I had been also thinking (but did not write down) that the tide would turn, and that teachers and schools themselves would no longer be seen as the whole cause of poverty or brilliance.
Instead, I feared that racists would once again become free to loudly and publicly blame black and brown people for their own poverty, just like they did from the end of Reconstruction 147 years ago, right up through the anti-Civil Rights backlash of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1983 the essay (disguised as an objective report) called “Nation At Risk” (NAR) jump-started an Education Reform drive that was truly bi-partisan, and had scores of billionaires both liberal (eg Gates) and conservative (eg Waltons) willing to fund it and push politicians to back it. Presidents Clinton, Bush2, and Obama and their secretaries of education all embraced it.
If you hadn’t noticed, this reform movement failed completely.
By its own terms (that is, test scores).
Despite having ‘edu-reformers’ in charge of every single large public school system in the nation.
But it took a while for those failures to become obvious.
At first, only a handful of writers such as Gerald Bracey pointed out the errors in that study and in the reformers’ steamroller. When the report first came out, I was teaching math to 7th graders in a very poor region of DC, and felt embarrassed that so many of my students there (100% Black) did so poorly in school, despite my efforts and those of my colleagues.
Some teachers from East Asia warned me not to believe the hype surrounding NAR. They said the model of education that exists in China, Japan, Korea and so on was NOT one that should be emulated by the US.
But I did believe the myth.
Later, I read some columns by Bracey and others and began to have doubts.
Then the amazing fraud Michelle Rhee was given control of DC’s entire public school system in 2007, less than two years before I retired.
I had never heard of the woman before, but upon her being named Chancellor of DCPS, I heard that she claimed to have performed educational miracles in a low-income, all-Black public school as a 3rd and 4th grade charter school teacher in Baltimore. She wrote in her resume: “Over a two-year period” in the mid-1990s she “moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”
When I read that sentence in herresume, I seem to recall my jaw literally dropping open.
If you have ever been around kids and looked at their test scores, you would realize that this feat would be the equivalent of landing a triple axel in ice skating, while also sinking a three-pointer in the NBA, and running a marathon in under two hours.
Simultaneously.
If this really had happened, it would have been front-page news in every single publication that dealt with education.
(Sounds like George Santos took lessons on fake resume claims from Michelle Rhee!)
Of course, there were no such articles. So I scratched my head and wondered.
After I retired, someone pointed me to where the fairly detailed Baltimore test scores could be found. I looked at them, and found that she had mythologized a small bump in test scores into the greatest educational achievement ever accomplished, anywhere. And nobody had called her on this lie.
I suspect that the bump can be attributed in large part to the fact that over one third of the students at her grade level, at that school, in that year, had scores that were so low that they weren’t counted!!! I wrote a few posts on my blog about it, and even did a call-in on an NPR interview with her, asking why she lied so much, in particular about those scores. She just giggled, as if to imply that I was just being an idiot for trying to call her on such a small technicality, when she was still working miracles.
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From theDaily Howler: “In the 1994-1995 school year, the seven schools run by EAI were under enormous pressure. During and after the previous year, major disputes had broken out about the low test scores of the EAI schools; by the fall of 1994, everyone knew that the pressure was on, that the plug might be pulled on the program. (As a simple Nexis search will show, all these matters were being discussed in the Baltimore Sun.) Do we possess three brain cells among us? If any school in the EAI group had an educational miracle occurring, this glorious fact would have been shouted to the skies by EAI’s corporate leadership. Trust us: The teachers involved would have gained acclaim in the national media—the kind of “acclaim” Rhee used to say she had attained, before she realized she had to stop saying it. It’s absurd to think there was some large group of third-graders “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher,” but their test scores somehow never came to the attention of the UMBC researchers.”
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Apparently nobody else with any knowledge of basic, elementary statistics and probability had previously bothered to compare those actual scores with her extraordinary claims. So I wrote what I found, with a fair amount of fury at the fact that such an amazing, world-class fraud and liar could be in charge of education in my home city, Washington, DC, the very seat of national government and so on. I got my 15 minutes of fame, but while Rhee did retire in disgrace, she has unfortunately never been indicted for fraud, even though she clearlysuborned all sorts of cheating and erasing of bubble marks on students’ tests, and gave prizes and awards to one of the most prolific cheaters, a principal in my own neighborhood. (see here for some details.)
As I have recently feared, but did not put into writing, the really scary part now is that right-wingers and racists are using the failure of this billionaire-led disruption of public schools to get rid of the very idea of public education as a public good. They applaud the self-segregation.
My former math colleague Betsy James compiled this graph. It appears that at some of the best-known charter organizations, such as Rocketship, DCI, ELHaynes, Achievement Prep, Richard Wright, and St Colletta’s, the highest executive salaries are literally off the chart.
She wrote, on Twitter , “I think it’s right to be suspicious of DC charters wanting all of the benefits of teachers unions while none of the responsibilities. But I also feel for charter teachers caught in the middle. Pay the teachers & show the receipts.”
In the wake of testimony this springabout charters needing, and deserving, the monetary increase that DCPS teachers fought for (and won) through their union, this blog post aims to be an outline of some basics of charter school funding and expenditures in DC as well as public accountability behind both.
The bottom line is that accounting of DC charter finances is disaggregated, incomplete, inconsistent, and sometimes purposefully obfuscating, and lacks any meaningful democratic governance and guardrails. As a result, true public oversight is almost impossible for the finances of the publicly funded schools that educate nearly half of DC’s students. This landscape represents a real danger to good use of taxpayer funds and, consequently, proper financing of all of DC’s publicly funded schools.
Each year, DC charter schools receive $1 billion from DC taxpayers (about the same as DCPS receives) by way of the uniform per student funding formula (UPSFF). That public money for charters (apportioned to each on the basis of student population and characteristics, as it is to DCPS) goes directly to the individual, privately run nonprofits that operate each of DC’s 69 charter LEAs.
A separate funding formula is used to provide charters with facilities funds from DC taxpayers. Those facilities funds are apportioned based on the number of students in each LEA, with a set amount per student. The total amount of facilities funds slated forcharters for FY24 is about $175 million. Though the idea is to ensure charters have funds specifically for facilities (something that DCPS does not have to pay for itself), DC charter facilities funds can be used for anything and are entirely untracked and unmonitored by DC.
While those two funding streams from DC taxpayers constitute the majority of each DC charter school’s annual revenue streams, DC charters can also receive federal and local grants from the office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE) as well as philanthropic and other (private) grant revenue.
To better outline charter finances, how they are reported, specific problem areas (reserves, audits, facilities funds, and philanthropy), and what all this means for DC democracy, I have organized this blog post in the following broad categories:
I. The Current Landscape II. Problems With The Current Landscape III. Reserves IV. Audits V. Facilities Funds VI. Philanthropy VII. Solutions
I am happy to include more and correct what is here as you, my readers, may advise–including adding more solutions to what is an annual $1 billion anti-democratic mess.
I. THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
To account for their spending, DC charters provide to the public charter school board (PCSB, their authorizer) annual 990s as well as annual budgets, annual audits, and annual reports.
In addition to publicly posting all of that, PCSB provides its own annual financial analysis reports and annual at risk funding reports, while posting the deputy mayor for education’s annual per pupil funding analyses (which look at a high level of per pupil funding in charters). The financial analysis reports are created by PCSB to analyze the fiscal health of individual charter schools, while at risk funding reports are compilations of what individual charter LEAs report of their planned use of at risk funds.
Between all of these, there is a lot of financial information—which sounds good except for its inherent disaggregation and resulting lack of meaningful and connected detail:
—annual reports of charter schools outline minimum, maximum, and average teacher salaries and also list “salaries of the 5 most highly compensated individuals in the organization, if over $100,000” for the prior school year. There is no requirement for donations to be outlined, and while listing the top five salaries is perhaps sufficient for a small LEA, it doesn’t work well for a large LEA like KIPP DC, whose latest annual report outlines top five salaries ranging from $216K to $359K (by comparison, the DCPS chancellor makes less than $300K, while DC’s mayor makes $220K). Moreover, each annual report is done by school year, not fiscal year like the financial analysis reports, annual budgets, and annual audits.
—annual budgets (done by fiscal year) appear to have more finely outlined details than annual reports, but again do not outline who donated what and do not outline all executive salaries, individual teacher salaries, specific grants and donations, and specific facilities costs and expenditures.
—annual audits are also done by fiscal year, but a year prior to the budgets, making alignment of the information between publicly available financial sources difficult (not to mention that some of the audit information is frankly out of date by the time of its posting). The audits appear to outline federal grants; contracts; lease activities; and real estate obligations as well as loans and other fiscal obligations. They also outline donor restrictions on funds. But as with the annual budgets, there is no outline of who donated what; all executive salaries; individual teacher salaries; all grants and donations; and clear delineation of facilities costs and expenditures as well as actual real estate holdings. As with the annual reports and budgets, the reporting is dependent on what the school itself provides to the auditing companies they hire for this purpose.
—990s for each DC charter LEA are publicly available on websites other than PCSB’s (for instance, the IRS website, guidestar, and pro publica’s nonprofit explorer)–but all are literally years behind the current year. (For example, the latest form for DC Prep is for 2019 on both PCSB’s and pro publica’s websites, dating from 2020, while guidestar has a 2018 form dating from 2019.) The 990s are the only place I have seen where some charter LEAs indicate that they have engaged in lobbying. The 990s also list the highest paid salaries, contracts, and fundraising expenses as well as contributions in excess of $5000—but without any donor information (i.e., just 5 individuals gave KIPP DC $14 million as reported on its 2019 990—but who they are is publicly unknown).
—financial analysis reports are created by PCSB based on information in the audits and data submitted directly to PCSB by charter LEAs. The financial analysis reports put that information into more readily understandable categories. The reports contain the days of cash on hand and percentage of DC and grant funding for each charter. The reports use this data among others to present “report cards” on each LEA’s fiscal strength.
—at risk funding reports before FY23 are collections of aspirational wishes and actions, not only because charters have not been required to report how their at risk funds are used, but also because the reporting is (perhaps obviously) highly variable. That will change slightly starting in 2024, when charters will report both their budgeted and actual at risk expenditures. But the variability of use will likely continue, as at risk funds in each charter are not mandated for any specific uses, unlike in DCPS.
II. PROBLEMS WITH THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
As outlined above, the public has a lot of available fiscal information around our charters–but it is not easily or even directly related to the most basic questions of accountability with respect to public money.
Setting aside clear and direct fiscal mismanagement, here are the problems:
1. There are no truly independent audits of DC charters, whether for attendance (which is directly related to DC’s school ratings and payments) or taxpayer funds. Charters’ annual audits are done by companies hired by individual charter businesses.
2. There is no forensic accounting, or tracking, by DC government of any charter money, including randomized tracking of taxpayer funds and money following students from charters to DCPS after count day. This is important inasmuch as DCPS sees an influx of students from charters every year—but the money cannot follow those students because there is no tracking of it OR of students. It is also important because all publicly available information on DC charter finances originates with the charter nonprofits themselves, incentivizing obfuscation. (More on that under “audits” below.)
3. There are no rules on reporting specific charter expenditures for teacher pay and facilities. As noted above, the facilities funding is completely untracked and without any mandate for its use. As a result, public reporting on these and other areas of charter spending is entirely voluntary, incomplete at best, and publicly untransparent.
4. There is no required disclosure of donors and their donations to charter schools. While donations do not constitute a large percentage of DC charter revenue as far as I can see, for some charters donations are sizable and constitute a powerful tool in their operations. Moreover, the way in which philanthropic revenue is accounted for is less than clear, with literally unbelievable reporting of $0 in philanthropic revenue for some LEAs. (More on that under “philanthropy” below.)
5. There are no mandated charter reserves or limits on reserves.
6. There are no rules for investments, or use, of charter reserves, which are mainly DC taxpayer funds. This represents a boon for the financial sector, essentially transferring public dollars to private hands without any way for the public to have a direct say in that investment and a direct benefit from it.
7. Although there is public reporting of charter contracts, it is completely disaggregated (see the PCSB website here), with charter 990s the only other source of this information (where it is truncated and years behind the present). This means there is no way for anyone outside the LEAs themselves to know what contracts any given LEA has at any given moment.
8. No elected or appointed DC official with any oversight of DC charters has knowledge of individual LEA charter donors, use of reserves, teacher pay, per pupil expenditures, facilities expenditures, contracts, or use of at risk funds, so oversight of DC charters by officials directly accountable to the public is necessarily limited.
As a result of this weak and publicly unresponsive governance, several things are apparent with respect to DC charter finances:
–Every LEA has different methods, different desires, and different uses for its money. While the central tenet of DC charters is their independent governance, those different things are not accounted for anywhere clearly or unambiguously. In fact, if revealed at all, that information is disaggregated such that meaningful public oversight is nearly impossible.
–At no point can anyone outline basic financial issues in charters, such as which LEA pays teachers the best or even the most consistently (i.e., is there a minimum and a maximum salary for teachers and administrators); what return on investment LEAs have for their investments; and what hundreds of millions in facilities funds are used for.
–Many charter executives have large-scale pay that is revealed explicitly only in the LEA’s 990s—and thus disaggregated from all teacher pay in all public accounting and not up to date. But when plotted against charter teacher pay (see here if that link isn’t working), the disparity is jarring—especially as at least 10 charter executives are currently making more than DC’s mayor, despite no charter LEA having as many students as DCPS, which the mayor herself is nominally in charge of.
The bottom line: There is no way for anyone in the public sphere to understand where that annual $1 billion investment in our charters actually goes and how much is being directly invested in our kids.
Below are a few areas of charter finances where the lack of public sunshine is very problematic.
III. RESERVES
Per FY21 guidelines (the most recent available) for PCSB’s financial analysis reports, PCSB recommends that schools have “at least 45 days of cash on hand. Fewer than 30 days of cash on hand may be cause for concern.”
But the median of cash on hand for charters, per the FY21 financial analysis report, is 165 days. It is not clear what level, if any, is actually required (as opposed to recommended)—and certainly there is nothing about what a maximum should be.
At the March 3 oversight hearing, starting at the 4 hour and 55 minute mark of the video, at large council member Christina Henderson asked the PCSB executive director about cash on hand, noting one school with 24 days of cash on hand while another school with about 700 days. Henderson mused that if charter LEAs have all that cash, why not just pay their teachers more?
In response, the PCSB executive director and the PCSB director of finance noted that refinancing or saving for mortgages may be a reason a school has small or large reserves, respectively.
A few minutes later in the same hearing, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin noted that if cash on hand is being banked for expansions, it’s getting ahead of the issue. He also noted that charter cash on hand goes up annually by $50 million.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear how to account for that annual growth.
For instance, the FY20 financial analysis report showed $351 million in “unrestricted cash” for DC’s charter schools.
But the FY21 financial analysis report showed that “unrestricted cash and cash equivalents” amounted to $419 million.
So: what is “unrestricted cash” versus “unrestricted cash and cash equivalents”? It is not defined clearly anywhere.
Moreover, annual growth in cash reserves appears to be different for each LEA, without any clearly delineated and publicly specified reasons for that growth, such that it is impossible for any DC officials or taxpayers to know if the growth is due to investments, better use of money, or something else (layoffs of staff, reorganizing, etc.).
Possibly the only deduction one can make around the annual growth of DC charter cash reserves is that it is mainly money paid by DC that is not going directly to students now or (possibly) ever, because most funding to DC charters comes directly from DC taxpayers.
When I mentioned last year to the PCSB director of finance this obscured public view of charter spending because of the obscurity around cash reserves, he noted that not only do PCSB staff check in with charters regularly when they see large reserves (or lack thereof), but that charter review and renewal reports show “patterns of cash” that elucidate their operation.
The trouble is that the public is not privy to PCSB staff conversations on that subject—not to mention that those charter renewal reports occur only every 5 years, which for the sake of public clarity and accounting is an eternity.
DC Prep provides an excellent example of these problems.
A year ago, at its May 2022 board meeting, DC Prep’s board discussed investing almost $30 million in cash reserves. That amount represents more than 10% of the LEA’s annual operating budget with about 2000 students. Shortly thereafter, DC Prep advertised for an investment manager (see the notice in the charter school section of the DC register, 69/26, dated 7/1/22).
As a staffer noted at minute 39 of the May 2022 meeting video, DC Prep has seen an extra $4 million in its coffers annually, mainly due to “healthy increases in per pupil funding.”
Not surprisingly, given that the school receives almost 90% of its revenues from DC taxpayers, at the 56 minute mark of the video of that May 2022 board meeting a DC Prep board member worried about the “optics” of a publicly funded charter school having an investment strategy for tens of millions.
But housing developer and board member Terry Eakin had a different view. At 58 minutes in the video, Eakin noted that “donors have given us over $36 million since the beginning [in 2003]. If we were investing in the stock market monies from the taxpayers, I think it would be different.” Eakin also noted (boldface mine) that “in the unlikely event we were to make a major investment and lose all of [the invested cash], it wouldn’t be monies we had gotten from DC. I would earmark it as monies we received from donors. . . . the way I look at it, we’re just trying to get a better return for our kids.”
At that same May 2022 board meeting, DC Prep’s board declined to give permanent raises to staff—even though teachers there are paid on average less than $70,000 per year; the school struggles with staff retention (that topic alone took up almost half of the May 2022 board meeting discussion); and the school’s top administrators have recently been paid more than the mayor.
Let us put all of this into perspective:
DC Prep’s most recent publicly available audits show that between 2014 and 2021, DC Prep got an average of 82% of its revenues directly from DC taxpayers. Each audit makes this statement: “DC Prep receives a substantial portion of its revenue from DC.” The school also has a fairly high debt load—something that the FY21 financial analysis report noted.
So we know that
–Terry Eakin’s statement regarding DC Prep’s cash reserves as given (mainly or wholly) by donors is incorrect; –DC Prep’s teachers are not well paid relative to its administrators; and –Despite troubles with staff retention, relatively low pay for teachers, and a high debt load, DC Prep’s board avoided using the LEA’s extra millions in cash to address any of it, declining to raise salaries overall or to offer (as detailed at minute 31 of the board video) a “substantial bonus” or “money” to discourage mid-year staff departures.
Upshot:
Even though charter cash reserves largely come from DC taxpayers, the purposefully weak governance structure of DC charters ensures that DC taxpayers (and the elected and appointed officials representing their interests) have NO control or say in any of it, even though all of it is central to the operation of those LEAs and the mission of teaching our kids and constitutes hundreds of millions transferred from the public to private hands.
IV. AUDITS
As noted above, DC charters’ annual audits are conducted by companies charters themselves hire and then provide with statements about the schools’ accounting. In addition, those audits and individual LEA reporting are the basis for PCSB’s financial analysis reports, which analyze and report on the fiscal health of charters.
But even while they appear to be extensive, charter audits have two glaring problems.
1. Charter business dealings and investments are not entirely (or at all) clear in the audits.
For instance, both KIPP DC and DC Prep own property that is not as far as I can see currently used or rented. As a result, I could not figure out how that is reported in the audits, because it is not specifically mentioned.
In December 2019, DC Prep bought 1619 Frankford St. SE, a decrepit residential property with a large lot, as a location for a future middle school. In the wake of public protest, DC Prep promised to sell the property if it got another location for its middle school. (See p. 79 of the transcript of the PCSB November 18, 2019 meeting here: “If we can secure an alternative site for our permanent location, we will resell the Frankford Street site.”)
But DC Prep still owns the property in 2023, despite being awarded in 2021 a huge site by DC for its middle school. How DC Prep’s ownership of 1619 Frankford is accounted for in publicly accessible documents is unclear–even when the school owes property taxesand accrued penalties on it.
In early 2017, KIPP DC bought 12 wooded, undeveloped acres behind Gainesville St. SE, in Hillcrest, and days later proposed to build a 900 seat high school there. While that proposal was defeated by community opposition, half a decade later KIPP DC still owns that land. The tax rate and assessed value is very low, amounting to a tiny fraction of KIPP DC’s expenditures and assets—but how this is accounted for, including the millions used to purchase the land and what KIPP DC’s future plans are for it, remain publicly obscured.
And that is not mentioning DC charters that also operate in other jurisdictions (i.e., Friendship and Eagle). Those operations are unaccounted for in publicly available documents for DC charters, even though those operations outside DC could affect the financial health of the LEAs’ DC operations.
2. Audits are delayed relative to other charter financial information, and this ensures poor information for the public while vitiating meaningful oversight.
Perhaps the most obvious example of that is the recent revelation that $2 million was embezzled from KIPP DC—which was (incredibly) not the only OR largest recent fiscal impropriety of KIPP DC.
KIPP DC’s $2 million embezzlement took place from April 2020 through August 2021, a relatively long period. But the school’s most recent publicly available audit, from June 2021, doesn’t mention it. That may be because KIPP DC was reported to have found the problem only months after that June 2021 audit, “during a routine internal review in December [2021].”
That said, the embezzlement did not become public knowledge until nearly a year after KIPP DC’s reported discovery of it, after the feds filed a lawsuit for civil forfeiture in August 2022.
In other words, but for the feds suing 8 months after KIPP DC said it discovered the $2 million embezzlement, we the DC public might STILL not know about any of this. As it is, the lawsuit was filed months after multiple spring oversight hearings in 2022 by the DC Council, hearings in which none of this was raised.
In addition to that embezzled $2 million, more than $5 million around construction contracts and commitments was in the last 2 or more years underreported by KIPP DC (see p. 42 in the June 2021 audit).
The most recent PCSB financial analysis report, from FY21, came out sometime after September 15, 2022–in the wake of reporting around the federal forfeiture lawsuit around the embezzlement at KIPP DC. The analysis of KIPP DC in that FY21 report gives the LEA a good rating for fiscal health, but also notes the $2M embezzlement AND the $5M underreporting. The financial analysis report goes on to note that it didn’t believe the underreporting was related to the embezzlement, but that the LEA will take “further corrective actions.”
So: what are those “further corrective actions” and when will we taxpayers hear about them?
In an early September 2022 story about the embezzlement, PCSB was reported to be holding a public hearing later in that same month to “highlight the steps it has taken and will take in the future to prevent other incidents of fiscal malfeasance in the charter sector.”
It never happened.
Then, in October 2022, when I spoke to him about the embezzlement, the PCSB director of finance said PCSB was “continuing to gather information and review it” and expected to have a “robust conversation” in November or December [2022] about it.
If that conversation ever happened, it certainly was not public.
That said, the charter board recently held a closed session on April 24, 2023 to discuss KIPP DC’s finances (remember: three YEARS after the embezzlement started and about two YEARS after the underreported $5 million). That 4/24/23 Monday morning meeting was publicly noticed only 72 hours before, on a Friday (April 21) in the DC Register.
And this is not even getting into the confusing information provided to the public about the $2 million that was embezzled.
For instance, the federal lawsuit specifically says this:
“Between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020, KIPP DC received approximately $1,372,412 in federal grants, and between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021, KIPP DC received approximately $3,426,314 in federal grants.”
One would thus conclude that the embezzled $2 million constituted federal grant money that the federal government is seeking to get back.
Yet in 2022 public reporting in the wake of that lawsuit filing (see here and here), a KIPP DC spokesperson said the embezzled funds came from “KIPP DC’s financial reserves and from a single private grant.”
So which is it: “private” money kept as cash reserves OR money the federal government is entitled to?
Now, three years after the embezzlement started, and two years after the underreporting of $5 million, we don’t know
whose money was taken; what the misreporting means for the public; when any missing money will be returned and how; and why none of this was ever publicly reported by KIPP DC and/or PCSB directly and unambiguously.
In fact, not one syllable about any of this was uttered at the recent spring 2023 oversight hearings at the council.
V. FACILITIES FUNDS
DC charter LEAs are granted facilities funds that provide a set amount per student each year, without any specification about how those funds are to be used. In addition, there is no tracking of them by any DC entity. In the last decade alone, DC charter LEAs received more than $1 billion in facilities allocations.
In a recent letter about charters wanting to have more money as a result of the DCPS teacher contract, the PCSB executive director noted that charter facilities funds must cover both capital expenses as well as maintenance for DC charter schools.
But that is in fact incorrect (as C4DC noted in its own correspondence on the subject): The UPSFF is meant to cover charter maintenance costs—which it in fact does in DCPS.
At the March 3 hearing, after noting that DC charter facilities allocations are about $25 million less than reported occupancy expenses in the sector, Ward 3 council member Matt Frumin said that $50 million of charter occupancy expenses are for maintenance. Thus, he noted, one might conclude that the facilities allowance for charters is $25 million too much!
Unfortunately, the accounting here is not good. For one, no one is tracking facilities funds. For another, facilities funds are given without regard for need. And for yet another, as a result of both of those things, no elected or appointed officials can exercise any oversight whatsoever.
It’s not just a blind trust—it’s needlessly anti-democratic and inevitably wasting public money.
Consider that in 2019, Rocketship applied to open a Ward 5 campus. Its application noted that eventually, the total facilities costs for all three of its DC campuses would amount to $6.5 million per year, for about 2112 students. The application noted that that comes out to about $3068 per student–which is less than what the school would expect to receive in per student charter facilities funds (in FY20, that was $3335 per student).
VI. PHILANTHROPY
Until sometime after 2017, philanthropic revenue in DC charters was reported unambiguously as precisely that: philanthropic revenue. (See, for example, the chart here for 2017, from the financial analysis report for that year.)
But sometime after 2017, PCSB stopped reporting philanthropic revenue clearly, eventually removing the term “philanthropy” entirely and changing the years of reporting, such that it is now practically impossible to know what, exactly, each charter has for philanthropic revenue.
Here’s what happened:
This document is a sequential compilation of screenshots of the FY18-FY21 financial analysis reports for exhibit 10, which starting in FY18 purportedly showed philanthropic revenue in DC charters.
In the FY18 report, this exhibit 10 table is titled “philanthropic revenue by school.” But unlike the 2017 table (where the column reporting this data is labeled “philanthropy”), here the values for individual LEAs are put into a column labeled “FY [X year] grants and contributions.”
As OSSE can and does give grants to charter schools, this is a bit confusing: what grants and what contributions? It’s not said. But if one looks at the 2017 table, and compares the 2017 values to the values reported for FY2017 on the FY18 table, it seems like they are the same values.
But while we can thus deduce (at least for the few LEAs I checked) that “grants and contributions” for 2018 = philanthropy for 2017, this is not explained anywhere.
For the FY19 financial analysis report, this information is reported differently yet. Instead of labelling the columns in exhibit 10 “FY [X year] grants and contributions” (as was done for the prior year’s report), the FY19 financial analysis report labels all of them with a 2-year span—for example, “2018-2019 total grants and other contributions.”
So: Is that a fiscal year? A school year? A calendar year?
Again, it is unexplained—but again, one can deduce that these are likely the same values as shown in the same exhibit for the same years in the FY18 financial analysis report.
That is, the “FY2017 grants and contributions” reported in the FY2018 financial analysis report for exhibit 10 (“philanthropic revenue by school”) appear to be the same as the “2016-2017 total grants and contributions” reported in the “philanthropic revenue by school” (exhibit 10) in the FY2019 financial analysis report—at least for the few I checked. The totals certainly add up to the same numbers.
But who will check from one year to the next to see if the reporting changed at all, in the event that these are in fact *not* intended to be equivalents, as no explanation is provided?
For the same exhibit in the FY20 financial analysis report, the labelling appears to be the same for the columns as in the FY19 financial analysis report—but the entire table is titled differently, as “grants and other contributions by school.”
Thus, with the FY20 financial analysis report, we have entirely lost any mention of philanthropy or philanthropic revenue!
As with the FY19 financial analysis report, exhibit 10 in the FY20 financial analysis report labels the columns with a year spread—for instance, the column with the most recent data is “2019-2020 total grants and contributions.”
In the latest financial analysis report, for FY21, exhibit 10 is different yet again, with the entire table being labelled “grants and other contributions by LEA” and columns being labelled thusly: “FY [year] total grants and other contributions.”
For all the exhibit 10 tables contained in the FY18-FY21 financial analysis reports, it appears that the column with the most recent data has the same values as a column outlining grants and contributions by LEA in those reports’ exhibit 9, which outlines sources of revenue by LEA (including total revenue, federal revenue, grants, and other (unspecified) income). The column in each report’s exhibit 9 that appears to be identical to that exhibit 10 column is titled “total grants and other contributions.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, each report’s exhibit 9 and all their columns, including the ones outlining grants and contributions, doesn’t mention philanthropy at all.
Thus, back in October, to better understand where philanthropic revenue figures in this reporting, I spoke with PCSB director of finance Michael Bayuk. He told me that the exhibit 9 column for the FY21 financial analysis report (“total grants and other contributions”) is state and local grants and philanthropy. He told me that “we didn’t think it” worthy of including philanthropy separately as a category.
He then noted that a “large part of these funds” (i.e., in that column of total grants and other contributions) is philanthropy. (I discovered, however, that this last bit is not true, at least for FY21—read on.)
As far as OSSE grants go, Bayuk noted that sometimes OSSE is a pass-through for federal money, so in that case, if an OSSE grant to a charter is federal money, it gets counted as federal for this table. The column in exhibit 9 titled “other income” is activity fees, interest income, rental income, and anything that doesn’t fit into the other columns. He noted that it is variable; it is certainly not forthcoming in terms of defining, or breaking out, where the money is coming from.
To better suss out philanthropic revenue in DC charters, in October 2022 I requested by FOIA from PCSB the source files for the column on exhibit 9 of the FY21 financial analysis report titled “total grants and other contributions,” broken out in terms of state, local, and other grants; philanthropy; and whatever else is contained in that column for each school.
Therein ensued nearly 6 months’ worth of obfuscation including unlawful delays; creation of documents specifically for me that were not what I requested; incomplete production; and document manipulation such that dates were obscured. (You can read the whole sorry saga here.)
But by March 2023, I had in my possession (finally!) what I think (and hope and believe) is a complete set of what are most likely original source files for this information. They consist of spreadsheets with an actual line item called “income from philanthropy.” Here’s a link to all the different folders and files, produced over a period of more than a month.
That line item, income from philanthropy, is separated out from grants and is apparently what DC charters report each year directly to PCSB. By compiling the FY21 income from philanthropy line items for each charter and comparing them to the values shown for each charter for grants and contributions on the FY21 financial analysis report, I discovered a few things:
1. PCSB collects information every year from DC charters specifically on their philanthropic revenue. But because there is no required reporting of philanthropy in DC charters other than this, the only measure we have is what PCSB gets—and it is available to DC taxpayers only by FOIA and until such a time as PCSB decides not to request that data from charters.
2. For the most recent year of grants and contributions in the FY21 financial analysis report, the values shown for that in exhibits 9 and 10 are identical—but in most cases not the same as “income from philanthropy” as reported on the documents I received via FOIA.
3. For only a relatively small subset of schools (12 out of 66 by my count), philanthropy constitutes the vast majority of grants and contributions.
4. For other schools, the majority of their grant and other contribution income appears not to come from philanthropy. For some of these, however, the utter lack of philanthropic revenue reported is mystifying. How is it that KIPP DC doesn’t have any philanthropic revenue for an entire year? (See this webpage for KIPP: “KIPP DC relies 100% on private donations to fund growth efforts to reach more students and operate critical programs like KIPP Forward and the Capital Teaching Residency.”)
5. For yet another subset of schools, there is nothing–no philanthropy and/or no grants—which appears to highlight disproportional outside funding in DC charters.
Notwithstanding that lack of clarity around philanthropic revenue, the sheer amount in charter “grants and contributions” is astonishing. In that short period starting with FY18, for instance, the total grew thusly:
All of that begs the question: what was/is behind that growth? Federal money in the pandemic? Something else? The point appears to be that no one knows—least of all DC taxpayers.
And this analysis of PCSB reporting shows that obscurity is purposeful.
VII. SOLUTIONS
All of these issues—the obfuscation, the lack of data, the impossibility of oversight, and the lack of budgetary guardrails and basic guidelines—make clear that there is no way for anyone in the public sphere to understand where DC taxpayers’ annual $1 billion investment in our charters goes and how much is directly invested in our kids.
This isn’t about the ever-mentioned “outcomes,” whether test scores, graduation rates, or post-secondary career or college achievement. It is, literally, about where the money DC taxpayers provide is going. Simply put, such “outcomes” are meaningless metrics without understanding where OUR money is actually going–and where it isn’t going.
So let us look at what we CAN and SHOULD do better regarding public accountability in charter finances:
–Track students so money follows them.
–Require teacher minimum pay in charters, along with full disclosure of all charter teacher salaries as in DCPS.
–Require documentation from individual LEAS that all their charter teachers receive increases as a result of any cash the charter sector receives as a result of DCPS teacher wage increases from union contracts.
–Disclose all donors and the amount they donate to all DC publicly funded schools.
–Hold regular investigative, independent audits of all DC charter businesses.
–Make DC—not private businesses or the financial institutions they choose to enrich—the reserve holder for all charter reserves, in amounts proportional to the percentage of taxpayer funds received. DC would be responsible for investment of that money and would pass the investment proceeds only to charter LEAs that have demonstrated need of it. This underscores that DC charter businesses are not mere nonprofits–they are chartered entities that are chartered for a specific public purpose and do not exist to profit from (or to profit others in) that public purpose.
–Enact a maximum pay limit for charter executives and administrators.
–Decouple all efforts to specifically increase charter teacher pay from increases in DCPS teacher pay. The two sectors are separate and governed differently, and teacher pay is purposefully different in each. If DC charter teacher pay is inadequate at any given moment, that is an issue solely to be addressed by the charter sector–not coupled to anything in DCPS.
–Disclose all charter school business deals and assets explicitly and directly, naming each.
–Have a website for all charter contracts per LEA at all times.
–Have explicit disclosure of, and tracking for, all facilities funds to charters, and apportion facilities funds based on demonstrated need and without regard for maintenance costs, which are included in the UPSFF.CommentLikeYou can also reply to this email to leave a comment.
On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s important for us as a nation to reflect on that conflict and its consequences. As the vice president of the United States in 2003, I was one of the architects of the project to go after Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Today, I believe it’s important to offer an honest assessment of my role in the Iraq War. Looking back on it now, I have to say that, wow, I mostly got it right.
Seriously, the Iraq War went basically as well as I could have hoped.
We in the Bush administration justified the war on the basis of destroying Saddam’s WMDs and bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. Twenty years later, we know that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, and that the United States left Iraq in the throes of poverty and violence. Critics then and now have suggested that we deliberately misrepresented intelligence, and that spreading democracy was merely a fig leaf for our true goal of maintaining U.S. political and economic dominance over the world.
To that, I say, no shit. Duh. Of course we were lying. Of course we only went in to maintain American hegemony. That was the whole plan all along.
Christ, what country do you think we are?
In hindsight, it’s stunning to see how right I was about the long-term impacts of invading Iraq. Sure, there are the obvious wins of destabilizing governments we don’t like, strengthening U.S. control over the oil industry, and killing a bunch of Muslims. That was all pretty neat, and exactly what we expected. But let’s be honest about the Iraqi victims: You don’t care about them, and I don’t care about them. Because, ultimately, the goal of the Iraq War was much bigger than that, and we achieved that goal: the victory of the U.S. war machine over the American people.
In my heart of hearts, I figured that if Americans would accept the Iraq War, then there was nothing they wouldn’t accept. It seems clear, 20 years later, that I’ve been proven right.
For starters, we wanted to put the American political and media class on a permanent war footing. After the Soviet Union collapsed, things looked dicey in terms of keeping Americans all frothed up about foreign adversaries. Sure, 9/11 helped, but what we really craved was a rationale for endless war. In Iraq, we implemented our playbook for the post-Vietnam, post-Soviet, 21st-century invasion, and it’s amazing to see how well it all played out. Today, all we have to do is say “democracy,” and our political and media elite will rush to support any military action like slobbering dogs. I don’t mean to be immodest, but that’s exactly how I predicted it would go down.
Any Iraq War reflection must contend with the rise of ISIS—one of America’s greatest accomplishments. ISIS was a real home run for us. We suspected that sowing wanton violence across the Middle East would stoke anti-American insurgencies that didn’t conform to conventional national or geographic boundaries. In theory, they could be everywhere. And if the enemy could be everywhere, it justified basically any action to stop them. Which was great, because the deliberately vague war on terror gave a blank check to the men and women who bravely reap the profits of our private military contractors.
I imagine the name Halliburton rings a bell? What we wanted to do, what Rumsfeld and Condi and I and the rest of that bunch really wanted to do, was forever shift war-making into the hands of weapons contractors and mercenary armies. Not only does that make me and a bunch of my buddies incredibly rich, but it makes it so that even if regular people wanted to stop the war machine, they couldn’t. All decisions are made outside public control, and there aren’t any democratic mechanisms left to stop it. Of all the legacies of the war, that might be my absolute favorite.
I’m calling on all Americans to support our mission to invade Thailand and restore democracy.
Gotcha! You started feeling all patriotic for a second there, didn’t you? Started getting all indignant about those poor suffering Thai people and ready to put their flag in your social media handle? I have no fucking clue if Thailand has a democracy, and I don’t care. But inspiring that knee-jerk jingoistic reaction in you, that right there is the legacy of the Iraq War. That’s my legacy.
When I’m right, I’m right.
Because ultimately, that might be the thing we were most right about: We figured that tying being a “real American” to patriotism would make it effectively impossible to mount a serious anti-war effort in this country ever again. Since the Iraq War, Democrats have been so worried about being labeled soft on terrorism that they’ve given full-throated support to every military action that our weapons lobbyists and intelligence agencies could devise. In addition, legitimate public grievances over America’s most heinous actions can be reduced by the media to feckless “culture war” battles, which neutralizes their power. If you don’t believe those were major driving forces behind the war in Iraq, I have a weapon of mass destruction to sell you.
It’s easy for armchair critics to condemn the Iraq War. But you have to remember what things were like back in 2003. People actually trusted the government and had faith in the idea of America. Trust and faith aren’t very sturdy things to build a perpetual war machine on, and they don’t make a lot of money, either. The Iraq War eroded faith in the government and drove more Americans into suspicion and hatred, just as we hoped it would. Combine that with rising inequality and the American cult of the individual, and you have a perfect recipe for ensuring that most Americans are too disillusioned to mount collective resistance to any governmental transgressions. That’s what I always hoped the Iraq War might accomplish, and man, it feels good to be right.
Looking back, it’s safe to say the Iraq War was the high point of my career. Except maybe shooting that guy.
Here in Michigan, the Democratic legislature just re-affirmed our state’s longstanding commitment to working families by removing anti-laborprovisions from state law. The move doesn’t apply to teachers and other public employees, because the conservative U.S. Supreme Court sideda few years back with Right-wing activists in their efforts to hinder contributions to public sector unions, but it’s still good news for the labor movement overall.
And I wanted to use their effort—alongside Republican efforts in other states to threaten teachers for what they say in classrooms—to make a simple point.
We need teachers unions. Other folks more prominent than me, like AFT’s Randi Weingarten, have made this pointrecently too. But I wanted to add my own voice as someone who has not been a union member, and someone who—although I’ve appeared with Randion her podcast and count many union members as friends—has never been an employee or even a consultant.
If you want to talk dollars, The Walton Family Foundation once supported my research on charter schools to the tune of more than $300,000. Arnold Ventures supported my fundraising for a research center at Michigan State–$1.9 million from them. And the US Department of Education awarded my team more than $2 million to study school choice—while Betsy DeVos was secretary.
Think about that when I say school vouchers are horrific. And understand, I’m getting no support from teachers’ unions.
Instead it is I who supports them.
I’ve been studying teacher labor markets almost as long as school vouchers. Mostly my research has looked at teacher recruitment and retention. But I’ve also written about teachers’unionsspecifically. There’s a debate among scholars on what unions do and whether their emphasis on spending translates into test score differences. In the “rent seeking” framework economists use, the concern is that dollars spent on salaries don’t have direct academic payoffs.
There is no question that spending more money on public schools has sustained and generational impacts on kids. Research has “essentially settled” that debate, according to today’s leading expert on the topic.
But I want to branch out from dollars and cents and test scores to talk about teacher voice.
And I want to do that by raising a few questions that I’ve asked myself over the last couple years:
Why should the voice of a billionaire heiress from Michigan with no experience in public schools count for more than the voices of 100,000 teachers in my state’s classrooms every day?
Why should the simple fact that they work with children made by other people mean that teachers surrender their own autonomy and judgment not just as professionals but as human beings?
Why should educators have to work under what amounts to gag orders, afraid to broach certain topics or issues in the classroom? Some states are setting up hotlines to report on teachers as if they’re parolees, and a bill in New Hampshire would essentially give the fringe-Right Secretary of Education subpoena power to haul teachers in front of a special tribunal for teaching “divisive concepts.” This, after a Moms for Liberty chapter put out a bounty on New Hampshire teachers who were likewise divisive on an issue. Read: an issue of race or gender.
It’s not just threats to teacher employment. We know this. There are threats to teachers’ lives. How many teachers have died alongside their students—other people’s children—over the years in school shootings?
Why does the Right claim to trust teachers enough to arm them with gunsin response to those shootings, but not enough to let them talk about race, gender, or any other “divisive concept?” Even some conservative commentatorshave worried publicly that we’re asking teachers to do too much. Why are we asking them to be an armed security force too?
‘In her recent history of “The Teacher Wars”, The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein noted that teachers formed unions, and fought for teacher tenure, to protect themselves not just professionally but personally. For free speech. To prevent harassment from supervisors—then as now, teachers were mostly professional women—and to keep from being fired for pregnancy or marital status.
So really, attacks on teachers are nothing new. Instead, teachers seem to be one of the few professions that it’s still acceptable in political conversation—even a mark of supposed intellectual sophistication in some circles—to ponder the shortcomings of the educators who work with our kids every day.
There’s nothing sophisticated about attacking hardworking, thoughtful, and dedicated people. And the only result of doing so will be the further erosion of our public, community schools. And that’s really the point. Just a few days ago, we learned that the big data that I and many others have gotten used to working with finally caught up to the on-the-frontlines warnings of educators everywhere: teachers are exiting the profession at unprecedented rates.
I’ve taken no money from teachers’ unions for any of the work I do. I’ve never been a member of a union—teachers’ or otherwise. Until now. Because after writing this today, I made a donation to my state’s primary teachers’ union and became a general member: a person “interested in advancing the cause of education…not eligible for other categories of membership.”
There’s a word for that in the labor movement. You hear it a lot here in Michigan, where I grew up and now teach future teachers in a college of education. That word is Solidarity.
It is truly amazing that there is an observable universe at all with the laws of gravity, physics and chemistry as they are. We should be grateful for this — without it, we would not exist.
However the universe began, it is truly amazing that untold generations of novae, supernovae, and planetary nebulae have successively enriched the interstellar medium enough for our own extraordinary solar system came into existence with lots of higher-atomic-number elements. We should be grateful for this — without it, we would not exist.
It is also truly amazing that this little planet of ours survived aeons of bombardments by other planetary bodies, enriched by a stabilizing Moon and a good bit of water and enough carbon to enable carbon-based life forms to arise and evolve. We should be grateful for this — without it, we would not exist. Note: no other planet has been discovered that appears to be habitable.
It is truly amazing that our species has evolved in such a way that we cooperate better than any other species (except the social insects) and we teach each other skills; so much so that in the past few centuries we have figured out large parts of the puzzles of matter, life, and the universe. Unfortunately, we are also really, really good at organizing ourselves into corporations, ruling classes, tribes, nations and armies that fight each other, oppress and exploit the majority, and do an amazing job of destroying the very fabric of life.
I am very, very grateful for all of these wonderful forces that brought us into being. Who or what (being or forces) brought us all into existence is a mystery we will never, ever figure out. If you want to call it “God”, go right ahead, but don’t pretend this god has anything to do with any of the fairy tales recorded in any “holy book”.
The only part of this planet that is habitable is extremely tiny. If you try to climb a mountain 4 miles (6 km) above sea level, you will die — unless you bring special, expensive equipment like bottled oxygen. Our very deepest mines (in South Africa), dug at enormous expense to mine gold, are so hot at those levels that you will die down there without special equipment. Also, you can’t dive more than a a few meters into the sea without special training and equipment. Ccompare that few miles of possible vertical travel to the diameter of the Earth (~8000 miles) and you will find that human life without amazing protective bubbles is as thick as a sheet of paper glued to a basketball. And we are screwing it up quickly.
If there are other planets out there that are as lucky as Earth, they are SSOOOO far away that there is no conceivable way to get there except in science fiction (ie fairy tales).
Let us stop oppressing and murdering each other, and stop destroying the only known habitable planet in the entire universe.
Because of the problem of nearly exponential growth, I wager that making a complete genealogical chart for any one person for say 5 generations forward and back, including in-laws and cousins, is a challenging mathematical-logical conundrum that is unsolvable on any single piece of paper. John once pointed out to me that the cousins and in-laws that really start accumulating very, very rapidly. Also: “most genealogy models show one to have more potential ancestors than human beings to have ever lived” if you go back far enough. ( see https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3677238/exponential-growth-and-decay-model-for-human-genealogy-common-ancestor
By coincidence, some of my students are studying exponential growth at the moment, and I will endeavor to create a problem for them on this. The cousins and in-laws are the tricky part. A logistic curve makes more sense. https://xaktly.com/LogisticFunctions.html
No wonder that numerous purpose-built software apps have been rolled out over the years to handle the genealogical problem. I’ve not sunk time into learning SQL or any other relational databases, but I’m glad there are people like Ellen who for whatever reason desire to do so!
My bottom line is that all of humans are cousins or brothers or sisters or whatever. We are all one family. Some of our ancestors have done wonderful things, others have been monsters, and we should try not to emulate the monsters but learn from the good that our foremothers and forefathers have done. We only have one planet. I’m an amateur astronomer, and I’ve looked through scopes and everything I see out there is more inhospitable than anybody’s imagined Hell. While we can probably not wipe out all of life on earth even if we tried our very, very worst, we seem to have acquired the power to make it into a place that nobody would *want* to live. Let’s not go that way!
Evidence shows that climate cycles are kind of fragile, and that seeming stasis for thousands or millions of years can change, and has changed, in mere decades or even overnight! (qv Chixclub). And we as a species are doing an excellent job of wiping out the best parts of our planet – generally for huge private profits for a relative few, who offered steady employment for a somewhat larger number of others who actually did the dirty and dangerous work of destruction — often despite objections from folks who foresaw dangers – and to the detriment of the rest of humanity and all life on earth.
A reminder of the things that humans have completely or almost wiped out over the past two centuries:
* a large fraction of all the jungles and forests
* many of the animals we see in zoos (rhinos, tigers, elephants, pandas)
* the innumerable cod, whales, certain oysters, buffalo, passenger pigeons, certain frogs, American chestnuts, elms, and ash; brazil trees, many mangroves and coral reefs, many insects, and more.
* and yet we keeping on burning fossil fuels and chopping down forests for pasture or plantations as if it won’t make any difference.
It won’t help things for one branch of the human family to try to wipe out another branch — the wars devastate things even more. If we dig up and burn and cut down and pollute everything and make this world uninhabitable, there is no other place to go, despite what certain ‘visionaries’ might claim.
We have won some battles against this in the past. My own parents took us kids on a lot of canoe trips here in the MD-DC-VA area back in the 1950s and 1960s, and I have continued that into the 2020a. I recall that in the old days, quite often there would be huge piles of soap suds below certain rapids on certain streams. This nasty effect was from the (a) the particular types of detergents that were legal to use back then and (b) the general lack of effective sewage treatment. Laws were passed forbidding those types of detergents, and lots of sewage treatment plants got built. Result? Problem solved! At least here in the US.
Other countries with corrupt governments, not so much. My friends from India and China say the air pollution there is unbelievably bad, and the water pollution is even worse.
Another problem that has been pretty much solved, world wide**: Freon and the ozone hole. It was a surprise to many that refrigerants and cans of spray paint or deodorant held a chemical that ended up wiping out the ozone layer that protects the earth from most of the dangerous UV rays. But it was shown, scientifically, to be the case; individuals and scientists made their case; and governments around the world stopped manufacturers from using the bad stuff and use other stuff instead, and they did! The ozone hole is now steadily shrinking, and air conditioners of today are both quieter and more efficient than those of yesteryear.
So victories are possible.
My little campaign right now involves light pollution. Along with other members of the DC Chapter of the International Dark-Sky Association, we are trying to get individuals and businesses and institutions to shut off all non-essential lighting for one hour here in DC, from 8:30 to 9:30 pm on March 25 (next month) as part of Earth Hour.
Why bother?
First of all, light pollution is indeed a problem. Only a very small fraction of the people of the world can go out their front door on a clear night and see the same Milky Way that **all** of our ancestors could see if you go back 200 years. Join One Of The World’s Largest Movements for Nature | Earth Hour 2022 It’s not nice to live in a prison yard where the lights are on, real bright, all night. Plus, all those lights have really, really bad impacts on human health and on migrating birds, and all the nocturnal insects. (When was the last time you had to clean off a windshield full of insects, or seen a cloud of them around a street light? In fact, careful surveys of insect populations show that the number and mass of them are plummeting everywhere they have been measured over the a period of decades. No insects, then no food. Our nice little planet was formed in indescribably violent cycles of events (supernovae and such, repeated at somewhat random intervals over the past 13 or 14 billion years) that astronomers are just now figuring out. It is an awful shame that just as we are beginning to understand how the universe has evolved, most humans no longer see any part of it except for our tiny little planet, the Sun, and the Moon. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/01/cut-light-pollution-health/ ) And it’s getting exponentially worse every year. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf4952#:~:text=Analysis%20of%20data%20from%20the,in%20less%20than%208%20years.
Join One Of The World’s Largest Movements for Nature | Earth Hour 2022 Thank you for taking part in Earth Hour 2022! Let’s keep the momentum going ’til Earth Hour 2023 next year – 25 …
We know that this one hour of relative dimming won’t in itself change much. But if we can organize this, then we can do more – for example, figure out how to properly shield all those street lights, porch lights, and so on; to fix their emission spectrum away from the blue end; and to have them turn off when nobody’s around. While still enabling people to get around safely and to be safe at night.
So if you know anybody who is in charge of lighting up a flag pole, a monument, a playing field, or advertising messages, see if you can persuade them to join this little movement, and to turn off all non-essential lighting that is visible from the outside. For just one hour: 8:30 to 9:30 pm, Saturday, March 25, 2023.
See if you can get building managers to turn off all those office lights as well for that hour.
If you are at home, turn off your porch light. If you need the lights on inside your home or work place during that time, then consider pulling the curtains.
Star Trek prepared me to feel a connection with the universe. Instead, I felt terrible grief for our planet. At Cop15, our leaders must negotiate to protect it
Wed 7 Dec 2022 10.00 ESTFollow William Shatner
Click to see figure captionThe age of extinction is supported byAbout this contentLast year, at the age of 90, I had a life-changing experience.
I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures.
I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before.
I was absolutely wrong.
As I explained in my latest book, what I felt was totally different. I knew that many before me had experienced a greater sense of care while contemplating our planet from above, because they were struck by the apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble.
I felt that too.
But the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.
While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death.
I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.
I worry about the world my grandchildren will be living in when they are my ageThis was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside.
I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier.
But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.
And of all places, it is in the city where I was born that a crucial meeting of the United Nations is being held. At Cop15, the UN biodiversity summit in Montreal, taking place from 7 to 19 December, world governments will negotiate a global deal to stop the loss of biodiversity by the end of the decade. We need world leaders to give their diplomats a powerful mandate for these talks: agree on strong targets to change the way we produce food, to drastically cut pollution, and to conserve 50% of our planet’s land and ocean, with the active leadership of Indigenous peoples and local communities, who have historically been pioneers on all these necessary actions.
I worry about the world my grandchildren will be living in when they are my age. My generation is leaving them a planet that might pretty soon be barely livable for many of Earth’s inhabitants. My experience in space filled me with sadness, but also with a strong resolve. I don’t want my grandchildren to simply survive. I want them, as an old friend used to say, to be able to live long and prosper.I will do everything I can so that we can protect our one and only home. Our world leaders have an immense responsibility to do the same in Montreal.
William Shatner is a Canadian actor who played Captain James T Kirk in Star Trek for almost 30 years.
Do you realize how DIFFICULT the problems are on today’s 7th-grade PARCC-style standardized tests?
Take a look at this handful of questions, and feel free to look at others. If you compare these to the typical 7th-grade standardized test items from 30 or 40 years ago, you will have to conclude that these items asked these days are **much** more difficult than the ones from the past.
I strongly doubt that the folks who wrote these items, and those who are putting these items on the tests that nearly every 7th grader in the USA has to take, could have solved these when they were 7th graders?
And how many of my readers can solve these now, as adults?
GFBrandenburg's Blog 