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KIPP is one of the charter school franchises that's been tossed around in Seattle  by ed reformers as an option if charter schools were to be legalized in our state. I've been following KIPP and several articles that I have come across are listed in the right column of this blog under "KIPP". It could possibly be the worst example of a school experience a child could have but they do market well. I was reading a post by Leonie Haimson that is well worth a read "At KIPP, I would wake up sick, every single day". The post is an interview that Leonie had with a former KIPP parent and the parent's daughter who was a student attending KIPP. At the end of the post was the following comment written by a former KIPP teacher that I wanted to share with you  today

Randomized trials are a common way to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of education programs. This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach for America (TFA). The TFA experiment faced challenges with recruitment, randomization of students, and analysis. The solutions to those challenges may be instructive for experimenters who wish to study future interventions at the student or classroom level. The article concludes that within-school random assignment studies such as the TFA evaluation are challenging but, under the right conditions, are also feasible and potentially very rewarding in terms of generating useful evidence for policy.

Over the past three years, more than $75 million in federal education funding has been diverted to just a handful of private, pro-voucher advocacy groups. This torrent of public funding appears to benefit and strengthen the advocacy infrastructure created by a network of right-wing foundations dedicated to the privatization of public education.  

Dissent Magazine uncovers a conference that DFER executive director Joe Williams spoke at in 2010. At that conference, Williams actually advocated for charter schools to spend money on advocacy organizations and lobbying through their "per pupil dollars" - meaning the very same funds that are supposed to be used to educate students. Williams justified this by saying that charters are an attempt to run a school "as a business" and that businesses of course allocate their funding "right off the bat" to "lobbying, advocacy work"

The young teacher started right off making a rookie mistake in the opening minutes of his first class, on his very first day. "How many of you know what a liter is?" he asked his high school math class. "Give me a thumbs up if you know, thumbs down if you don't." None of the kids responded, so he entreated, "Come on, I just need to know where you are. Thumbs up if you know, thumbs down if you don't." An experienced teacher would not have asked students to volunteer their ignorance. An experienced teacher might have held up an empty milk carton and asked someone to identify it. Once someone had said, "that's a quart of milk," the veteran might have pulled out a one-gallon container to be identified. Only then would she have shown them a liter container, explaining that most countries in the world use a different measuring system, et cetera. But the rookie didn't know any better. He'd graduated from Yale that spring, had a few weeks of training that summer, thanks to Teach for America, and then was given his own classroom.

"Producer, stadium developers donate to group backing Villaraigosa's school board candidates," is a piece detailing how fringe right wing billionaire Philip Anschutz has donated at least $100,000 to the Mayor Failure's Coalition for School Reform - a slush fund to elect privatization friendly school board candidates for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

In a series of recent blog posts and in a forthcoming article I have discussed the potential problems with using bad, versus entirely inappropriate measures for determining teacher effectiveness.  I have pointed out, for example, that using value-added measures to estimate teacher effectiveness and then determine whether a teacher should be denied tenure, or have their tenure removed might raise due process concerns which arise from the imprecision and potential outright inaccuracy of teacher effectiveness estimates derived from such methods. I have also explained that in some states like New Jersey, which have adopted Student Growth Percentile measures as an evaluation tool, that where those measures are used as a basis for dismissing teachers, teachers (or their attorney's) might simply rely on the language of the authors of those methods to point out that they are not designed to, nor were they intended to attribute responsibility for the measured student growth to the teacher. Where attribution of responsibility is off the table the dismissing a teacher on an assumption of ineffectiveness based on these measures is entirely inappropriate, and a potential violation of the teacher's due process rights. But, the problem is that state legislatures are increasingly mandating that these measures absolutely be used when making high stakes personnel decisions.

Lamenting that millions of American children receive "a third world education," Mitt Romney on Wednesday called for poor and disabled students to be able to use federal funds to attend any public, private or online school they choose.

Public education has been a disaster for Andrew Cuomo, and vice versa. Right from the start of his administration, he's used the wrong tactics, the wrong strategies and the wrong sequences if he had any intention of actually elevating New York's public education system and giving especially stressed urban and rural school districts a much-needed boost.

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we've turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court's ruling that racially segregated schools were "inherently unequal" shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned "Black Monday" and vowed "massive resistance." But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

The core issues at stake here are the same ones that students and workers around the world are facing right now: austerity and the increasing privatization of education.

A recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed the escalating number of students who have been suspended since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the city's schools more than a decade ago. Some believe one contributing factor may lie in the growing number of the public charter schools created during his tenure that develop their own discipline codes and have higher than average suspension rates. Advocates for Children, a nonprofit that represents the legal rights of public school children, believe that the rise in charters (77 in 2008 and 135 in 2012) has gone hand in hand with the fact that a number of them exclude children-particularly those with special needs-at higher than average rates.

It's always good to see issues of school segregation and integration back on the table as part of the education reform discussion; most recently, the discussion of this important reform goal was triggered in New York by Eva Moskowitz's latest demand of the state that her chain of schools should be exempted from following the state charter law which requires that all charters serve high-needs students in proportions comparable to those of local schools. However, Moskowitz's claim that her purpose in seeking this right to play by different rules than other charters is simply to expand school integration is deeply disingenuous.

That sense of immediacy, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the fierce urgency of now," gave rise to the charter school movement. Charter schools are public schools that operate under separate management, giving them the freedom to innovate, to refine, and to tailor approaches to specific groups of students. Many charters have longer school days, weeks, and years. We have seen urban charter schools that perform better than their traditional public school counterparts, making up ground that students have lost in traditional schools. They are a right-now education solution for children who need a high-quality education.

This post is about a for-profit charter management organization, Imagine Schools, and real estate/facilities. I'm using the dataset ImagineSchools posted here. Imagine is one of the largest charter operators in the country. The company currently operates 70-something schools. A common challenge for charter schools is access to facilities. Some districts give charters access to entire schools, some allow district schools and charter schools to operate out of the same building ("co-location"), and some charters secure facilities through non-profit or for-profit organization in the private sector. To the best of my knowledge, Imagine does not have any schools in district facilities. Instead, Imagine either owns the schools through the company's real estate arm, SchoolHouse Finance, LLC, or partners with one of two real estate investment trusts ("REITs"), Entertainment Properties Trust and Inland Public Properties Development. As of right now, EPT owns 27 facilities used by Imagine and IPPD owns seven facilities used by Imagine. To gather financial information I collected data from IRS 990 forms for the years 2008 through 20101. I pulled the following information

The Boston Consulting Group has identified up to 60 Philadelphia school buildings as potential candidates for closure and helped line up private vendors willing to replace the School District's unionized blue-collar workforce at a $50 million discount. These steps are just part of the blue-chip consulting firm's far-ranging behind-the-scenes effort to help the beleaguered city school system rethink how it does business. The broad scope of BCG's efforts this spring are detailed in previously unreleased "statements of work" obtained by the Notebook/NewsWorks under Pennsylvania's Right to Know law.

"In 1954 the Supreme Court declared that public education is "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education stood for the proposition that the federal government would no longer allow states and municipalities to deny equal educational opportunity to a historically oppressed racial minority. Ruling unanimously, the justices overturned the noxious concept that "separate" education could ever be "equal." Yet today, nearly 60 years later, our schools remain separate and unequal. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are nonwhite. The average white student attends a school where 77 percent of his or her peers are also white. Schools today are "as segregated as they were in the 1960s before busing began." We are living in a world in which schools are patently separate."

"Several months ago I described the problems in a study that seemed to have great policy relevance, but little empirical support for its contentions.  Sadly, examples of studies like these abound in education, and another is currently making headlines.  "Vouchers Boost Blacks' College Enrollment Rates," claim the stories-- and boy do the effects seem large! A "24 percent increase" in college attendance among black recipients of those vouchers-- what a dream. And it must be an accurate statement, right, since this was an experiment?"

"This week I went to a screening of Won't Back Down starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal.  The movie is about a mom and a teacher who band together and use the Parent Trigger law (which is never mentioned by name) to take over and turnaround a failing elementary school in Pittsburgh.  The film is loosely based on real events (though in my research I couldn't find anything other than the Los Angeles based parent trigger law, which was backed by a big charter school organization), and produced by the same man who produced Waiting for Superman. As someone who has been deeply embroiled in the discussion and reality of parents advocating for better schools, for student and parent rights, and as a PA C0-President who has worked closely with many teachers and administrators, this movie got to me on many levels. So, I have decided to break it down in two parts: As a movie and then as a propaganda film."

"Why are these 29,000 teachers and school workers going on strike in the nation's third-largest public school district? Because they want what all workers want: fair pay and decent working conditions. They also want what all teachers want - to serve their students to their best of their abilities. Here's a few things you need to know about the strike, and why the CTU is right and Mayor Rahm Emanuel - who has failed to fairly bargain with the union - is wrong:"