Memphis Commercial Appeal Awful Again

A few days ago the Corporate Appeal has a story by Jane Roberts on the front page above the fold that typifies their coverage of the charter school issue.  A clip:

. . . .Nearly a year after former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton launched his charter school business, he draws a salary of $200,000 a year as chief executive officer although enrollment is a fraction of projections, and he has raised no outside money.

As of March 10, W.E.B. Du Bois Charter Consortium had 655 students, down from the 1,800 Herenton projected a year ago. His nine-school consortium has dwindled to five schools. There are no new schools in the hopper for next year, although his five-year budget is based on enrollment reaching 4,000 in 2014.. . . .

My comment posted at the Corporate Appeal website:

Front page, above the fold, for this story?

Herenton has served as a convenient target any time criticism arises about the charter industry that is draining the public coffers in Memphis. The Roberts story allows all the suburbanites to vent their outrage over morning coffee at someone who has no connection to the Gates Foundation, other than the fact that he was given his little charter fiefdom by Gates and Hyde to buy his support for the demolition of Memphis Public Schools four years ago.

Now he stands in the way of the corporate bottom feeders and profiteers who want to carve up Herenton's old territory for more chain gang schools like KIPP or the remote control test factories like Rocketship, where children are tethered to a computer screen for hours each day doing digital worksheets.

As Nashville_Native points out in an earlier comment, the Commercial Appeal dares not look inside the corporate charter black box that remains out of sight of the state taxpayers who are pouring into it over $80 million each year for the 10,000 segregated charter students in Memphis to be culturally sterilized.

Haslam and Huffman Named in Teacher Lawsuits Over Nitwit Evaluation Scheme

Full story from the Tennessean:

Tennessee’s largest teachers’ union is suing Gov. Bill Haslam and his commissioner of education over an evaluation tool they say penalizes good educators unfairly.

It’s the second suit filed recently against the Knox County Board of Education on behalf of a teacher, but this one expands legal action to name top state officials as defendants. The plaintiff is Mark Taylor, a science teacher held up by the union as an example of why they believe a tool that scores teachers based on student learning gains doesn’t work.

Taylor teaches high-school-level physical science to Farragut Middle School’s brightest eighth-graders. But those students take the regular eighth-grade Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program science test, with questions unrelated to the advanced curriculum Taylor teaches. They still do well on the TCAP because they’re smart, but their gains drop slightly from those earned in seventh grade.

As a result, Taylor misses out on a performance-based bonus.

His suit, filed Wednesday, includes an email exchange between his parents and former University of Tennessee professor William Sanders, who invented the learning gains measurement in the early 1980s. They used to be Sunday school classmates. In the exchange, Sanders says his tool wouldn’t work Taylor’s case, and the students should be given an end-of-course exam to measure Taylor’s effectiveness, not the TCAP.

“Everyone admits it’s completely unfair, but everyone admits they’re not willing to do anything to fix it,” Taylor told The Tennessean in February.

In the first suit, filed earlier this month, the Tennessee Education Association and alternative education teacher Lisa Trout said Knox County Schools unconstitutionally used Tennessee Value Added Assessment System data in bonus decisions — and Trout missed out after the district miscalculated her score.

Student learning gains make up 35 percent of evaluation scores. After supporting that system in 2010 when Tennessee applied for federal Race to the Top funds, TEA has flipped its support of tying learning gains to it.

Haslam’s spokesman said it would be inappropriate to comment on pending legislation. In the past, Huffman has criticized TEA for reversing itself on supporting the measure.

Expect more lawsuits on behalf of more teachers, the TEA warns.

Joey Garrison contributed to this report. 

Reach Heidi Hall at 615-726-5977 or on Twitter @HeidiHallTN

Charter Bill Mounts to $78 Million for Next Year as School Budget Deficit Soars

This year, alone, Shelby County plans to close ten schools and turn them over for charter conversion.  It is now becoming increasingly clear that, without a huge infusion of Federal funds, turning Memphis into a New Orleans type charter chain gang system is going to an expensive ordeal for the pampered citizens of the leafy suburbs.  I guess that is what NOLA school board president, Phyllis Landrieu, meant when she said that she thanked Katrina all the time, back in 2006, when politicos of the Big Easy were rolling around in $1.8 billion of FEMA cash.

The privileged suburbanites of Shelby County's may be in for a big surprise when property taxes have to be raised to pay for out-of-state corporations to bring in their TFA missionaries to culturally neuter and behaviorally sterilize the black children of Memphis in the segregated charters.  This year's budget deficit for schools of $103 million could almost be eliminated if the County were not handing over $78 million for charters.  Losing students to charters ends up starving the remaining public schools.  From an earlier story at the Commercial Appeal:

“Just because we lose some employees doesn’t mean we won’t be running the same kind of services,” he said, adding that the district still must have HR and back office support for the charter schools. “With the charters, the ASD, school closures, a lot of funds will not be coming into the district.”

About 8,830 students are enrolled charter schools this year in the school district. By next year, enrollment is projected to be 13,688, plus 2,500 more students in ASD charters. For every student the district loses, it must subtract $8,000 in state and local funding.

Now it does not take a mathematician to understand that 13,688 x $8,000 per student = $109,504,000 lost to charters by next year.  

But even with such draconian cuts on the table this year, Superintendent Hopson plans to satisfy the Gates Foundation with almost $16,000,000 planned for a merit pay plan, even though repeated research studies have demonstrated that these schemes to not improve achievement or close the gaps.  

Also, the Superintendent plans to offer children from closed public schools the opportunity for "blended learning" in their new charter schools, which means that they will be tethered to computer screens for large chunks of the day doing digital handouts.  

Hopson Blaming Parents for School Closures

Tomorrow evening the titans of King Cotton in Memphis will decide the next round of public school turnovers to the corporate welfare kings and queens lined up at the public feeding trough.

Superintendent Dorsey Hopson is correct about one thing: closing these schools is not about saving money. If it were, he would be hard pressed to explain the economics of handing over $7500 per child to corporate charter operators hand selected by the "Achievement" School District, which is headed by a former corporate charter kingpin.  See this earlier piece on how the charter takeover cycle works.

For that $7500 per child, the County gets a culturally sterilized child who is taught to answer "how high" when told to jump by white corporate missionary girls from TFA or or MTR who are placed in positions once occupied by teachers.

If anyone were to believe Mr. Hopson on any of his other points, they would have concede that it is the parents'  fault that these poverty-wracked and malignantly neglected public schools should be closed. In fact, Hopson takes this own irresponsibility one step further by making his closure choices contingent upon whether parents have submitted an improvement plan to keep them open:

“The problem is that the population in these communities does not support the schools,” Hopson said. “Again, neither of these proposals addresses the declining population.”

Really? Community schools should be decimated because parents working two minimum wage jobs cannot put together a school plan that can stand up under the scrutiny of lawyers and economists and greedy charter operators?

This rationale ranks right up there near the pinnacle of all time political cowardice, and those who show up tomorrow evening should be taking close notes who not to vote for in the next round of elections.

Shelby County has a chance to do something to address educational inequality and segregation as it redraws boundaries examines its option, but instead of using proven methods to make schools attractive so that parents will come back to them, Mr. Hopson and his handlers have a corporate apartheid solution in mind that destroys the profession of teaching and the art and science of education.

Meanwhile, those claiming that education in Memphis is the civil rights issue of this generation are working overtime behind the scenes to institute the the kind of Jim Crow schooling that Memphis children have not seen for a half century.

Be at the School Board Meeting Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 5:30.  160 South Hollywood.

How the Charter School Replacement Strategy Works

The Gates business plan for Memphis schools requires public school closures and corporate charter start-ups to replace them.  A dozen schools are on the hit list for the coming year, and the charter operators are lined up waiting for the buildings to become empty.  Parents, however, are not nearly as uninformed as county officials who are doing the Gates dirty work believe. See video here.

How the Charterization Cycle Works

So here is how the charter school takeover cycle works.  First, we need public schools isolated by years of neglect, segregation, and poverty--schools that everyone outside the affected communities would rather forget about.   Memphis has an ample supply of these schools in the poorest neighborhoods.

These neighborhood schools make easy targets for profiteers and ideologues convinced (or pretending to believe) that these public schools have not met accountability expectations over the decades because of lazy teachers, public bureaucracy, unconcerned parents, unions, or other reasons having nothing do with poverty, race, or a sordid history of inequality. 

Since 2002,NCLB’s impossible demand for schools to reach 100 percent proficiency by 2014 brought the accountability issue to a crisis state, beginning with the poorest schools where students’ scores were the lowest.  

Parents who could afford to, over the past decade, moved or sent their children to schools not in the dreaded “Needs Improvement” zones, thus leaving the poorest schools with smaller and academically weaker student populations and, thus, with even less capacity to make the yearly progress on test scores that was required by NCLB. 

Further deprived, then, of resources both human and monetary, these schools are eventually labeled “underperforming” and “under-utilized,” thus clearing the way for school closure attempts.  Standing in the way are parents, students, and teachers.  It will take bodies to block this juggernaut.

Waiting in the wings are the corporate charter operators and management companies, ready to open total compliance corporate charter schools staffed with temporary missionaries from Teach for America, or one of the other organizations that emulate the TFA practice of placing white privileged young women with no experience or training in schools that need the most professional and mature teachers.

With empty buildings from the shuttered public schools sitting idle, the charter operators step up to claim them by offering a token payment to the County. (Note KIPP's early bargaining position int the video above.)

Because these corporate charters are schools of choice, students who are not performing as expected or who resist the penal model of schooling are expected to choose another school.  Otherwise, they would bring down the charter test scores, thus tarnishing brands like KIPP.  

These rejected or ejected students end up back in the remaining public schools in surrounding areas, which further concentrates the low test performers in the surviving schools.   

Further weakening of the surviving schools comes from absorbing further austerity measures from the County to pay the $7,518 for every public school student lost to a charter school.  If another 2,000 students are lost to new charters next year in Memphis, that amounts to $15,036,000 leaving the public schools and going to that amounts to corporate welfare charter schools getting fat on taxpayer dollars.  Meanwhile, the County’s $24,000,000 schools deficit is used to justify more cuts and further weakening of the public school’s capacity to meet testing expectations. 

(See this earlier post that provides links to the Report that predicted a $212 donut hole in Shelby County's school budget from charter expansion.)

With a State and federal continuing commitment to close the bottom five percent of tested schools each year, it is easy to see that there will be a continuing supply of bottom five percent-ers until all public schools labeled for corporate reform takeover have been “turned around.” 

At that point, we may suspect that other money generating shortcomings will have been identified for those schools, so that the lucrative business of education reform can continue without pause in perpetuity, with the public stuck paying the bill for an unending string of corporate non-solutions to the problems that we refuse to acknowledge (poverty, segregation, corporate control of schools).

For those who want to believe that charter schools are providing a superior “product,” I invite you to look just below to a post from June 2013 when the latest national charter school study was released:

JUNE 26, 2013 BY JIM HORN

The corporate charter industry is working every angle to put the best makeup on 

the CREDO charter study of 2013.  And “news coverage” in Tennessee shows their efforts paying off.

Two examples of Tennessee media  “coverage” of the 2013 CREDO charter school study are provided below, and as you can see, they are both lifted from the Tennessee Charter Schools Association blog post.  Who said blogs are not respected sources of information!?

The blog post, of course, is the typical self-serving propaganda we have come to expect from the charter school promotion groups, especially the bare-knuckled privateers that the Tennessee Tea Party has put charge of containing and culturally sterilizing the children of the urban poor in Tennessee.

I have provided links to all three “stories,” but I have only included the first sentences in order to give you the essence of how lazy and irresponsible reporting come to mislead the public on how their money is spent for corporate benefit:

The source, from the Tennessee Charter Schools Association (TCSA): 

“Tennessee is among eleven states in which charter school performance has outpaced traditional public school growth in both mathematics and reading, according to a newly published study by the independent Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University.” 

The “news” story from the Tennessean: 

“Tennessee’s charter schools have outpaced traditional public school growth in reading and mathematics in 2013, according to a study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University.”

The “news” story from UT’s public radio, WUOT: 

“A new study finds Tennessee’s charter schools are outpacing public schools in reading and mathematics this year.”

Now if you are an average citizen reading either of these “information sources,” you may conclude that Tennessee charters are outperforming public schools on the state tests.  Which, of course, is the intent of the TCSA propaganda.  What the reporters for the Tennessean or WUOT did not do, is to do what CREDO had done by indicating howthe charter and public comparisons were made by matching students demographically within their communities:

Using the VCR [virtual control record] approach, a “virtual twin” was constructed for each charter student by drawing on the available records of traditional public school (TPS) students with identical traits and identical or very similar prior test scores who were enrolled in TPS that the charter students would have likely attended if they were not in their charter school.

Factors included in the matching criteria were:

• Grade level

• Gender9

• Race/Ethnicity

• Free or Reduced-Price Lunch Eligibility

• English Language Learner Status

• Special Education Status

• Prior test score on state achievement tests (p. 8)

In other words, Tennessee’s economically disadvantaged charter school student test scores are compared to what we could expect in the poorest public schools that have been malignantly neglected for decades.  

When Tennessee’s 27 [now 41] charter schools’ growth scores are compared with the state average, the comparisons show that the majority of Tennessee charters are testing below the state average (which, by the way, is significantly below the national NAEP average).  

Please see this post from 2011 to get an idea of how the charter investment groups in Tennessee are using Wall Street methods to put lipstick on their pig.

Next School Privatization Moves in Memphis

A local columnist in Memphis, Wendi Thomas, has a cynical piece today in the Memphis Corporate Appeal on the planned shutdown of 12 more Memphis schools.  

The Shelby County School Board, which represents the interests of the corporate machine, has brought in an economist from Chicago to assure the local media and politicians that the closure of 47 schools in Chicago is fine, because, after all, the closures have not affected test scores in Chicago. How the Chicago researcher knows this is hard to tell, since the closures were only approved at the end of the last school year!  So, school closures in Memphis will be just fine, the illogic goes, because someone said it will not hurt test scores in Chicago.  

The meeting will be at 6 PM today at 160 South Hollywood in Memphis.

Below is a chart that Wendi Thomas posted from the Achievement School District, which attempts to justify the closures on low test scores and low enrollment.   

If low enrollment were a criterion that really mattered in making decisions on closing schools, then almost all the charter school in Memphis would shut down: only one of the 22 charter schools in Memphis has over 400 students, and almost half of the 22 charters have fewer than 100 students.  

Will Shelby County Schools try to make the case that turning over closed public schools to smaller corporate charter operators will improve the "programmatic utilization rate?"  I'd say.

In terms of low test scores of targeted schools that the chart above identifies as  having "less than 40% Proficient," this is another phony criterion being used to justify school privatization in Memphis.  

Note in the chart below that the Memphis average is closer to 30% of students at Proficient.  Are the poorest schools supposed to be better than the average school in terms of test scores??

When we look at the Memphis charter schools in the chart below from the latest State report (2012), we see that very few of the replacement charter schools have proficiency rates over 40 percent.

In fact, we find a number of charter schools'  Math or Reading/Language Arts scores below Wendi Thomas's public poster school of failure, with its 20 percent of children proficient in reading and math. Why is the school board of Shelby County not howling to shut down these segregated charter schools?

Please note, too, the vast differences in the percentages of ELL and SPED students in Memphis charters, compared to Memphis public schools:

Below are my comments on the Wendi Thomas column, which is here if you can get by the firewall.

Let's face it, these planned closures will serve the needs of corporate charter school operators and the local/state political cowards who are flush with Gates cash and federal grants for coming up with this scheme.

Ms. Davis is quick to note that leaving these malignantly neglected schools open will not solve poverty in the community, but she does not acknowledge that closing them will have the opposite effect, as these schools, once closed, will remove the principal sources of any remaining pride in these impoverished communities, These closures will simply add to the reasons for others to flee these areas that could use some of the hundreds of millions that will be outsourced to charter operators to open schools with fewer students.

The charters that replace them will pay corporate foundations to provide charter reform schools that look more like minimum security prisons than schools, with white missionary teachers who work for a couple of years before moving on to grad school. It's not hard to tell who the winners and losers are here, especially since most of the charter reform schools do no better on tests than the shuttered public schools.

What will happen to the empty schools? Easy--they will be handed over the KIPPs and KIPP knockoffs to use for a few dollars a year, if that.

Please note, too, that if the size of the student population were the issue here that most of the charter schools in Memphis should be shut down, since most are smaller than these public schools that are on the chopping block.

Finally, to Ms. Davis's callous calculus in weighing the effects of closure in Chicago of almost 50 schools. To reduce down the human loss and the community disruption to whether or not test scores went up or down as a result seems to me to show a level of indifference that I am unaccustomed to seeing, even in the Commercial Appeal.

Use of Value-Added Is "Parochial and Ineffectual"

Tennessee is the test site for every crackpot, over-the-top corporate thought disorder that is translatable into an ed industry scheme that fronts as education policy.  The state has TFA lawyer and the former Mr. Michelle Rhee, Kevin Huffman,  running the schools from Nashville as Commissioner, and earlier this year Huffman and Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change, a front organization for laundering corporate education cash, came up with a plan to use student test scores (TVAAS) as the sole criterion for decisions related to teacher licensure renewal.

As a result, Tennessee teachers have finally awakened from their slumber and now represent one of the major fronts in the war against high stakes testing and corporate control of schools.

Below is Part 3 in four part analysis by TEA chief legal counsel, Rick Colbert, who lays out Huffman's deception and criminal misuse of VAM.  Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2, which provide good starting points for any legal team as they prepare class action lawsuits across the nation.