Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In a 2010 New York Times article titled Charter Schools’ New Cheerleaders: Financiers, reporters Tripp Gabriel and Jennifer Medina wrote the following about what was going on in the state of New York:
Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm…
Although the April 9 breakfast with Mr. Cuomo was not a formal fund-raiser, the hedge fund managers have been wielding their money to influence educational policy in Albany, particularly among Democrats, who control both the Senate and the Assembly but have historically been aligned with the teachers unions.
They[hedge fund managers] have been contributing generously to lawmakers in hopes of creating a friendlier climate for charter schools. More immediately, they have raised a multimillion-dollar war chest to lobby this month for a bill to raise the maximum number of charter schools statewide to 460 from 200.
That same year—2010—Juan Gonzalez believed that he had uncovered one of the reasons why hedge fund managers, some wealthy Americans, and the executives of some Wall Street banks had become such big proponents of charter schools and had gotten involved in their development. Gonzalez said the banks and other wealthy investors had been making “windfall profits” by taking advantage of “a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction.” That little know tax break, the New Markets Tax Credit, can be so lucrative, Gonzalez said, “that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.” He added that the tax break “gives an enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities, and it’s been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools.”
Gonzalez focused his research on the city of Albany—which, he wrote, “boasts the state’s highest percentage of charter school enrollments.” He provided an explanation of how lucrative investments in building new charter schools can be:
What happens is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government. In addition, this is a tax credit on money that they’re lending, so they’re also collecting interest on the loans as well as getting the thirty-nine percent tax credit. They piggy-back the tax credit on other kinds of federal tax credits like historic preservation or job creation or brownfields credits.
The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money. The problem is, that the charter schools end up paying in rents, the debt service on these loans and so now, a lot of the charter schools in Albany are straining paying their debt service–their rent has gone up from $170,000 to $500,000 in a year or–huge increases in their rents as they strain to pay off these loans, these construction loans. The rents are eating-up huge portions of their total cost. And, of course, the money is coming from the state.
Brighter Choice Foundation
According to Gonzalez, “a nonprofit called the Brighter Choice Foundation had employed the New Markets Tax Credit to arrange private financing for five of the city’s nine charter schools.” By 2010, many of those charter schools were struggling to pay escalating rents, which were “going toward the debt service that Brighter Choice incurred during construction.”
Gonzalez gave examples of the escalating rents:
The Henry Johnson Charter School saw the rent for its 31,000-square-foot building skyrocket from $170,000 in 2008 to $560,000 in 2009.
The Albany Community School‘s went from from $195,000 to $350,000.
Green Tech High Charter School rent rose from $443,000 to $487,000.
Gonzalez reported that a number of Albany’s charter schools have fallen into debt to the Brighter Choice Foundation. He wondered why the schools’ financial problems hadn’t raised eyebrows with state regulators or caused concern for the charters’ school boards. He noted that the powerful charter school lobby had “so far successfully battled to prevent independent government audits of how its schools spend their state aid.” He added that “key officers of Albany’s charter school boards are themselves board members, employees or former employees of the Brighter Choice Foundation or its affiliates.”
Gonzalez said that the city of Albany is “exhibit A in the web of potential conflicts that keep popping up in the charter school movement.” It appears Gonzalez is correct about Albany being just one example of what’s going on in the movement. Brighter Horizons isn’t the only “foundation” or company making profits off of charter schools.
Imagine Schools Inc.
There is a national charter school company called Imagine Schools Inc., one of the biggest for-profit charter school management companies in the country. Matthew Haag of the Dallas Morning News wrote about Imagine Schools in 2008:
A national charter school company that plans to open new schools in Texas, including one in McKinney, has run afoul of an education official in Nevada and two of its former principals, and they all pose the same question.
Does Imagine Schools Inc. force its charter schools to spend too much money on complex real estate deals and not enough money on teachers and academic programs?
Virginia-based Imagine Schools has emerged as one of the largest for-profit charter school management companies, running several dozen schools in 12 states. It plans to open Imagine International Academy of North Texas in McKinney next year.
Charter schools house their students in Texas in a variety of ways, according to the former Charter Resource Center of Texas, from renting space in a shopping center to doing complex property transactions such as Imagine’s.
Typically, after an Imagine-managed charter school gets approval to open, Schoolhouse Finance, Imagine’s real estate arm, purchases a campus and charges the school rent. After the school begins to pay that rent, Schoolhouse sells the campus to a real estate investment trust, which then leases it back to Schoolhouse.
The charter school eventually sends rent payments – in one case upward of 40 percent of the school’s entire publicly funded budget – to two for-profit companies.
“The arrangement is very lucrative because it’s a direct conduit to public funds. The school [property] is paid off with public funds,” said Gary Horton, who oversees charter school funding for the Nevada Department of Education. Nevada’s charter schools include Imagine’s 100 Academy of Excellence in North Las Vegas.
Haag added that charter schools in Texas are generally exempt from the kind of financial oversight that “state education officials give school districts. The agency annually grades how school districts spend their money, but not yet for charters.”
Haag explained what happened with 100 Academy of Excellence in Nevada:
In Nevada, the state awarded 100 Academy of Excellence in North Las Vegas a charter, and the school hired Imagine to run its educational services. Schoolhouse Finance, the Imagine subsidiary, paid for the school’s property and building construction. Schoolhouse Finance then leased the property to the charter school for $1.4 million a year.
Next, Schoolhouse Finance sold the $8 million property to a real estate investment trust, Kansas City, Mo.,-based Entertainment Properties Trust. The trust then leased the property back to Schoolhouse Finance at a lower rate than the charter school pays.
Money remaining after Schoolhouse Finance pays its lease to the trust goes to Imagine Schools Inc. This tiered lease system has led to 10 percent returns on investment for owners and investors in the two companies, Sharp said.
But 100 Academy of Excellence’s annual rent, which represents 40 percent of its annual state-funded budget, leaves the school struggling to pay for textbooks, according to Nevada Department of Education records.
“My concern is that I have to make payments [to the charter school], and I know the payments aren’t going to the kids,” said Horton, a persistent critic of Imagine’s operations.
Stephanie Strom reported in the New York Times in 2010 that soon after 100 Academy of Excellence opened in 2006, the school board began documenting problems. Its bookkeeping practices were lax and it lacked a sufficient number of licensed teachers. The school had also violated regulations requiring competitive bidding when it paid Imagine “for necessities like furniture and computers.”
Strom added that the school had had three principals in four years. She said that two of the principals had been “pressured to resign after complaining that there was not enough money for essentials like textbooks and a school nurse.”
In addition, Strom reported that regulators in a number of states had found that Imagine Schools had “elbowed the charter holders out of virtually all school decision making — hiring and firing principals and staff members, controlling and profiting from school real estate, and retaining fees under contracts that often guarantee Imagine’s management in perpetuity.”
The regulators claimed that Imagine’s arrangements allowed it to use “public money with little oversight.” Marc Dean Millot, a former president of the National Charter Schools Alliance, said, “Under either charter law or traditional nonprofit law, there really is no way an entity should end up on both sides of business transactions.” He added, “Imagine works to dominate the board of the charter holder, and then it does a deal with the board it dominates — and that cannot be an arm’s length transaction.”
White Hat Management
In a 2011 Pro-Publica article titled Charter Schools Outsource Education to Management Firms, With Mixed Results, Sharona Coutts wrote about charter schools run by White Hat Management in Ohio:
Since 2008, an Ohio-based company, White Hat Management, has collected around $230 million to run charter schools in that state. The company has grown into a national chain and reports that it has about 20,000 students across the country. But now 10 of its own schools and the state of Ohio are suing, complaining that many White Hat students are failing, and that the company has refused to account for how it has spent the money.
The dispute between White Hat and Ohio, which is unfolding in state court in Franklin County, provides a glimpse at a larger trend: the growing role of private management companies in publicly funded charter schools.
Coutt reported that about one third of the charter schools in this country are now run by management companies, which can be either for-profit or non-profit, and not run locally. These companies not only have the right to hire and fire staff—they can also develop curricula and discipline students. She added that while the “shortcomings of traditional public schools” have been under scrutiny in recent years—“a look at the private sector’s efforts to run schools in Ohio, Florida and New York shows that turning things over to a company has created its own set of problems for public schools.” She said that government data on charter schools suggest that those with “for-profit managers have somewhat worse academic results than charters without management companies, and a number of boards have clashed with managers over a lack of transparency in how they are using public funds.”
The Ohio Department of Education joined the lawsuit in the fall of 2010. It asked the court to help the “group of public schools break free from dominance by private interests.” The department argued in a court motion that things had not gone well under White Hat’s management. It said, “Most of the schools have received the equivalent of D’s and F’s on their State report cards and their performance has declined during the term of the agreements.”
James D. Colner, an attorney representing the schools, said, “A big part of the argument here is being able to follow the money. We have no idea whether they’re earning a reasonable profit or not. We have no idea whether the money is being efficiently or effectively spent for our students.” That should be of great concern to citizens of Ohio. Coutt contends that oversight of the industry has lagged. She added that it has resulted “in a patchwork of state and district regulation, which experts say is failing to safeguard the interests of children and taxpayers.”
Closing
Laura Clawson (Daily Kos):
In short, education reform is a good cause. Experimentation is good — and some of the best charter schools today have experimented in what could be valuable ways. But the push, coming from Wall Street and the extremely wealthy, for this specific form of charter schools, for this specific way of funding them, is part of both short-term and long-term drives for profit that will accrue to the wealthiest while weakening the middle class. The question is not whether we should back away from the cause of education, or the cause of education reform. The question is in whose interests it should be done and who should most strongly influence the outcomes.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Juan Gonzalez: Big Banks Making a Bundle on New Construction as Schools Bear the Cost (Democracy Now!)
Albany charter cash cow: Big banks making a bundle on new construction as schools bear the cost (New York Daily News)
Show us the money: “Master Class” for private equity investors in public education (Parents across America)
“New market tax credits” and charter schools (Parents across America)
Cashing in on the charters: Petrino DiLeo exposes a new attempt by Wall Street to make money off our schools (Socialist Worker)
Charter school company with plans for McKinney is criticized (Susan Ohanian)
The big business of charter schools (Washington Post)
Evil Ed, inc: the Wall Street-charter school connection (Open Left)
Corporations Advise School Closings, While Private Charters Suck Public Schools Away: As charter proponents aim to cash in on major investment returns, Philly braces for a massive schools shakeup. (AlterNet)
Charter Schools’ New Cheerleaders: Financiers (New York Times)
For School Company, Issues of Money and Control (New York Times)
Charter Schools Outsource Education to Management Firms, With Mixed Results (Pro Publica)
Education: follow the money (Daily Kos)
Wall Street Hearts Charter Schools, Gets Rich Off Them (FireDogLake)
Wall Street Behind Charter School Push (Huffington Post)
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/164003.article
Outbreak of ‘new managerialism’ infects faculties
20 July 2001
“New managerialism” is emerging as a dominant force in British higher education, according to a two-year study into the running of universities.
A team led by Rosemary Deem, professor of education at Bristol University, has conducted interviews with more than 150 senior academics and administrators from 16 universities and held focus group discussions in a bid to understand what is happening.
“New managerialism” usually refers to practices commonplace in the private sector, particularly the imposition of a powerful management body that overrides professional skills and knowledge. It keeps discipline under tight control and is driven by efficiency, external accountability and monitoring, and an emphasis on standards.
Higher education, with declining public funding, the shift from an elite to a mass system, and the increasing reliance on internal and external controls, is a fertile breeding ground for these practices.
“The imposition of new managerialism has been much studied in public services from health to local government and schools but has been little examined in higher education,” Professor Deem said.
(more):
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/164003.article
http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/doku.php?id=managerialism_and_education
Managerialism and Education [Excerpt]
Patrick Fitzsimons
University of Auckland
One of the features of contemporary Western society is the tendency under neoliberal philosophy to define social, economic, and political issues, as problems to be resolved through management. Under neoliberalism there is also a generalised governmental concern to promote efficiency in what were previously non-governmental spheres—i.e., in self constitution—and that includes redefining the cultural as the economic. During recent decades, these developments have been associated with the introduction of managerialism as a new mode of governance under the restructured public sectors of many Western societies. The restructuring has involved the reform of education in which there has been a significant shift away from an emphasis on administration and policy to an emphasis on management. This form of managerialism is known as New Public Management (NPM) and has been very influential in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It has been used both as the legitimating basis and instrumental means for redesigning state educational bureaucracies, educational institutions and even the public policy process.
Under NPM, there is an elaboration of explicit standards and measures of performance in quantitative terms that set specific targets for personnel, an emphasis on economic rewards and sanctions, and a reconstruction of accountability relationships. It promotes a reduction in scope for ministerial discretion in the administration of government agencies, it separates the funding agencies from providers of services as well as separating advisory, delivery, and regulatory functions. NPM introduces accrual accounting, capital charging and a distinction between the state’s ownership and purchasing interests. There has been a decentralization of management control towards what is often referred to as the doctrine of self-management. In the interests of so-called productive efficiency then, the provision of educational services has been made contestable; and, in the interests of so-called allocative efficiency, state education has been marketised and privatised.
http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/doku.php?id=managerialism_and_education
http://www.educationnews.org/articles/24519/1/An-Interview-with-Henry-Levin-About-Privatization/Page1.html
(Worth reading in full: perhaps with a degree of skepticism?)
Henry Levin heads the self titled “National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education”. at Columbia University (Teachers college). His interview is insightful with his introduction to his own background excerpted here::
“I have been interested in the issues of privatization since 1963 when I took a course in public finance (my Ph.D. is in Economics) and I read Milton Friedman’s famous article on “The Role of the State in Education”. I wrote my first article on the subject in 1968 in The Urban Review, “The Failure of the Public Schools and the Free Market Remedy.” This was not a promotional article, but one which raised a set of questions that needed to be considered including a call for an experiment in an inner city. In 1971 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) responded with its plans for a voucher experiment and the formulation of the Jencks plan, a plan that was never implemented with vouchers, but led to the school choice plan in San Jose, California called Alum Rock. Fast forwarding, when I took early retirement from Stanford University to go to Teachers College, Columbia University, I decided to start a center that would be balanced on the issues of privatization in neither advocating for or against, but simply studying the phenomenon.”
While foundation (Ford Foundation and others) supports finance the “Center” Levin’s “objectives” are purported to be non-promotional but a good deal of the work produced by the Center appears supportive and “objectively” constructive (subjectively cautious but certainly not critical at any depth).
In other “News” from Education, meanwhile, Published:October 5, 2004
Privatization of Public Education
http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/privatization-of-public-education/
certain reviews have noted his presence within the arena of for profit educational transitions:
“Opponents, however, see the pressure for profit replacing student achievement as the driving force within schools. They see individual needs—particularly those of children with special, costly requirements—being sacrificed to the needs of corporate shareholders. They fear that school districts won’t be nearly vigilant enough in monitoring companies’ performance. And, foes note, private managers can be as inefficient and incompetent as public ones.
In what some call the “second wave” of the charter school movement, for-profit management companies have taken over the operation of charter schools. According to EduVentures, a Boston consulting firm that has tracked the rise of the education industry, roughly 10 percent of the estimated 1,200 charter schools in 1999 were managed by for-profit companies. One successful private manager of charter schools is the Tesseract Group Inc., formerly Education Alternatives Inc. Private companies’ entry into the charter school arena raises tough questions: Should taxpayer dollars intended for schools be permitted to generate a private profit, even if the company produces positive student results? Does the involvement of private companies defy the traditionally grassroots nature of charter schools? The education research community, too, is taking note of the increased private focus on public education. Henry Levin, a noted education researcher and economist, moved in April 1999 from Stanford University to Columbia University, where he will direct the new National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. Mr. Levin hopes to conduct neutral research, without any political pull from conservatives or liberals, on the impact of privatization to advance the debate about vouchers, charter schools, and private companies in education.”
The links in the previous posting (#1) is edited by Henry Levin and published under the auspices of his Center at Columbia. The actual article is co-written by J. Scott who is on the Faculty at Berkeley. The (#2) link is a list of her papers and are worth reviewing.
(1)
http://www.academia.edu/529443/Privatization_and_charter_school_reform_economic_political_and_social_dimensions
(2)
http://berkeley.academia.edu/Janellescott (Papers)
Janelle Scott
University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education
The website link may be down, and ironically one is a “domain for sale”
This link is working:
http://www.ibiblio.org/commercialfree/
http://www.ibiblio.org/commercialfree/policies.html
A Citizens Guide to Adopting Commercial-Free School Board Policies In Your Community
The Goal: Making Every Public School District A Commercial-Free Zone
The Center for Commercial Free Public Education is a nonprofit public education advocacy organization that addresses the issue of commercialism in our public schools. The Center provides support to students, parents, teachers, school board members and other concerned citizens organizing across the U.S. to keep their schools commercial-free and community-controlled. By providing our constituents with the information and the skills that they need to have a voice in the running of their schools, we facilitate leadership development and democratic participation at the local level.” (more):
” For more detailed information, contact the Center for Commercial Free Public Education at 510-268-1100, or log on to our website: http://www.commercialfree.org...”
Proper crediting for above: (full article)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/chicago-school-closings-2013_n_2927419.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications
Chicago School Closings: District Plans To Shutter 54 Schools
Posted: 03/21/2013 7:27 pm EDT | Updated: 03/21/2013 7:36 pm EDT
by Kim Bellware
AND:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chicago/
Chicago District To Shutter 54 Schools, Largest Number In U.S. History..
Communities On Edge Awaited Long-Delayed Announcement
Comments (609)
| Education
Bruce,
Thanks for the links!
Elaine: Thanks for the follow up on this profit driven mania. These profit-maximizing tactics point to a troubling conflict of interest that goes beyond the private delivery of education and the welfare of our children.. They raise a broader, more important question about the
“CAPTURE” of the upcoming generation.: How much should we rely on the private sector to satisfy broad social needs when the very process of maximizing profits and balancing books are at ends with itself, not to mention with the fact that public and private (“partnerships”) are total contradictions. The confusion for the public is over tax bases more than over the educational process of public responsibility. The idea of “Vouchers” (ironically) is intrinsically socialism yet the so-called private sector chooses not to recognize that rationing and charters are pretty much the same thing…only it serves exclusive committee interests not the public at large. Charters are appearing for small town governments and democracy itself is insidiously being concentrated as the OWNERship class structure runs the business of harnessing society to its monetary measures of self sustaining interests. We may need to expand the debate and unite people with communication and truthful information that will finally convince them that the public interest is actually being sabotaged and subverted by a profit motive. A profit motive that consolidates power and influence in fewer and fewer hands, all rationalized as “economic” necessity. Economics are a measure not an end; and society must realize that it must measure economy not the other way around. Adding a profit motive (even as falsely presented as a tax reduction) will not put education in the hands of parents as they believe; nor will it sustain any reduction in actual costs. It is mere cost shifting, and “coupons” will eventually fail as middle class and lower class substitutes for real choices and real accessibility to competitive educational options. Costs and social services must be managed, but the charter agenda has never really been about costs from the beginning…its been about private control over privilege..
From health to pensions to education, the United States can not afford to turn society itself over to private interests and call this a democratic process. Look at the “retribution” in Chicago: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/chicago-school-closings-2013_n_2927419.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications; where [excerpt]:
“Citing budget concerns and falling enrollment, Chicago Public Schools officials announced Thursday they plan to close 54 schools next year and shut down 61 school buildings — the largest single wave of school closures in U.S. history.
For months, looming closures seemed inevitable. After a teachers union strike last fall concluded with an expensive contract, observers were left without a doubt that the only way the cash-strapped district could afford it was to shut down schools and fire the teachers who worked there.
Since the September strike, Chicago hired a new CEO for its schools, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a veteran of closures in cities like Detroit. The district held hearings with parents about the fates of their children. Rumors flew about how many and which schools would be axed, with some predicting as many as 129 could close.
On Thursday, news of the final closure list began to trickle out. The day had come, a week before the district’s April 1 deadline. Byrd-Bennett announced on local television that CPS would close 54 elementary schools, name six for “turnarounds” and send 11 schools to share buildings with others.
As the news dribbled in through aldermen and school officials themselves earlier Thursday, many angry Chicagoans were searching for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, who waged his mayoral campaign on promises of education reform. DNAInfo Chicago reported Emanuel was on vacation with his family.”
Meanwhile: The privatization watch noted:(link @ the previous entry)
“IN: Common Core will hurt students, teachers – Opinion. As out-of-state investors and pro- privatization education interest groups pour into our state with their deep pockets to advocate through media advertisements in favor of Common Core State standards, it would seem the practitioners commissioned to implement them should be consulted as well. As a teacher of 22 years in our public schools, concerns exist with the newest “fad” to sweep the nation.
Indianapolis Star http://www.indystar.com/article/20130321/OPINION/303210018/Common-Core-will-hurt-students-teachers?nclick_check=1
[and]
Julian Smith (author) rightly states that “…Common Core is a shift away from educating children toward training them for the workforce. Big business thinks it would be cheaper, and more beneficial to them, to apply a factory-style approach to our schools. They do not understand that children are not widgets.
One doesn’t have to dig too deep to realize that Common Core is one more colossal bad idea with personal individual as well as national implications and unintended adverse consequences.”
http://www.privatizationwatch.org/
TN: Tennessee Is Abandoning Public Education
Diane Ravich’s Blog
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/03/21/tennessee-is-abandoning-public-education/
“Within 5 years TEA and all the locals will be relegated to cursory “remember whens” as the major population centers of the state no longer are in the business of educating their own children. Charters, vouchers and non-profits will have no union affiliates. This will bankrupt the state level organization and open the floodgates for private equity and hedge funds to capitalize off of public tax dollars.”
Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market
By Stephanie Simon
Reuters
Posted: 08/02/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/02/private-firms-eyeing-prof_n_1732856.html
Excerpt;
NEW YORK, Aug 1 (Reuters) – The investors gathered in a tony private club in Manhattan were eager to hear about the next big thing, and education consultant Rob Lytle was happy to oblige.
Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards for public schools, he urged the crowd. If they’re as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.
“You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up,” said Lytle, a partner at The Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting firm. “It could get really, really big.”
Indeed, investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education.
The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.
Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into — fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.
Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They’re pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.
The For-Profit Loophole with Nonprofit Charter Schools
Written by Ruth McCambridge
Friday, 18 January 2013
Nonprofit Quarterly
http://nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/21663-the-for-profit-loophole-with-nonprofit-charter-schools.html
In Mississippi, the State Senate has passed a charter school bill but it has provided that charter schools may be run only by a nonprofit. The bill will now be taken up in the Mississippi House. The nonprofit restriction came about, in part, due to concerns from Parents for Public Schools, who noted that a 2013 study from the National Education Policy Center found that only 48.2 percent of for-profit charter schools met federal Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) benchmarks, whereas 56.4 percent of nonprofit charter schools met the benchmarks.
In an editorial in the Clarion Ledger, Sam R. Hall argues, “While those numbers aren’t that far apart in my mind, the greater concern comes from whether or not for-profit corporations are more interested in a student’s education or shareholders’ bottom lines.” Where such restrictions exist in other states, however, they have often been circumvented when nonprofits have contracted out such core functions as management and curriculum development to for-profits.
Writes Hall, “At the end of the day, if the intent of the law is to prevent for-profit corporations from running charter schools, then Mississippi should close the loophole like other states have done. Otherwise, lawmakers should not try to pull a fast one and say, ‘Look what we’re doing,’ when they know the loophole exists.” If Hall’s concerns about for-profit contractors play out in Mississippi as has occurred in some other states, the inclusion of the nonprofit mandate in the bill now before the Mississippi House may not amount to the protection against an overriding profit motive in education that advocates have expressed concern about.
The NPQ Newswire has been following a diffuse but compelling thread of conversation regarding the quantifiably negative effects of a profit motive in healthcare cost and quality. Now we note that this same issue is active in conversations about charter schools, which we have also been following closely, particularly as a new ruling by the National Labor Relations Board adds questions to the debate as to whether charter schools are really “public” schools or not.
Emails Link Jeb Bush Education Group To Officials And ALEC
By Susie Madrak
January 31, 2013
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/emails-link-jeb-bush-education-group-
Looks like Rupert Murdoch will profit from “reform” of Chicago school system.
8/20/12
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/20/1122017/-Looks-like-Rupert-Murdoch-will-profit-from-reform-of-Chicago-school-system
Excerpt:
It seems so odd that things like this can happen in our education system now. It just doesn’t seem to matter about that alleged illegal phone hacking his News Corp has been doing. I guess the rich and powerful often don’t have to be accountable to the rest of us.
Rupert Murdoch is now profiting from the testing craziness hitting Chicago’s public schools.
In case Chicago missed it, Rupert Murdoch is now profiting from the testing craziness hitting Chicago’s public schools. He owns an outfit called “Wireless Generation” that is now a contractor with CPS. Anyone who doesn’t already know that the administration of Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third largest school system, is in the hands of amateurs (or worse, outsiders who want to destroy public education and turn it over to the private sector at all costs), should be contacting any of the 241 principals of the so-called “Track E” schools which begin receiving their students on August 13, 2012.
Things have gotten so crazy in the 2012 world of edits, memos, Power Points, orders, reforms, re-reforms, and re-re-re-reforms from the administration of former Rochester school supt. Jean-Claude Brizard and former “Relationship Banker” Rahm Emanuel that it would take a team of a dozen investigative reporters on the ground school-by-school (with a backup team of another dozen researchers) to separate out the greed, mendacity, incompetence, and silliness that is being foisted on Chicago behind the smokescreen of the latest iteration of “School Reform.” Meanwhile, the city’s communities, teachers, principals, and children will be facing centrally planned chaos as the first full year of Rahm’s version of “School Reform” kicks in non Monday August 13, 2012. The 241 Chicago “Track E” schools would make this sub-system one of the 20 largest school districts in the USA were it a separate system. But it would be one of only three (the other two are Detroit and New Orleans) currently ruled by a group of outside mercenaries dedicated to destroying public education.
Last year New York City to its credit stopped a contract that would have given Rupert Murdoch and his Wireless Generation 27 million dollars of Race to the Top money.
NYC stopped a contract that would give Rupert Murdoch $27 million of Race to the Top funding.
New York City ditched a $27 million education contract with News Corp subsidiary Wireless Generation, citing the ongoing investigations into the phone hacking allegations related to News Corp’s now-defunct News Of The World tabloid.
State Controller Thomas DiNapoli rejected the Education Department’s contract with the company, the New York Daily News reports, which would have paid $27 million to create software to track test scores. The funding would have come out of the state’s $700 million “Race to the Top” education funds, but DiNapoli’s office said that there were concerns about News Corp’s “incomplete record” and about the ongoing scandal
“In light of the significant ongoing investigations and continuing revelations with respect to News Corp., we are returning the contract with Wireless Generation unapproved,” wrote DiNapoli’s office of the decision.
Wireless Generation will still be employed as a subcontractor by one of the companies that did get the bid for the NYC schools.
Fox in the Schoolhouse: Rupert Murdoch Wants to Teach Your Kids!
News Corp.’s major move into the education business.
—By Stephanie Mencimer
Fri Sep. 23, 2011
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/rupert-murdoch-news-corp-wireless-generation-education
Rupert Murdoch’s reputation precedes him—but one thing he’s not well known for is his education reform advocacy. But that could soon change. Next month, Murdoch will make an unusual public appearance in San Francisco, delivering the keynote address at an education summit hosted by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has lately been crisscrossing the country promoting his own version of education reform.
The high-profile speech to a collection of conservative ed reformers, state legislators, and educators is just the latest step in Murdoch’s quiet march into the business of education, which has been somewhat eclipsed by the phone-hacking scandal besieging his media empire. (On Tuesday, word of Murdoch’s appearance at Bush’s conference came just hours after reports that News Corp. had agreed to pay more than $4 million to the family of a 13-year-old British murder victim, Milly Dowler, whose voicemail was hacked by reporters for Murdoch’s News of the World. ) But Murdoch has made it very clear that he views America’s public schools as a potential gold mine.
“In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a 50-year nap would not recognize the world around him…But not in education,” he remarked in May during a speech at the “e-G8 forum” that preceded the G8 summit in France. “Our schools remain the last holdout from the digital revolution.”
Last November, News Corp. dropped $360 million to buy Wireless Generation, a Brooklyn-based education technology company that provides software, assessment tools, and data services. “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching,” Murdoch said at the time.
A few weeks before the deal, News Corp. had hired one of the nation’s most prominent education figures, Joel Klein, away from his job as New York City schools chancellor. As it happens, Klein was already familiar with Wireless Generation, which began working with the New York City school system during his tenure.
While Murdoch’s arrival to the education business is being cheered by Jeb Bush and other conservatives, the idea of the parent company of News of the World and Fox getting into the school biz hasn’t gone over well with the education establishment. Murdoch’s new venture has stirred controversy in New York, where this summer the state sought to enter into a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to track student performance. Given Klein’s hiring, the deal prompted an outcry by teachers’ unions and other critics who saw the public school system becoming just another example of revolving-door politics and crony capitalism. (“They chose us because we’re good,” and not due to any connection to Klein, says Wireless Generation’s spokeswoman, Joan Lebow.)
In early August, New York teachers’ unions demanded the state rescind its plans to contract with Wireless Generation. “It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized database for personal student information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news-gathering tactics,” representatives from the state and New York City teachers’ unions wrote.
Wireless Generation had caused controversy even before Murdoch purchased the company. Last year, when New Jersey lost out on millions of federal education funding due to a screw-up on its grant application, the company landed at the center of the debacle. The state, after all, had reportedly paid the firm $500,000 to ensure the accuracy of its application, among other things.
Gates, In Alliance with Murdoch’s News Corp, Builds a New App for Corporate Education Reform?
By Leonie Haimson
8/9/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/bill-gates-rupert-murdoch-impatient-optimists_b_920000.html
Excerpt:
On Aug. 3, Vicki Phillips of the the Gates Foundation announced the creation of an “amazing” new software program that will be like a “huge app store — just for teachers — with the Netflix and Facebook capabilities we love the most.”
“There are few times in life when we are fortunate enough to be part of something amazing,” she wrote. “I believe this is one of those times, and I am especially excited because the ‘something amazing’ is being led by states.”
Really? This was led by states, and not by the Gates Foundation? Hmm… we’ve heard that one before.
The announcement continues:
“As part of our contribution, the foundation took an important first step a few weeks ago and selected a vendor to build the open software that will allow states to access a shared, performance-driven marketplace of free and premium tools and content. That vendor, Wireless Generation, will create the software, but it will be owned by an independent nonprofit, so that any school, school district, curriculum developer, or tool builder can contribute to the collaborative.”
Did it really have to be Wireless Generation?
Already, Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Joel Klein, has encountered much controversy, because of privacy concerns, among other issues, arising from the phone-hacking scandal in Great Britain. On Aug. 5 it was revealed that the teacher unions wrote a letter to the New York State Education Department, asking that the proposed no-bid contract with Wireless be withdrawn.
Earlier I posted a column and a petition to state officials, expressing many of the same concerns — as well as the fact that ARIS, the $80-million data system that is the model for this new, statewide system, is widely considered to have been a huge waste of money.
And now Gates is going to fund a nationwide data system with the same defects and potential risks?
Dr. Ed Fuller urges us to note the words “free” and “content” above. So Wireless Generation and Murdoch are poised to make a buck off of this project — and the content they receive from teachers, who are expected to share their ideas free of charge?
Un-“MET” Goals
Gates Foundation’s MET Study Fails to Solve the Teacher Evaluation Challenge
http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/01/review-MET-final-2013
That should read “involved” not involve. Time for bed!
Elaine,
if Murdoch is involve, we are all in trouble.
Bill Gates’ Big Play: How Much Can Money Buy in Education?
By Anthony Cody
November 5, 2011
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/11/bill_gates_shows_us_how_much_c.html
Excerpt:
What would happen if one of the wealthiest men in the world decided to remake the institution of public education in America? What if that man believed he understood the secrets to success, and sought to align the nation’s schools to his vision and methods? What if he decided to devote all his time and considerable money to this objective? Could he succeed? We are in the process of finding out just how far money and a sharply defined agenda can take you.
Bill Gates’ first challenge was to define a vision. After experimenting with small schools, he discovered that this approach did not lead to consistently higher student performance. So he stepped back and said, OK, let’s figure out just what IS going to increase those test scores? This was the crucial decision that has determined all other steps that have followed. The purpose of schooling has been determined by the measurement that tells us if we have succeeded. Although Bill Gates would perceive this as a neutral objective, in fact it has created a driving agenda for school change. The agenda is this: To recraft the system so that it is just as relentlessly focused on test score improvement as any business is focused on making money.
How does one go about making your own agenda everyone else’s?
Bill Gates had a huge head start, in that No Child Left Behind had already set the wheels in motion. The idea that test scores are all that matter was already encoded into federal law and funding policies. The trouble is that law is punitive, cumbersome, illogical and bound to fail, by its own set of indicators. So we had to move beyond NCLB, and create a sustainable trajectory for test-driven reforms. This has been done in several ways.
First, acknowledge that current tests are of limited value. We cannot abandon them because they are all we have, and we cannot ignore the data they give us, even though it is not all we might wish for. Develop a plan for a new generation of tests that will be clearly superior to existing tests. These new tests will be richer, and incorporate technology, and based on new quasi-national standards that are likewise superior. The Gates Foundation has been a huge supporter of the Common Core Standards, and is partnering with the Pearson Foundation to develop online reading and math courses aligned with the standards.
It can’t hurt to have your high-level staff transfer over to working for the US Department of Education. And if lobbying rules would block this due to ethical considerations, simply get waivers.
Bill Gates recently asserted:
It may surprise you–it was certainly surprising to us–but the field of education doesn’t know very much at all about effective teaching.
It does surprise me, because I am familiar with the amazing work done over the past two decades by educators who created the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The National Board defined the highest level of teaching in line with all the things we value in a classroom. The standards include creating a strong classroom community that nurtures and supports all students. They include how well we meet the diverse needs of students from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds. The portfolios teachers assemble need to provide strong evidence that students are learning, including work samples that show how the teacher has challenged and guided the student. Now we see that the National Board faces tremendous pressure to include test score data as an important indicator of teacher quality.
Research can lead the way. The Gates Foundation is going after its goals by investing in research that implicitly defines “effectiveness” as the ability to increase test scores. The studies have been in the works for years, and are now being released one after another. The way the research questions are posed, and the data is interpreted, allows you to control a great deal of the debate. For example, a recent study of charter schools came out, funded by the Gates Foundation, in which the key question posed focused on the “impact…on student outcomes,” as measured by test scores. Similarly, a huge project called Measures of Effective Teaching appears to define effectiveness primarily by looking at test score gains.
My View of the Common Core Standards
By Diane Ravitch
July 9, 2012
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/09/my-view-of-the-common-core-standards/
I have neither endorsed nor rejected the Common Core national standards, for one simple reason: They are being rolled out in 45 states without a field trial anywhere. How can I say that I love them or like them or hate them when I don’t know how they will work when they reach the nation’s classrooms?
In 2009, I went to an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute where Dane Linn, one of the project directors for developing the standards, described the process. I asked if they intended to pilot test them, and I did not get a “yes” answer. The standards were released early in 2010. By happenstance, I was invited to the White House to meet with the head of the President’s Domestic Policy Council, the President’s education advisor, and Rahm Emanuel. When asked what I thought of the standards, I suggested that they should be tried out in three or four or five states first, to work out the bugs. They were not interested.
I have worked on state standards in various states. When the standards are written, no one knows how they will work until teachers take them and teach them. When you get feedback from teachers, you find out what works and what doesn’t work. You find out that some content or expectations are in the wrong grade level; some are too hard for that grade, and some are too easy. And some stuff just doesn’t work at all, and you take it out.
The Common Core will be implemented in 45 states without that kind of trial. No one knows if they will raise expectations and achievement, whether they will have no effect, whether they will depress achievement, or whether they will be so rigorous that they increase the achievement gaps.
Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution thinks they won’t matter.
The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which received large grants from the Gates Foundation to evaluate the standards and has supported them vigorously, estimates that the cost of implementing them will be between $1 billion and $8.3 billion. The conservative Pioneer Institute estimates that the cost of implementation would be about $16 billion, and suggests this figure is a “mid-range” estimate.
The Gates Foundation, lest we forget, paid to develop the standards, paid to evaluate the standards, and is underwriting Pearson’s program to create online courses and resources for the standards, which will be sold by Pearson, for a profit, to schools across the nation.
Of course, every textbook publisher now says that its products are aligned with the Common Core standards, and a bevy of consultants have come out of the woodwork to teach everyone how to teach them.
In these times of austerity, I wonder how much money districts and states have available to implement the standards faithfully. I wonder how much money they will put into professional development. I wonder about the quality of the two new assessments that the U.S. Department of Education laid out $350 million for.
These are things I wonder. But how can I possibly pass judgment until I find out how the standards work in real classrooms with real children and real teachers?