Category: In The News: APPs media

APPS News: October 2017

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by Karel Kilimnik

Six More Schools Targeted for Possible Turnaround

 The 2017-18 school year started with a bang as Superintendent William Hite announced his second cohort of Priority Schools: Steele, Rhoads and Gideon elementary schools; Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences (FSAS) and Wagner middle schools; and Penn Treaty Middle/High School. Just as Kensington Health and Science Academy was targeted last year even after it had been designated a Community School by the City, so has Gideon this year. Following last year’s $200,000 payment to Cambridge Education, the SRC has paid the company an additional $100,000 to perform a “School Quality Review” at the six schools now designated part of the district’s “System of Great Schools (SGS)”. The SRC passed a resolution authorizing Cambridge Education, for $100,000 this year, “…to retain a consultant to conduct objective third party school quality reviews in a number of schools that have been identified as under- performing through the District’s SGS process. The consultant’s purpose will be to conduct an onsite review of school performance and to document and communicate the primary factors supporting and impeding learning at the school…”

APPS review of Cambridge’s 2016 report showed that it was so lacking in substantive data and anecdotal reporting that it could not be used to decide the fate of the eleven schools.

In the district’s September 19 press release, Dr. Hite stated that the Institute of Student Achievement (ISA), a subsidiary of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has already been hired to perform coaching and professional development at Penn Treaty:

“Last year, the District launched a high school improvement cohort supported by a high-performing high school support organization – the Institute for Student Achievement. Penn Treaty will be joining this cohort of high schools, alongside Overbrook, Kensington Health Sciences Academy, and Fels. School Quality Reviews and community feedback will be used to inform priorities and focus for that work.”

Why has this decision been made before hearing from the Penn Treaty community? Why does the district have to hire one company to tell another company what to do?

Click here to read the entire APPS News

Lisa Haver has a column in the Daily News saying billionaires are gaining too much influence on public education.

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Billionaires gaining too much influence on public education | Philadelphia Daily News

When President Trump nominated Betsy DeVos, a woman with no degree or experience in education, as U.S. Secretary of Education, defenders of public education organized an unprecedented effort to fight her confirmation. Unfortunately, her stunning display of ignorance about education and the rights of public school students was not enough to stop the Senate from confirming her.  But we now know who DeVos is and what her agenda is: advancing the privatization of public education under the guise of  “choice.”  She is a government official, accountable to the American people. We can call our elected officials when she fails to uphold the rights of all schoolchildren.

But whom can we call to stop Priscilla Chan from imposing her will on public education?  Or Laurene Jobs?

Priscilla Chan is a physcian and wife of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, now the world’s fifth wealthiest person. Laurene Jobs is the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the world’s fourth wealthiest woman. Neither has a degree in education or any experience teaching in public schools, but both have embarked on massive projects to impose their ideological visions of education on schoolchildren across the country.

The recently established Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is funding the development and distribution of software that would create an online profile of each student’s “strengths, needs, motivations, and progress” and may, according to a June Education Week article, “help teachers better recognize and respond to each student’s academic needs while also supporting a holistic approach to nurturing children’s social, emotional and physical development.” That’s a tall order for two young people with no background in child development or education—unless you count Zuckerberg’s foray into education reform in Newark in 2014, when his $100 million grant enabled Gov. Christie’s disastrous privatization scheme. Zuckerberg, who has never lived in Newark, later told a reporter he “learned a lot of lessons from that.”

Meanwhile, CZI is investing in lobbying for legislation that would enable the imposition of this unproven program in schools and districts across the country in the same way the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation successfully lobbied for the use of Common Core standards in all 50 states before they had been tested in a pilot program.

Laurene Jobs graduated with a degree in economics from Penn, ran a natural foods company and worked for three years at Goldman Sachs as a trading strategist before marrying Steve Jobs. None of that qualifies her to even teach in a public school, but her massive wealth apparently makes her an expert in the history and curriculum of public education, as well as child development and pedagogy. Recently, Jobs and her XQ Institute bought an hour on the four major TV networks to simulcast a star-studded (but not educator-studded) extravanganza  to hawk her plan to “reimagine” the country’s high schools — mostly by using more technology.  Has Jobs found some research that shows teenagers need to spend more time looking at electronic devices?  When you run a technology company, not surprisingly, the answer to everything, including the things you know nothing about, is more technology.

Over the past 20 years, education policy has increasingly been enacted not to satisfy the needs of the students and their families, but the wants of the wealthy and powerful who are converting public education from a civic enterprise to a marketplace for edu-vendors: the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has paid to expand charters and lobby for the use of Common Core standards in all 50 states; real estate and insurance mogul Eli Broad now leads a group of corporate funders pushing a plan to move half of all K-12 students in Los Angeles into charter schools; the Walton family has initiated a new $1 billion campaign to promote charters nationwide; Trump financier Carl Icahn has established a chain of charters in New York City.

No one elected these billionaires, and they are accountable to no one.  We can’t call our members of Congress to object to their policies. While Americans continue to condemn the power of the very rich to influence elections, we must also fight to stop them from having more influence over the future of our young people than the constituents of democratically elected school boards.

Also see:
Be Like Lisa | Save Maine Schools 
September 18, 2017

APPS News: August 2017

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by Karel Kilimnik
August 31, 2017

It’s been a busy summer for education activists. APPS members have:

  • Responded to the challenges posed by the new District website
  • Appealed the District’s response to our Right To Know request for information about the secret meetings held between District staff and charter school operators over a 6-month period this year
  • Produced our regular editions of Eyes and Ears on SRC meetings
  • Worked with members of the Strawberry Mansion High community to get information about a possible co-location of an outsourced program at the school

Disappearing Documents

On August 1, without any prior public notification, the District posted a new website. The previous site was taken down, and information about charter evaluations, individual schools and SRC history were nowhere to be found. Minutes and Resolutions from SRC meetings from 2001 to 2016 were gone. The entire page on Dr Hite’s prized System of Great Schools disappeared. We were unable to contact the Director and Assistant Director of the Communications Office as they were both on vacation the week the new website made its debut. We were able to speak off the record with some SRC staff members, but no one could give us a definite answer on when—or if—that information would be restored. First we were told October, then January 2018. Dr. Hite, in his first remarks on the subject at the August 17 SRC meeting, said that all information would be restored by “Spring 2018”. Is this the SRC’s idea of transparency and community engagement?

Several APPS members raised concerns about the disappearance of public information by a government agency at the August 17 SRC meeting. Dr Hite actually responded to Lisa Haver’s question by stating that the “district was interested in restoring information and would appreciate feedback about what is missing, how users’ experiences can be improved and what is not working well.” Email him at hite@philasd.org.

Because of the pressure from APPS members, we have seen much of the information about SRC history restored. We will continue to monitor the website.

 APPS Files Right to Know on Secret Meetings with Charter Supporters

Click here to read the rest of the post.

APPS Files Right to Know Appeal on District’s Secret Meetings with Charter Operators

by Lynda Rubin
August 9, 2017

APPS has filed an appeal to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records after receiving sparse information from the district in response to a formal Right to Know request filed in May. That request was filed after a NewsWorks article, also published in the Public School Notebook, revealed that SRC and district officials had met for months behind closed doors with several charter operators and industry supporters.

imgresHigh-level school district officials—including Superintendent William Hite, Charter School Office Director Dawn Lynne Kacer and SRC Chief of Staff Claire Landau—met behind closed doors for over six months with several charter operators and charter industry lobbyists, including Philadelphia School Partnership Director Mark Gleason, Mastery Schools CEO Scott Gordon, Russell Byers CEO Laurada Byers, Global Leadership Academy CEO Naomi Booker and PCCY Executive Director Donna Cooper.

The reason given by district spokespersons for those meetings was to discuss changes in the state’s charter law being proposed in the state legislature. No explanation was given for the secrecy of the meetings or the exclusion of advocacy groups and individuals who had come out publicly against the pending bill. If the SRC and district had intended to create language which balanced the ability of public schools to thrive side-by-side with charters, advocates to safeguard public school interests would have been involved and the meetings would, and should, have been held publicly.

APPS filed a legal Right-to-Know request with the SRC and School District on May 23, 2017 in order to discover the exact nature of these meetings: who attended and what was discussed, as well as any communications about proposed resolutions drafted by the group or individuals on behalf of the group.

The district’s Office of General Counsel responded on July 14, 2017, providing few details beyond those already included in the NewsWorks article. In fact, the district claimed that no minutes were taken. One of the heavily redacted emails between Landau and Amanda Fenton, Director of State and Federal Policy for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, referred to “the attached proposal for a comprehensive overview of the legislative proposal with the items discussed added.” However, the district claimed in its official response that the proposal in question was “an internal document”. A follow-up email from Landau to Fenton (Subject: “Legislative Language Check-In”) states, “Attached is the document that sums up where we are at the moment.” That document was also redacted by the district’s lawyers in the RTK response to APPS.

When SRC and district officials meet in secret, for months, with the managers of the schools they are supposed to be regulating, that is an obvious conflict of interest. That should be investigated by the PA Attorney General. When SRC and district officials meet to discuss legislation it will be proposing or supporting, that is a public matter. APPS will be investigating possible violations of the PA Sunshine Act, which says that the public has a right to know, and comment on, what its government officials are doing when conducting public business.

APPS Attorney Rich Migliore has filed an appeal to obtain all requested information and documents. Stay posted for the outcome of this appeal.

Actions show District prioritizes charter operators | Commentary by Lisa Haver and Lynda Rubin in the Public School Notebook – June 12, 2017