'In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland'.
PRIVATIZING YET ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE------THE FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY-----PUBLIC EDUCATION.
WHETHER YOU SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SEGREGATION IN EDUCATION IN EMBRACING THESE CHARTER/SCHOOL CHOICE POLICIES-----PEOPLE ARE CARING LESS ABOUT THE SEGREGATION AND SIMPLY WANT GOOD SCHOOLS IN THEIR COMMUNITIES.
One thing I do with my campaign is educate as to what is happening with these public private partnerships that corporate pols pretend are for the public good. I've spoken of communications and the Post Office and public energy/water utilities and VEOLA/Exelon. I am passionate about public education so much is shared on the road about the privatization of public education in Baltimore. Wall Street chose urban communities for this push for two reasons. One, these poor communities are desperate for jobs and to be small business owners and they are desperate for any means of quality education. It is no coincidence that the majority of organizations supporting this privatization plan are black churches/ministers who are connecting to charter schools. Do they know that these schools will be taken by Wall Street national charter chains that will not care about children or that the plan will end public education and equal opportunity and access? I think many of these churches and ministers simply see a need-----and they want an opportunity to operate a small business and are not thinking what vocational K-community college means especially for people of color. That is what is happening in Baltimore. BUILD is a great group of people but they embrace this charter movement and they endorse the most global corporate of candidates that work against the interests of people in the communities they represent. These pols work against all people's interests except the wealthy corporate crowd.
The Baltimore Education Coalition is only a Johns Hopkins organization that is basically a Michelle Rhee education privatization group of Teach for America, charters, school choice, and national corporate non-profits that come into a schools and take over all school policy. If you take a look at these non-profit websites it is clear they are a standard site with very little information and absolutely no feel on local community.
THIS IS WHAT CORPORATIONS ARE USING TO TAKE OVER COMMUNITY MOVEMENT TOWARDS CHARTERS. Remember, Hopkins = Bloomberg =Wall Street so the intent is to make businesses out of each individual school.
When I tell people Mike Miller of the Maryland Assembly said he would work to end state funding of public education I have only a case of he said-she said. If I remind people that all corporations in Baltimore are receiving tax breaks excluding property taxes-----that corporations like Hopkins are still categorized as non-profits and pay no property taxes-----and that the Baltimore City Hall is shouting for large cuts to residential property taxes-----WHICH IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF FUNDING FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS----where is the money for funding schools going to come? So, if we are eliminating resources locally----then is it likely that those state funds will disappear? I encourage people to think what filling our school board with business people, Teach for America, and charter school owners means to public education. Think about KIPP as the national charter chain that already has gone private in many states across America and is just waiting to do so in Baltimore. Ending public funding will force schools to partner with corporations and national charter chains will be there to expand.
This Wall Street plan is happening in cities across America and the goal will be to build this private charter platform in these cities and then expand them across the state. It only takes a few pieces of legislation to do this and we all know how quickly all of this Race to the Top and Common Core legislation passed the Maryland Assembly. So, this is the goal and ending public education will take yet another cornerstone of democracy into the hands of Wall Street. Controlling what people are taught is a must in an autocratic society.
I especially talk with religious communities about the intention and how Wall Street will not allow for religious teaching in the system they are developing. The Catholic Church is taking most of its private schools to charters no doubt to receive education funding giving this charter movement more legitimacy. I let these leaders know the intent and most are surprised but when they look at the big picture-----
THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE IS CLEAR. BALTIMORE'S SYSTEM OF CHARTERS AND SCHOOLS AS BUSINESSES ARE SIMPLY A PLATFORM FOR TAKEOVER BY NATIONAL CHARTER CHAINS.
Below you see an article that does a good job looking at both sides. I want to emphasize that when KIPP says the bulk of private donations go to building space for its schools----KIPP in Baltimore simply converts existing space as does most of KIPP across the country. KIPP is already privatized in some states and as we see these charters are not public schools----they are simply getting the public money other public schools that are closed would be getting. I have looked at how achievement data and demographic data in Baltimore schools is collected and shared and I know that KIPP in Baltimore just as around the country is allowed to hide much data under guise of 'charter' and that much of the data raises concerns.
So, KIPP is the Wall Street national charter chain of choice and heavy funding up front will end in massive profits when KIPP takes over most public schools across America. Remember, these national charter chains are made to look good now but believe me----once they are allowed to replace our public schools----if left to move forward this could be in a decade----all of that private donation would stop, quality fall, and these schools will only be vocational tracking into what will be mostly low-wage employment.
Look at some of Baltimore's highest achieving public schools having their funding taken for advanced programs -----while achievement is truly excelling----and you see the future.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FOLLOW THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF EQUAL PROTECTION AS WITH ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY. USING CHARTERS TO SKIRT THIS IS ONE STEP TO ENDING THIS REQUIREMENT. WHAT HAPPENS TO 90% OF AMERICANS IF EQUAL PROTECTION LAWS DISAPPEAR? THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT DISAPPEARS-----WHERE ALL PEOPLE ARE CITIZENS DESERVING A HUMANITIES/LIBERAL ARTS BASED EDUCATION.
Below you see the direct connection with the policy of advancing this one national charter chain. Maryland is making it harder and harder for low-income families to receive any kinds of financial aid for 4 year institutions like U of M College Park. Below you see a scholarship directed specifically at KIPP students. If getting a scholarship to UMD requires attending KIPP----then more parents move their children to KIPP. College Park and Wallace Loh is the most corporate of public universities and their desire to move public K-12 education to that of corporate is no secret. More students graduating from KIPP going to college-----WELL, THAT IS WHY!
So, these are the clues one sees to which national charter chains will get the nod as all state funding for public education moves from public schools to these charters.
UMD Forms Partnership with KIPP Charter Schools Network
August 15, 2013
Contacts: Beth Cavanaugh, UMD, 301-405-4625
Steve Mancini, KIPP, 415-531-5396
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) announced today the creation of a formal partnership to attract and recruit KIPP students, including those in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. regions. Through this partnership, KIPP students will have access to existing programs and resources created for low-income or first-generation college students, as well as scholarships created through a gift from Charles Daggs, UMD class of 1969 and a KIPP Bay Area board member. This partnership will also help to support KIPP's mission to increase college competition rates for underserved KIPP students throughout the country.
"We all win by creating new opportunities and upward mobility," says University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh. "This new partnership extends our success with talented, low-income students, and our progress closing the achievement gap. It creates a much richer learning environment for all students. Congratulations to KIPP and our alums, whose vision makes this possible."
This fall, four KIPP students – three from Baltimore City and one from Washington, D.C. – will enter UMD's freshmen class. Three of these students have been awarded full scholarships through the Daggs gift and the UMD Incentive Awards Program.
"This partnership will support our hardworking KIPP students as they work toward a degree from one of the best public universities in the country," says Richard Barth, CEO at KIPP. "We are so grateful for Chuck Daggs's generous gift, which is helping to support this partnership and providing much-needed resources to some of our top graduates who have excelled in their schools and communities, to help them attain an excellent college education."
Established in 2002, KIPP Baltimore consists of two schools – one elementary school and one middle school. In Washington, D.C., KIPP operates nine schools – one high school, three middle schools, and eight elementary schools. All schools are free, open-enrollment charter schools that offer a rigorous, college preparatory education.
KIPP Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are part of a national network of 141 KIPP public charter schools. A report released this year by independent research firm Mathematica showed that KIPP middle schools nationwide are producing positive, significant and substantial achievement gains for students in all grades and four subjects—math, reading, science, and social studies. Mathematica researchers found that KIPP achieved these academic gains with students that entered middle school with lower achievement scores than their peers in neighboring district schools.
KIPP – the Knowledge Is Power Program – is a national network of open-enrollment, college-preparatory public charter schools with a track record of preparing students in underserved communities for success in college and in life. KIPP was founded in Houston in 1994 and has grown to 141 schools serving more than 50,000 students in 20 states and Washington, D.C. More than 95 percent of students enrolled in KIPP schools are African American or Latino, and 86 percent qualify for the federal free and reduced-price meals program.
Read a story from The Baltimore Sun on the new KIPP partnership here.
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Keep in mind that Baltimore City schools perform so badly because they have been starved of revenue for decades. The state underfunded them for decades, Baltimore City is left with systemic fraud and corruption that extends to the school funding....so, students of Baltimore City schools have been victims of misappropriation of education funds they were legally required to receive. These funds mostly ended up in affluent and corporate development in Baltimore with a few corrupt education administrators joining in to the fleecing of the Baltimore education budget.
THIS IS WHY BALTIMORE CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE IN SHAMBLES AND NOT PERFORMING SO SIMPLY MAKING SURE THEY ARE FULLY FUNDED AND RESOURCED----THAT TEACHERS RECEIVE HELP IN THE CLASSROOMS IS THE ANSWER.
What education privatizers are doing is sending all the funding, resources, and help to charters instead while most Baltimore public schools cannot even afford toilet paper. Your warm and fuzzy community charter will be taken over by these national charter chains.
THE MIDDLE-CLASS NEEDS TO KNOW THAT THIS GOAL OF NATIONAL CHARTER CHAINS WILL NOT STAY WITH THE POOR STUDENTS----IT WILL BECOME ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
March 31, 2011
New study of KIPP says the charter chain pulls in more cash than other schools
By Sarah Garland
Charter schools that post unusually high academic gains are often accused of having unfair advantages over traditional public schools, including more advantaged students and more private money at their disposal. A new and highly contentious study released today attempts to prove that the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), the largest charter-school network in the country, is inundated with both in comparison to its regular public-school counterparts and other charter schools.
The study is likely to give ammunition to charter-school critics as evidence that KIPP’s high test scores can be attributed to extra cash and a population of students that’s easier to educate. But the study’s findings are far from conclusive: The data used in the financial analysis are limited and, according to KIPP, often inaccurate, and the methodology used to examine KIPP students is problematic.
In the national battles over whether to increase the number of charter schools, research has been a weapon wielded aggressively by both sides. (Teachers’ unions and their supporters are typically on the anti-charter side, and ed-reformer-types like Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the D.C. schools, and Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City schools, are on the other.)
But this study is different than many others because it accepts the fact that KIPP’s academic outcomes are indisputably extraordinary, and seeks instead to dig more deeply into “the reasons for its success.”
Most notably, the study, by Western Michigan University researchers at the Study Group on Educational Management Organizations, addresses the question of whether KIPP receives more money per student from government and private sources than other schools. Critics have wondered whether the chain’s reliance on philanthropic dollars, which have helped fund its rapid expansion, can be maintained as the network continues to grow.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at a KIPP school in Newark (photo courtesy of Gary He for Facebook)
“Are KIPP schools sustainable, and are we overly reliant on philanthropic dollars?” are questions that KIPP also asks itself, Steve Mancini, a spokesperson for the charter network, told The Hechinger Report yesterday. The possibility that KIPP is getting more money per student than its traditional-school counterparts also raises the question of whether it’s reasonable to expect regular public schools to match KIPP’s achievements, and whether increasing the number of charter schools is an efficient use of money – an important question in tough economic times.
Here is what the study found:
In the 2007 school year, 12 KIPP school districts encompassing 25 schools received $12,731 per pupil from local, state and federal governments. Public-school districts where the KIPP schools were located received $11,960 (a few dollars more than the national public school average). Charter schools in general received much less on average: $9,579. Compared to regular public schools and other charters, KIPP received much more federal money, as well as more than double what other charters received in local funding.
Besides the extra government money that KIPP receives, the study found that the 12 KIPP school districts reported $37 million to the IRS in private donations in 2008, about $5,760 per pupil on top of the nearly $13,000 per pupil they received from the government.
“We were surprised they were getting so much,” said Gary Miron, a researcher at Western Michigan University and lead author of the study.
But KIPP vigorously rejected the study’s data after reviewing it yesterday. “This report has multiple factual misrepresentations,” Mancini said.
Mancini noted that the study focused on only 25 KIPP schools out of 58 open at the time when researchers calculated the financial data — missing schools in California, for example, which allocates much less money to charter schools than other states. According to KIPP’s own estimates, its schools receive about $9,000 to $10,000 per pupil, on average, from government sources, a figure that is closer to what other charters receive.
As for the private money, Mancini said the study does not take into account the fact that a significant part of the donations goes toward paying for buildings, often a large cost for charter schools in districts that don’t give them facilities. Miron, the study’s author, said that school districts must also pay for buildings, but Mancini countered that these costs are generally not included in per-pupil calculations.
KIPP estimates that it receives only about $2,500 per student from private sources, putting the total (including government money) at around $11,500 or $12,500 per pupil, right around what regular public schools receive. The study does not include data on the amount of private money other charter schools receive, but, keeping in mind that KIPP is the largest and best-known charter network in the country, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume KIPP does better at fundraising and that other charters receive less.
The takeaway is that KIPP’s model is not especially cheap, although KIPP does offer extras that traditional public schools don’t — like Saturday school and longer school days — for a similar amount of money.
“I think what this study does is at least give us pause about inferring that the KIPP model is a low-cost model,” said Jeffrey Henig, a political scientist at Teachers College who briefly reviewed the study before it was published, and who is affiliated with the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, housed at Teachers College. (The Hechinger Report is also located at Teachers College.)
The New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the study focused on the money issues, but articles in Education Week and Bloomberg News focused on the study’s examination of KIPP students.
KIPP uses a “no-excuses” model in which students and parents are required to sign performance contracts. Most of the students it educates are low-income. In fact, the WMU study found that KIPP enrolls higher percentages of low-income students than the public-school districts in which its schools are located.
But the idea that charter schools “cream” the best students from surrounding neighborhood schools and push out students who don’t perform well academically is a persistent critique of the schools, and the study claims to have found that the hardest-to-educate KIPP students tend to leave the schools at high rates.
A study finds that 40 percent of black males quit KIPP schools, a figure contested by KIPP (photo courtesy of brookesb)
In particular, the researchers argue that 40 percent of African-American male students, a group that generally posts lower test scores, “drop out” of KIPP schools between sixth and eighth grade. (Most KIPP schools are middle schools.)
“KIPP schools are cycling out those low-performing students, but they’re not replacing them,” said Miron. This is thought to be advantageous to KIPP for two reasons: first, the schools get to keep the funding tied to the student for that academic year even after he or she leaves the school; and, second, a school’s test score average goes up when low-performing students quit.
KIPP aggressively contests this finding, however. Mancini pointed to a study KIPP commissioned from the nonpartisan research group, Mathematica, which followed individual students over time. The WMU study used aggregated data taken as a snapshot and compared KIPP attrition rates to the rate of students who moved out of the school districts in which KIPP schools were located. Mathematica researchers said that a student leaving an individual school is not the same phenomenon as a student leaving a district.
“You have to do a school-by-school comparison,” said Brian Gill, one of the co-authors of the Mathematica report, which found that, on average, attrition at KIPP schools is about on par with schools in surrounding neighborhoods. “There’s a real danger from people drawing inferences from this that aren’t supported.”
The WMU study also assumes that all missing students have left the school and that none are held back a grade. In fact, many KIPP schools have policies that require low-performing students to repeat a grade, and they have been shown to enforce such policies at higher rates than other schools. Miron contends that students who are held back are more likely to leave, a phenomenon that we examined in a previous story. That some KIPP schools don’t replace students if they leave is true, however, and both Mancini and the Mathematica research team said they have been looking into this phenomenon.
Next week, Mathematica will release a new study on the matter, but as with most charter school studies, it’s unlikely to be the last word.
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The designation of charter schools as public is ridiculous and is done simply to allow taxpayers to pay to build the infrastructure for these national charter chains. Once the structure is built in a city like Baltimore then all pretense to private will end and you will see these schools listed on the Wall Street stock exchange.
Charters fail to meet all the requirements of public schools as regards equal access and opportunity, public transparency with data, and any oversight of whether information provided is accurate. It is when large institutions do extended research into these areas that all of the data becomes questionable.
We know that all of the pressure on teachers and administrators of both charter and public schools is forcing some to falsify data because it is impossible to make these changes as fast as these programs are implemented. Remember, Bush created the No Child Left Behind laws that are now being used to close schools and force these evaluations and tests in the classrooms-----but it was unfunded and never advanced. This push now for immediate change-----
IS A WALL STREET PLOY TO MOVE A VERY, VERY BAD PUBLIC POLICY THROUGH BEFORE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN STOP IT.
I want to emphasize------some charters are good----they do indeed offer choice and do so under the rules of public education. The problem is that those that do not are gobbling up charter growth at tremendous speed. That is what a corporation does----expands and takes the market share.
Public or Private: Charter Schools Can’t Have It Both Ways
Email to a friend Permalink Saturday, January 05, 2013
Aaron Regunberg, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™
Are charter schools public? Are they private? Are they somewhere in between? There is a lively debate in the education community over these questions. Charter advocates claim that charter schools are, of course, public schools, with all the democratic accountability that this entails. The only difference, they say, is that charters are public schools with the freedom and space to innovate. On the other side, charter critics argue that contracting with the government to receive taxpayer money does not make an organization public (after all, no one would say Haliburton is public) and if a school is not regulated and governed by any elected or appointed bodies answerable to the public, then it is not a public school.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was recently forced to weigh in on this question. It came out with a clear verdict that charter schools are not, in fact, public schools.
The ruling came in response to a case regarding a charter school in Chicago, the Chicago Math and Science Academy (CMSA). In 2010, two thirds of CMSA’s teachers voted to unionize, in accordance with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, which grants the employees of all public schools the right to form unions. In an attempt to invalidate this vote, charter officials filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board arguing that CMSA should not be covered under the state law because it does not qualify as a public school.
And that is precisely what NLRB concluded, ruling that CMSA is a “private entity” and is consequently covered under the federal law governing the private sector. According to the federal government, the debate is settled—charter schools are not public schools, and that is all there is to it.
Of course, that is not the whole story, because the charter movement is diverse. On the one hand, there are some community-based charter schools that are very much of and by and answerable to the communities they serve, which to me is what the word “public” is all about. On the other hand, there are corporate charter chains that have been widely criticized for discriminatory practices and unaccountable governance, which do not seem public at all. We should acknowledge these differences, and carve out a place for some nuance in the public-or-private debate.
What we should not do, however, is allow the charter movement or any particular charter chains to have it both ways. The Chicago Math and Science Academy has taken at least $23 million in taxpayer money since it formed in 2004, so it is perfectly willing to be “public” with regards to whose money it spends. But when its teachers want to join a union, now it is a “private entity.” That is hypocrisy, plain and simple. The situation is similar regarding many charter schools’ demographic situations. Chains like KIPP claim they enroll the same student populations as public schools and, like public schools, do not turn any students away. Yet widespread evidence suggests these schools use a variety of tactics, such as counseling certain students out, to create unrepresentative student bodies. In fact, a recent study found that in 2008, 11.5 percent of KIPP students were ELLs, compared with 19.2 percent of students in their local school districts, while 5.9 percent of KIPP students had disabilities, compared with 12.1 percent of students in the local school districts. Likewise, I have written a number of posts about similar irregularities found in the Achievement First charter chain, whose cadre of well-paid lobbyists could not stop stressing the “public” nature of their schools during last year’s hearings in Rhode Island.
That is not how it works. If you’re public, you’re public—you take all students, not just the ones who are easiest to educate; you offer fair protections to your employees; you play by the same rules on an even playing field. And if you’re private, stop claiming otherwise—stop saying your schools are public schools when they are not. Charters cannot have their cake and eat it too, and it’s about time we stopped letting them do so.
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Remember, Finland's education system is based on the US public education of my time----before the Reagan/Clinton education reforms and defunding of public education. We have a successful model that allowed for the best and the brightest in the world and moved more poor students into the middle-class in history. So, why are we moving towards something with no research, no proof of achievement, and that takes the entire public education system down?
THAT'S WALL STREET------AND THEIR POLS FOR YOU
As you see below the Finns transformed their schools system 40 years ago----that was when the US system was thriving.....now the Finns are performing as the US used to.
Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? The country's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework
By LynNell Hancock Smithsonian Magazine
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.
Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”
The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”
In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
PRIVATIZING YET ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE------THE FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY-----PUBLIC EDUCATION.
WHETHER YOU SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SEGREGATION IN EDUCATION IN EMBRACING THESE CHARTER/SCHOOL CHOICE POLICIES-----PEOPLE ARE CARING LESS ABOUT THE SEGREGATION AND SIMPLY WANT GOOD SCHOOLS IN THEIR COMMUNITIES.
One thing I do with my campaign is educate as to what is happening with these public private partnerships that corporate pols pretend are for the public good. I've spoken of communications and the Post Office and public energy/water utilities and VEOLA/Exelon. I am passionate about public education so much is shared on the road about the privatization of public education in Baltimore. Wall Street chose urban communities for this push for two reasons. One, these poor communities are desperate for jobs and to be small business owners and they are desperate for any means of quality education. It is no coincidence that the majority of organizations supporting this privatization plan are black churches/ministers who are connecting to charter schools. Do they know that these schools will be taken by Wall Street national charter chains that will not care about children or that the plan will end public education and equal opportunity and access? I think many of these churches and ministers simply see a need-----and they want an opportunity to operate a small business and are not thinking what vocational K-community college means especially for people of color. That is what is happening in Baltimore. BUILD is a great group of people but they embrace this charter movement and they endorse the most global corporate of candidates that work against the interests of people in the communities they represent. These pols work against all people's interests except the wealthy corporate crowd.
The Baltimore Education Coalition is only a Johns Hopkins organization that is basically a Michelle Rhee education privatization group of Teach for America, charters, school choice, and national corporate non-profits that come into a schools and take over all school policy. If you take a look at these non-profit websites it is clear they are a standard site with very little information and absolutely no feel on local community.
THIS IS WHAT CORPORATIONS ARE USING TO TAKE OVER COMMUNITY MOVEMENT TOWARDS CHARTERS. Remember, Hopkins = Bloomberg =Wall Street so the intent is to make businesses out of each individual school.
When I tell people Mike Miller of the Maryland Assembly said he would work to end state funding of public education I have only a case of he said-she said. If I remind people that all corporations in Baltimore are receiving tax breaks excluding property taxes-----that corporations like Hopkins are still categorized as non-profits and pay no property taxes-----and that the Baltimore City Hall is shouting for large cuts to residential property taxes-----WHICH IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF FUNDING FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS----where is the money for funding schools going to come? So, if we are eliminating resources locally----then is it likely that those state funds will disappear? I encourage people to think what filling our school board with business people, Teach for America, and charter school owners means to public education. Think about KIPP as the national charter chain that already has gone private in many states across America and is just waiting to do so in Baltimore. Ending public funding will force schools to partner with corporations and national charter chains will be there to expand.
This Wall Street plan is happening in cities across America and the goal will be to build this private charter platform in these cities and then expand them across the state. It only takes a few pieces of legislation to do this and we all know how quickly all of this Race to the Top and Common Core legislation passed the Maryland Assembly. So, this is the goal and ending public education will take yet another cornerstone of democracy into the hands of Wall Street. Controlling what people are taught is a must in an autocratic society.
I especially talk with religious communities about the intention and how Wall Street will not allow for religious teaching in the system they are developing. The Catholic Church is taking most of its private schools to charters no doubt to receive education funding giving this charter movement more legitimacy. I let these leaders know the intent and most are surprised but when they look at the big picture-----
THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE IS CLEAR. BALTIMORE'S SYSTEM OF CHARTERS AND SCHOOLS AS BUSINESSES ARE SIMPLY A PLATFORM FOR TAKEOVER BY NATIONAL CHARTER CHAINS.
Below you see an article that does a good job looking at both sides. I want to emphasize that when KIPP says the bulk of private donations go to building space for its schools----KIPP in Baltimore simply converts existing space as does most of KIPP across the country. KIPP is already privatized in some states and as we see these charters are not public schools----they are simply getting the public money other public schools that are closed would be getting. I have looked at how achievement data and demographic data in Baltimore schools is collected and shared and I know that KIPP in Baltimore just as around the country is allowed to hide much data under guise of 'charter' and that much of the data raises concerns.
So, KIPP is the Wall Street national charter chain of choice and heavy funding up front will end in massive profits when KIPP takes over most public schools across America. Remember, these national charter chains are made to look good now but believe me----once they are allowed to replace our public schools----if left to move forward this could be in a decade----all of that private donation would stop, quality fall, and these schools will only be vocational tracking into what will be mostly low-wage employment.
Look at some of Baltimore's highest achieving public schools having their funding taken for advanced programs -----while achievement is truly excelling----and you see the future.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FOLLOW THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF EQUAL PROTECTION AS WITH ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY. USING CHARTERS TO SKIRT THIS IS ONE STEP TO ENDING THIS REQUIREMENT. WHAT HAPPENS TO 90% OF AMERICANS IF EQUAL PROTECTION LAWS DISAPPEAR? THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT DISAPPEARS-----WHERE ALL PEOPLE ARE CITIZENS DESERVING A HUMANITIES/LIBERAL ARTS BASED EDUCATION.
Below you see the direct connection with the policy of advancing this one national charter chain. Maryland is making it harder and harder for low-income families to receive any kinds of financial aid for 4 year institutions like U of M College Park. Below you see a scholarship directed specifically at KIPP students. If getting a scholarship to UMD requires attending KIPP----then more parents move their children to KIPP. College Park and Wallace Loh is the most corporate of public universities and their desire to move public K-12 education to that of corporate is no secret. More students graduating from KIPP going to college-----WELL, THAT IS WHY!
So, these are the clues one sees to which national charter chains will get the nod as all state funding for public education moves from public schools to these charters.
UMD Forms Partnership with KIPP Charter Schools Network
August 15, 2013
Contacts: Beth Cavanaugh, UMD, 301-405-4625
Steve Mancini, KIPP, 415-531-5396
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) announced today the creation of a formal partnership to attract and recruit KIPP students, including those in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. regions. Through this partnership, KIPP students will have access to existing programs and resources created for low-income or first-generation college students, as well as scholarships created through a gift from Charles Daggs, UMD class of 1969 and a KIPP Bay Area board member. This partnership will also help to support KIPP's mission to increase college competition rates for underserved KIPP students throughout the country.
"We all win by creating new opportunities and upward mobility," says University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh. "This new partnership extends our success with talented, low-income students, and our progress closing the achievement gap. It creates a much richer learning environment for all students. Congratulations to KIPP and our alums, whose vision makes this possible."
This fall, four KIPP students – three from Baltimore City and one from Washington, D.C. – will enter UMD's freshmen class. Three of these students have been awarded full scholarships through the Daggs gift and the UMD Incentive Awards Program.
"This partnership will support our hardworking KIPP students as they work toward a degree from one of the best public universities in the country," says Richard Barth, CEO at KIPP. "We are so grateful for Chuck Daggs's generous gift, which is helping to support this partnership and providing much-needed resources to some of our top graduates who have excelled in their schools and communities, to help them attain an excellent college education."
Established in 2002, KIPP Baltimore consists of two schools – one elementary school and one middle school. In Washington, D.C., KIPP operates nine schools – one high school, three middle schools, and eight elementary schools. All schools are free, open-enrollment charter schools that offer a rigorous, college preparatory education.
KIPP Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are part of a national network of 141 KIPP public charter schools. A report released this year by independent research firm Mathematica showed that KIPP middle schools nationwide are producing positive, significant and substantial achievement gains for students in all grades and four subjects—math, reading, science, and social studies. Mathematica researchers found that KIPP achieved these academic gains with students that entered middle school with lower achievement scores than their peers in neighboring district schools.
KIPP – the Knowledge Is Power Program – is a national network of open-enrollment, college-preparatory public charter schools with a track record of preparing students in underserved communities for success in college and in life. KIPP was founded in Houston in 1994 and has grown to 141 schools serving more than 50,000 students in 20 states and Washington, D.C. More than 95 percent of students enrolled in KIPP schools are African American or Latino, and 86 percent qualify for the federal free and reduced-price meals program.
Read a story from The Baltimore Sun on the new KIPP partnership here.
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Keep in mind that Baltimore City schools perform so badly because they have been starved of revenue for decades. The state underfunded them for decades, Baltimore City is left with systemic fraud and corruption that extends to the school funding....so, students of Baltimore City schools have been victims of misappropriation of education funds they were legally required to receive. These funds mostly ended up in affluent and corporate development in Baltimore with a few corrupt education administrators joining in to the fleecing of the Baltimore education budget.
THIS IS WHY BALTIMORE CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE IN SHAMBLES AND NOT PERFORMING SO SIMPLY MAKING SURE THEY ARE FULLY FUNDED AND RESOURCED----THAT TEACHERS RECEIVE HELP IN THE CLASSROOMS IS THE ANSWER.
What education privatizers are doing is sending all the funding, resources, and help to charters instead while most Baltimore public schools cannot even afford toilet paper. Your warm and fuzzy community charter will be taken over by these national charter chains.
THE MIDDLE-CLASS NEEDS TO KNOW THAT THIS GOAL OF NATIONAL CHARTER CHAINS WILL NOT STAY WITH THE POOR STUDENTS----IT WILL BECOME ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
March 31, 2011
New study of KIPP says the charter chain pulls in more cash than other schools
By Sarah Garland
Charter schools that post unusually high academic gains are often accused of having unfair advantages over traditional public schools, including more advantaged students and more private money at their disposal. A new and highly contentious study released today attempts to prove that the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), the largest charter-school network in the country, is inundated with both in comparison to its regular public-school counterparts and other charter schools.
The study is likely to give ammunition to charter-school critics as evidence that KIPP’s high test scores can be attributed to extra cash and a population of students that’s easier to educate. But the study’s findings are far from conclusive: The data used in the financial analysis are limited and, according to KIPP, often inaccurate, and the methodology used to examine KIPP students is problematic.
In the national battles over whether to increase the number of charter schools, research has been a weapon wielded aggressively by both sides. (Teachers’ unions and their supporters are typically on the anti-charter side, and ed-reformer-types like Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the D.C. schools, and Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City schools, are on the other.)
But this study is different than many others because it accepts the fact that KIPP’s academic outcomes are indisputably extraordinary, and seeks instead to dig more deeply into “the reasons for its success.”
Most notably, the study, by Western Michigan University researchers at the Study Group on Educational Management Organizations, addresses the question of whether KIPP receives more money per student from government and private sources than other schools. Critics have wondered whether the chain’s reliance on philanthropic dollars, which have helped fund its rapid expansion, can be maintained as the network continues to grow.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at a KIPP school in Newark (photo courtesy of Gary He for Facebook)
“Are KIPP schools sustainable, and are we overly reliant on philanthropic dollars?” are questions that KIPP also asks itself, Steve Mancini, a spokesperson for the charter network, told The Hechinger Report yesterday. The possibility that KIPP is getting more money per student than its traditional-school counterparts also raises the question of whether it’s reasonable to expect regular public schools to match KIPP’s achievements, and whether increasing the number of charter schools is an efficient use of money – an important question in tough economic times.
Here is what the study found:
In the 2007 school year, 12 KIPP school districts encompassing 25 schools received $12,731 per pupil from local, state and federal governments. Public-school districts where the KIPP schools were located received $11,960 (a few dollars more than the national public school average). Charter schools in general received much less on average: $9,579. Compared to regular public schools and other charters, KIPP received much more federal money, as well as more than double what other charters received in local funding.
Besides the extra government money that KIPP receives, the study found that the 12 KIPP school districts reported $37 million to the IRS in private donations in 2008, about $5,760 per pupil on top of the nearly $13,000 per pupil they received from the government.
“We were surprised they were getting so much,” said Gary Miron, a researcher at Western Michigan University and lead author of the study.
But KIPP vigorously rejected the study’s data after reviewing it yesterday. “This report has multiple factual misrepresentations,” Mancini said.
Mancini noted that the study focused on only 25 KIPP schools out of 58 open at the time when researchers calculated the financial data — missing schools in California, for example, which allocates much less money to charter schools than other states. According to KIPP’s own estimates, its schools receive about $9,000 to $10,000 per pupil, on average, from government sources, a figure that is closer to what other charters receive.
As for the private money, Mancini said the study does not take into account the fact that a significant part of the donations goes toward paying for buildings, often a large cost for charter schools in districts that don’t give them facilities. Miron, the study’s author, said that school districts must also pay for buildings, but Mancini countered that these costs are generally not included in per-pupil calculations.
KIPP estimates that it receives only about $2,500 per student from private sources, putting the total (including government money) at around $11,500 or $12,500 per pupil, right around what regular public schools receive. The study does not include data on the amount of private money other charter schools receive, but, keeping in mind that KIPP is the largest and best-known charter network in the country, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume KIPP does better at fundraising and that other charters receive less.
The takeaway is that KIPP’s model is not especially cheap, although KIPP does offer extras that traditional public schools don’t — like Saturday school and longer school days — for a similar amount of money.
“I think what this study does is at least give us pause about inferring that the KIPP model is a low-cost model,” said Jeffrey Henig, a political scientist at Teachers College who briefly reviewed the study before it was published, and who is affiliated with the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, housed at Teachers College. (The Hechinger Report is also located at Teachers College.)
The New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the study focused on the money issues, but articles in Education Week and Bloomberg News focused on the study’s examination of KIPP students.
KIPP uses a “no-excuses” model in which students and parents are required to sign performance contracts. Most of the students it educates are low-income. In fact, the WMU study found that KIPP enrolls higher percentages of low-income students than the public-school districts in which its schools are located.
But the idea that charter schools “cream” the best students from surrounding neighborhood schools and push out students who don’t perform well academically is a persistent critique of the schools, and the study claims to have found that the hardest-to-educate KIPP students tend to leave the schools at high rates.
A study finds that 40 percent of black males quit KIPP schools, a figure contested by KIPP (photo courtesy of brookesb)
In particular, the researchers argue that 40 percent of African-American male students, a group that generally posts lower test scores, “drop out” of KIPP schools between sixth and eighth grade. (Most KIPP schools are middle schools.)
“KIPP schools are cycling out those low-performing students, but they’re not replacing them,” said Miron. This is thought to be advantageous to KIPP for two reasons: first, the schools get to keep the funding tied to the student for that academic year even after he or she leaves the school; and, second, a school’s test score average goes up when low-performing students quit.
KIPP aggressively contests this finding, however. Mancini pointed to a study KIPP commissioned from the nonpartisan research group, Mathematica, which followed individual students over time. The WMU study used aggregated data taken as a snapshot and compared KIPP attrition rates to the rate of students who moved out of the school districts in which KIPP schools were located. Mathematica researchers said that a student leaving an individual school is not the same phenomenon as a student leaving a district.
“You have to do a school-by-school comparison,” said Brian Gill, one of the co-authors of the Mathematica report, which found that, on average, attrition at KIPP schools is about on par with schools in surrounding neighborhoods. “There’s a real danger from people drawing inferences from this that aren’t supported.”
The WMU study also assumes that all missing students have left the school and that none are held back a grade. In fact, many KIPP schools have policies that require low-performing students to repeat a grade, and they have been shown to enforce such policies at higher rates than other schools. Miron contends that students who are held back are more likely to leave, a phenomenon that we examined in a previous story. That some KIPP schools don’t replace students if they leave is true, however, and both Mancini and the Mathematica research team said they have been looking into this phenomenon.
Next week, Mathematica will release a new study on the matter, but as with most charter school studies, it’s unlikely to be the last word.
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The designation of charter schools as public is ridiculous and is done simply to allow taxpayers to pay to build the infrastructure for these national charter chains. Once the structure is built in a city like Baltimore then all pretense to private will end and you will see these schools listed on the Wall Street stock exchange.
Charters fail to meet all the requirements of public schools as regards equal access and opportunity, public transparency with data, and any oversight of whether information provided is accurate. It is when large institutions do extended research into these areas that all of the data becomes questionable.
We know that all of the pressure on teachers and administrators of both charter and public schools is forcing some to falsify data because it is impossible to make these changes as fast as these programs are implemented. Remember, Bush created the No Child Left Behind laws that are now being used to close schools and force these evaluations and tests in the classrooms-----but it was unfunded and never advanced. This push now for immediate change-----
IS A WALL STREET PLOY TO MOVE A VERY, VERY BAD PUBLIC POLICY THROUGH BEFORE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CAN STOP IT.
I want to emphasize------some charters are good----they do indeed offer choice and do so under the rules of public education. The problem is that those that do not are gobbling up charter growth at tremendous speed. That is what a corporation does----expands and takes the market share.
Public or Private: Charter Schools Can’t Have It Both Ways
Email to a friend Permalink Saturday, January 05, 2013
Aaron Regunberg, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™
Are charter schools public? Are they private? Are they somewhere in between? There is a lively debate in the education community over these questions. Charter advocates claim that charter schools are, of course, public schools, with all the democratic accountability that this entails. The only difference, they say, is that charters are public schools with the freedom and space to innovate. On the other side, charter critics argue that contracting with the government to receive taxpayer money does not make an organization public (after all, no one would say Haliburton is public) and if a school is not regulated and governed by any elected or appointed bodies answerable to the public, then it is not a public school.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was recently forced to weigh in on this question. It came out with a clear verdict that charter schools are not, in fact, public schools.
The ruling came in response to a case regarding a charter school in Chicago, the Chicago Math and Science Academy (CMSA). In 2010, two thirds of CMSA’s teachers voted to unionize, in accordance with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, which grants the employees of all public schools the right to form unions. In an attempt to invalidate this vote, charter officials filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board arguing that CMSA should not be covered under the state law because it does not qualify as a public school.
And that is precisely what NLRB concluded, ruling that CMSA is a “private entity” and is consequently covered under the federal law governing the private sector. According to the federal government, the debate is settled—charter schools are not public schools, and that is all there is to it.
Of course, that is not the whole story, because the charter movement is diverse. On the one hand, there are some community-based charter schools that are very much of and by and answerable to the communities they serve, which to me is what the word “public” is all about. On the other hand, there are corporate charter chains that have been widely criticized for discriminatory practices and unaccountable governance, which do not seem public at all. We should acknowledge these differences, and carve out a place for some nuance in the public-or-private debate.
What we should not do, however, is allow the charter movement or any particular charter chains to have it both ways. The Chicago Math and Science Academy has taken at least $23 million in taxpayer money since it formed in 2004, so it is perfectly willing to be “public” with regards to whose money it spends. But when its teachers want to join a union, now it is a “private entity.” That is hypocrisy, plain and simple. The situation is similar regarding many charter schools’ demographic situations. Chains like KIPP claim they enroll the same student populations as public schools and, like public schools, do not turn any students away. Yet widespread evidence suggests these schools use a variety of tactics, such as counseling certain students out, to create unrepresentative student bodies. In fact, a recent study found that in 2008, 11.5 percent of KIPP students were ELLs, compared with 19.2 percent of students in their local school districts, while 5.9 percent of KIPP students had disabilities, compared with 12.1 percent of students in the local school districts. Likewise, I have written a number of posts about similar irregularities found in the Achievement First charter chain, whose cadre of well-paid lobbyists could not stop stressing the “public” nature of their schools during last year’s hearings in Rhode Island.
That is not how it works. If you’re public, you’re public—you take all students, not just the ones who are easiest to educate; you offer fair protections to your employees; you play by the same rules on an even playing field. And if you’re private, stop claiming otherwise—stop saying your schools are public schools when they are not. Charters cannot have their cake and eat it too, and it’s about time we stopped letting them do so.
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Remember, Finland's education system is based on the US public education of my time----before the Reagan/Clinton education reforms and defunding of public education. We have a successful model that allowed for the best and the brightest in the world and moved more poor students into the middle-class in history. So, why are we moving towards something with no research, no proof of achievement, and that takes the entire public education system down?
THAT'S WALL STREET------AND THEIR POLS FOR YOU
As you see below the Finns transformed their schools system 40 years ago----that was when the US system was thriving.....now the Finns are performing as the US used to.
Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? The country's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework
By LynNell Hancock Smithsonian Magazine
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.
“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.
Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. “You helped me,” he told his former teacher. Besart had opened his own car repair firm and a cleaning company. “No big fuss,” Louhivuori told me. “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for the tiny Nordic nation’s staggering record of education success, a phenomenon that has inspired, baffled and even irked many of America’s parents and educators. Finnish schooling became an unlikely hot topic after the 2010 documentary film Waiting for “Superman” contrasted it with America’s troubled public schools.
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”
The transformation of the Finns’ education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide. “I’m still surprised,” said Arjariita Heikkinen, principal of a Helsinki comprehensive school. “I didn’t realize we were that good.”
In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
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