Spending Sunday with Tim Walz on his birthday & the wonderful Network for Public Education conference

The annual conference of Network for Public Education, on whose board I sit, was held last weekend in Columbus, Ohio.  It was terrific as usual, with wonderful speeches and incisive and illuminating workshops and panel discussions on how to strengthen our public schools and protect them from the depredations of budget cuts, privatization, and censorship.

But the highlight for me and many others was Tim Walz' inspiring keynote address on Sunday afternoon, where he spoke about how we have to fight Trump's attempt to dismantle and defund our public schools. An article about his speech is here, though the article underestimates the numbers in the audience and the response: there were actually about 350 people there, including state legislators, Commissioners of Education, educators, parents, and advocates, who were ecstatic to hear him speak.

Walz was introduced by Randi Weingarten, who was introduced by Diane Ravitch.  Diane approvingly noted how earlier, Randi had been called "the most dangerous person in the world" by Mike Pompeo.

Randi said that we cannot give into the "autocrats who want to bully people into silence," and asked what does it mean when the President "wants to destroy the only federal agency devoted to education."

She noted it was Tim Walz' birthday, and after he stepped up to the dais, she presented him with a cake and we all sang him Happy Birthday.

Both Tim Walz and Randi hailed the protest rallies and marches the had occurred nationwide the day before, demanding that Trump and Musk take their "Hands Off" our democracy and our schools.  Tim Walz assured us that we aren't overreacting, since "The road to authoritarianism is littered to people saying you’re overreacting." 

He added: "People say that they’re not into politics but I say that  politics are into you. When I’m asked who’s leading the Democratic Party I say they’re in the streets like yesterday."  

Walz pointed out that the takeover of our public schools is being engineered by the oligarchs -- though "we shouldn't call them oligarchs but greedy bastards."  He also said that the middle class was built in the US by our public education system and the unions.

Of course, I did get a selfie with Walz -- and when I introduced myself, I said I was from Class Size Matters.  As a long time teacher, he immediately responded, "yes it does!"  I added that he was the best thing to come out of the 2024 election, and he replied, "You're too kind."  As opposed to so many politicians, he truly comes off as the warmest, most humble human being -- and funny besides.

Earlier that day,  I had been a presenter at a workshop on the risks of AI in the classroom, along with Cassie Creswell from Illinois Families for Public Schools, and co-chair along with me of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  Concluding the workshop with eclat was the retired teacher, brilliant blogger and education guru Peter Greene.  Our presentation is below.

Doomed to Fail: High rate of charter school failure nationwide -- & how Success charter schools juke the stats

 

A new report was just released by the National Center for Charter School Accountability and the Network for Public Education on charter school closures and is posted here; it's well worth reading.  It reveals that more than one in four charter schools nationwide close within five years, leading to disruptive churn and instability in children’s  education. Between 1998 and 2022, more than one million students were affected by charter shutdowns. According to their analysis, these closures are most often caused by falling enrollment, followed by fraud and mismanagement, and low academic achievement.

While NY State has a relatively low charter school closure rate, Success Academy charter schools -- the largest charter chain in the state --has been shown to juke these stats.  Success is well-known for frequently opening and closing schools in a particular district and then opening a new school miles away, often with different grade levels, while keeping the same name, which suppresses their official failure rate.  This practice also appears to be a strategy to game the system by continuing to open new schools even after their authorized number under the legal state charter cap has been reached, as once a charter school has closed that does not automatically give them another slot under the law.  One example of this sleazy practice is described on p. 7 of the NPE report and below:

“Closure underestimation also occurs when a charter school closes, and another school opens in the same charter chain using the closed school’s NCES number. For example, as described by New York City public school advocate and Executive Director of Class Size Matters Leonie Haimson below, the Success Academy chain manipulates closures to create new schools and avoid the city’s charter cap. Because the same NCES [National Center for Education Statistics] number is used, the two closures are undetectable in the CCD [Common Core of Data].

Success Academy Fort Greene was the infamous “got to go” school and was originally an elementary school in New York City’s District13. Some years back, apparently due to falling enrollment, this school closed, and yet another school with the same name opened up at another site in District 14, 1.5 miles away, as a middle school.

Success Academy then closed the Fort Greene middle school in District 14, also apparently due to falling enrollment, and opened a new Sheepshead Bay elementary school in District

22 more than 7 miles away. On their own website, this new school is correctly called Success Sheepshead Bay and enrolls K-1 grades.

The listing in the CCD is for the first school (Success Academy Fort Greene), now with the Success Sheepshead Bay address. You can read more about what Leonie Haimson refers to as Success Academy’s three-card monte here.”

High rates of charter failure abandon more than one million students.