Looks like the Carpe Diem charter school chain which started in Yuma is experiencing problems. One of its Indiana schools lost its charter and is being shut down, and the flagship Yuma school is struggling to reach full enrollment. I’ve been following the Carpe Diem story since 2011, wondering if its “blending learning” system would rise or fall. Indications are, it’s falling.
Charters wither and die all the time, so an ailing charter isn’t news. What makes this news is the school’s “blended learning” educational strategy and the lavish praise heaped upon it by people in the privatization/”education reform” community. The Goldwater Institute loves Carpe Diem. So did John Huppenthal when he was Ed Supe. What the charters do is “blend” computer-based learning with more traditional classroom teaching. For Carpe Diem, that means students spend hours in computer labs that look like call centers working their way through off-the-shelf online curriculum. They also spend some of their time in classrooms with teachers, but the computers take up so much of the students’ day, it doesn’t take many teachers to handle the classroom chores. The student-teacher ratio is 50-to-1, more than twice the ratio at most schools. That means a school with 300 students has six teachers, barely enough to stretch across the disciplines.
Conservatives love the blended learning concept because, well, teacher salaries are such a waste of money. Businesses don’t make a profit on monthly paychecks. But if you cut the teaching staff in half and buy or rent lots of computer education programming—and of course you have to replace all those computers with new ones every few years—ka-ching! What once was money wasted on salaries ends up in the pockets of for-profit education companies and computer vendors. Conservatives don’t put it that way, of course. It would sound crass. They say “blended learning” gives students curriculum tailored to their learning styles. Students move through the material as quickly or slowly as necessary to achieve mastery, with the educational software analyzing each student’s responses to individualize the best learning strategy. Computer-based education is the disruptive wave of the future, and the future is now.
I doubt computers are the future of education, but they’re certain to grow in importance. It’s inevitable, and if it’s done well, it can enhance and enrich student learning. But right now, do we have the software we need to both stimulate and educate students? And even if we have the right digital stuff, are students self-motivated enough to learn by sitting for hours in front of computer screens with only minimal interaction with educators? Carpe Diem and its supporters think so.
In 2010, the charter’s state test scores were higher than expected, making it look like the blended learning strategy was succeeding. But there was a problem. The test papers had a significantly higher number of erasures than normal. Even more troubling, the number of erasures where wrong answers were changed to right answers was seven times the state average. Those are huge red flags pointing to the possibility that adults went through the finished tests and changed answers. If that’s true, the schools scores meant nothing, and the adult cheaters should have been exposed and fired. But cheating by erasure is hard to verify, and Arizona didn’t make a serious effort to investigate. However, the scores over the next two years added to the suspicion that the 2010 scores were inflated. In 2011 and 2012, the student passing rate on the state tests dropped between 10 and 30 percent. The school had a few explanations for the drop.
It changed its online curriculum. Lots of new students enrolled. The school principal died. Confident in its rationalizations and selling itself based on the 2010 “success,” Carpe Diem expanded to other states in 2012, opening campuses in Ohio, Texas and Indiana.
I haven’t seen any reporting on the Ohio and Texas schools, but the three Indiana schools have suffered with poor enrollment and low test scores. This year, the state charter board voted to close the Meridian campus. Built for 300, it had only 120 students. It earned a state grade of D for two years in a row, then moved up to a C. The current plan is to consolidate the three Indianapolis schools at the Meridian campus and see if they can make a go of it, but Robert Sommers, who has the job of expanding the franchise, isn’t optimistic. He said it’s hard to attract students and harder to keep them.
“That is just a fundamental flaw,” Sommers said. “Kids just didn’t want to enroll, and when they did, they didn’t want to stay.”
The original Yuma school is struggling with enrollment as well. If there’s a future for “blended learning,” it looks like Carpe Diem isn’t it.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2017.
Please look at the Save Our Schools petition that is going around to repeal the bill the legislature passed ( SB 1431/HB 2394 expands the voucher program) in April 2017. This bill supports the move toward increasing funding for vouchers to charter schools – these are not publicly owned schools, but rather taxpayer paid for profit entities. Although there is a cap on the number of vouchers in the bill, several legislators have stated it can be increased. My belief is in public schools, however flawed at the moment , because they belong to us all.
Supporters of Public Schools: please get your facts straight. SB1431 allowed “all 1.1 million students in Arizona schools to use state dollars to attend private or parochial schools, so that parents can choose.”
http://tucson.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/lawmakers-move-arizona-closer-to-school-voucher-option-for-all/article_bc6e7056-6f06-5198-929a-5ed29b5194b0.html
Private and parochial schools are not charter schools, and most reputable private and parochial school are non-profit. Unlike publicly funded charter schools, they must charge tuition to students to attend. SB1431 allowed students exiting the public school system to take approximately $5K per year of the per-pupil funding and apply it towards tuition in a private / parochial school.
The tendency in the “Save Public Schools” crowd to systematically misrepresent the initiatives against which they are trying to organize the public is not confidence inspiring. Schools need to educate. They need to be run by and supported by people who are capable of getting their facts straight. They are not worthy of support if they and their supporters are “so flawed at the moment” that they can’t teach students how to master facts and communicate accurately.
Further: no sufficiently attentive citizen who had observed the operations of TUSD governance and administration for a reasonable length of time would believe that public schools necessarily “belong to us all.” Some of the larger and more dysfunctional institutions of public education in Southern Arizona show signs of “belonging” more to the interest groups and political networks connected with them than they belong to the families that enroll their children in them. Cf. an inexperienced Superintendent netting $500K per annum of the sadly limited funding available to educate children and tossing around $10K bonuses to his central admin cronies, while teachers qualify for food stamps and students drink lead-polluted water out of the un-inspected drinking fountains and go without textbooks which the district owns, but the districts employees can’t find in their warehouses. Cf. TUSD Board members running for re-election receiving $5K campaign contributions from a marketing executive at the firm to which these Board members have voted to outsource substitute teacher labor, to the detriment of compensation and benefits for the substitute teachers and to the detriment of children in scores of TUSD classrooms that have no permanent, certified teacher covering them.
Students need to get out of the toxic (literally, not just figuratively, TOXIC) nightmare of TUSD. Stop trying to distort the facts and organize the public against initiatives that help students get good educations in safe facilities. Or, if you can’t do that, at least work as hard to solve the pervasive problems in TUSD as you are working to try to block families from exiting it.
…and no amount of opposition to charter and private schools make the public schools any better than they are. They are what they are, and until they accept that reality and figure out a way to fix them, it is foolish to try to expand them.
The shouldn’t be surprising fact about TUSD schools is that despite all the problems enumerated by the above poster, that many, many children at all levels are in fact receiving a good or excellent educational experience. The recent tour on FaceBook by the newest board member shows proof of good curriculum, devoted teachers, quality educational activities in every school she visited. Why is anyone surprised? Why are 85% of AZ students in AZ public schools? Because there are many good teachers and good experiences and progressing students in them. We are not Trenton, NYC, Chicago, LA, or Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Our schools are not discipline horror stories when teachers work to make the school environment work for the students. We rush to talk badly about local schools, mostly based on bad funding situations, ignoring the hard workers within the ranks. Pay attention to the problems, contact the legislature to fund them properly, and stay in touch with your local board members. We can do this.
A school SYSTEM, to be effective, needs to have a way of ensuring that most classrooms in most schools — let’s say an average of 90% at any given time — are staffed with competent, effective teachers.
How many and what percent of TUSD classrooms are currently covered by uncertified, outsourced substitutes?
How many and what percent of TUSD classrooms are currently staffed with recently credentialed (within the last 3 years) teachers?
How do these numbers and percents of the total teaching force compare with the numbers and percents in every other local district?
Now: What is the percent of students in public schools in Pima County that are enrolled in TUSD?
What were the discipline and administrative problems at Secrist?
What have the problems with staffing the math / science program and maintaining Fine Arts magnet status been at Utterback?
You can point to examples of functionality here and there within TUSD, but functionality is not system wide. Identify the weaknesses, which are pervasive, and calculate what percent of students moving through the TUSD system are likely to receive excellent instruction in 90% of the classrooms to which they will be assigned K-12. Now disaggregate that percent for TUSD schools on the SW side vs. TUSD schools on the NE side. Now compare those disaggregated percents with the same figures for other local school districts.
Why are 85% of AZ students in public schools? Because not many people who live within the boundaries of low functioning school districts like TUSD have had the means to pay tuition and provide transportation to better alternatives. There are many parallels between TUSD and Trenton, Newark, Chicago, etc., and you can’t change that by pure assertion to the contrary.
Pay attention to the problems, note that for decades many professionally informed and hard working advocates and administrators have tried and failed to clean up the mess that is TUSD. Stop lying to the public about the minuscule chances that any given student enrolled in a system as honeycombed with problems as TUSD will graduate from grade 12 with optimal development of their academic potential, and recognize that staying in touch with Board members in TUSD — considering what those Board members are and what that collective Board is — will not do any constituent one DAMN bit of good. You can watch the June 13 Board meeting from start to finish, if you have any doubt about it:
http://govboard.tusd1.schooldesk.net/Meetings/MeetingVideo/tabid/79277/ctl/view/itemid/154311/Default.aspx?returnurl=http://govboard.tusd1.schooldesk.net/Meetings/MeetingVideo/tabid/79277/Default.aspx
“We” cannot “do this.” Nor can YOU and Ann Eve Pedersen and Jen Darland do it, with or without the help of the various gullible and poorly informed citizens you may be able to rally to your lost cause, people liable to become confused and disseminate false information like that in post #1 above. Too many “Supporters of Public Schools” have neither the TRUTH nor an understanding of WHAT SOUND EDUCATION ACTUALLY IS on their side. SOUND EDUCATION is NOT what is delivered to TOO MANY students in TOO MANY classrooms in TUSD, and you can’t change that by happy-face, misleading PR and / or by hiring or retaining Stephanie Boe at $90K per year in a district where so many classrooms are manned by uncertified, long term subs making a fraction of Ms. Boe’s salary, with no benefits.
If “Supporters of Public Ed” were responsible, they would stop promoting public policy that has the effect of destroying the lifeboats that get students off the sinking ship.
Want to prove me wrong, gcb1? Answer ALL of the questions asked above with actual data, actual facts. Look WHAT THIS DISTRICT ACTUALLY IS in the face and tell the public the TRUTH.
I will add that glib promotions of the district and how “good” or “excellent” portions of it may be is extremely offensive to the thousands of TUSD parents who recently found by reading yet another expose-style report in the AZ Daily Star — NOT by receiving notification from the district — that our TUSD students had attended school for several years in facilities where there were unsafe levels of lead in the water dispensed by the drinking fountains.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/elevated-levels-of-lead-found-at-pima-county-schools-facilities/article_a0f33304-d901-5946-8164-d7b2854a75d9.html
Inexcusable. Stop promoting, stop defending this abomination. And for God’s sake, stop blocking the exits. Let parents protect the well-being of their children by taking their per -pupil funding and applying it elsewhere.
Note that the “likes” on a comment that tries to rally opposition to a legislative measure by providing completely inaccurate information about what that measure actually contains at this point exceed the dislikes. On a post which corrects the inaccuries and provides a link to valid information, the dislikes exceeds the likes.
Nicely sums up some of the potential problems with democratic forms of governance, doesn’t it? Too bad the American public district schools which enroll over 80% of our population haven’t yet been able to produce an electorate in this country where the majority is not ignorant or apathetic or both.
That is no different than the the immigration debate. read what Obama said about it in 2005.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-democrats-immigration-mistake/528678/
The truth shall set you free.
Excellent article in The Atlantic. Thanks for the link.
What a scandal it would be for students to be allowed to apply their per-pupil funding in a school where they might learn, as some students in Tucson do, that Cesar Chavez agreed with the formerly expressed opinions of Obama, Krugman, Greenwald and Sanders. Or that Dorothy Day, an icon of the left, was not “pro-choice.” Or that they should think for themselves and try to discern the truth on every issue rather than swallowing every item in a party platform whole.
Lots of manipulations these days to try to “manufacture consent,” distort the truth on issues, and / or mislead the voting public. Self-interested, serve-the-money-interests and win-the-election-by-pandering-to-an-ignorant-electorate behaviors are pervasive on both sides of the political spectrum as Lessig and others have taken the trouble to document.
https://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Version-Lawrence-Lessig/dp/1455537012/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498053652&sr=1-4&keywords=lessig+lawrence
The TRUTH remains something independent of the agendas of political parties and interest groups, including the charter lobby, and including the “Supporters of Public Schools” group, which can be observed locally actively producing misleading impressions about legislative initiatives they oppose and trying to suppress awareness of what conditions actually are in some of our largest public districts.
Think for a moment: what does this manipulative, dishonest behavior toward the electorate imply about what kind of citizens “Supporters of Public Schools” will be trying to produce in the “educational” institutions they champion? Will they ask these institutions to form citizens capable of self-directed research and critical thinking independent of a party line? Forgive me, Supporters of Public Schools, for answering that question honestly and saying it plainly: having observed your local operations for several years now, it seems to me very unlikely.
There’s a reason why “Independent Schools” chose that name and that stance for themselves. In the final analysis, it may be the only stance that is capable of producing valid educational programs.
Does a public school district like TUSD serve and promote EQUITY? Should we do what “Supporters of Public Schools” (Ann Eve Pedersen, Jen Darland, etc.) ask, oppose SB1431 and, by so doing, ensure that people who want to transfer out of some of the district’s lower performing schools and enroll their children in private schools do not have the economic means necessary to do so?
Consider these things observed by constituents with students enrolled in TUSD:
1. Parents at both Sam Hughes and Fruchthendler Elementary Schools, the schools which Ann Eve Pedersen’s and Jen Darland’s families used, raised private money and tax credit funds and used the funds to significantly augment the resources available to students enrolled in those schools, creating conditions quite different from what might be available to students attending, for example, TUSD schools in less affluent neighborhoods on the SW side. Parents not only raised the funds, which is relatively easy in affluent neighborhoods like the neighborhoods surrounding those schools, they got TUSD central, in spite of its professed concerns with “EQUITY” to permit them to apply their funds in areas where they wanted them applied, including:
Hughes: Playground equipment, a piano, fine arts programming, a librarian, a first grade teacher, classroom aides, project-based-learning professional development and curricular support, a counselor, a P.E. Teacher, a chess teacher, reading specialists, 36 computers
Fruchthendler (a partial list, including only staff positions funded) PE coach, track coach , Spanish teacher, computer teacher, Kinder-2nd grade tutor, 3rd -5th grade tutor
On the topic of how that permission was obtained, one of the well-connected fundraisers involved with the Hughes efforts gave the impression that part of the trick was supporting campaigns “the district” was running by knocking on doors and persuading constituents to vote for them. Were these just campaigns for bonds and overrides (and, more recently, perhaps for the dubious Ducey-concocted initiative, Prop 123), or were they also political campaigns supporting certain candidates for the district’s Governing Board? Who knows — though it’s interesting to note that Ann Eve Pedersen was Jen Darland’s campaign manager when she ran for the TUSD Board in 2014. Darland is a Democrat who gave the appearance during her campaign of being closely associated with sitting Board members Adelita Grijalva and Kristel Foster. During Darland’s campaign, questions were raised about whether Pedersen had improperly used a district employee e-mail contact list to invite people to a Darland campaign event at her home.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/multiple-campaign-violations-alleged-in-tusd-board-race/article_5686d533-8c07-5c28-951a-0651164dba82.html
2. Jen Darland’s family, like former Superintendent HT Sanchez’s family, used TUSD’s Fruchthendler Elementary. Not just once but twice during the 2013-2016 period when the TUSD Board was controlled by the majority Grijalva-Foster-Juarez, proposals were passed by the TUSD Board that would create a pipeline directly from Fruchthendler Elementary to Sabino High School, allowing Fruchthendler parents to bypass Magee Middle school, a middle school serving a more socio-economically diverse population than the Fruchthendler neighborhood. Evidently Magee was good enough for other TUSD students, but not good enough for the friends, neighbors and classmates of the children of Ms. Darland and Dr. Sanchez. The desegregation authority twice vetoed the plan as one that would increase inequity in the district. No doubt the desire to install the Fruchthendler-Sabino direct feed pipeline was one more reason the Superintendent and Board majority 2013-2016 used desegregation funds — the main purpose of which should be to improve services to underserved students — to pay expensive lawyers to try to resolve the desegregation case and get out from under court oversight. If they could get rid of oversight, there would be no one to say “No” to plans like the Fruchthendler-Sabino pipeline.
3. Wasn’t it Senator Bradley who introduced the idea of public school tax credits in the AZ legislature? Did his family utilize a private school K-8, and then University High School, the TUSD school with competitive admissions, extremely high test scores, and (after public school tax credits were passed by the legislature) the highest public school tax credit net in the district?
Do your internet research, David Safier, and phone some of your well-connected friends to fact-check. Research ALL the obstacles to and perversions of EQUITY (and who is responsible for them) and inform the public. That’s your goal here in this blog, right?
So, bottom line: is the sadly misled, factually inaccurate commenter #1 above correct in stating that we should sign the SOS petition to save the public schools that “belong to us all”? One could say that TUSD schools like Utterback, a very “flawed at the moment” institution serving a low-SES population which recently lost its magnet status in part because of the poor quality of its programs and deficiently qualified staff, may “belong to” anyone who wants to enroll it: it will always have plenty of open seats. But schools like Fruchthendler, Sam Hughes, and University High do not belong to anyone who wants to enroll. The first two belong first to people who live in their designated neighborhoods, which have prohibitively high home values. After that, if there are spaces, they are open to those who apply to “open enroll.” Through what mysterious process or algorithm TUSD’s central office authorities determine how some who apply get in and some do not, we do not know. What we do know is that there are not enough spaces in the “good” schools in TUSD like Sam Hughes and Fruchthendler for all those who would like to attend. As for University High School, it is only available to students who have high GPAs and high scores on tests of cognitive aptitude. It serves a lot of relatively affluent, relatively well educated Tucsonans, including several well-connected Democratic “Supporters of Public Schools!” who sent their kids to more affluent public districts and / or to private schools K-8 and would only condescend to enroll a child in TUSD if the child passed the admissions test to University High School. You know: the sort of people who scream “EQUITY!” and “WELFARE FOR THE RICH!” when less affluent families want to take their their per-pupil funding out of some of the low functioning schools in TUSD and, through ESA legislation / SB1431, transfer it to the kinds of private schools many of these equity-concerned (?) folks used for their own children.
Perhaps Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Darland might want to give a pass on ESAs to those TUSD residents who have applied to “open enroll” in Hughes and Fruchthendler, but did not get in. Perhaps Senator Bradley might want to give a pass on ESAs to those who have applied for admission to University High School, but did not get in. Perhaps not. Do they actually care about TUSD residents who don’t happen to be able to access the little enclaves of privilege some TUSD constituents have managed to carve out for themselves in the midst of a massive dysfunctional district where only the privileged and people with “pull” get their advocacy goals met, a district which, nevertheless, serves primarily people without “pull,” the children of the poor? Their opposition to SB1431 would appear to suggest not.
I see the League of Women Voters of Arizona has signed on as a supporter of the misleadingly titled “Save Our Schools” campaign:
http://saveourschoolsarizona.org/pages/87
Another sad sign that the AZ League, in spite of its professed concern with EQUITY, doesn’t actually know what the term means and / or is led by people who haven’t the faintest clue what is going on at the ground level in TUSD.
I detect the influence of some of our local “Supporters of Public Ed.” They may be able to mislead the Board of the League of Women Voters of AZ by pouting and telling fairy tales about financially transparent, democratically controlled and uniformly deserving public school districts whose only obstacle to delivering “GREAT EDUCATION to EVERYONE !” is lack of funds, but a lot of people locally see through campaigns based on the false notion of public school districts as bastions of an “EQUITY” that has never existed and will never begin to exist in districts like TUSD, even if funding is increased.
Equity cannot begin to exist in TUSD in part because some of our better known “Supporters of Public Ed” don’t care to advocate for it. They remain silent when the factual findings of people like Sylvia Campoy are disparaged by the district’s representatives. They remain silent when the Superintendent re-allocates millions of dollars from improving services to underserved students to paying three different sets of expensive law firms to pick fights with the desegregation judge. They remain silent when their friends on the TUSD Board vote twice in support of a patently inequitable plan to funnel students directly from wealthy-neighborhood-Fruchthendler-Elementary to wealthy-neighborhood-Sabino-High-School, bypassing a middle school where Fruchthendler children might have to attend school with (shudder) less privileged TUSD students.
Did I miss the “Supporters of Public Ed”‘s conspicuous advocacy on these topics, David Safier? If so, please send me a link to where I can see these public-spirited, compassionate campaigners using their influence in the community to defend EQUITY in TUSD.
(In general, I will say that it’s best when education policy analysis and education policy initiatives are created by people who’ve taken the time and trouble to study for a few years under the tutelage of experts in education and / or education policy. Right now the policy initiatives produced by our local “Supporters of Public Schools!” are not, and while they continue to market their own particular brand of hypocrisy and ignorance to the electorate, what they are actually doing is a lot of damage to the credibility of and soundness of management in public schools in this state.)