Education Historian
Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor
Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University, a historian of education, and author of more than ten books—including The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (2003) and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010). Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991 to 1993 during the administration of George H. W. Bush. When she was Assistant Secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of voluntary state and national academic standards. “From 1997 to 2004, she was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal testing program. She was appointed by the Clinton administration’s Secretary of Education Richard Riley in 1997 and reappointed by him in 2001. From 1995 until 2005, she held the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution and edited Brookings Papers on Education Policy. Before entering government service, she was Adjunct Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.”
Ravitch, once a champion of charter schools, supported the No Child Left Behind initiative. After careful investigation, Ravitch changed her mind and became one of our country’s most well-known critics of charter-based education. She believes that “the privatization of public education has to stop.” In late March, Ravitch sat down with Bill Moyers on Moyers & Company to discuss the subject of privatizing of public schools—which has become “big business as bankers, hedge fund managers and private equity investors are entering what they consider to be an ‘emerging market.’” You can view a video of that program, Public Schools for Sale?, below the fold.
Public Schools for Sale?
SOURCES
Public Schools for Sale? (Moyers & Company)
Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste (Moyers and Company)
Diane Ravtich: Curriculum Vitae
FURTHER READING
A Look at Some of the Driving Forces behind the School Reform Movement and the Effort to Privatize Public Education (Res Ipsa Loquitor)
Charter Schools and The Profit Motive (Res Ipsa Loquitor)
From the ABC’s of Privatizing Public Education: A Is for ALEC, I is for iPad…and P Is for Profits (Res Ipsa Loquitor)
Elaine,
Follow the money.
Elaine M,
“You’d have to do some extensive research to find the answer to that question.”
I agree it would require some research.
It appears you’ve done your research on Charter schools, as you’ve cited a number of different articles and research. Perhaps a step back to take a macro look at the public school system in your state would be useful. Or not.
Charter Schools and Charter School Management Organizations (CMOs) Are a Form of Privatization
United Church of Christ
http://www.ucc.org/justice/public-education/charter-schools-and-charter.html
Excerpt:
The sponsors of charter schools persistently refer to them as public charter schools, but charter schools are public only in the sense that they receive public funding. They are virtually always privately managed and often privately owned. Oversight of charters is provided by appointed governing boards who are rarely required to meet in public or be accountable to the public. Although back in the early 1990s charters were conceived by school teachers as places they could innovate without as many constraints as traditional schools, today the charter movement has largely been taken over by large chains. Overall, charter schools have not out-performed traditional public schools, although such generalizations are deceiving because they mask the disparity in quality among charter schools.
Today federal policy is a prominent factor driving privatization through the establishment of charter schools. For the past ten years, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been labeling a lot of schools failing; now we also have Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top and the new NCLB Waivers that attack teachers in a number of ways, and also require that the bottom scoring 5 percent of schools—so-called “failing” schools—be closed, reconstituted, or charterized and perhaps turned over to Charter Management Organizations or Educational Management Organizations. States had tried to be cautious in the experimentation with charter schools by setting caps on the number of new charters that could be authorized in any one year, but in 2009, to qualify for Race to the Top, a state’s legislature had to eliminate any caps the state had set on the authorization of new charters. Race to the Top opened the floodgates for privatization.
While in most places charter schools are required to admit students by lottery without admissions tests or criteria, there is evidence that charters (without economies of scale to offer special programs) serve far fewer of the most expensive children to educate, children who need special eduation services and English language learners. And many charters, while abiding by the letter of the law by avoiding admissions tests, require a complicated application process, an admissions interview or a parental contract. Charters also have enrollment caps, while traditional public schools are required to accept all children. It is important to ask whether charters are creating one set of schools for the most promising children while making the traditional public schools a system of last resort.
A little something on United Church of Christ.
http://christianity.about.com/od/unitedchurchofchrist/a/uccprofile.htm
Mr Keebler,
Now we have Race to the Top.
Steve,
“How do average teacher salaries, median teacher salaries, etc compare to other government workers in your state?”
All governments workers? State workers? Town employees? Government workers with the same levels of education?
“How do average teacher benefits and retirement compare to everyone else in your state?”
You’d have to do some extensive research to find the answer to that question.
“How does your state measure success of teachers and school administrators for the work they do and outcomes achieved?”
The same way the other states have been doing it since school reform appeared on the scene and No Child Left Behind was enacted–with high-stakes standardized testing.
No child left behind has been renamed everyone has a price in the legislature. Kinda like that new rugar, it’s nice and shiny, but it don’t work and you can’t fire it.
What happened when privatizing prisons, schools, Army hospitals (Walter Reed), airport security, courtroom security, military services, etc? The quality of the services fell. Lowest bidder, lowest wages, lowest quality employee, makes for service that’s not worth the money. Privatize Medicare and you’ll see a similar scenario.
Paul Schulte,
If the paper is run by liberals, why does it usually endorse Republicans for office?
Look…you’re the one who said that Arizona charter schools have more oversight than traditional public schools–yet you provided no proof to back up your claim. You just continue to criticize any information that I put before you. Maybe you could find some information to support your claim???
Elaine – this is the group that oversees charter schools in Arizona. You will not the section for schools who are up for renewal in 2014. All charters are for 15 years to start. At year 15 they have to apply for renewal. It is a rather painful process and not all of them get full renewals. They are audited every year by an accounting firm to make sure they are not diddling with the public funds or at least the diddling is legal. This does not happen with traditional public schools. Unless they are continually underperforming, a traditional public school is always good to go.
Elaine M,
Agreed, the cost varies (drastically) from state to state and most schools get a large amount of their funding through local property taxes. They do get a LOT of federal funding as well.
There are numerous reports showing each state’s per student/per year cost. The key is to notice the trends over the past decade or two. How do those increase cost (per student) translate to actual results?
How do average teacher salaries, median teacher salaries, etc compare to other government workers in your state?
How do average teacher benefits and retirement compare to everyone else in your state?
How does your state measure success of teachers and school administrators for the work they do and outcomes achieved?
Paul,
Which article was only about looking for low bidders on textbooks?
Paul,
Doesn’t the Arizona Republic endorse mostly Republican candidates?
The Arizona Republic is owned and run by liberals.
Steve,
The per pupil cost varies not only state by state–but community by community. In the state where I live, much of a school system’s financing is raised through property taxes.
1. What is the average cost per student per year in public schools in this nation? (NY, CA, and DC are around $25K.)
2. What have test scores and student’s overall results done in the past ____ years? (Put any number you like in there.)
3. When the Senate had a hearing last week to amend the First Amendment regarding campaign contributions, who ranked 3rd highest on the biggest donor list? (Hint, it wasn’t the Koch Bros., they were 59.)
1+2+3 = Gold Star! The students answer is irrelevant, their approach and effort to solving the problem is what’s most important.
The problem isn’t Charter Schools; they are simply a result of yet another failed bloated government system. Education is indeed a fundamental building block of this Republic. The founders wrote/spoke about this extensively.
What percentage of publically educated Americans knows what type of government we have? How many can name the 3 branches of government? How many can name their two US Senators or their Congressman?
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both” James Madison
“A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?” George Washington
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson
Paul,
Our school system had panels of teachers and administrators review textbooks before selecting the ones that were adopted. Regarding school supplies–writing paper,construction paper, pencils, erasers, rulers, glue, scissors, folders, etc.:My town joined a collaborative with other cities and towns in the area to negotiate lower prices for those items from suppliers. I believe our system also purchased janitorial supplies through the collaborative. Like many schools in our area, we had a budget manager who oversaw financial transactions and kept a close eye on the school budget.
Elaine – so, no low bidder for the textbooks. That was what your article was about. Most charter schools in Arizona are too small to get low bid on anything because the quantity is too small. The various charters have talked about combining to get better prices but then you are stuck with low bid materials and we all know how that works out. 😉
Elaine – laws broken? Anyone? Anyone? Hands up for laws broken? BTW, the Arizona Republic is anti-charter school. Just passing that on. Plus, their readership has been dropping like a rock over the years. My wife only buys it on Sunday for the coupons.
Elaine – although Tim Noah’s article thinks there is corruption, even he admits that the schools are doing nothing wrong legally. Did your school bid out textbooks or did they buy the best textbooks they thought would work for their students and teachers?
Insiders benefiting in charter deals
Board members, school officials did more than $70 mil in business
By Anne Ryman
The Republic | azcentral.com
Nov 17, 2012
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20121016insiders-benefiting-charter-deals.html
Excerpt:
Arizona has 535 charter schools that enrolled about 144,800 students this school year, or about 14 percent of students in public schools.
Arizona’s regulations on charter schools are relatively lax. The state allows charters to seek exemptions from state laws that require schools to obtain competitive bids for goods or services. Nearly 90 percent of the state’s charter holders have gotten permanent exemptions from the state Board for Charter Schools, according to the state’s database.
The schools’ purchases from their own officials range from curriculum and business consulting to land leases and transportation services. A handful of non-profit schools outsource most of their operations to a board member’s for-profit company. The transactions are legal provided schools report the relationships on their federal tax forms and board members abstain from voting on their own contracts.
In one case, school officials in Phoenix thought they were exempt from purchasing laws and failed to put a contract out to bid for non-academic services that were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In another case, a Glendale school purchased a van for almost twice its value and had to get the money refunded.
It’s impossible to know whether any money was potentially diverted from classrooms through insider transactions or lack of competitive bidding. Several charters said they saved money but were unable to provide specifics; others did not respond to interview requests. Some said they contracted with a school official’s company because the quality of the product or service was better than what was on the market.
Educators and ethicists say the arrangements raise questions about whether the schools are being used partly for personal gain.
“This is crony capitalism,” said Alex Molnar, an education professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who has studied charter schools. “This is greasing the palms of special-interest and favored individuals.”
A for-profit company paid by a charter school, even a company that operates most of the school, does not have to disclose spending details or how much profit it makes. Some board members who did business with their schools told The Republic they made a profit on the transactions. Others said they lost money. Some refused to comment.
How Charter Schools Fleece Taxpayers
By Timothy Noah
11/20/12
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/110355/its-easy-fleece-charter-schools
Excerpt:
In government, if I help myself to taxpayer dollars, we call that embezzlement and I go to jail. In the private sector, if I help myself to taxpayer dollars, we call that innovation and I get hailed as a visionary exponent of public-private partnership. That’s the lesson of a Nov. 17 investigation by Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic into the state’s charter schools.
In her examination of Arizona’s 50 largest nonprofit charter schools and all of Arizona’s nonprofit charter schools with assets exceeding $10 million, Ryman found “at least 17 contracts or arrangements, totaling more than $70 million over five years and involving about 40 school sites, in which money from the non-profit charter school went to for-profit or non-profit companies run by board members, executives or their relatives.” That says to me that in Arizona, at least, charter-school corruption isn’t the exception. It’s the rule. And that’s just in the nonprofit charter schools. Documentation for the for-profit schools is not publicly available. What are the odds that charter-school proprietors operating in the dark are less inclined to enrich themselves at public expense?
The self-dealing is entirely legal. All you have to do is get yourself an exemption from state laws requiring that goods and services be bid competitively. Clearly these exemptions aren’t difficult to acquire, because 90 percent of Arizona’s charter holders—not 90 percent of the charter schools surveyed by the Arizona Republic, but 90 percent of all the state’s charter schools—have acquired permanent exemptions from state competitive bidding requirements. No exemption has ever been withdrawn by the state. If you are a charter-school officer and you stand to benefit personally from some financial transaction with the school, you may not vote on whether to make the purchase. But that’s about the only rule.
The result? “The schools’ purchases from their own officials,” Ryman writes, “range from curriculum and business consulting to land leases and transportation services. A handful of non-profit schools outsource most of their operations to a board member’s for-profit company.” A nonprofit called Great Hearts Academies runs 15 Arizona charter schools. Since 2009, according to Ryman, the schools have purchased $987,995 in books from Educational Sales Co., whose chairman, Daniel Sauer, is a Great Hearts officer. And that doesn’t count additional book purchases made directly by parents. Six of the Great Hearts schools have links on their Web sites for parents who wish to make such purchases. The links are, of course, to Educational Sales Co. Since 2007 Sauer has donated $50,400 to Great Hearts. You can call that philanthropy, or you can call that an investment on which Sauer’s company received a return of more than 1800 percent. I’m not sure even Russian oligarchs typically get that much on the back end.
Audit: U.S. oversight of charter schools in Arizona has been lax
By Christina Hoag
Associated Press
Oct 24, 2012
http://www.azcentral.com/news/free/20121024audit-us-oversightof-charter-schools-inarizona-lax.html
An audit of the U.S. Department of Education’s division overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in charter-school funding has criticized the office for failing to properly monitor how Arizona and other states spend the money.
The report by the department’s Office of the Inspector General, which was released in late September, also singled out state education departments in Arizona, California and Florida for lax monitoring of what charter schools do with the funds and whether their expenditures comply with U.S. regulations.
The Education Department’s Office of Innovation and Improvement spent $940 million from 2008 to 2011 on charter schools, which are autonomously operated public schools.
Most of the money was funneled through state education departments, although some was given directly to charter schools.
The funds are administered through competitive grants aimed at helping launch new charters and replicate successful charter models.
The inspector general said the innovation office has not given proper guidance to states on monitoring the use of the money and does not have policies to ensure that states corrected deficiencies when they were found.
Additionally, the audit, which was conducted by San Francisco-based education research company WestEd, found that the office did not review expenditures to ensure they met with federal disbursement requirements.
The office has agreed to beef up its procedures to track federal funds and ensure states are adequately overseeing charter schools, the report said.
In Arizona, which received about $26 million in funding for charter schools from 2008 to 2011, reviewers lacked a monitoring checklist and thus collected inconsistent data when they visited schools, the report said.
Elaine – you will note that the screw up is by the feds. That they did monitor but did it poorly.
pete, You are correct, sir. The didactic, school marm bit does get old quickly.