Three times the question of charter schools has been put to a referendum in Washington State, and three times the voters have said no.
Undeterred, the charter-lovers of the technology sector are putting another couple million into a campaign to take it back to the voters again.
Bill Gates put in $1 million, chump change, you might say. More from the Bezos family of amazon.com fame. How embarrassing for Gates that his own home state has no charter schools.
Not surprisingly, Stand on Children is working on behalf of the billionaires’ drive to save poor children from their “dreadful” public schools.
So the drive is on to take the issue back to the voters for a fourth shot.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They must not understand the “three times and you’re out” rule.
The constant rants about millionaires, billionaires, wealthy just sounds like Marxist class envy.
There are plenty of middle class, working people who want alternatives to failed public schools. Let’s not mislead anyone.
It would be one thing if “plenty of middle class, working people who want alternatives,” were behind the charter school drive in Washington State, however that is not the case. I do think it is reasonable to know who is funding initiatives and this charter school initiative is most definitely funded by a few wealthy people. To imply otherwise would be to mislead.
Maybe you can expand on that? Who are these wealthy people in Washington State and what is driving their efforts?
In NH it’s your everyday moms who are driving the Charters. They can’t afford private schools so they are finding ways to get their kids out of the failing public schools.
Here is one: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Polaris-Charter-School/189841287702717
I was just asked by another parent to sit on an advisory panel for a Charter they are wanting to open. It would be based on the Core Knowledge k-8 and Hillsdale which focuses on CIVICS Ed.
These parents are fed up with the social engineering/anti-knowlege public schools.
In no way do I fault teachers for what is happening in our schools, but I can’t sit by and watch these kids suffer based on the transformation in our state’s public school system.
Our schools are already dominated by Marc Tucker’s vision. It’s just a matter of time before the rest of the country is subjected to this garbage.
Some schools are not fully immersed, but most of them are and parents are starting to see this is not going to work for their kids.
It’s the parents who are sacrificing to pay tuition or homeschool. The number of students in home-schooling is on the rise. The number attending public schools in NH are on a decline.
It’s unfortunate that the teachers are caught in the crossfire, but the ones who are truly getting the shaft are the kids.
Hey “Mom”; how often will you get on here and apologize for the people who are trying, desperately, to hand over our public schools to private businesses—both “for profit” and “non profit”?
Perhaps you can tell us why not one single wealthy backer of Privatized Schools is sending their own child to a public school?
Not one.
Can you tell us why they are so obsessed with controlling our schools when none of them send their own children there?
None of them. Why is that?
And please don’t tell us some nonsense about the public schools being “bad” where these billionaires live; the neighborhood that Bill and Melinda Gates resides in has the very best schools in the state. Typical for most billionaire neighborhoods anywhere in the country.
Question: “Who are these wealthy people in Washington State and what is driving their efforts?”
Answer #1: Perhaps you’ve heard of Bill and Melinda Gates; Paul Allen; Jeff Bezos; Nick Hanauer and many more. They’re about 85% of the funding for this, along with the Walton (Walmart) foundation and Broad.
Answer #2: Ideology, Arrogance and Extreme Greed. Any other clueless questions?
The money is flowing from out of state as well. David Brain (investor) even talked about charters as “investments” for “portfolios”. Anyone can find that. Was on King 5 News even.
Personally, i have been in a FB war with one investor, until i figured out who he was. Then our mutual “friend” completely shut the thing down. This is no joke. This is money! The investors KNOW that the state will be paying them to make money. And the teachers will be very much untrained. They will start with Americore teachers who have had three weeks of training.
Kate,
One look at your Facebook page tells us most of what we need to know. You’re obviously entitled to join extremist right-wing, anti-public education groups. You’re also entitled to crow about your membership in the Tea Party and your love of Ron Paul.
But you should come clean and stop pretending that you care about public schools, and the community of students, parents and teachers that comprise them.
Most businesses fail. Did you know that? Why would you advocate that as a model for anything—particularly education?
https://www.facebook.com/kateisrosie
This is you. Right?
Wow. They are coming out of the woodwork. She may be an investor as well. With the money that is being spent. I had a similar debate with Ben Silvka…until I figured out who he was. Microsoft investor. I asked him if his child would ever go to a public school. He denied an answer.
NCLB came, in four years. I was gone. This new pogrom of national Common Core, revision after revision of State Standards to align, I guess, with the vision thing of corporate power? We saw it coming several years ago and, just like the fleecing of American families by Big Banking, the plutocrats bring their latest version up close and personal: starving public education until it relinquishes so that corporations and misguided groups of profiteering educational change agents like Stand for Children, Rhee, TFA, ad nauseum, can take the helm as unwitting, unknowing government agencies (Duncan) pave the way for this total corporate domination vision thing. It’s the same screed of Goldman Sachs and similar financial institutions: proprietary targeting using other peoples’ money.
This confluence of government and private capital, conflated with limitless funding from the billionaires who feel they have an insider advantage on how schools should operate, how learning happens, are hastening to end public education. We are now seeing court rulings being overturned in favor of slumlord charters. All the lies continue. There is little movement to push against all this. Anyone who would deny this onslaught of vulture capitalism, who are under the influence of their own Stockholm Syndrome, who still feel collaboration with these assailant forces seems the best policy, will hopefully come to find such considerations as delusional. As delusional as the freedom people feel they have as they are crammed into Ghettos and surrounded by barbed wire.
Ravitch is right: they are still assembling the plane shortly after takeoff. And along the way, the crew, the corporate profiteers, buying up the real estate of public education; the whole complex of the ancillary crew of testing and other support services corporations are adding nuts and bolts with abandon. Just keep it in the air long enough and we will be landing on our own airstrip, made of the skeletons of public schools. Schools that have produced most all of our greatest talents.
Standards. During all my years of teaching, I believed (and still believe) that standards were, and are still, only guidelines. The implementation of these guidelines were always done through site discussion and determinations on how the curricula might best be delivered. Benchmarks were designed, but not ever written in concrete. They were fluid, moving with the changes in student population, and later, designed to incorporate variations for student mastery, outcomes, etc. That is, our site, with our district support, allowed us to augment or modify, or leave untouched, all the new programs as they came and went.
Until NCLB appeared. Whether one feels this Act was well intentioned or not, it was bought, sometimes forced upon states, by the will of lobbied
If your local community, school districts, staff, parents, are aware of what’s closing in on them, then great. If not, then its time to spread the word. And now is the time to take action. I see large unions taking funding from the corporate hegemony. These unions become just as culpable for the destruction of public education if they choose to collaborate with the corporate educational reformers.
The sign post aren’t just ahead. We haven’t entered some kind of Twilight Zone. But these sign posts, these great voices for public education, have been the reflectors for our headlights, our early warnings as to what lies ahead. Looking out the back window, I see our vehicle’s tail lights as we pass those sign posts. Our way forward, our fight for public education, to slip past that Twilight Zone, is to push back–collectively. Our path is clear.
An average of $6 per signature was paid to get the measure on the ballot in WA. Not sure I’d call that democracy in action (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018662045_apwacharterschoolsinitiative1stldwritethru.html)
The number submitted was 350,000. You do the math. That’s 2.1 million just to get it on the ballot. Even more will go during the actual election cycle, and the backers have money to spare for the cause (see article for funders [I count only 6 major donors] and the amounts they gave) This is one more step to privitizing the very large public education sector.
The Initiative in WA is a BADLY written one. There’s so much wrong with this initiative, it’s hard to know where to start (read this: http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2012/05/nightmare-charter-school-scenarios.html ) to learn about issues surrounding loss of real estate, conversion schools, SPED students, and loss of parent input. And here to learn about charter success rates (17% of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37% of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46% of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference. (Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) Stanford University; http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/National_Release.pdf)
Washington citizens should insist on properly funded education system, as per the recent WA Supreme Court decision McCleary. After a few years of actually meeting the “paramount duty” of fully funding education, if progress has not been made, THEN open the charter discussion. Education in Washington has been so underfunded for a very long time. Let’s give that a chance to work first.
If any of you No on 1240 folks want to help, this is the time! http://www.peopleforourpublicschools.org We are against a shower of money. Need volunteers and donations like NOW. Especially in Seattle.