About Those Charters That Are Taking Over Newark

Let's go back to today's usurpation of democracy in Newark. The state-appointed superintendent, Cami Anderson, overrode the elected yet powerless local advisory board to allow for the closing of several public schools and subsequent leasing of the properties to five charters. This all happened immediately after the state reaffirmed that they will retain control over Newark's schools; the justification was that the schools are not run well, even though it's the state itself that's controlling them.

Yes, they are that shameless at the NJDOE. But more on the Broadies that hatch these schemes later...

Let's look instead at who the lucky winners in the charter school property giveaway are:

Five charters, Paulo Freire, Newark Legacy, 100 Legacy Academy, Team Academy and North Star Academy, will lease facilities previously known as Burnet Street School, Madison School, West Side NAF Academy, Eighteenth Avenue School and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School starting next school year.

The only lease agreement the board did not contest was that of Paulo Freire Charter School, whose chief is former Science Park High School teacher Tauheedah Baker-Jones. The board voted unanimously to approve its lease of space at Burnet Street School. [emphasis mine]

Well, what do we know about these schools? Paulo Freire, which was approved by the board, is a brand new school, opening in September of 2012. So, according to its website, is 100 Legacy. Newark Legacy opened its doors in 2010, but only to kindergarteners and first graders who moved up a grade level each year. So we have no academic records with which to judge the school's successes (the third graders will take their first NJASK this spring).

Apparently, the plan is to close public schools - some of which were "beating the odds" - and replace them with charters that don't have a record of success. To be fair: maybe there are good reasons to believe these schools will succeed. Having a respected educator as your leader is always a good sign; of course, Anderson could have just hired Baker-Jones to run one of the public schools.

In any case, what about TEAM and North Star? Well, thanks to Bruce Baker, we actually know quite a bit about both.

I'd rather Baker put out his own synopsis of his work on these two, but let's take a quick look anyway. Baker did an extensive post on TEAM last year:

Misinformed charter punditry doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help the public to make more informed decisions either about choices for their own children or about policy preferences more generally. It also doesn’t help charter operators get their jobs done and it doesn’t help those working in traditional public schools focus on things that really matter.  This post is in direct response to the irresponsible and unjustified statement below from a recent editorial in the NJ Star Ledger:

The best of these schools, like the TEAM Academy in Newark, are miracles in our midst. With the same demographic mix of students as district schools, their kids are doing much better in basic skills. And they are doing it for less money, in a setting that is safe and orderly.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2011/10/nj_sets_right_course_on_charte.html

Nearly every phrase in this statement is misleading or simply wrong. And that’s a shame. My apologies for being trapped in meetings yesterday and not having a chance to return calls on this topic. I might have been able to head this off.  Perhaps most disturbingly, this stuff really doesn’t help out TEAM Academy much either. Readers of my blog know that I often go after stories about the high flying Newark and Jersey City charters which, for the most part, stick out like sore thumbs when it comes to demographics and attrition. Readers also realize that it is not that I think these schools are doing a bad job. Rather, I think many are doing a great service. But, I am concerned that the media often deceives the public into believing that the “successes” of schools like North Star and Robert Treat can be scaled up to improve the entire system, which they cannot, because they simply do not serve students like those in the rest of the system.

Bruce goes on to show that TEAM is a decent charter school; in many ways, it's the best of Newark's "successful" charters when it comes to not cultivating a different student population. But it's not producing any miracles: it still has fewer special education students and student in poverty, it has a relatively high attrition rate, and it spends a significant amount of money to get its results.

North Star, on the other hand...

Here’s North Star on the map, in context. Smaller lighter circles are lower % free lunch schools. Most of the charters in this map are… well.. smaller lighter circles (with charters identified with a red asterisk). Not all, however, are as non-representative as North Star.

[...]

My point here is not that these are bad schools, or that they are necessarily engaging in any particular immoral or unethical activity. But rather, that a significant portion of the apparent success of schools like North Star is a) attributable to the demographically different population they serve to begin with and b) attributable to the patterns of student attrition that occur within cohorts over time. [emphasis mine]

Again, I don't want to spend too much time recapping Baker's work, because he can do that much better himself (I hope he will). And I want to do everything I can to encourage all of you to go back and read his original posts.

The point here is that, out of the five charters slated to take the locations created by closing public schools, we have significant data on only two. And that data shows that these schools are not replicable. They do not serve the same student populations, and they rely on funding outside of the public school budgets.

The NJDOE is overseeing the replacement of public schools in Newark that serve all children and answer to the public with charter schools that do not.

I don't know about you, but I find this incredibly disturbing.

Charter Schools: Bad For the Planet

Darcie has a great post updating the Regis Academy charter school application. Regis, you'll remember, is coming to the high-performing Cherry Hill School District, despite the fact that the community neither wants nor needs it. Regis's founder, Pastor Amir Khan, admitted that he needed the revenue from the charter school - courtesy of local taxpayers - to help pay his mortgage (so much for the 1st Amendment), even though it looks like he is still is danger of being evicted from his church/school property .

Originally, Regis was supposed to draw from three other districts contiguous to its location in Cherry Hill. But as the community has rejected the school and overwhelmingly decided not to send its children there, Pastor Khan has had to draw children from other districts - in contravention of state law. I guess the Regis folks figure the Broadies who have infested the NJDOE will just simply ignore the rules whenever they feel like it. Wonder whatever gave them that idea?

Darcie includes this graph of the proposed sending districts for Regis:

That's a lot of different places! Let's map it:

Note the scale in the lower left corner; this area is over 50 miles across. Cherry Hill, where Regis is supposed to be located, is marked in blue.

Does this make any sense? Why would we spend all this money and waste all this gas to transport a few children from all over South Jersey to attend a charter school? I could see it if Regis were a specialized school for autistic children, or those with emotional disabilities, or even highly-capable kids. But here's what Regis wants to do with its kids after carting them all over the state:

Rev. Amir Khan, the controversial head of the Solid Rock Worship Center, says students at Regis Academy will receive their own Sprint tablet. Every classroom will be equipped with Blackboard, a multi-media learning platform more prevalent in colleges than elementary schools."We believe we can bring innovation and technology to children starting in kindergarten,” says Khan, who ran a telecommunications company, among other entrepreneurial ventures, before becoming a pastor. "There are ways advanced technology can be taught in basic formats to make it very interesting, such as opening up devices to see how they communicate from one phone to another or opening up computers to see how they establish a network.”  (emphasis mine)  

Yes, here in New Jersey, we are considering leaving the rest of you a big carbon footprint just so kids can open up a computer.

Just another "unavoidable" cost...

ADDING: An unbelievable twist to this story - written only hours after I posted:

Seems that Regis, facing eviction from their current facility where Amir Khan also houses his church, Solid Rock Worchip Center, as well as many other ventures, has found themselves a new facility!  


How did the districts find out about the change of facility?  


It must have been at a Regis Board of Trustees Meeting, right?  Concerned citizens have attended EVERY meeting, to stay abreast of any big happenings.  After all, public dollars will be spent to educate Regis students, so the public has a right to have a say in how that money is spent.  


WRONG!  


There has been no mention of the change of facility at ANY Regis Meeting.  In fact, their website still uses the original address for the facility the Camden Diocese is evicting them from!

Well, then Amir Khan must have broke the news in the press!  He seems to LOVE talking to the press, even when the chips are down!


WRONG!


Just recently, perhaps even in the last few days, Amir Khan told WHYY reporter Jen Howard that he had struck a deal with the Diocese! 

Well, then the NJDOE must have let the districts know before they conducted that preparedness visit last week, which included a tour of the facility!  

WRONG!

In fact, unbeknownst to the districts, the preparedness visit was conducted at the NEW facility!



The districts found out when the address on the transportation requests they received from Regis did not match the address of the facility.  


Classic.

So the sending districts didn't know about the new facility, but the NJDOE did? Does the town? Do the neighbors have any say in the zoning? Were traffic impact studies done?

Unbelievable.

Newark Will NEVER Have Control Of Its Schools

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the state-appointed superintendent of Newark's schools' told its duly elected advisory board to go jump in the Passaic:

Newark’s top education official has overruled the wishes of the district’s advisory school board and will lease five district-owned facilities to charter schools, a district spokeswoman said.

Because the district is state controlled, virtually any decision made by the district’s elected school board can be overturned by Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson or acting state Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf.

On Monday, the board voted to strike down four of the five proposed lease agreements after deciding at an earlier meeting to table balloting. Many parents and community leaders oppose the leases.

[...]

School board member Marques-Aquil Lewis said the board voted against some leases because Anderson hadn’t provided information about agreements that allowed charters to share space with district school students this past year.

"How can we vote on these leases when we don’t know the results from last year?" he asked. "This decision is a clear sign of disrespect to the community."

Lewis added the board plans to seek legal advice about reversing Anderson’s decision. [emphasis mine]

Well, I'm sure old Uncle Eli will pick up the legal fees for the district; he's paying for all the other consultants. But here's what really kills me: at the exact same time Anderson was overruling the board, the NJDOE was ensuring that she had the power to do so.

Here is a letter, dated July 2, that explicitly rejects any basis for returning even partial local control to Newark:



Why can't the good people of Newark run their own schools? Because the state says:

In light of a decline in the area of Fiscal Management, the Commissioner cannot
determine that there is substantial evidence the district has adequate programs, personnel and policies in place and in operation to ensure that the prior progress demonstrated by the district has been sustained. For example, business personnel were not properly implementing the district’s policy regarding purchase orders; there were confirming orders. Additionally, the district does not have adequate internal controls to comply with the Public Contracts Law. Specifically, there were instances in which purchases exceeded the quote threshold without evidence of quotes. Moreover, the child nutrition program does not operate without a general fund transfer each year. These concerns are heightened given the size of the district’s budget and the fact that these areas were also noncompliant during previous evaluations.

Anyone see the many layers of irony here?

• The state-appointed superintendent won't release information to the local advisory board to help them make a decision, but she retains her override power because the state says the board isn't forthcoming with evidence that it's following policy.
• The state criticizes Newark's schools for not being in compliance with policy, even though the state has run the schools for 18 years! And there was a decade of state monitoring before that!
• Superintendent Cami Anderson, empowered by the state, is overriding the board, after a year of running the district. Yet the same state that gave her the power to override local control admits the district has not improved since its last evaluation! 

There is simply no way that Newark, under the current New Jersey educational regime, is going to get its schools back. The Broadies who have infested the NJDOE want charters, and they want them run by their people. Nothing is going to stop them; certainly not a bunch of noisy parents who don't want to see school funds dumped into charters that don't do any better than the local public schools.

It's worth pointing out that Supermayor is just fine with this:

Newark Mayor Cory Booker scolded the board for striking down most of the leases and said he supports Anderson’s decision.

"We have an opportunity to expand high-quality school options for children and create revenue for the district, yet we continue to let the interest of adults get in the way of the interest of our kids," he said. [emphasis mine]

You know, I'd have to say I actually agree with Supermayor here: it looks like the interests of certain adults are definitely trumping the interests of kids - and their parents.

Local control is his Kryptonite!

"Unavoidable Costs" Are Avoidable

Bruce Baker Twitter-points us to a great op-ed about the fiscal disaster taking place in Philadelphia's schools. Read the entire thing to understand that huge inequities are taking place right now in Pennsylvania (a situation Chris Christie aspires to bring to New Jersey).

I agree with nearly everything in the op-ed; however, there is one passage I take issue with:

Has the School District been spending more than it was given? No.

The District ran surpluses of about $30 million a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011.  In 2012, after massive spending cuts to make up for a 15 percent reduction in state and federal funding and unavoidable cost increases in areas like health care, pensions, utilities and charter schools, the District says its 2012 budget is close to balanced. So, the District is not living beyond its means. [second emphasis mine]

It's the use of the word "unavoidable." OK, I understand the term is used here to mean "unavoidable for the Philadelphia school district," but we need to continually remind ourselves that so many of our "unavoidable" education costs are completely avoidable.

Take health care. Our country spends more than twice as much as Britain, Sweden, and France, yet has worse health outcomes, and not everyone is insured. That is insane, and it directly affects costs for districts like Philadelphia. Maybe Obamacare will really cut costs, but it's obvious to me it won't cut them nearly as much as a single-payer system would have.

How about pensions? Well, let's look at Pennsylvania:

Despite their tepid returns, retirement systems that have bet big on alternatives are paying a hefty tab. While funds with little stakes in hedge funds and private equity pay an average of 17 cents on every $100 invested, funds with large stakes pay 77 cents.

The Pennsylvania state retirement system, which has about 46 percent of its money in alternatives, paid those managers 77 percent of the system’s total $195 million in fees last year. Last fall, the system replaced the two consulting firms that had emphasized those investments. Over the last five years, its annualized returns of 3.6 percent lagged behind its peers’.

In a series of e-mails, Pamela Hile, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania fund, said that the fund had made many new investments in alternatives from 2004 to 2007. Some of these entities, like venture-capital funds, often have negative returns in the early years as that money is invested, she said.

Noting that pension funds have time horizons that stretch into decades, Ms. Hile added that the retirement system had outperformed its 8 percent target over the last 25 years, with an 8.8 percent annualized return. [emphasis mine]

Wait - is that before or after the fees?

The sad truth is that Wall Street has been overselling itself for years as a justification for taking more and more off of the top. The promise of deferred compensation kept public employee salaries artificially low. But now that employees are demanding the promises made to them be fulfilled, politicians are breaking their word (see the top of this blog).

Was this "unavoidable"? Absolutely not. We've allowed Wall Street to write its own rules for years, and this is the price we're now paying. Taxing the "wealth" generated in financial markets would go a long way toward making pensions solvent. Hell, they're making money hand over fist by playing around with our funds; why do we allow them to pay reduced tax rates for the privilege?

Utilities? This country has never been serious about weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels; what if we were? How much would we have saved by now if we had implemented real energy conservation measures in our schools and all over our public infrastructure?

And charter schools? Well, don't even get me started...

Maybe not all of these cost increases were completely "avoidable," but they all could have been mitigated - they still can be. The problem is that a local school board does not have nearly the political clout needed to make these things happen. This has to be a nationwide effort.

We, as a country, as wasting a ton of money in health care costs, retirement costs, energy costs, and yes, on school "choice." If we chose to, we could cut all of those costs and still have good health insurance, decent retirements for teachers, plenty of energy, a cleaner planet, and money to affect real change in the lives of children in poverty.

It is not the fault of the education system, nor of educators, nor of their unions, nor of local districts, that we, as a nation, continue to make these poor decisions. Every one of them is "avoidable."

The only question left is whether we care enough about our children to put aside the interests of those who profit from these completely "avoidable" choices.

International House of Education Statistics

I'll be doing the #soschat tonight on the Twitter machine, which should be fun (if TweetDeck for Mac stops acting so quirky). Stop in if you can: 9:00 PM EDT.

We needed a topic, and I'm sick of talking about Chris Christie, so I thought we'd talk about international comparisons. Why? Because they seem to be a lynchpin of the entire reformy argument: "Our kids suck compared to the rest of the world! Even our kids who we say don't suck really suck! 'Cause their teachers suck!" Blah, blah, blah...

It's just not true, and we need to say so. I thought it might be helpful, therefore, to have some links to my stuff and others about this topic.

First, here's me:

• International Test Score Comparison Fail - Part I
• International Test Score Comparison Fail - Part II
• Poverty, Shmoverty!
• Poverty, Shmoverty! Part II
• Poverty, Shmoverty - Part III
• Poverty, Shmoverty: Part IV
• Dare To Compare
• Poverty Matters

Tino Sanandaji is an economist who has blogged about this stuff before. He hasn't had a lot of play in the debate, but I find his work to be fascinating. Here are just a few of his posts:

• The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia.
• How well do above average American States do compared to above average countries in test scores?
• Breaking Matt Yglesia's Heart

Valerie Strauss has had some excellent posts about international comparisons:

• What international test scores really tell us: Lessons buried in PISA report
• Hysteria over PISA misses the point
• You MUST read this one! Do international test comparisons make sense?

Of course, any time Matt DiCarlo tackles a topic, it's worth reading:

• PISA For Our Time: A Balanced Look

Same with Bruce Baker:

• Ed Next’s triple-normative leap! Does the “Global Report Card” tell us anything?

Here's Paul Thomas:

• High-Stakes Testing: Lessons Ignored

And Mel Riddille:

• PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid

It occurs to me I have a lot of reading to do before tonight. See you there.

Zombies, pancakes, and test scores: bringing the world together.

The Shot Against Charters Heard 'Round the World

A citizen revolution has been brewing in Newark for some time, with local citizens getting increasingly sick and tired of being left out of decisions that affect their own children.

So, if this is a revolution, yesterday was the Battle of Lexington and Concord:

The Newark public schools uneasy relationship with the city’s charter schools stirred more debate last night, as the district’s advisory board rejected leases to share space with the alternative schools. Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson, however, appeared poised to overrule and let the leases proceed. 

The proposed leases of five district buildings to charter school operators for next year has been the latest source of friction in a long run of contentious community meetings surrounding the state-run schools. 

Unable to make a decision last week, the district advisory board met in a special meeting last night to further consider them. The state has a deadline for issuing its final charters for next fall by July 15. 

After lengthy public comment, the board formally and overwhelmingly voted against four of the five proposed leases.

Remember: Cami Anderson is from New York City, the hotbed of colocation. Big charter guns like Eva Moskowitz have used colocation to grow their charter networks in Gotham, despite the fact that they themselves admit their results are not replicable for large student populations. As Diane Ravitch points out, Moskowitz is happy to shill for increasing her management fees even as she sucks the life out of her neighboring public schools.

Well, maybe we're finally seeing the one upside to all of this: the good people of Newark need only look across the Hudson to be forewarned about what's coming their way. Of course, Chris Christie rules Newark with the same iron glove Bloomberg uses in NYC, so it really doesn't matter much what the mere plebes think:

Still, almost as soon as it was taken, many expected that Anderson, appointed by Gov. Chris Christie last year, would promptly overrule at least some of the votes.

Anderson quickly left the meeting without comment, but spokeswoman Renee Harper said a decision could come as soon as today. Harper would not make a prediction but said the veto was a clear option.

“She maintains that right and will act in the best interest of the district and of all the children,” Harper said in an interview. “We’ll see what happens.”

The meeting at the Belmont Runyon Elementary School continued the run of raucous community meetings that have grown commonplace in the city over charter schools and the state’s ongoing control of the district overall. The state seized operation of district in 1994, appointing its superintendent ever since.

It is Anderson as the latest superintendent who has made the sharing of district space with charter schools one of the centerpieces of her sweeping reorganization of the district.

Let's be crystal clear about this: the people of Newark have no control over their schools. Eli Broad has paid a relatively small sum of money (for him) to basically reshape the Newark schools however his protege, ACTING Commissioner Chris Cerf, sees fit. It doesn't matter if the plans themselves are hack junk; they want to close neighborhood schools and replace them with charters that serve substantially different student populations. So that's what they're going to get - period.

And if anyone says "boo," well...

Others brought up what is becoming a recurring theme of the community meetings, that the state is selling out the public schools to for-private interests, even if the charter schools are virtually all non-profit entities.

“We know who the enemy is, and we must fight to our last breath to save our children and to save Newark public schools,” said Mildred Crump, a city councilwoman who was the first in the audience to speak at the meeting.

“For those of you willing to sell our children for profit, shame on you,” she said.

Added Junius Williams, a longtime civic activist in Newark: “This is a real estate scheme to put public property in private hands.”

Board members did not offer up much comment before voting. The only one to speak at length, member Shavar Jeffries called the deals a “win-win” for the district in providing additional income for the district and additional choices for the city’s schoolchildren.

“These charter schools are public schools,” Jeffries said. “We have heard a lot of rhetoric that is frankly ridiculous … But these are public schools regulated by the state of New Jersey, and they are educating Newark children.”

Well, if they are public schools, why don't we force them to take all students and keep them, regardless of whether they meet the schools' "codes of conduct"? Why don't we make them provide services to kids with severe learning disabilities, like the schools in Newark that get mocked for doing just that? Why aren't tenure laws applicable to all of them? Why do they have unelected boards of governance?

Charters are not public schools in any meaningful sense. It's not ridiculous to say so. And it's not ridiculous for the citizens of Newark to be highly skeptical of colocation plans that they've had no say in.

ADDING: We haven't really talked about Teachers Village in a while:

You want to talk about charters and real estate? Let's start here; more to come this summer...

The Patterns of Reforminess

The very reformy Deborah Kenny wants you to know that her charter schools are totally awesome simply because... well, they're just awesome, OK?

Critics claim that charter schools are successful only because they cherry-pick students, because they have smaller class sizes, or because motivated parents apply for charter lotteries and non-motivated parents do not. And even if charters are successful, they argue, there is no way to scale that success to reform a large district.

None of that is true. Charters succeed because of their two defining characteristics—accountability and freedom. In exchange for being held accountable for student achievement results, charter schools are generally free from bureaucratic and union rules that prevent principals from hiring, firing or evaluating their own teams.

Oh, snap! All you haters can just step off, 'cause Kenny's bringing the accountability and freedom! Her schools are the awesomest!

Er, right?

On their homepage, Harlem Village Academy shares their results, which include #1 school in Harlem for 8th grade reading and math, with 100% proficient in math for three straight years.  They also have a near perfect New York Regents passing rate.

Throughout the years, though, this school has been criticized for its high attrition rate of both students and teachers.  Two good posts from about two years ago are here and here.  With the release of the new book, I thought I’d check the most recent 2010-2011 data to see what is happening there.

I downloaded the recent state and city report cards from here and also the state report cards for New York City district 5 here, and found some interesting information.

In 2010-2011, HVA had 55% free lunch and 13% reduced lunch.  The district, that year, had 74% free with 5% reduced.

In 2010-2011, HVA had 3% LEP vs. 11% for the whole district.

In 2010-2011 38% of the students at HVA were suspended for at least one day while 7% were suspended for the whole district.

Student attrition at HVA is huge.  For example, the 66 5th graders in 2007-2008 have shrunk to just 16 9th graders in the 2010-2011 school year.  This is a 75% attrition.  In that same time, the district that the school is in went from 904 5th graders in 2007-2008 to 1313 9th graders in 2010-2011.  That is a 45% growth.

Though these are different cohorts, the graph below from The Charter Center show HVA’s enrollment by grade for 2010-2011.  This is not what this graph would look like in a regular school.

As far as their achievement, it is true that the students had a high passing rate on their state tests, particularly in math.  But when I looked at their Regents grades, I noticed that, according to their state report card, no students took the Geometry or the Algebra II / Trigonometry Regents.  So their 100% passing rate seems to come from all their students, through 12th grade, only taking the 9th grade level Algebra Regents.  When I asked the school, though a mutual acquaintance, why this was, they wrote back that the state didn’t include all the data and they actually had 90 students take Geometry (nothing about Algebra II), and that 82% passed.  But since they only had 80 students who could feasibly qualify to take that test, this seems unlikely.  I currently have a data request into the NYC DOE to clear this up, so I will update if I get new information.

When a school is truly great, teachers want to keep teaching there year after year.  So it should be telling that in this school over the past three years the amount of staff turnover was 2007-2008 53%, for 2008-2009, 38%, and for 2009-2010, a whopping 61%.  By comparison, the teacher attrition for the entire district in 2009-2010 was just 19%.

Read the rest for the whole sordid tale. And don't pretend like you're surprised, because...

- Steve Perry blames the teachers unions for low student achievement, but his magnet school has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Ben Chavis blames the teachers unions for low student achievement, but his charter schools have different student populations than they did prior to his arrival.

- Juan Williams blames the teacher unions for low student achievement, but the charter school he touted in a bit of propaganda masquerading as journalism has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Shelley Skinner of B4K blamed labor agreements for low student achievement, but her charter school has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Kathy Mone said her charter got great results even thought it "took the most difficult cases," but her charter schools has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Bergen Arts & Sciences Charter School touts its "data driven" approach, but has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- New Orleans.

- New York.

- KIPP.

- HCZ.

Over and over and over again, we keep running into the same problem: the "successful" reformy schools either had different student populations to begin with, or changed their student populations to create "success."

Gosh, is anyone else seeing a pattern here?

The New "Bargaining": Take This and Shut Up!

Roy Roberts invents a new definition for the term "collective bargaining":

DETROIT — The state-appointed emergency manager running the Detroit Public Schools imposed a contract Sunday on the district's teachers, the district has announced.

Roy Roberts is empowered by Michigan's emergency manager law to impose work terms on employees.

"This new collective bargaining agreement with our teachers provides the flexibility needed for our schools to be successful and to meet the educational needs of the children and families who come to us," Roberts said in a statement. "It also produces the savings necessary for the district to ultimately return to financial solvency and remove the debt that erodes financial resources reaching the classroom."

District spokesman Steven Wasko declined to reveal terms of the contract, saying Roberts wants the Detroit Federation Teachers to inform its members first.

Gosh, that's very thoughtful of him: he's letting the teachers hear what he is forcing them to take through "bargaining" before the rest of the public. What a guy.

It looks like these guys are just following the playbook that reformyists are using in the rest of the country:

The June 20^th press conference at Detroit’s Renaissance High School offered many revelations and sweeping plans by Governor Rick Snyder, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts, Mike Flanagan, and private interests to completely overhaul the DPS and to go statewide in five years.  While having many exciting and even inspiring ideas and points of interest, the EAS plan itself uses the new PA4 law to create the state-run system, disenfranchise voters, sell public assets, abrogate contracts and privatize.  The plan may be successful in the five year time frame of raising test scores or increasing high school graduation and college acceptance rates, but at what cost to democracy?  How can any plan be considered successful if its foundation is based upon voter disenfranchisement and the complete violation of the right to democratically elect representatives?

It can't, but don't worry: it won't be successful in raising student achievement, either. Newark and Paterson - two cities that have a lot in common with Detroit - have disenfranchised their citizens for years, and it hasn't helped. Louisiana is disenfranchising its citizens through privatization, and it's not helping. Generalissimo Bloomberg has held the NYC schools in his iron fist for years, and it hasn't helped.

There is no correlation between student achievement and the loss of local control of schools. Because the people who inevitably take over have no idea what they are doing:

In the final moments of the Monday press conference Roy Roberts revealed a major flaw and the folly of attempting such a broad, sweeping, experimental takeover of publicly owned education when he was asked a simple and legitimate question from an audience member.  Such an undertaking is powerful and may have many far reaching and unintended negative consequences and legal challenges, which is why Roberts was asked  how the plan intends to get around the Headlee Amendment of  1978.  When asked this very important question as to how indeed the new, more powerful school system created under the new, more powerful law would get around our state’s constitution, Roy Roberts answered quickly and succinctly, “I don’t know.”   He didn’t know.

And yet he does somehow magically know what a fair wage for teachers should be, without any bargaining involved. Nice. Do he and Rahm Emanuel play golf together or something?

Oh, and of course, you know who has been stoking this fire:

At the press conference Snyder announced his initiative to remove more than three dozen of Detroit’s lowest performing schools and place them under the authority of a pilot school district, which will function as an independent entity.  Seeking to model the new system after Kalamazoo’s Promise program which offers a four year scholarship to qualifying students, Snyder told the press that a second initiative will be to raise funds and resources from businesses and  philanthropic entities and foundations such as the Eli Broad Foundation and Kellogg Foundation to provide funding for students to qualify for at least two years of college or training after graduation.  The takeover involves a partnership between Eastern Michigan University (EMU)and DPS and will have an 11 member authority to oversee its five year plan to go statewide.

Broadies, Broadies, everywhere. Eli Broad is a Michigan State alum and deeply involved with Michigan's educational system. The parallels to New Jersey are, frankly, a little creepy; about $400K is all it takes, apparently, to buy any state's school system.

How long, I wonder, before New Jersey "bargains" with Newark's teachers the way Michigan has "bargained" with Detroit's?

ADDING: Diane Ravitch has more about this nasty trend of disenfranchisement rearing its head in Chicago.

ADDING MORE: Jon Pelto shows how well state takeovers are working in Connecticut. It's a freaking epidemic.

Teacher Evaluations: A Race To Nowhere

New York is rushing to change teacher evaluation, even if they're not ready for it:

An important deadline in the state’s ongoing teacher evaluation process occurs Sunday, but most schools will be missing it.  

July 1 was set as the day for schools around the state to submit plans for their new teacher evaluations to the State Education Department. The evaluations are required in order to qualify for federal grant money that New York State won under the Race to the Top program.

But only around 65 of the states more than 700 school districts will be ready, says New York State School Boards Association’s executive director Tim Kremer.

“Not going to make that deadline, for most districts,” Kremer said.

The major reason for the delay is that schools were waiting for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the legislature to finalize a plan to limit disclosure of teacher evaluations to the public. On June 21, the last day of the legislative session, they agreed on legislation to keep the results private, except to parents who actually have a child in the teacher’s class. Teachers and administrators were hesitant to work on deals on evaluation plans until then.

The School Boards Association backed Cuomo’s bill,  Kremer said, largely because there are too many unknowns in the unfinished teacher evaluation process to expose the very first results to wide public scrutiny.

“We’re not quite ready for primetime,” said Kremer, who said it’s a “work in progress.” [emphasis mine]

Connecticut is rushing as well:

Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor said during Wednesday's day-long meeting at the state Capitol complex that while he is "proud" that the state has made it to this point, "profound disagreements" and questions remain among key stakeholders.

Some of those questions include whether these evaluations will actually improve education. What happens when there's a dispute in how much weight to give standardized tests in a teacher's grade? And, finally, who will pay for all these new requirements?

"We don't have enough administrative personnel to carry this out [statewide]. We are going to be laying off teachers to carry out these evaluations," said Joe Cirasuolo, executive director of the state's superintendents association, who is supportive of these new evaluations but cited cost concerns after the meeting of the panel that forwarded these recommended guidelines to the state board.

[...]

The state has arranged for the University of Connecticut's Center for Education Policy Analysis to evaluate the pilot program.

Casey D. Cobb, the director of UConn's center, said his team intends to report on the rollout of the evaluations, but not whether the system is improving student outcomes.

"The pilot could be a spot-on system for evaluating teachers. Most likely it's not and will need to be fine-tuned. That's where we come in," Cobb said. "A validity study cannot be done in a year. That's a much longer study." [emphasis mine]

New Jersey rushed to change evaluations, until they realized they wouldn't have time to evaluate their "pilot" program before the final program was rolled out. But they're still rolling out a new system based on growth measures that are completely inappropriate to the task.

You would think everyone would want to review the evidence before rushing to implement schemes that haven't been shown to work. But when folks like Michelle Rhee control the debate - a woman who crows about her changes to the Washington DC evaluation system when they had no discernible effect on student learning - politicians must feel they have to follow her lead. They need to urgently do something - anything! - to prove how much they care about kids.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think running around like a chicken with your head cut off does a lot for students.

"We may be lost, but we're making great time!"