ABC 7 News The NewsChannel.com http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/21537953/detail.html
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Fraud and Corruption in Denver Public Schools? "Dummy" Classes and Fake Students in Contemporary Learning Academy
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
ABC 7 News reports that DPS alternative HS "Contemporary Learning Academy" set up dummy classes and filled them with fake students
Smiling Administration of CLA under "friendly" fire of an insider whistleblower.
From left to right, and top to bottom: Joe Sandoval, DPS Instructional Superintendent, supervisor of the "Contemporary Learning Academy" (CLA), Sally Stanley, Principal, Tom Archuleta, Assistant Principal, Anita Venohr, Assistant Principal, and Carol Gianfrancisco, counselor
DPS Investigating School For 'Dummy' Classes, Fake Students
School Appears To Have Been Inflating Enrollment Numbers On Student Count Day
Russell Haythorn, 7NEWS Reporter
DENVER -- The Denver Public School District has launched an internal investigation after 7NEWS started asking questions about potential fraud. At issue are claims of fake classes and phantom students created to boost the "October Count" to get more school funding.
Count day determines how many students are enrolled in a particular school, and how much money the school district will get from the state.
Several internal school documents and e-mails reveal so-called "dummy" classes set up by administrators at Denver's Contemporary Learning Academy. The "dummy classes" and the fake students who are enrolled in them appear to be an effort to falsify enrollment numbers on student count day to get more money from the state.
"The school is pretending that classes exist, which do not. It is pretending that there are students enrolled attending those fake classes -- students who are not," said a source speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Late Thursday night, security guards seized two hard drives from the school in north Denver.
Serious questions remain about whether this was an incident isolated to the Contemporary Learning Academy, or whether it is a systemic issue district-wide.
"It is absolutely unethical," said the source. "It's cheating every single one of us. I felt cheated as a citizen of Colorado and an employee of the school. I was asked to participate in this. We were exploited."
A former CLA counselor contacted 7NEWS Friday morning after watching the story on 7NEWS Thursday evening.
"These kind of practices have gone on for years. I was forced to falsify records because I was young and didn't know better," said the counselor, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Contemporary Learning Center is an alternative high school for students who have struggled in traditional academic settings. Its student body is largely male (58 percent) and minority youngsters, including 60 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black students. Nearly 80 percent of students receive free or subsidized lunches.
The high school only has about 250 students with a low student-teacher ratio of about 9-to-1.
The school has struggled with low test scores and past controversy.
CLA failed to achieve "Adequate Yearly Progress" benchmarks in 2007. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, that means the school failed to meet the minimum levels of improvement set by the state for student performance and other accountability measures.
For 2008 Colorado Student Assessment Program testing, none of the school's 9th and 10th graders met math standards and only 1 percent met writing standards.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Outside money, political muscle at work in Denver Public Schools board race (Written by Guerin Lee Green)
Big money and outside political agendas are driving much of what passes for political debate about reform in Denver Public Schools today.
A handful of groups are pushing what some term a radical charter school agenda, with a premium placed upon creating new schools, autonomous from public control, and without a unionized teaching workforce, but using tax dollars, instead of putting resources and reforms into traditional schools. The push is to virtually “privatize” public schools, built upon the argument that DPS and its traditional schools, teachers and parents can’t or won’t change fast enough to meet reform goals.
The fight has bled into the school board races this year. A group called Stand for Children (STAND), which operates in a number of states, and is directed by national board of directors, including the sister of DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg, has come to Denver with the goal of putting dollars and people into the school board race. STAND acknowledges that Boasberg and Jonah Edelman, STAND’s national chief, have longtime ties. Grassroots groups like the Metropolitan Organization for People, Padres Unidos, and even the Colorado Children’s Campaign, have accepted donations from the Donnell-Kay foundation and Piton foundation, to lobby the district of behalf of charter schools, and produce weakly researched studies as predicate for sweeping change. Elite opinion leader groups, notably A+ Denver, create an air of respectability for the changes.
The pattern that has emerged over the past few years is clear. A few funders decide on a policy direction. They then fund researchers and lobbyists to provide both a factual veneer and potempkin public support for the policy. Finally, a network of groups work to push the agenda through school board elections, increasingly financed by money from outside of Denver. That includes forums with slanted questions, and 527 groups (controversial groups that spend money in political campaigns with few disclosure requirements), spending money that influence the outcome of what were previously highly local school board races (STAND, according to its State Director, is supporting candidates through their political committee, which is based in Oregon. It effectively allows the group to channel out-of-state money into school board campaigns with minimum attention). The groups are tied together by more than just money. STAND’s Colorado Director was previously a lobbyist for the Colorado Children’s Campaign. A+ Denver has more than a dozen committee members with roles or jobs within the foundations, or other ties.
Increasingly, the movement controls news coverage. EdNewsColorado.org employs full-time reporters covering education, and news organizations, including our sister newspaper, have used their reporting on issues. Yet EdNews editor Alan Gottlieb is advocating that voters vote against school board candidate Christopher Scott, an apparent violation of the tax exempt status of EdNews’ parent organization, the Public Education and Business Coalition. And on the affiliated Schools for Tomorrow blog, Alexander Ooms went after Jeanne Kaplan, an incumbent school board member running unopposed for re-election for refusing to respond to a questionnaire. “I find it deeply troubling when a sitting board member — running unopposed no less — chooses not to answer a serious inquiry,” wrote Ooms, a former charter school president.
Scott is boycotting a forum sponsored by the network of pro-charter groups. “It is of concern to voters that school board candidate forums be unbiased, unimpeachable, and promote the equal exchange of ideas related to education,” Scott said. “That cannot happen when the organizations funding the sponsors have been working with my opponent to create new charters schools in Denver.”
More troubling is that some DPS schools are promoting these very forums, using tax dollars to publicize what are clearly political events with an electoral bias, and may have instructed principals to help STAND with political organizing. Flyers went home to parents, promoting the events, printed on district photocopiers from more than one school. DPS spokesman Michael Vaughn unequivocally denied the district sent the flyers, but at least two distinct flyers were produced and disseminated to parents.
DPS principals were contacted by STAND in late April. In an email obtained by the Cherry Creek News, Brad Jupp, a senior advisor to Tom Boasberg, was named in a communication sent to principals. “Brad Jupp strongly recommended I meet with you (a DPS principal) as soon as possible to learn from you and talk about building a Stand for Children Team.”
Spooked principals got DPS’ general council, John Kechriotis, involved. Kechrioitis emailed Jupp on April 28: “Brad: I am not sure if you are aware that Stand for Children is utilizing your name to get meetings at DPS schools. Absent explicit language that your name is being lent in its personal capacity as opposed to your official DPS employee capacity, it is probably not a good idea. Principals may well feel that the Chief Academic Office(sic) to the Superintendent is mandating the meeting with Johnny Merrill and Stand for Children, and since this is directly tied to a public election, that can’t be done. Let me know, but better that your name get pulled from future emails. There have been a few complaints. Call me if you would like.”
Jupp clearly knew STAND was using his name, and worked to provide the principals more guidance. One principal emailed Jupp after STAND organizer Denise Gomez contacted them: “Hi Brad, This looks political. How does this fit with my job? I am unclear what she may want from me.” Jupp responded in an April 15th email: “Subject: Meeting at Brad Jupp’s suggestion. Right you are. Call me after 6:30 tonight for a little background.”
Another email from a parent at Stedman Elementary, says the parent met with Gomez after Gomez got the parent’s name and contact info from the principal
STAND looked for parents that were involved in school communities, as identified by principals in some cases, to build a political organization to be used in this fall’s school board campaigns. The group made presentations at parent nights, invited into school by principals; essentially the group leveraged some principals to fuel a political organization. The group began organizing in April, and sat down with some principals, and in some cases principals passed along parent information, usually with parent permission. Some principals apparently believed that they were acting at district direction— whether that direction was explicit or not.
With the strong Boasberg connection to STAND, many school board candidates have taken offense to the groups efforts, including Kaplan and Jacqui Shumway, who is running in Northeast Denver’s District 4 race.
STAND’s organizing tactics are reminiscent of those of the religious right in the mid and late 1980s, when a number of organizations ran stealth candidates that took over many school board across the country. By working directly through school district connections, organizations rallied like minded parents to elect candidates that then went on to hire and fire staff, and in many places install curriculum that taught creationism, banned sex ed, and changed district policies on health issues. STAND to date is only advocating “school choice on a systemic level,” the new code language for the radical charter agenda. And while STAND may ultimately have a more benign agenda, the approach, and apparent misuse of school resources, are eerily similar.
Source: Cherry Creek News, http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/content/view/5316/2/
A handful of groups are pushing what some term a radical charter school agenda, with a premium placed upon creating new schools, autonomous from public control, and without a unionized teaching workforce, but using tax dollars, instead of putting resources and reforms into traditional schools. The push is to virtually “privatize” public schools, built upon the argument that DPS and its traditional schools, teachers and parents can’t or won’t change fast enough to meet reform goals.
The fight has bled into the school board races this year. A group called Stand for Children (STAND), which operates in a number of states, and is directed by national board of directors, including the sister of DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg, has come to Denver with the goal of putting dollars and people into the school board race. STAND acknowledges that Boasberg and Jonah Edelman, STAND’s national chief, have longtime ties. Grassroots groups like the Metropolitan Organization for People, Padres Unidos, and even the Colorado Children’s Campaign, have accepted donations from the Donnell-Kay foundation and Piton foundation, to lobby the district of behalf of charter schools, and produce weakly researched studies as predicate for sweeping change. Elite opinion leader groups, notably A+ Denver, create an air of respectability for the changes.
The pattern that has emerged over the past few years is clear. A few funders decide on a policy direction. They then fund researchers and lobbyists to provide both a factual veneer and potempkin public support for the policy. Finally, a network of groups work to push the agenda through school board elections, increasingly financed by money from outside of Denver. That includes forums with slanted questions, and 527 groups (controversial groups that spend money in political campaigns with few disclosure requirements), spending money that influence the outcome of what were previously highly local school board races (STAND, according to its State Director, is supporting candidates through their political committee, which is based in Oregon. It effectively allows the group to channel out-of-state money into school board campaigns with minimum attention). The groups are tied together by more than just money. STAND’s Colorado Director was previously a lobbyist for the Colorado Children’s Campaign. A+ Denver has more than a dozen committee members with roles or jobs within the foundations, or other ties.
Increasingly, the movement controls news coverage. EdNewsColorado.org employs full-time reporters covering education, and news organizations, including our sister newspaper, have used their reporting on issues. Yet EdNews editor Alan Gottlieb is advocating that voters vote against school board candidate Christopher Scott, an apparent violation of the tax exempt status of EdNews’ parent organization, the Public Education and Business Coalition. And on the affiliated Schools for Tomorrow blog, Alexander Ooms went after Jeanne Kaplan, an incumbent school board member running unopposed for re-election for refusing to respond to a questionnaire. “I find it deeply troubling when a sitting board member — running unopposed no less — chooses not to answer a serious inquiry,” wrote Ooms, a former charter school president.
Scott is boycotting a forum sponsored by the network of pro-charter groups. “It is of concern to voters that school board candidate forums be unbiased, unimpeachable, and promote the equal exchange of ideas related to education,” Scott said. “That cannot happen when the organizations funding the sponsors have been working with my opponent to create new charters schools in Denver.”
More troubling is that some DPS schools are promoting these very forums, using tax dollars to publicize what are clearly political events with an electoral bias, and may have instructed principals to help STAND with political organizing. Flyers went home to parents, promoting the events, printed on district photocopiers from more than one school. DPS spokesman Michael Vaughn unequivocally denied the district sent the flyers, but at least two distinct flyers were produced and disseminated to parents.
DPS principals were contacted by STAND in late April. In an email obtained by the Cherry Creek News, Brad Jupp, a senior advisor to Tom Boasberg, was named in a communication sent to principals. “Brad Jupp strongly recommended I meet with you (a DPS principal) as soon as possible to learn from you and talk about building a Stand for Children Team.”
Spooked principals got DPS’ general council, John Kechriotis, involved. Kechrioitis emailed Jupp on April 28: “Brad: I am not sure if you are aware that Stand for Children is utilizing your name to get meetings at DPS schools. Absent explicit language that your name is being lent in its personal capacity as opposed to your official DPS employee capacity, it is probably not a good idea. Principals may well feel that the Chief Academic Office(sic) to the Superintendent is mandating the meeting with Johnny Merrill and Stand for Children, and since this is directly tied to a public election, that can’t be done. Let me know, but better that your name get pulled from future emails. There have been a few complaints. Call me if you would like.”
Jupp clearly knew STAND was using his name, and worked to provide the principals more guidance. One principal emailed Jupp after STAND organizer Denise Gomez contacted them: “Hi Brad, This looks political. How does this fit with my job? I am unclear what she may want from me.” Jupp responded in an April 15th email: “Subject: Meeting at Brad Jupp’s suggestion. Right you are. Call me after 6:30 tonight for a little background.”
Another email from a parent at Stedman Elementary, says the parent met with Gomez after Gomez got the parent’s name and contact info from the principal
STAND looked for parents that were involved in school communities, as identified by principals in some cases, to build a political organization to be used in this fall’s school board campaigns. The group made presentations at parent nights, invited into school by principals; essentially the group leveraged some principals to fuel a political organization. The group began organizing in April, and sat down with some principals, and in some cases principals passed along parent information, usually with parent permission. Some principals apparently believed that they were acting at district direction— whether that direction was explicit or not.
With the strong Boasberg connection to STAND, many school board candidates have taken offense to the groups efforts, including Kaplan and Jacqui Shumway, who is running in Northeast Denver’s District 4 race.
STAND’s organizing tactics are reminiscent of those of the religious right in the mid and late 1980s, when a number of organizations ran stealth candidates that took over many school board across the country. By working directly through school district connections, organizations rallied like minded parents to elect candidates that then went on to hire and fire staff, and in many places install curriculum that taught creationism, banned sex ed, and changed district policies on health issues. STAND to date is only advocating “school choice on a systemic level,” the new code language for the radical charter agenda. And while STAND may ultimately have a more benign agenda, the approach, and apparent misuse of school resources, are eerily similar.
Source: Cherry Creek News, http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/content/view/5316/2/
Friday, August 14, 2009
CSAP Failure Results in Bruce Randolph (Middle Grades) Show that Unsuccessful DPS bureaucrat for Reform and Innovation Kristin Waters Must Resign
2009 CSAP Results are here and provide interesting info about one of the members of DPS' new Administration.
Her name is Kristin Waters, the recently appointed bureaucrat in the well-paid and bombastic position of Assistant to the Superintendent for "Reform and Innovation".
Waters was the highly promotioned principal of Bruce Randolph School between 2005 and April 2009.
However, at the Middle School level, Bruce Randolph is going south. Results from 2009 CSAP testing show that at least 80% of the students are not proficient in the core subjects. Only 5% of the students are at or above proficiency in Science, 16% in Writing, 17% in Math, and 20% in Reading.
During the 2008-2009 school year, the last for Waters as Bruce Randolph's principal, the decay was visible. Middle School Science proficient students went down by 7%. Reading and Math proficient students went down by 5%. Only writing showed a meager increase of proficient students by 3%.
CSAP figures prove false the public relations effort to present Waters as a successful administrator.
Because her experiment at Bruce Randolph Middle Grades failed, despite the financial and PR support received from DPS and other sources, Waters must go.There is no point in keeping as a 6-figure DPS bureaucrat a principal showing managerial failure at the middle school level.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Teach for America teachers: an open letter to you
Jesse Alred
Houston Education Reform Examiner
July 18, 9:29 PM
I am a veteran teacher from Houston seeking a dialogue with current and past Teach for America teachers regarding what appears to be a pattern of TFA leaders and alumni in school district leadership positions espousing status quo ideas and profiting from close relationships with plutocratic corporations while self-righteously proclaiming they are the new civil rights movement.
I first became aware of this when a former local TFA director, now a school board member, recently proposed to fire teachers based on test scores and opposed allowing us to vote to have a single union.
The conservative-TFA nexus began at the beginning, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp's initial efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide's negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India.
The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize taking responsibility for the event. Not only did Union Carbide provide financial support for Ms. Kopp, it provided her with other corporate contacts and office space for her and her staff.
Ms. Kopp has never expressed the least bit of odd feeling Teach for America's birth in the polluted womb of Union Carbide.
A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project and was all but saved by their managerial assistance.
The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools run by elected school boards with for-profit, corporate-run schools.
In 2000, two TFA alumni, Michael Feinberg and David Levin, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bushes at the Republican National Convention in 2000.
This was vital to Bush, since as Texas governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican.
Feinberg and Levin placed the African-American and Hispanic kids in their charge on that 2000 Republican stage with them. Was it worth it for KIPP? Did any of their graduates fight or die in Iraq? Or the fathers, uncles or cousins of their students?
In Washington D.C., TFA alum and Chancellor Michelle Rhee has fired 1000 teachers and has only minor improvements to show for it in terms of student improvements. She says we need "a different breed of teachers."
Rhee falls into the trap of other TFA alums, underestimating the power of inequality and behavior in student outcomes and therefore laying all the blame at the feet of teachers who are not from her socioeconomic background. Her misconceptions must have caused some significant portion of the 1000 people she put out of work.
Wendy Kopp's idea for Teach for America was a good one. TFA teachers do great work. But its leaders often seem to blame teachers, public schools and teachers' organizations for the achievement gap. By blaming teachers for some deep-seated social problems this nation has, they are not only providing an inaccurate critique; they also feed conservatives more ammunition to use in their 28-year campaign against employing government as a problem solver.
Our achievement gap mirrors our country's level of economic inequality, the greatest among affluent nations. Better schools are only part of the solution. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed our schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It's not the other way around.
The obstacle in schools serving low-income kids is not teacher or principal quality, but student buy in. Too many kids do not see schools as relevant to their lives and act accordingly when forced to be there.
As more people are starting to recognize, we need national health care, a stronger union movement, higher wages, redistributive tax policy, generous college funding, immigration reform, trade policy, and dimunition of military spending to defend and expand the middle class. In public education, we need to experiment with new models making schools more appealing to kids not planning for college. Magnet schools and charters like Kipp works for a select group of kids whose families envision college in their futures, but we need models relevant to the others.
Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor People's March—even when it alienated corporate funders. His final speech, the night of his assassination, was on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. In his last book, Where do we go from here, he argued for modifying American capitalism to include some measure of wealth distribution.
I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. You as an individual TFA teacher have a responsibility here because your work alone gives TFA leaders credibility It's not the other way around. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.
Houston Education Reform Examiner
July 18, 9:29 PM
I am a veteran teacher from Houston seeking a dialogue with current and past Teach for America teachers regarding what appears to be a pattern of TFA leaders and alumni in school district leadership positions espousing status quo ideas and profiting from close relationships with plutocratic corporations while self-righteously proclaiming they are the new civil rights movement.
I first became aware of this when a former local TFA director, now a school board member, recently proposed to fire teachers based on test scores and opposed allowing us to vote to have a single union.
The conservative-TFA nexus began at the beginning, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp's initial efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide's negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India.
The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize taking responsibility for the event. Not only did Union Carbide provide financial support for Ms. Kopp, it provided her with other corporate contacts and office space for her and her staff.
Ms. Kopp has never expressed the least bit of odd feeling Teach for America's birth in the polluted womb of Union Carbide.
A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project and was all but saved by their managerial assistance.
The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools run by elected school boards with for-profit, corporate-run schools.
In 2000, two TFA alumni, Michael Feinberg and David Levin, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bushes at the Republican National Convention in 2000.
This was vital to Bush, since as Texas governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican.
Feinberg and Levin placed the African-American and Hispanic kids in their charge on that 2000 Republican stage with them. Was it worth it for KIPP? Did any of their graduates fight or die in Iraq? Or the fathers, uncles or cousins of their students?
In Washington D.C., TFA alum and Chancellor Michelle Rhee has fired 1000 teachers and has only minor improvements to show for it in terms of student improvements. She says we need "a different breed of teachers."
Rhee falls into the trap of other TFA alums, underestimating the power of inequality and behavior in student outcomes and therefore laying all the blame at the feet of teachers who are not from her socioeconomic background. Her misconceptions must have caused some significant portion of the 1000 people she put out of work.
Wendy Kopp's idea for Teach for America was a good one. TFA teachers do great work. But its leaders often seem to blame teachers, public schools and teachers' organizations for the achievement gap. By blaming teachers for some deep-seated social problems this nation has, they are not only providing an inaccurate critique; they also feed conservatives more ammunition to use in their 28-year campaign against employing government as a problem solver.
Our achievement gap mirrors our country's level of economic inequality, the greatest among affluent nations. Better schools are only part of the solution. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed our schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It's not the other way around.
The obstacle in schools serving low-income kids is not teacher or principal quality, but student buy in. Too many kids do not see schools as relevant to their lives and act accordingly when forced to be there.
As more people are starting to recognize, we need national health care, a stronger union movement, higher wages, redistributive tax policy, generous college funding, immigration reform, trade policy, and dimunition of military spending to defend and expand the middle class. In public education, we need to experiment with new models making schools more appealing to kids not planning for college. Magnet schools and charters like Kipp works for a select group of kids whose families envision college in their futures, but we need models relevant to the others.
Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor People's March—even when it alienated corporate funders. His final speech, the night of his assassination, was on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. In his last book, Where do we go from here, he argued for modifying American capitalism to include some measure of wealth distribution.
I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. You as an individual TFA teacher have a responsibility here because your work alone gives TFA leaders credibility It's not the other way around. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Racial discrimination in Denver Public Schools: African-American and Hispanic teachers affected by DPS non-written policies
Educators to file U.S. complaint about DPS
The district says it'll strive to hire more African-Americans.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Henry Roman and Jennifer Portillo, new President and Vice-President of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA)
Mr. Henry Roman and Ms. Jennifer Portillo, voted President and Vice-President of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, will be installed as new Executive Officers of DCTA on Thursday May 21, at the Rep Council meeting in the Denver Center for International Studies.
Our congratulations to DCTA's new leadership team!
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