that split the community and ended up in court, the Adelanto school board voted in January to convert its struggling Desert Trails Elementary School to a charter, beginning next fall.

Lori Yuan: “This wasn’t a grassroots movement.” 

Opponents, including Desert Trails parent Lori Yuan, say that this parent-trigger effort was controlled by organizers brought in by Parent Revolution, and that they tricked the community into believing this was simply an effort to improve conditions at the school, not to give it over to a private charter operator. Parent Revolution officials, in turn, say that their opposition used unethical tactics in contesting the petitions. 

“Our community was misled,” recalls Yuan, who has two children at the school. “Parents didn’t know they were signing for a charter takeover.”

Shelly Whitfield, who has five children at Desert Trails Elementary, says she was repeatedly approached at home and school to sign a petition. “They came to my door several times and said they were going to get computers and help get the kids better lunches,” she remembers. She says she is strongly opposed to the end result – the conversion of the school to a charter operation.

Parent Revolution provided help in many ways. It rented a house for the Desert Trails’ activist parents to use as a headquarters, provided a full-time organizer to work with them, and also sent in experts to train and advise parents on everything from strategy on dealing with the school board to writing letters to help in researching potential charter schools, Ramirez and others say. It even provided T-shirts.

Yuan and other parents had contested the signatures gathered by parent-trigger advocates, but their challenge was rejected by a San Bernardino County Superior Court judge. In the end, only 53 of the 466 original signers would vote in an election to determine the school’s future. The bad feelings in the community over the battle for charter conversion have continued to this day.

“This was a true test of the mettle of empowered parents,” trumpeted FreedomWorks, a prime force in the Tea Party movement.

Yuan disagrees: “We’ve known all along this wasn’t a grassroots movement.”

How about real choices for parents in their neighborhood schools?

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Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig Charter Schools, Parent Trigger

Parent trigger laws: Wolves in sheep’s clothing and astroturfing

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves (Matthew 7:15). The true nature of corporate-minded “reformers” (i.e. DFERs) will be revealed by their actions (by their fruits shall ye know them, verse 16). Parent trigger laws inspired by ALEC and others have been introduced from California to Georgia and in between. I have had emails coming at me from all directions asking about House Bill 300, the proposed Texas parent trigger bill. Some view parent trigger bills as a form of local control that empowers communities (an ALEC style argument even proffered by a Hollywood movie) others see it as a corporate power grab.

Which is it?

ALEC, a national organization “composed of legislators, businesses and foundations” with great influence and connections to extreme think tanks and supported by funding from corporations that are seeking to drive a public policy agenda based on privatization and profit, calls their boiler plate for parent trigger laws the “Parent Empowerment and Choice Act.” They describe parent trigger as:

The Parent Trigger Act places democratic control into the hands of parents at school level. Parents can, with a simple majority, opt to usher in one of three choice-based options of reform: (1) transforming their school into a charter school, (2) supplying students from that school with a 75 percent per pupil cost voucher, or (3) closing the school.

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) described parent trigger in a press release for their parent trigger policy memo:

These policies authorize parent referenda that would turn neighborhood schools over to private charter school operators or would otherwise force drastic changes to the governance of these schools. This parent trigger approach is being touted as a way to empower parents in dealing with troubled local schools and in guiding their children’s education.

NEPC’s policy memo on parent triggers frames the reform:

The evidence to date suggests that turning public schools over to charter operators or replacing school staff is not likely to lead to better student outcomes.  But research has clearly established that students learn more when they have access to quality instructional materials and well-prepared teachers…. while the parent trigger offers a superficial appeal to democratic processes by “letting parents decide,” it ultimately thwarts continued, sustained community and parental involvement:

The parent trigger approach challenges the democratic underpinnings of public education, temporarily empowering the majority of parents currently using a school but disenfranchising the broader community, including the taxpayers funding the school and parents whose children who would subsequently attend the school. This is a startlingly unique and odd approach to improving a public institution. It would be like turning over control of a public transit system exclusively to a majority vote of the people who happened to be riding the bus on a given day; or handing control of the library to 51% of the people who have currently checked out books; or asking parents of college students (or perhaps those students themselves) to vote to assume governance control of a university.

Interestingly, Amanda Austin emailed me and posited that parent trigger advocates are astroturfing. What is astroturfing? Paraphrased from Wikipedia:

Astroturfing refers to campaigns that are designed to mask the sponsors of the message to give the appearance of coming from a grassroots participant. Astroturfing is intended to give the statements the credibility of an independent entity by withholding information about the source’s financial connection. The term is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.

So essentially an artificial/fake grassroots movement with behind-the-scenes corporate-minded financial backing…

A report by Annenburg Institute for School reform’s policy brief on parent trigger described the first California trigger attempts by Parent Revolution as

…bitter, divisive, and protracted campaigns.

Who is Parent Revolution?

Parent Revolution was launched with a million-dollar budget supported by the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations, all major philanthropic supporters of the charter school movement.

In Texas, Texas Families First has signed up a variety of legislators to support HB300. Who funds Texas Families First? hehehe. Who the heckfire knows… Because if you look up their 990 you only can find that “Citizen Leader Alliance” (which shares the same Houston P.O Box with Texas Families First) has $1.5 million per year at their disposal (Thanks to Sylvia from Austin for hunting down the financial information). Wow. My best guess is that families in Houston (or Texas) have not banded together and saved their pennies to raise those funds in a grassroots fashion because it would be easily trackable online. Which means that probably corporate-minded donors (similar to Parent Revolution) are funding “Texas Families First.” (More on TFF’s ideology later in the week)

NEPC weighed in the important of community-based policies actually being, well, community-based.

The parent trigger approach and the story told in Won’t Back Down contain an essential truth: parents should indeed be able to act to improve their children’s schools….wise, effective action must have at least three elements that are missing from parent trigger: (1) it must genuinely arise from deliberation and organization within the affected community, not through external advocacy groups using these communities to advance their own agendas;  (2) it must be evidence-based in the sense that the intervention is likely to yield benefits; and (3) it must be built on the core reality that students learn when they have opportunities to learn—governance changes might play a minor role, but they can’t sensibly be at the center.

How about the real grassroots groups? In Florida, LULAC and NAACP are standing together against parent trigger. Here is their statement:

LULAC Florida and the Florida Conference of the NAACP oppose the Parent Empowerment in Education bill as unnecessary legislation that fails to address the persistence of educational inequity in Florida’s charter schools. We affirm the importance and positive impact of parent empowerment and engagement on student achievement. However, the Florida Parent Trigger bill misleads by asserting that legislation will provide parents an “empowerment” over school policy input; the truth is they already have it. There is no substance to the claim that Parent Trigger legislation empowers parents and no evidence that the parent trigger process leads to improvements in parent engagement, student achievement, or narrowing the achievement gap. Florida civil rights organizations want solutions to civil rights problems before bills are adopted that lead to further expansion of the charter school network. These problems include segregated school environments and targeted denial of access.
by their fruits shall ye know them… The LULAC and NAACP statement in Florida highlights the inequities that are well-documented (Special Education, ELLs, discipline policies etc.) in many charters in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. They state:
Inequities in charter school policy have existed for far too long, for almost two decades now since the first school was chartered in 1996. The Parent Trigger bill, and any others that could prematurely expand the number of charter schools in the state, should be voted down. To do otherwise would be to continue to perpetuate injustice and constitute a disservice to our students, their parents, taxpayers, and the state.

After much thought, and reviewing the scholarship, my view is that parent trigger bills are legislation pressed by corporate-minded foundations and neoliberals (allied with some current and former KIPPsters and TFAers) that have (wittingly or unwittingly) adopted boiler plate legislation from ALEC under the guise of community and parent empowerment to grift school buildings from communities. Parent tricker laws— wolves in sheep’s clothing empowered by astroturf organizations.

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