Report: NYC Charter Schools Violate Federal, State Law With Disciplinary Codes

Orange jumpsuits anybody?

Most of New York City’s charter schools have disciplinary codes that do not meet either state or federal requirements, according to a report by a children’s advocacy organization that is to be released on Thursday.

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In preparing the report, the group surveyed the disciplinary policies of 155 charter organizations — large networks as well as smaller, independent schools — out of 183 such organizations that operated in New York City during the 2013-14 school year. (The 155 organizations had 164 disciplinary policies between them because some set different standards for different grade levels, Advocates for Children said.)

Some charter schools have drawn criticism for having high suspension rates and a strict approach to discipline that pushes children out of the classroom unnecessarily. But many charter advocates have said it is crucial to maintain order so children can learn.

The Advocates for Children report cites complaints from parents who said their children had been suspended from charter schools over minor offenses such as wearing the wrong shoes or laughing while serving detention. Ultimately, though, the group said the main issue was legal.

Half of the policies examined by Advocates for Children let charter schools suspend or expel students for being late or cutting class — punishments the group said violated state law. At three dozen schools, there were no special rules covering the suspension or expulsion of children with disabilities, which the group said violated federal law. And in 25 instances, charter schools could suspend students for long periods without a hearing, which the group said violated the United States and New York State Constitutions, as well as state law.

Of course the pushback from the charter operators and supporters is that charter schools are not public schools so they don't have to abide by the same state and federal laws that public schools do.

You see, charter schools are only public schools when it comes time to take public money, get co-located in a public school building or have their rent paid by NYC for private space if no co-location space is available.

For everything else - from the disciplinary codes to the ability of city or state agencies to audit them to the teacher evaluation law - they're private entities that do not have to abide by the same rules and regulations public schools do.

It's fabulous being a charter school operator in Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's New York State.

You get the best of both worlds - all the benefits without any of the responsibilities, obligations, rules or regulations.

And so, it's perfectly all right for a charter school to make students wear orange shirts (so similar to the orange jumpsuits prisoners are forced to wear) when they're being punished for some minor infraction whereas if a public school ever tried that same thing, it would (rightfully) be stopped in its tracks.

Pope Francis

I am told by my Catholic relatives that this pontiff is not liked very much by some of the more "conservative" members of the church.

If Pope Francis keeps writing the kinds of things he's been writing about the global financial system and capitalism, keeps calling the fat cat RC bishops/cardinals out for spending millions of euros on their palaces, I wonder how long it will be until he comes down with some mysterious ailment that ends his papacy a la John Paul I or just has some kind of accident in that Ford Focus he drives around in.

This was a pretty strong critique he launched at the markets and the free marketeers.

The cynic in me says that sort of thing will not be allowed to stand for long - they'll either convince him to moderate his tone or we'll be looking for white smoke in the sky again real soon.

Market-Based B.S.

Global stock markets plunged overnight and here is how Reuters explained the moves:

(Reuters) - Share markets fell sharply on Thursday as investors piled back into safer assets, unnerved by the twin setbacks of unexpected weakness in China's economy and signals that the U.S. central bank may soon scale back its stimulus program.

The yen bounced sharply off recent lows and German Bunds rose, gaining support from a shift in sentiment that followed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's comment that the bank may trim its bond purchases at one of its next policy meetings.

A surprise drop in Chinese factory activity in May, followed by data pointing to a second quarter economic contraction in the euro zone, added to investors' worries.

The revived concerns about global growth sent Oil and copper prices lower, and MSCI's world equity index .MIWD00000PUS fell 1.2 percent, putting it on course for its worst day of the month.

Japan's main Nikkei share index .N225 earlier plunged 7.3 percent, its biggest one-day percentage drop in two years and calling a halt to a rally driven by aggressive stimulus measures that the Bank of Japan unveiled in April.

"All the global developments we see in the markets right now are purely liquidity-driven, they are no longer underpinned by fundamentals," said Tobias Blattner European Economist at Daiwa Capital Markets.

"We must learn to live with that kind of volatility."

Let's repeat - "All the global developments we see in the markets right now are purely liquidity-driven, they are no longer underpinned by fundamentals."

This should end well.

The next time you see Ben Bernanke claim the Fed is not creating bubbles, remember that statement:

"All the global developments we see in the markets right now are purely liquidity-driven, they are no longer underpinned by fundamentals."

Wall Street Journal Opinion Writer Compares Schools To Supermarkets And Schoolchildren To Corn Flakes

All to sell the American public on free market schools! And evil, evil teachers unions!

Here is the piece in full, because it's behind a paywall:

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools
What if groceries were paid for by taxes, and you were assigned a store based on where you live?
By DONALD J. BOUDREAUX

Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system—politicized and monopolistic—will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets' monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries. Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as "customers," on the grounds that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to be discussed in terms of commerce.

Recognizing that the erosion of their monopoly would stop the gravy train that pays their members handsome salaries without requiring them to satisfy paying customers, unions would ensure that any grass-roots effort to introduce supermarket choice meets fierce political opposition.

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education—the unions' self-serving protestations notwithstanding.

Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Now here are some of the comments left by readers:

Can't imagine what you see as "missed." That this man teaches anywhere is the greatest indictment of education in America. Comparing education...or police forces, fire departments, or any other public service to free market industries is something that could only come from a Libertarian think tank...oh, wait, that is what he represents.

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Seriously, this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Next we'll read about competitive markets making your stroke care better.

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Leave to the WSJ to publish tripe like this, accusing teachers of raking in huge salaries at the public's expense and comparing children to boxes of corn flakes and food commodities. Seriously. there is no shame at the WSJ.

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This analogy is fundamentally flawed in that people are biologically programmed to feel hunger when they need food, but the desire to learn comes from internal and external motivation (being able to get a job and feed yourself comes to mind). How easy it is for a grocery stores to convince families to buy food! But imagine if parents never taught their children how to feel hunger. Imagine if buying food was never a priority in a child's home, so the child never understood that eating food leads to a healthy life. Imagine if the child was living in poverty and was never around food much, so the supermarket manager had to show them how to chew and how to swallow. Now imagine that the supermarket alone is held accountable for children's nourishment.

I am a public school teacher in a high poverty school. Every day I try to teach my students how to crave knowledge. Many of them do. They see that education is the means through which they will make a better life for themself. Others don't see it. They're just kids, after all. They haven't thought through the consequences of not graduating high school. They're also frustrated because, due to circumstances out of their control, they were given a late start. Maybe they moved around a lot, so they missed a lot of school; maybe English is their second language; maybe their parents never read with them when they were younger; maybe they're too busy being the parents to younger siblings that school becomes a second priority. Too many have never felt success before and so have given up on the idea that they ever will. I try to show them that this doesn't have to be true.

There's a reason why we don't hear about "all those failing public schools in wealthy neighborhoods." It's because education is a social and economic issue. I challenge critics of public schools to go visit some one day. Come see the difference we are making in the lives of kids. Come see the challenges we face every day and the challenges we overcome. Come see our kids learn.

The fetishization of free markets continues unabated.

If the writer of the article wants to see a monopoly at work, he ought to take a close look at how the Gates Foundation and Pearson Education are promoting a national curriculum with national testing.

Or how Comcast/NBC now provides 70% of the country with cable.

Or how Sony owns nearly every record company in the world.

Or how there will be just three cell phone companies in the US after AT&T complete their payoffs to the Obama administration and get their merger with T-Mobile.

Or how Monsanto owns the seed market (TM).

In NYC, Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX 5, FOX News, FOX Business, the NY Post and Channel 9. Bloomberg owns Bloomberg News, Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Two oligarchs in one city own 10 different media outlets.

I know I'm missing a whole bunch of monopolies, but the point is this - the free market is NOT free or competitive. The big players either crush the little ones or buy them up, corner the market, pay off the gov't regulators and politicians, and rake in the bucks.

More and more consolidation, less and less choice.

That's what the "free" market is these days.

NYCDOE Merit Pay Experiment Didn't Work At All

A Vanderbilt study found that merit pay for teachers doesn't raise achievement for students.

Now a study of a "transcendent" NYC merit pay scheme finds it too was a failure.

In fact, schools that took part in the merit pay experiment actually declined in performance.

Elizabeth Green at Gotham Schools reports:

New York City’s heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — deemed “transcendent” when it was announced in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes.

“If anything,” Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, “student achievement declined.” Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

The program, which was first funded by private foundations and then by taxpayer dollars, also had no impact on teacher behaviors that researchers measured. These included whether teachers stayed at their schools or in the city school district and how teachers described their job satisfaction and school quality in a survey.

The program had only a “negligible” effect on a list of other measures that includes student attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and high school graduation rates, the study found.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The Bloomberg administration quietly discontinued it last year, turning back on the mayor’s early vow to expand the program quickly.

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The deal was seen as a landmark in 2007 when Mayor Bloomberg announced it with then-United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten by his side. “I am a capitalist, and I am in favor of incentives for individual people,” Bloomberg said then, while Weingarten emphasized that schools could decide to distribute bonuses evenly among educators. She called the program “transcendent.”

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Researchers were also surprised to find that middle school students actually seemed to be worse off. After three years attending schools involved in the project, middle school students’ math and English test scores declined by a statistically significant amount compared to students attending similar schools that were not part of the project.

The study adds to a research literature on teacher incentive pay that is decidedly more lukewarm than much of the popular conversation about teacher pay. Fryer, himself a strong early advocate of experimenting with financial incentives to improve student achievement, calls the literature “ambivalent.” While programs in developing countries such as India and Kenya have had positive effects, few teacher incentive pay efforts in the United States have been deemed effective.

Hey - merit pay schemes don't work in education.

They just don't.

But they fit the prevailing ideology of so many of the "Best and Brightest" we have running both parties and all the education think tanks.

Market-based reforms are the kind of policies that excite these folks.

After all, they are capitalists, as Mayor Moneybags so smugly noted back in 2007.

So what if the shit they push is harmful.

It's capitalism!

Yippeeeee!!!!!

Money!!!!!

Bonuses!!!!

Yayyy!!!!!

Privatized CIA

They've privatized the prison system, they're in the middle of privatizing the school system, and hell, war is often fought by military contractors these days rather than by the U.S. Army. So why not privatize spying too?

WASHINGTON — Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, he still runs a network of spies.

Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class.

Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy,” Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge’s suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.

Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.

His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.

For all of the can-you-top-this qualities to Mr. Clarridge’s operation, it is a startling demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones and rivalries inside the American government to carry out their own agenda.

It also shows how the outsourcing of military and intelligence operations has spawned legally murky clandestine operations that can be at cross-purposes with America’s foreign policy goals. Despite Mr. Clarridge’s keen interest in undermining Afghanistan’s ruling family, President Obama’s administration appears resigned to working with President Karzai and his half brother, who is widely suspected of having ties to drug traffickers.

Charles E. Allen, a former top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security who worked with Mr. Clarridge at the C.I.A., termed him an “extraordinary” case officer who had operated on “the edge of his skis” in missions abroad years ago.

But he warned against Mr. Clarridge’s recent activities, saying that private spies operating in war zones “can get both nations in trouble and themselves in trouble.” He added, “We don’t need privateers.”

On the contrary, Mr. Allen - we can ONLY trust private contractors, private consultants and privateers.

Don't you understand, the market KNOWS best.

So what if the privateers are, you know, Iran Contra criminals with their own agendas.

This is about free market principles.

And seriously, what could be more important than those?