Private School Vouchers: For-Profit Companies Using Public Money

[FayeforCure]

For-Profit Companies offer Conflicts of Interest and no Accountability!!

Huge national monopolies are being created without any accountability: setting standards and testing done by the very same company.

Insider jobs funded by public monies.

The Education Policy Forum, a group of Jacksonville college professors with an interest in public education, is particularly troubled by Florida’s move towards private school vouchers, as well as charter schools, many of which are run by for-profit companies using public money. One for-profit charter school outfit, CharterSchoolsUSA, is currently taking applications for its Baymeadows Road location in Jacksonville. CharterSchoolsUSA’s national organization is headed up by John Hage, who has worked for two conservative political think tanks: the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future. On May 1, The St. Pete Times reported on a Western Michigan University study that found many for profit charters, including CharterSchoolsUSA, fail to achieve adequate yearly progress, a metric created by the No Child Left Behind Act. Only 37 percent of CharterSchoolsUSA’s schools have met the standard, compared to 67 percent of public schools, according to the report.

But it’s not just charter companies or so-called Education Management Organizations that stand to profit from recent changes to education policy, says FSCJ’s Professor Hall. “The testing service companies have something very large to gain,” he says. Once a state embraces a standards-based approach, he explains, “you’re looking for something to measure.” In addition to providing the measurements, White adds, many of those same private companies “also provide the curriculum.”

The professors’ views are borne out by recent news. As reported by The New York Times April 27, textbook company and testing giant, Pearson, has teamed up with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ foundation on a joint venture to create online reading and math courses aligned with national “common core standards.” Gates’ foundation has underwritten teacher evaluations research in Hillsborough County while Pearson administers the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Pearson’s most recent contract with the state also includes developing “end of course exams,” one of several controversial education changes adopted by the current Legislature.

Pearson’s dominance of the private ed testing market appears to parallel the ascent of its K-12 testing officer, William Piferrer, who moved quickly from being “travel aide” to former Gov. Bush at age 24, through a series of positions with the Department of Education and the Governor’s Office before taking a position with NCS Pearson in 2007.

Regardless of who profits from privatization and testing, though, The Education Policy Forum believes students ultimately lose. The Student Success Act, passed this year, ties 50 percent of a teacher’s pay to student FCAT scores or end-of-course exam data. White’s concern about these tests transcends fairness issues for teachers. At bottom, he says, policymakers are issuing tests that amount to little more than “checklists” for students.

“They want to have a checklist of what students have learned at any given time,” White explains. “[A]nd when they say ‘learned something’ they mean ‘are you familiar enough with it to answer a question on a test,’ and not ‘do you understand the concept.’”

This approach leads to teaching to the test, scripted curricula and strict pacing guidelines, all of which hurt kids, the professors say. White says that current education policy tells teachers not to deviate from scripts even if they have a better way of teaching the material.

As for expanding virtual education, Katrina Hall cites the research of Richard Allington, et al, in their book, “Schools That Work: Where All Children Read and Write,” that shows most of the published studies that claim virtual-ed words are “usually authored by the software developers.”

But lack of rigorous research about what’s best for children didn’t stop the legislature from authorizing broad expansion of “virtual charter schools.” This move worries Hall, who says that while it may give homeschoolers and charter schools a good way to access curriculum, it could short-circuit critical social development in youngsters. “Children need to interact with each other in real-time, same space situations,” Hall says. Laws that push virtual education on younger children, much like policies that overemphasize paper-and pencil tests for pre-schoolers and kindergartners, all ignore what child development research says: Young children learn through play.

http://jaxledger.com/2011/05/10/a-show-of-force-education-professors-speak-out-against-state-broadside-of-public-education/

[jandar]

Nobody wants to realize how tied up the lawmakers that pass these laws are with the companies that stand to profit the most.