Behind Frenemy Lines - May 10, 2014, by Jason Stanford - This is a typical day for Greg Abbott’s gubernatorial bid: He goes into the office, screws up his own campaign and goes home. If it weren’t for his mistakes—Ted Nugent, thanking a supporter who called Wendy Davis “retard Barbie”, calling South Texas a “Third-World Country”, and his bungled opposition to equal pay come to mind—Abbott would seem to have no campaign at all. But it’s when you separate the wheat from the gaffe on education that Abbott’s campaign looks like a disaster waiting to happen.

The negative coverage of Abbott’s education plan—and boy howdy has there been a lot—is focused on Abbott’s mistakes. His education plan cites Charles Murray, whose retrograde views on race and gender got him called a “White Nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. On page 20, his plan calls for “standardized tests” in pre-K. As a dodge, his campaign spokesmanclaimed that was in the plan “for informational purposes only.” And then he cancels campaign events at public schools when the Davis campaign points out that the schools are suing him over funding cuts.

But behind this façade of denials, backpedaling, and obliviousness sits the luckiest man in American politics, because almost no one has bothered to discuss his idea to create “takeover districts” for low-performing schools. He has reportedly modeled his plan on the privatization reforms in New Orleans.

That last bit should scare you. Education reformers—that is, those who think private charters would do better than public schools at educating poor children—call the Recovery School District in New Orleans a success. If the RSD is a success, I’m the third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. No matter how much I wish that to be true, the facts say otherwise. Here’s why:

No one argues that schools in New Orleans were turning out Harvard scholars by the boatload, so the legislature created the RSD, a takeover district as Abbott has conceived. Davis also supports recovery districts, but Abbott likes the New Orleans model in which “failing” schools would be run by private charters that promised to get the schools shipshape and back into the public school system within five years.

Before taking a look at the results, we must first figure out what “failure” means, because they keep moving that target. RSD used to takeover any school that failed to get a passing score of 60 on the state performance index. After Katrina, the legislature changed that to allow RSD to scoop up any school that fell short of the state’s 87.4 average. The New Orleans private charter district took over 94 schools, 26 of which met the old passing standard. The state redefined failure to mean below average so more schools could get privatized.

Almost a decade later, the takeover district in New Orleans has failed to turn around even one school, so “improvement” became the new goal. Not one school has received an “A” or even a “B” grade. In fact, RSD stopped disclosing the grades their schools received, preferring to publicize percentages of improvement without disclosing the underlying data or that they were cherry-picking the data every year, making it impossible to honestly chart progress. By their original standards, though, all the RSD schools are still failing.

Remember, Louisiana was throwing millions of tax dollars at what were essentially startup small businesses. Fraud and bankruptcy are commonplace, and if you think that’s confined to New Orleans, think again.

Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy looked at 15 states that have charter schools, one of which was Texas and found “rampant fraud, waste and abuse,” according to a report released last week. The two groups found numerous cases of embezzlement, misuse of tax dollars, child endangerment, bilking taxpayers for services not rendered, inflated enrollment numbers, and general mismanagement. Private charters are running schools like a business. Unfortunately, that business is Wall Street.

It’s never the schools in the wealthy neighborhoods that get taken over. On average, poor children score worse than their wealthier peers. We have always known that, but we cannot get poor children to achieve in school simply by insisting they act like wealthy children.

Now Abbott is using the false dogma of education reform as cover to give up on public schools. Giving up on public schools will not fix public schools, but if Abbott becomes governor, he’ll go into the office every morning, screw up public schools, and go home.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Source