Charter Harm Broken Down Statewide

Out of Delaware’s total 136,027 students, 11,865 go to charter schools, 124,162 continue in public education… (8.72%) (btw Red Clay’s charters not included since Red Clay is the authorizer)

That little 9% siphons a money better spent in public schools. Costs in 2016.

ACADEMIA ANTONIA ALONSO 1,232 Payments $3,524,608.63

ACADEMY OF DOVER CHARTER SCHL 1,374 Payments $3,628,701.16

CAMPUS COMMUNITY SCHOOL 2,425 Payments $4,558,838.47

DE COLLEGE PREPARATORY ACADEMY 1,364 Payments $2,351,143.15

DELAWARE DESIGN-LAB HS 1,282 Payments $2,410,480.42

EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL 1,144 Payments $2,757,920.69

EAST SIDE CHARTER SCHOOL 3,060 Payments $7,426,823.05

FAMILY FOUNDATIONS ACADEMY 2,613 Payments $8,846,337.76

FIRST STATE MONTESSORI ACADEMY 1,388 Payments $3,794,639.93

FREIRE CHARTER SCHOOL 1,354 Payments $2,958,912.10

GATEWAY LAB SCHOOL 1,749 Payments $4,556,773.53

GREAT OAKS CHARTER SCHOOL 751 Payments $3,229,356.48

KUUMBA ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL 1,995 Payments $8,058,005.38

LAS AMERICAS ASPIRA 3,549 Payments $7,931,013.77

MAPLETON CHARTER SCHOOL AT WHI 2 Payments $1,736.86

MAURICE J. MOYER ACADEMY 50 Payments $112,524.40

MOT CHARTER SCHOOL 4,510 Payments $11,355,105.68

NEWARK CHARTER SCHOOL 3,958 Payments $26,599,416.25

ODYSSEY CHARTER 3,161 Payments $13,048,335.82

POSITIVE OUTCOMES CHARTER SCHL 1,746 Payments $3,118,502.54

PRESTIGE ACADEMY 1,427 Payments $3,687,431.41

PROVIDENCE CREEK ACAD CHTR SCH 3,351 Payments $7,414,681.73

REACH ACADEMY FOR GIRLS 37 Payments $233,814.90

SUSSEX ACADEMY OF ARTS SCIENCE 2,336 Payments $6,422,637.21

THE DELAWARE MET 870 Payments $2,100,835.55

THOMAS A EDISON CHARTER SCHOOL 2,790 Payments $9,237,268.52

All told, roughly $149,365,845.39 was spent on non-Red Clay Charters… which taught only 11,865 students. On gross cost, that amounts to $12,588 a student…. Without charters and all else being equal, that same money when spread across the balance of those left in public schools, is a lost benefit of $1202 or rounded down, $1200 loss per student remaining in public schools… (Total benefit to a class of 20 would be $24,000).

So in a future court case by the ACLU over the unconstitutionality of charter schools in Delaware, when asked to prove harm backing their claim, here it is… Charter Schools take $1200 away from each student remaining in public schools…

Now some people think that since money follows a child that those schools with fewer students need less. Unfortunately no. The costs to those schools losing students to charters remain the same. Utility costs don’t change because you have fewer students; teaching costs don’t change because you have fewer students. Maintenance costs don’t change because you have fewer students. In fact, no costs get eliminated because you have fewer students. What does happen is all those fixed costs go up as a percentage of total revenue coming in. So there is less discretionary income available for students… You have to cut things like football, sports, music, arts, and all those things that are more important than books in any school.

Likewise, the charters on a shoe string budget are also running at levels of no frills with none of the above. A whole generation loses big time.

And for what gain? Only one of those schools met proficiency levels… Roughly 2000 students…

WE are going through all this pain of hurting 134,000 students just to hit our goals for 2200.

This is why, Charter Schools need to be eliminated from Delaware. Or with enough political will, they can still be allowed to stay, but only if they are fully funded by line items in the state budget, and public schools return to being fully funded by their localities.

The problem is not so much with the harm Charters do to their own students… It is what they do to everyone else…. And upon surveying the damage done so far, it is past time everyone not hired or associated with the CHARTER SCHOOLS NETWORK, stands up and says… NO MORE……

Time To KILL Delaware’s Charters

That’s a broad brush… but you can’t really pick and choose when you start a debate.. Those delineations with exceptions can come later… There are still possible solutions allowing us to save Charters as a program, and yes, they will cost more… But it’s just money assessed and spent; it’s not the ruin of people’s lives which is the unseen cost of allowing Delaware’s Charter to continue……

Charter School proponents insist they have the freedom and right to tap into the public schools financial stream… In a way they are not unlike those who discovered cheap desert land bordering the Colorado River, bought it for a song, then diverted the river water to irrigate crops where none had ever been before….

In the original small amounts there was nothing wrong with it… There was plenty to be shared. But as more and more start tapping the mighty Colorado, it becomes less mighty.. in fact, it dries up hundreds of miles before reaching it’s outlet, denying all those downstream the water they once had…

This is what Charters do to public schools. Their only rational for it is this: we know those in power and so they let us do it…

Charter schools do not teach better than public schools. They do not perform better than public schools. They seem to be worse than public schools.

No, it is only power and their fleecing of it, which allows them to exist at all. If you were a legislator and got treated royally by rich charter supporters, maybe have a BBQ, some expensive liquor, hobnob with celebrities a little, there would be a good tendency to give back something in return to people who “gave” to you…

Thus Delaware through Dave Sokola, got charter schools. They were almost died out a year ago, because as mentioned above, they don’t work at teaching our children what they need to know. But then, the potential for huge charter firms to enter Delaware, firms which educate for profit, opened new opportunities to get wealthy off the backs of children. Suddenly existing charter supporters, those enriching themselves off the public stream, had large financial backing to be able to corral our legislators as well as the support of a think tank to invent face-saving platitudes about being pro charter. The big firms see the potential to buy out the little and use their river access to flood vast levels of the interior, but also shriveling the river to almost nothing….

So now, not later, is the time to KILL charters.

They have zero redeeming value.

Furthermore they continue Afro-American and Hispanic segregation in public schools. The NAACP’s proposed moratorium, cites increased segregation, high rates of suspensions and expulsions for black students, fiscal mismanagement, and poor oversight in charter schools as reasons to hit pause on the sector’s growth…..

Just as we made fundamental changes to our public educational system to allow charters in the first place (they were illegal originally); we can also make fundamental changes to disallow charters in second place. All it takes is the stroke of a pen…

The sooner that is done, then more financial waters flow through our public schools and since those educate the gross majority of our kids, it is there we can best impact the betterment of our national education…..

The One REAL Problem With Charter Schools

One thing that is important this election season is to find out who is for charter schools and who is against them… Then vote for someone who is against them….

Recently some regulations were changed deep inside the DOE to allow more money to go to charters and be taken out of public schools… They supposedly were stopped by loud noises from legislators. But such will keep coming again and again as long as Charter School law remains open and charters still remain an option….

Did you ever wonder why they always have to “sneak” charter school changes through? Why do YOU sneak things, like past your wife or husband, like past your boss, like past your children? Is it because you don’t want to get caught?  Exactly… So why are we “sneaking” changes to charter law in the dead of night?

Because it is bad legislation for Delaware’s soon to be one million people, and it benefits probably 5 friends of those players pushing it forward….  The only way to pass something that will piss off one million to make 5 people happy, is to keep it hidden from those million people…

When someone says at any forum that they are FOR charter schools…. if you can, ask them in public this question:…. Since only one in five children go to charter schools in Delaware, and since Charter Schools take money away from those other four…. how do you propose re-compensating those Public Schools who get hurt by having a Charter take their money, so the levels of educations for 4 out of 5 Delaware children, can remain the same??

And that’s the rub… When they say we are going to improve education for one fifth of our children by great charter schools, what isn’t said at all, is that 4/5ths of our children now have to suffer educational losses due to funding cuts!

How can that even make education better?

If you have a +1 and then add a -4 to it, Common Core or not, you still get a -3 compared to zero change if you did nothing at all….

So ask them, in public, out loud, how if they promote a charter, what is their plan to fill the gap of funding in the public schools system caused by those very charters they support….

Then, don’t vote for them.  Vote for their opponent…

Because in all campaigns leading up to this year…. there has been deep silence on that other side of the issue…..

But that other side,  the harm they do to the MAJORITY of students, is exactly why charters in 25 years, have never adequately functioned to improve education across any wide area….

Who Deserves Your Vote, And Who Doesn’t?

This post will deal with incumbents.  We are dealing solely with past records, not future promises. We will trace votes of our current legislators over the past 4 years with a focus on the three big bills which impacted our schools and their education resources. Those bills were SB 51. HB 165, and HB 50.  The first two were lobbyist written bills to allow changes beneficial to privatization of education. The third bill was in retaliation to a DOE gone wild and gave ultimate power to parents over the education of their children, and tied the hands of the bureaucrats who were testing insanely… So an ideal candidate would have voted no on the first two listed, and YES on the last.

SB 51 was offered under the guise of improving teacher’s qualifications, but its intent was to insert the Markell corporate machine into teacher’s certification process….. This was a Sokola sponsored bill and only he knew what was in it. It was touchdown run through the Senate getting unanimous passage, and had very few detractors in the House due to both the glibness of its synopsis and the speed with which it got rammed through… Prior to this bill, teacher certification was an independent process, handled by non political national accrediting agencies. After this bill, all Delaware teaching schools had to be licensed and “certified” by the Delaware DOE… This bill really has nothing else in it except it being a power move to bring independent teacher accreditation under the direct thumb of the DOE…  After this bill, even though you passed all your classes at an accredited university, you still have to go through an evaluation of your transcript by the DOE through a process called “course counting.” Depending on what current Rodel person does that, your degree program could either stand up and get you certified, or you get a deficiency letter telling you that you need so many hours of this or that to be certified.

Here was the synopsis which glowingly sounds fantastic; so much not a full minute was wasted in its discussion in both the committee and floor of the Senate..

This bill strengthens teacher preparation by raising the standards for entry into the teaching profession.  More specifically, the bill requires all Delaware teacher preparation programs to set high admission and completion requirements, to provide high-quality student teaching experiences and ongoing evaluation of program participants, and to prepare prospective elementary school teachers in age-appropriate literacy and mathematics instruction.  Further, the bill requires preparation programs to track and report data on the effectiveness of their programs.  Finally, the bill requires new educators to pass both an approved content-readiness exam and performance assessment before receiving an initial license, and requires special education teachers to demonstrate content knowledge if they plan to teach in a secondary subject.

 

And below is the actual language added to the bill.

 

Consistent with § 122 of this title, no individual, public or private educational association, corporation, or institution, including any institution of post-secondary education, shall offer an educator preparation program for the training of educators to be licensed in this State without first having procured the assent of the Department for the offering of such programs. A program approval process based on standards adopted pursuant to this section must be established for educator preparation approval programs, phased in according to timelines determined by the Department, and fully implemented for such programs in the State. Each program shall be approved by the Department based upon significant, objective, and quantifiable performance measures.

 

Yeah, they got us.. sneaked it through before anyone read it.  Ask Paul Baumbach what happened when he stood up to make an objection to it in the House…..

The next critical bill was HB 165: The Charter School Carpet Bombing Run Bill. This bill provided conduit funding to charters. It allowed the DOE to directly transfer funds from public districts to charter schools if those came in arrears.  It allowed conduit bond financing. It established the Charter School Performance Fund whose winners would be handpicked by the DOE with no transparency.  It put all of the state’s charters under a charter contract with the DOE. The DOE became the sole decider of chartering a school. Districts can work concurrently but if they disagree with the DOE, the DOE has final word.  it allows for 10 year charter approvals at sole discretion of DOE……

Again as with SB51, with the exception of the opening of conduit funding, the details themselves are innocuous.  Funds were previously transferred from district to charters, all charters already had authorizers, charters were free to establish their own performance fund if they wish…. But what this bill did accomplish and used conduit funding as its leverage, was to exert state control over all charters. The charters must answer to the state, and by default, since they must, they have to comply with everything the State says… Now when the state is being good, there is no problem with this.  But when the state’s DOE gets taken over by a “non profit” and is being bad, there is no recourse…

Let’s rephrase that… in the olden days, as in with a disagreement with Christina, the state would have to come to the board and present its case and the board could look at all options and possibilities and say “no” to the proposal saving its taxpayers hundreds of millions over multiple years…  But that got flipped. Now, the boards must go to the state and make their cases, to them, and after hearing (and dismissing) contrary evidence, the state can hold to its decision… With this passage, you, the local citizen, just got stripped of your power.

Of course, nothing in the synopsis would give you a clue of how things would change….

This bill updates the State’s charter school law to improve charter school accountability and support. More specifically, the bill raises the bar for starting charter schools with a pre-screening process, applicant interviews and additional opportunities to receive and use public input regarding the impact of new and expanded charter schools. Further, the bill increases charter flexibility and support, with ten year terms for high-performing charters, more timely allocation of funding, clear allowance of conduit financing, equalized minor capital funding, and creation of a charter school performance fund. Finally, the bill sets and enforces consistent expectations for charter schools, with authorizer-charter agreements, required plans for board member training, required provision of lunch to eligible students, clear closure protocols and a revised renewal process that is aligned to the charter performance frameworks.

Yet the language of the bill itself, took on a more undemocratic Draconian tone….

Applicants seeking a charter from the Department that have submitted an application deemed by the Department sufficient to receive a full review shall be offered an opportunity for an interview in support of the application.  Such interviews will allow the Department to assess applicant capacity, allow it to clarify information provided in the application, and gather additional information. The information gained in the interview process may be among the factors considered by the approving authority in approving or denying an application.

Now whereas there could be a local districts’ concern over having KIPP or another mega charter chain come into their district and begin tearing apart the entire woven educational fabric put in place over decades, those concerns to the state are now irrelevant. Because if governor’s office disagrees and perhaps wishes to use KIPP as a weapon to punish that district for its earlier non-support of his initiatives, guess who gets final say now? Plus, from the corporates’ point of view, whereas it is impossible for them to bribe all a district’s citizens to support something not in their best interests. it is very easy to offer a bribe to individuals..

Secondly, this allowed private entities, to apply and use government monies to update and upgrade their structures.  Renting out ones building to a charter then using state funds to renovated that building up to code for children, is a free way to increase the value of your property.  We all know of former politicians who used the “discretionary street fund” to improve the property values in their neighborhood.  That program was finally killed because of the appearance of impropriety.  This bill now allows that for privatized “charter” schools.

Thirdly, we come to the HB 50, The Opt-Out Bill.

This bill was initiated by parent-student advocate John Kowalko of Newark and threw overwhelming support to letting parents be the ones to determine whether their child should or should not comply with the fail, failing, failed experiment involving the Smarter Balanced Assessment.  Never mind that is what the Constitution of the United States of America calls for. Never mind that the original charter of the Us Department of Education explicitly states that the Federal Government shall have no control of curriculum or individual details involving education. Never mind that his bill would not change state law, it just outlined already existing policy it so it would be more prominent.

The corporatist’s killed it.  It was done not on the floor of the House, not on the floor of the Senate, both on which they were overwhelmingly passed. No.  It was sneaked though by a governor’s veto AND by speaker of the house Pete Schwartzkopf’s burial of the re-vote in the Speaker’s House Desk Drawer.

It is one of the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy to pay attention to the workings of their governments and when officials fail to follow their bosses orders (you), to fire them and replace them with someone fresh…

We have such an opportunity now and if we do want to live in a future that gets better instead of worse, we do have to pay attention and see who votes what, who supports us and who stabs us in the backs… For our ignorance in letting the same people stick knives in us over and over and over and over is the primary source of all the pain we feel today.
We have a job, an obligation, a duty… When we don’t do our duty, the entire fabric of the hammock upon which our whole life rests… begins to unravel leading to a nasty surprise at some future point….

Here is where you find out who your Delaware Representative IS

Here is where you find out who your Delaware Senator IS

Here are the votes on the three litmus test bills above that separated the sheep from the goats…

SB 51:  Teacher Subjugation

 

HB 165  Charter School Dominance

And for guaranteeing every parents’ Constitutional right to determine the future of their own child…..
HB 50 (VETOED BY JACK MARKELL, GOVERNOR)

We’ve been given a great litmus test to sort through our representative and senators and see what their soul really consists of when they think no one is watching…  This has always been the best judge of character; not what they pontificate when put on the podium, but in how they live their lives when no one is watching….

Some things to look for.  Did your representative migrate to the truth as more was revealed, or did they dig in on a bad original decision?  Did your representative act as a leader? Did they have the foresight to be on the right side of this cause before all the discussion entailed?  Or did your representative vote “as he was told to” by the governor…

(The last case (HB 50) shows the sycophants plain as day!)  You are smart enough to figure whose side you want to vote for.  I’m just reminding you of how they act when they think they are alone…

How To Tell If Your Educational Department Is On The UP And UP

Does your education department try to manipulate the public with false information and one-sided viewpoints?

They then are not on the up and up.

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Does your education department try to sneak things past you without you knowing?

They then are not on the up and up.

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Does your education department try to bypass your legislative process?

They then are not on the up and up..

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Does your education department establish rules and regulations with no public input or discussion, or does it appoint boards of people it holds close and keep out people with differing opinions?

They then are not on the up and up…

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Does your education department try to make you think things are really bad, but there is no evidence supporting them other than what they make up?

They then are not on the up and up….

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Does your education department cater to business while demeaning teachers, parents, and students?

They then are not on the up and up…. There are no businesses operating out of those undersized school desks in any of our classrooms. They have no part in the decisions being made by our school officials.

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If your education department does any of these, rest assured,

They are not on the up and up…. Something is wrong…. All of these things are non-democratic. Your education department is running a totalitarian operation in your state which is unconstitutional…

Think about it… If you were running an operation that would benefit the entire state, wouldn’t you want people to know?  Of course.  You would sell it, and sell it, and sell it, and sell it, and the people would buy it, and buy it, and buy it, and everybody would be on the same page.

But when you have to sneak things through as the only way to get it done, telling just a few people while leaving the rest in complete darkness… well, why ARE you sneaking something through except for the fact that it is bad overall and couldn’t get the votes required to make it into policy?  If something is that bad, why then, do we need it?

 

 

 

Change The Narrative About Delaware’s Schools

 

As we approach election season, we expect to hear those aligned along big business, begin in earnest to crucify our public schools.

While I believe some of these candidates may be well meaning, I expect their campaigns to be summed up as follows:

Delaware education is failing. Its teachers and students perform terribly. Let me (and my wealthy friends) fix it…..

Parents of the public school community are sick and tired of that narrative. We know it is not true.

Too often, the News Journal, WDEL, and others lead with the same lazy headlines: “Delaware Education is failing!” That same contemptuous narrative leads to chatter at water coolers, at dinner parties and in church parlors as well as comment sections.

Parents whose kids HAVE gone through Delaware’s public schools can say with certainty, no way have Delaware’s teachers failed in teaching our children. The vast majority of our kids’ classmates and their parents are not failing at all.

No, what is failing is Delaware’s support of public education. What is failing are toilets that overflow in kids’ schools. Bathrooms that don’t have soap. Roofs that leak. Understaffing. Overcrowded classrooms.

The narrative should be that Delaware is failing bigtime in its support of public education.

With such headlines our media feeds the blame game. Many families with excessive resources either leave the state or pay private school tuition of $22,000 or more, then proclaim “Yep, Delaware public education sucks” — even though Delaware functions at a fraction of that amount to educate a much more diverse population.

We are tired of the undeserved contempt.

We believe we have an outstanding citizens on our school boards and outstanding staffs manning all of Delaware’s Schools. So let’s all change the lazy and contemptuous narrative in the community. Change the media headlines. RE-invest in Delaware’s schools and make the wealthy pay 100% of the bill. It’s Delaware’s  parental responsibility to the future generation to continue what is working well now…

It’s outside big money that is screwing things up….

 

How Charter Schools DESTROY Education Opportunity In A Single District

Some people think we have to live with having Charter Schools.. John Young just put forward a motion that was passed by the Christina School Board opening it up for charter applications 2017-2018.  Many members on that board have been anti-charter in the past so now might be a good time to examine the pros and cons for letting Charter Schools exist…

We’ll start with the perception.  Charter Schools have an overall decent perception for one reason.  When one looks at test scores rankings of a state’s schools, the top spots almost invariably are held by the same charters year after year.  Therefore that being the only acquaintance non school parents have with education, that remains their go-to opinion.

There is a reason that they lead.. These charters control who gets in; public school’s can’t and accept everyone. For the same reason it is why MIT is the smartest college/university in the nation; they select only from people who have perfect scores on their SAT’s.  So the reputation MIT has among colleges, is the best analogy to describe how most Delawareans unfamiliar with educational issues, view charters…

Not all charter schools are this good however. One charter is 103rd out of 106 schools. Another is 95th out of the same 106. Another is 92nd. Another is 90th…  So whereas we do have two good charters that lead the pack in state scoring, we also have at least 5 that have 90 public schools doing much, much better than them…

First lesson in dealing with charters is:  don’t generalize. Don’t think all charters are good.

When you say you want to get rid of charters, you never hear complaints from parents of those charters who have 90 public schools doing better than their child’s school. Those parents dream of a new entity coming in and taking over their charters.  No, you only hear from parents who support the two top schools, because having their child return to a public school, for them is a step down.

Charters take money from public schools.  Some quote this as a good thing and cite the scores of the top schools versus how much money they save the state.  They cherry pick their results and say, “see, we educate better for less”.  But charters also include those near the bottom. They educate worse for less.  And they take both money and children from public schools who ARE doing a better job at educating… and desperately need that money they are giving up.

When you look at the charter problem there are two ways to react.  One is emotionally. The other is rationally.

The emotional way is to say, “oh no, I love my kid’s charter; I’ll fight to keep it”.  It is not based on rationality at all, but an emotional bond one has with it because of one’s child…

The rational way is to say… ok, let’s look at the math.  One of every Delaware child is a charter students and some of those schools are great, and some are not.  (If curious you can go through here and peg them on their rank of all state schools).  But by default, 4 of every 5 Delaware students must remain in public schools.

So if you (assuming the charter is one of the good ones), take a child out of the public school and put him in a better charter school, you get a benefit.  Call it +1 student doing better than they would had they remained… But, that money leaving the school, means that there is less money now to be spent in the public schools. Christina leads the pack with $21 million flowing out of its district; $21 million which could otherwise be spent in its existing schools.  Therefore having the charter close by negatively impacts those 4 out of 5 remaining in public schools. Some cutbacks have to occur.

So when you look at programs, you have to balance the positives with the negatives. Charter supporters and charter lobbyists often use slight of hand to only show you the positives.  But one can’t accept only the positives and ignore the negatives if one is intent on making good policy. Therefore, despite the current myopia inside our DOE, the reality is that with Charters you could theoretically get a +1 benefit to one fifth of your students, but a negative -4  would occur for all those remaining in public school.

Bottom line of charter impact?  -04 + 01  =  -03…   Your net total if applying the impact of charters across all spectrums of your student body, is a negative number.  It is a negative number because you have to account for those hurt by an action as well as those helped.. For example if we only looked at those who are being helped, robbing banks would be a great career….

In every argument about charters… someone needs to bring up the question:  what is its impact on those remaining in public schools?

Balance could theoretically be leveled like this:

• Charters have more student activities.  What is the impact of that on those remaining in public schools?
• Charters have more going to college!  What is the impact of that on those remaining in public schools?
• Charters have the top scores in the state!  What is the impact of that on those remaining in public schools?
• Charters provide a choice. Parents should not be stuck.  What is the impact of that on those who are stuck in public schools?
  

This IS the million dollar question that must be considered for every positive a charter might have!   Because no matter how great that charter IS, it is hurting 4 others for every gain it gets putting society in the negative as far as learning goes.

This is not just an academic thought exercise.  Everywhere charters have entered a school district or system, the overall measurements of student achievements has dropped system wide.  Some schools develop to do well, but there are 4 times their number that are imploding from a gross lack of financial renewal.

To consider charters as a benefit, you have to close your eyes to the negative impact they create outside their four walls and simply just look at the inside parameters of that school.

A schoolmaster can well afford to do that. Same with a Charter school parent.  But no one at a district level, state level, or national level can responsibly ignore the harm that having charters around, does to a public school system…

So people can defend charters all they want. They can pretend that those against charters are pooh-pooh babies or whatever.  They can deprecate with slurs anyone who dares contest that charters are the sole white knight of education… (they are predominantly white)…

And if they are successful at swaying those in power, the entire system of education gets worse, and worse, and worse as time flies. Because you can’t go against math….

-4  +  1  =   -3……

There is absolutely no way you can win with an equation like that.

 

 

 

 

 

Somethings To Consider

Kevin posted an RYP and here were some questionable points that need clarity or legislative safeguards to protect our children.

The Vendor shall develop the interfaces with the DDOE’s Student Information System
(Delaware Student Information System – DELSIS), the DDOE Code Library, and DDOE’s Identity Management System……..Interfaces must include data transfer capabilities from DELSIS and the Delaware Code Library…  PAGE 16

Comment:  one can see transfer to, but why from?  Why would the DOE want to be able to manipulate data involving specific children and their specific test scores?
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The proposed system must support collecting and maintaining records for students as they move through the school system, and archived until four years after graduation from high school or the student’s 22nd  birthday, whichever occurs first…. PAGE 15
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Vendors must describe in their proposal:

• The mechanism for detailed test results (test history) to be archived in off-line storage
  
• The normal time period for maintaining historical on-line information
• The process to archive data off-line through user-controlled purge criteria
• The process to restore archived data into current system, use it, and then purge it in a controlled manner, retaining the archived data off-line. PAGE 16

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Data files containing scores must be available at the DDOE within forty-five (45) calendar days after a student completes the assessment. Assessment results files must provide both student level and item level data.  PAGE 19

Comment: which means they must have the scores by July 15th if last test was before June 1st.

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Vendor must provide a method for:

• Changing the SID associated with a test without having to end the test.
• Ending a test event in cases where the test results are likely invalid
• Changing an Institution Identifier associated with a test
• Restarting a test from the beginning and while not incrementing the total number of opportunities used by a student
• Restarting or resuming a test after a student moves to another location within the Delaware public schools, based on the SID.  PAGE 19

 

Comment: being able to change ID’s of either the student or school in the middle of the test from a central office does not instill confidence in this test.
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The Vendor shall propose procedures for monitoring the accuracy of readers’ (grader’s) scores throughout the scoring process using papers from the benchmarking sessions. The readers (graders) should be unaware they are scoring papers with pre-established scores.  PAGE 24

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The Vendor shall propose a reader quality control reporting system for hand-scoring and indicate how they will use that system to ensure quality scoring. The Vendor shall include the following items in that system:

•  tracking of reader scores/discrepancies;
•  use of training reports that show reader performance during training and qualifying;
•  inter-reader reliability reports;
•  recalibration reports that show reader scores on the recalibration sets;
•  troubled paper identification in which papers with extremely personal and/or offensive content are flagged and forwarded to DDOE along with the necessary identifying information;
• and other reports and/or procedures as deemed necessary by the Vendor to ensure a quality scoring  PAGE 24

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The DDOE would prefer not to use any materials that need copyright permission.  PAGE 25

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Week in Review

Saturday:  News Journal publishes hit piece on Kathleen Davies, auditor of accounts working under Tom Wagner.

Sunday:  kavips  and Kevin glean from the article’s writing that no wrong doing was behind the removal and this was done to hush up a politically sensitive scandal which Kathleen had uncovered.

Sunday:  Kim Williams comments auditor Tom Wagner told her he pulled the audit, and sent letters to the charter schools.

Monday:  kavips points out that something at Newark Charter School scared someone and caused the audit to be pulled and Kathleen to be sidelined.

Tuesday:  Using the Delaware Checkbook,  kavips does a piece showing the inequities of education between Bancroft where teachers have to pay out of pocket for pencils for their kids, and Newark Charter which spends almost .5 million alone on student activities.

Wednesday:  Several Charter parents call out kavips saying they pay for those trips, the state did not.

Saturday:  Kevin posts an expose on Newark Charter showing that they did not use the money given by parents for the trips, but charged all those trips to the state, and instead used the parent’s money for two capital projects which are not paid for by the state.

In one week, we now know why Kathleen Davies was put on administrative leave. Ironically, this would still be undercover if they had just removed Kathleen without trying to slam her in the press without having anything to slam her with…

What we know…

Newark Charter School does not file an IRS 990 as required by law… VIOLATION

Newark Charter Collects money from parents for field trips and uses it for capital projects.  VIOLATION

Kathleen was removed from the audits and put on leave; Tom Wagner, State Auditor, stopped the audits and sent letters instead to charter schools.  VIOLATION

 

 

Crime, Crime, Crime

Crime is relative. Stealing land from native Americans was not a crime. Exhorting registered Delawarean businesses to pay back interest on unclaimed property that didn’t exist, was not a crime.

So this guy walks onto a subway car with a friend and there were 4 other late night riders on board…

He pulls a gun and robs the 4 passengers between stops. Then he give the money to his friend and runs….

As his friend goes up the escalator, a cop grabs him at the top and makes an arrest. The friend says, I did nothing wrong, Sir, someone just gave it to me…..

Moral of story.

The four passengers represent students in public school.
The friend represents charter schools.
The gun belongs to the STATE….

Did a crime happen or no? Parents with students in Newark Charter, want you think no crime happened here. In the lottery of life, someone just gave them money. People in the DOE want you to think no crime happened here. Dave Sokola, Earl Jaques, and Jack Markell want you to think no crime happened here…

So how do four passengers have all their stuff unloaded off of them, and everyone says no crime occurs?

Because all crime is relative…..