Charter Looting

As ideologues press on in their battle to replace public schools in urban areas with unregulated, though tax-supported, charter chain gangs for the poor, the opportunities for corruption and outright thievery increase. Here are details of the latest from Philadelphia, where freedom from oversight quickly turned to the opportunity to loot:

By Martha Woodall
Inquirer Staff Writer

The embattled board of the Philadelphia Academy Charter School last night released a scathing internal report alleging that the charter's founder and its former chief executive officer systematically looted the school for personal gain.

The report, compiled by a team of lawyers led by a former federal prosecutor, says more than $700,000 is missing from a school account and cites "substantial evidence of wrongdoing" by Brien N. Gardiner, a former public school principal who founded the popular charter in Northeast Philadelphia, and Kevin M. O'Shea, a former police officer who replaced Gardiner as CEO two years ago.

Gardiner's alleged "frauds" were complex and included what appears to have been a no-interest $70,000 loan to one of his other business entities, the report says.

O'Shea's misconduct, it says, was "no less destructive, as he systematically siphoned cash from virtually every aspect of [the school's] operations, even going so far as to misappropriate money raised by the Student Council and National Honor Society that was intended for the Marine Corps' Toys for Tots Program."

The 62-page report, by former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer and other attorneys at Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll L.L.P., also alleges that O'Shea's sister, Constance, coordinator of the school's elementary program, destroyed computer records in April at her brother's behest to keep investigators from getting them.

. . . .

Hockeimer's team found Gardiner had violated his duties to the charter to advance other business interests. By doing so, the report says, he jeopardized the school's ability to pay for capital projects and educational programs.

"Gardiner's conduct is particularly surprising and disappointing in light of the profound trust PACS' faculty, staff, parents and students placed in him," the report says.

Ballard Spahr investigators labeled O'Shea's allegedly fraudulent conduct "pervasive." Their report says they uncovered "substantial evidence" that he stole a large amount of lunch money at the high school, pocketed the $2 students paid to attend school without uniforms on Dress Down Days, kept the proceeds from the candy and soda machines at the school, and forced maintenance staff to cut his lawn and make repairs to the $1.4 million house he built in Beach Haven.

A former city police officer with a high school diploma, O'Shea earned $204,000 as the school's chief executive officer until he and Gardiner were fired in May.

The "largest abuse in monetary terms" detailed in the report stems from actions of the nonprofit that owns the Philadelphia Academy's high school building. The school has been paying nearly $67,000 a month in taxpayer money to rent the building from Philadelphia Academy Charter Development Corp., a nonprofit established by Gardiner that had been led by O'Shea's wife, Jamie. . . .

Retention Still Harms Students, Just As It Always Has

The gross immorality of student retention based on standardized test scores continues to spread, even though the vast compendium of research consistently points to the harm caused by such practices.  Here is the latest in a long line of research that points to what the test and punish crowd has known and ignored for years.  ht to Monty Neill for this link:

Five years after a state law required school districts to make third-graders who fail the reading FCAT repeat the year, questions remain about whether the strict rule that has affected tens of thousands of students is effective.

Soon after the law was enacted, the state trumpeted stories of parents initially upset by the retention who later were pleased. But a recent Miami-Dade study that followed the first group of retained students concluded that retention only improves student achievement initially.

''It appears now that the gains have essentially disappeared,'' the study states.

A similar Broward study that tracked the first group of retained students -- who just finished seventh grade -- also found that as they have grown up, their attendance rate in school has dropped and their suspension rate has risen.

State data show that for students who have repeated third grade -- despite the extra year in elementary school -- nearly half fail the reading test as fourth-graders.

Arizona State University Professor Mary Lee Smith studied Florida's law the year after it was enacted and has continued monitoring its effects. In 2004, her policy brief recommended the law be repealed.

Four years later, Smith's objections are the same.

'The research stretching over a 60-plus-year period has consistently demonstrated the same thing: that retention in grade does not improve performance in subsequent years' achievement and bears a strong relationship to dropping out of school later,'' Smith wrote in an e-mail to The Miami Herald. ``No other body or research is so strongly one-sided, yet policy makers and politicians point to it as a way to improve performance.''

She said many other strategies, including small class sizes, high quality preschools, good teachers, remediation on academic skills before and after school and tutoring are better than retention as long as they are not teaching to the test.

Policies like Florida's dot the country. In New York City, for the last four years, third-graders who score in the lowest of four levels on English and math tests have been required to repeat the grade unless they score higher after summer school or if teachers appeal. . . .

Weingarten's New Nonsense Rhetoric as AFT Chief

Randi Weingarten got national attention with her recent support for public school destruction by charter--and for her enthusiasm for teacher bonus pay based on test scores.  In kowtowing to the Gates and Broad agenda, she obviously built a network of insiders strong enough to deal her way to the top of the AFT.  Today she offered the rank and file a litany of pipe dreams that are confounded by the recent capitulations of principle that got her into her new position.  Here is a clip:

. . . .In a speech minutes later to the delegates gathered in Chicago, Ms. Weingarten criticized the No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s signature domestic initiative, as “too badly broken to be fixed,” and outlined “a new vision of schools for the 21st century.”

“Can you imagine a federal law that promoted community schools — schools that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one roof all the services and activities they and their families need?” Ms. Weingarten asked in the speech.

“Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities and homework assistance,” she said. “And suppose the schools included child care and dental, medical and counseling clinics.” . . . .

See Randi's imagination soar.  Soar, soar, soar.  Imagine, imagine, imagine.  Let's just forget her most recent enthusiasm for the cheap charter school solution for the poor, with the test prep parrot curriculums and facilities that routinely do not have basics like libraries, gyms, or even cafeterias.  Imagine that!

Privatizing Testocrats Gear Up, and Bracey Finds More Crap in WaPo

The Broads, the Dells, and Bill and Melinda have launched another salvo in their 60 million dollar fear-mongering propaganda campaign against America's public schools. New flag-waving ads are already in the can, ready to launch as NBC prepares extensive coverage of the Genocide Olympics.

And, of course, the big money has the big media in its pocket, as evidenced in today's uncritical adver-porting of the propaganda smear in the Washington Post, a dull hatchet job that even a dolt like Jay Mathews knows is entirely misleading, one-sided, and without merit.

Here is Bracey's letter to WaPo, which will never find its way into print. Much too honest, even if it were not, Jerry doesn't have enough cash to buy the news space. Thanks, anyway, GB:

From: GERALD BRACEY
To: chandlerm@washpost.com ; mathewsj@washpost.com ; valerie strauss ; haynesv@washpost.com ; Fred Hiatt
Cc: ombudsman@washpost.com
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 11:09 AM
Subject: crap

It's bad enough that Roy Romer, who used to be pretty smart when I knew him in CO, has become the most irrational of school critics, but it's worse that page C7 of today's Post gives his his latest fear mongering crap--let's call it what it is, shit, and see if that gets through the filters--free publicity. In God's name, WHY? Who put the Post up to this story?

I think the Post owes it to schools to base a piece at least as long on U. S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology which was just issued by the RAND corporation. We're #1, says RAND. It's a much more reasoned document though it, too, makes some errors when talking about school performance. It at least credits U. S. kids on international tests where they do well. If you look around at the fear mongers, you'll notice they mention PISA ranks and nothing else. That's because, as RAND observes, on TIMSS and PIRLS we look good. Of course, even RAND's study considers that there might be a link between test scores and competitiveness, which no one has ever demonstrated. In fact, in his epilogue to a recent book about PISA (see below), U of Vienna professor Stefan Hopmann notes that PISA rests on two assumptions: that it assesses important knowledge, and that it assesses knowledge important to the economic future of a nation. There is no research, says Hopmann, to support either assumption. So why does the Post accept PISA at face value?

Last week, I sent in an oped, Getting It Backwards, that begins with a quote from an English economist. He takes the proper perspective. Critics in this country look at test scores and worry about competitiveness. He looks at America's #1 economy and impugns the validity of the test comparisons. Prais' argument appears in a book I recently received edited by three profs at the U of Vienna but with chapters from researchers all over Europe that virtually demolishes PISA, the international study that is used in Romer's ads (I know, the article mentions Marc Lampkin as CEO, but if you go to their site you immediately see that Roy is the driving force). Why do American media accept these studies so uncritically?

Gerald W. Bracey

AFT Calls for Abolishing NCLB

Some great reporting here by George Schmidt at the AFT Convention for Substance:

Outgoing AFT president Ed McElroy calls for abolition of No Child Left Behind

By George N. Schmidt

CHICAGO. NAVY PIER AT THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS. JULY 11, 2008.

In a major address to the 3,000 delegates to the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), outgoing AFT President Ed McElroy announced that the union was no longer in favor of tinkering with the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law and called for the abolition of NCLB.

According to the press release summarizing McElroy's remarks: "McElroy pledged that the AFT would work with the next president to move beyond the No Child Left Behind Act (which he called 'an idea whose time has gone') to 'create a new education law that respects the knowledge of classroom professionals and helps teachers and paraprofessionals provide our students with the high-quality education they deserve."

To the loudest cheers of his valedictory speech, McElroy repeated that No Child Left Behind cannot be repaired, and had to be replaced. He reminded the delegates that their duties includes electing an even greater majority of Democratic Party candidates to the House and Senate in Washington in November, and to replacing George W. Bush with Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who received the endorsement of the AFT executive council in June and who will receive the backing of the convention later this weekend. . . .

.

What George Wood Learned

HT to Monty Neill. From Forum for Education and Democracy:

For one of the few times this year, I am alone at school. It is the weekend after all the reports were due for state accountability, after the final requests for next year’s materials were sent to the treasurer’s office, and after I sent off my final report to the school board. Time to clean up my desk, catch up on some reading, write some notes to faculty members—and think about what I learned in school this year.

Working both in a school and with The Forum provides an opportunity to feel the juxtaposition between the rhetoric of policy debates and the reality of the day-to-day lives of our children, their teachers, and their families. Here are a few things I learned this year working in both worlds:

Parents trust the judgment of their child’s teachers above all other measures of student or school success. I have yet to have a parent enter my office and ask for her child’s test scores to see how s/he is doing in school. I have fielded requests to meet with teachers, to review graded work, to observe a classroom, or to discuss with the teacher how the child can do better. This should not be a surprise, given the recent AP poll that showed nearly 70% of parents (and the general public) think classroom work and homework, as compared to standardized tests, are the best measures of student learning and engagement.

What’s missing from this equation is a policy environment that honors the judgment of teachers, supports that judgment, and engages parents in the process. Instead, policy makers tend to rely on large-scale, standardized measures of achievement in which the public has very little trust. The good news is that, among my friends and colleagues at the state and federal level, there is a growing awareness that something is amiss in how we judge our schools. We are using measures in which the public has little faith, measures that are not serving our students’ developmental learning needs .

The question is this: Can we have standards without standardization? If we pay attention to the performance assessments used in places like Rhode Island and other parts of the world, the answer is yes. (See our report on this here.) So maybe the real question is whether or not the reality on the ground can influence the policy made at the top.

There is much to be learned from educators around the world and the policies that support them. When The Forum released its report, Democracy At Risk, it was with a fair amount of internal discussion around the issue of international comparisons of schools. Many critics have pointed out that international test scores unfairly paint all of our schools as failing and are used to alarm the general population. There is also the question of what types of measures these comparisons rely upon. Fair enough. Our intention is to encourage debate about these things and see what we can learn from examining them.

What I learned from looking at these far-from-perfect numbers is that the nations that do well on these comparisons do things I wish we did, including:
Funding their schools equitably, often nationally, and refusing to allow the disparities we see in this nation;
Taking care of their children by providing national health care, early childhood education, safe neighborhoods, and quality housing;
Supporting a professional teaching corps by providing financial support to become a teacher, ensuring mentoring programs, and investing in ongoing professional development;
Making sure there is a supply of well-prepared and well-supported teachers for every child and every school;
Relying upon performance assessments, and assessments of learning at the school and classroom level, to gauge how schools are doing;
Using assessments that engage students in higher order thinking processes to solve real-world problems; and
Refusing to use standardized assessments for high-stakes decisions.

Every time I mention this list to policy-makers they seem astounded. What I have learned this year is that we have a mythological notion of what is going on in schools around the world. We believe something like this: In other nations kids go to school all the time, study primarily math, take tests almost daily, and are subjected to a great deal of drill and memorization work. In fact, nothing could be further from the case and to pursue a policy agenda based on this mythology will deeply damage our schools.

Education is still not an election issue—and maybe that is a good thing. Again, according to polling, education is not an issue very high on the charts when it comes to national elections. According to the Public Education Network’s survey, education follows well behind gas prices and employment when respondents are asked about crucial issues. And when it comes to a presidential candidate, only 10% of respondents indicate that his/her stand on education is of most importance.

That is not to say there are not significant differences between the two major party candidates when it comes to education. What it does indicate is that local schools are, for the most part, seen as just that—local. The public knows they carry the responsibility for their schools. But they also want the federal government to help carry out this responsibility—as opposed to a ‘scolding nanny’ who seems to do nothing but demand better results on measures of limited value while carrying out the task with fewer and fewer resources.

We know our schools have a national impact; most importantly on the type of citizens we provide our democracy. As such, they should be part of our national policy debates--which takes me back to the two other things learned this year. What we need is a system of national policy supports for schools that insures every child, regardless of condition, has equal access to a good school, with good teachers, where what they learn is judged by what they can do on complex tasks.

That may be too much to wish for by the time I get back to this desk in August. But what I have learned is that we know how and what to do—I do not yet know if we have the will to do it.

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