A parent in Austin sent the following account of events there, along with a link to the newspaper story.
Dear Diane,
I thought you might be interested in the vote of Austin ISD last night – not to renew the IDEA contract. It was standing room only – many of the students you met at Eastside Memorial made incredibly impassioned pleas for the Board to “give our school back to the community”. Here’s a short article someone sent to me late last night. The info is correct.
Here’s the link to the Statesman story today: http://www.statesman.com/news/news/residents-pack-austin-school-board-meeting-for-ide/nTYtz/
Note of interest: the new Board members were very heroic in my estimation. They include a civil rights attorney (who has a 4 month old baby and a child in elementary school), a Catholic priest, and a 27-year veteran retired teacher. Interesting group.
Patti
New Austin ISD Board Turns Back Charter School Wave
The Austin ISD school board tonight sounded a clarion call that public school districts need not be overrun by the by attempts from large-scale funders to dictate public education policy in the United States, voting not to renew the district’s contract with IDEA charter schools.
IDEA had opened its first school in Austin this past August, in partnership with the school district, by emptying out an elementary school that had been passing state assessments–a move that was opposed by a majority of the parents in the neighborhood the school was intended to serve. Parents responded by enrolling their children in other public schools – only 28% of enrollment was from the target area.
The Austin American Statesman commented on the process used to rush the IDEA proposal to the Board for a vote, “In its short history, the charter school has generated much controversy, triggered by trustees’ rush to make a deal – even voting while they amended the IDEA contract from the dais. Let by Superintendent Maria Carstarphen, six trustees pushed through the IDEA deal a year ago over the protests of many East Austin parents, teachers, students, and community leaders, including two former mayors who also were former trustees.”
Just last week, IDEA schools were awarded $29 million in Race to the Top funds, but that didn’t have nearly the impact on board members as the fact that the Austin IDEA school opened with a curriculum that did not include art and music, which are offered in every other Austin ISD School, as well as an empty library after IDEA chose not to have books for its K-6 school (in its first year with just grades K-2 and 6 because those grades are not subject to state accountability ratings). New Board members asked why students in this low income area shouldn’t have the same opportunities as students in every other Austin school. Other Board member were very concerned that IDEA graduates from schools it operates in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas received the worst grades of any high school in the county during their first year at Texas public colleges and universities, according to the latest data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
The Austin school board made the decision in the culminating meeting of the first month in office for four new members elected in November. In their campaigns, three of the four new members had focused on the fact that the superintendent did not achieve community buy-in for the IDEA charter and other changes that were generated at the top–most in compliance with school management models sponsored by the Gates, Broad, and Arne Duncan’s US Department of Education. While IDEA CEO Tom Torkelson said that “I would hate to see the board go down as the most knee-jerk reactionary board in the nation”, board members talked about the need to look to the community and award-winning Austin educators to make sure its schools work, citing a number of examples of high performing AISD schools and programs in Austin schools with similar populations.
Ironically, the Austin Board approved creation of a new in-district charter school on the same night it voted not to renew the IDEA contract. A group organized by Austin InterFaith and Education Austin spent over two years working with parents, students, and teachers to transform an Austin school into an in-district charter that will benefit from flexible district and state requirements. Over 80% of parents and teachers signed on, and it was approved by the Board with no dissension from the community.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whoa! That’s huge. Great letter. So encouraged by this after becoming so discouraged the past few years.
Superintendent Maria Carstarphen- another DCPS veteran admin unleashed upon the world. She’s done very well. She used to work for National Geographic, wrote a book, went into education, got on an administartive fast track with Janney in DCPS and before you knew it she was in Minnesota as a Super and then in Texas. Wow!
A school with no library? How horrific!
@Mark: Its worth noting that Meria Carstarphen was a proponent of the first IDEA contract. We’d rather she move on elsewhere.
Mark–only 12% of charter schools in Texas have a full time librarian.
No library! I guess charters really don’t value education, do they. Sounds like people are getting sick of the charters already.
Wow. I love this story!! Oh by the way, my charter doesn’t have a librarian or any fine arts teachers. But, you know, they are just a waste of money. It is better for the CEO to make a profit! Can you believe the Obama admin gave these people money? What a corrupt system we have. Will it ever end?
In general charter schools are a scam. Just look at the article describing no books and driving out the local residents. This is typical of Gates, Broad and Duncan. After all Duncan comes from Chicago and charter schools are a failure there and nationally according to the Stanford Study which showed that only 17% did better than regular public schools. Charter schools are revenue generators for wealthy individuals and investors as the Hedge Funds say “We learned there is a lot of money in education and in charter schools we can double our money in 7 years instead of 12 years by using government money.”
By the way Obama has been a corporatizer and privatizer in Chicago since at least 1995. So is it any wonder that he and Duncan are behind the destruction of public education as they are in the pockets of the wealthy.
People really need to know the background of this situation to understand the true insanity of what went on here. Here’s a summary of an article someone sent to me last June: (the full article follows in the next post)
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In spite of months of overwhelming community opposition—and with no prior transparency to, or input from this community—Austin’s pro-charter school board votes to “re-purpose” two public school campus—Allan Elementary School & Eastside Memorial High School—as the new location for an IDEA Corporation charter school.
Technically IDEA and the pro-charter Austin School Board must get students’ parents from Allan and Eastside to “choose” this school. However, their version of “choice”, of course, is that your students are, by default, enrolled in the IDEA charter whether you like it or not, and you must fill out complicated forms to “opt out” if you want your child to remain in, and transfer to, a nearby public school.
Well, in spite of this outrageous roadblock, almost all the parents do opt out. This occurs even after…
1) the district bans any “opt out” grassroots parent meetings (“Transfer Fairs”) from occurring on school grounds;
2) the District has its employees—Parents Support Personnel, school administrators, etc.,—aggressively proselytize and pressure parents to have their children attend the IDEA charter;
3) IDEA officials crashed PTA meetings, usurped the agenda, and pushed the attending parents to attend IDEA;
4) IDEA held recruiting meetings at eastside churches and community centers. They also embarked upon aggressive telephone and walking campaigns in an effort to convince families not to transfer out of the new charter school; and
5) Parents in the Allan attendance zone also received multiple sales calls from IDEA, which include outright, bald-faced lies. For example, they are told that “Allan as IDEA would remain the same next year with all the same teachers.”
FALSE. AISD teachers at Allan will have to apply, interview and get hired by IDEA in order to teach at the charter school next year, which makes heavy use of Teach for America instructors.
THE TRUTH: not a single AISD teacher at Allan have even applied to teach at the IDEA charter school, nor are any likely to.
With hardly any students’ parents “opting in”—this in spite of their sleazy recruitment tactics—IDEA now had to struggle reach enrollment thresholds, and had to do so:
No. 1) by a certain deadline (February 14);
No. 2) without recruiting outside the schools attendance zone—as doing so would
be illegal under the “no compete” clause in the ed code.
Well, IDEA couldn’t do No. 1, so the District kept extending the deadline—from February 14… to March 9… to March 31… and finally to May 30.
As of now (early June 2012), there’s a measly 67 students enrolled at IDEA—those whose parents did not go through the required rigamarole to “opt” out.
As for No. 2, they began violating that by recruiting in the neighborhoods/school attendance zones that are “far outside” that of the school they are taking over. This, in turn, has enraged THOSE parents as, for example, students were pulled out during instruction time, and forced to watch videos and listen to speeches pushing them to attend IDEA, These forced pitch meeting were arranged by the school district, and were interrupting valuable instruction time during the crucial final prep week before the state tests.
Furthermore, the nearby public schools that the opting out parents’ kids will ostensibly be attending next year are struggling to take on hundreds of new students. Indeed, the administrations of those schools still do not even know how many hundreds of students will be added to their student bodies, let alone the names of these students. These schools soon must finalize their budgets for next year. Yet, they do not have updated enrollment information from AISD with specific numbers of students that will attend their schools next year and in which grade levels.
Here’s the final paragraph from the article opposing IDEA:
“Clearly IDEA has not met the minimum enrollment requirements of its contract and started to recruit far outside the Allan (its original) attendance zone. Questionably IDEA has begun to directly compete with other AISD schools for student enrollment in spite of the “no-compete” clause in its contract with AISD. Unacceptably IDEA has begun to disrupt the classroom instruction of current AISD students in pursuit of its own business interests. Undeniably the Austin community still does not want IDEA as an in-district charter. Regrettably the list of transgressions outruns this page and the violation of public trust continues to amass in Austin. ”
In the next post will be the full article.
Here’s the full article (which the post above summarizes):
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In-District against the Will of Parents and the Community
Apr 2, 2012 No Comments ›› Lorie Barzano
By Lorie Barzano
Co-Chair of CoalitionSAUS (Strengthen Austin Urban Schools)
A parent led group representing inner-city public schools working to ensure accessible, quality Public Education for all children and healthy, thriving Public Schools in Austin’s urban core
In a special meeting on December 19, 2011, over the loud, repeated protests of thousands of parents and community members and under heavy police presence, the Austin ISD Board of Trustees approved a contract with IDEA Charter School by a 6 to 3 vote. The contract empowers IDEA, a south Texas, nonprofit charter school corporation, to co-locate on the Allan Elementary campus first, and later at Eastside Memorial High School, establishing the first in-district charter(s) in Austin.
Amid a litany of complaints and continued objections, AISD took the unprecedented step of signing the contract with IDEA before ever (and still not) publicly posting a line-item budget for the agreement. IDEA will co-locate charter schools on public school campuses located on the east side of Austin in low-income, minority neighborhoods, beginning in the 2012-2013 school year.
Parents complained about the district’s lack of transparency in developing the IDEA contract behind closed doors before even announcing it to the public as an option. Community groups objected to the district’s development of a “charter plan” without the involvement and participation of the stakeholders, namely the parents, neighbors and communities directly affected by the plan. Taxpayers citywide questioned the rush to make a pervasive and precedent-setting decision in such an abbreviated (5-week) timeframe for discussion and review.
Ten months previously, in February 2011, CoalitionSAUS sent an open letter to the AISD Administration and Board of Trustees which “…requested the District utilize an authentic, transparent, two-way communication, community-based process, with a reasonable timeframe, for establishing campus needs, gathering information, reviewing available data, considering possibilities, generating options and making decisions about facility use changes affecting a school community, such as closing a school or re-purposing a campus.” We have repeated this request at meetings with multiple AISD administrators, individual Trustees and at “Citizen Communications” at every AISD Board meeting since.
Since late May 2011, parents and teachers at Allan Elementary had heard rumors about vast changes to come to their campus. In early October 2011, CoalitionSAUS met with AISD’s Superintendent and asked her about the rumors of sweeping changes at Allan for the next school year. She categorically denied any “unannounced plan” for sweeping changes. Two weeks later, she publicly announced an “Administrative Recommendation” for the district to sign a contract with IDEA charter school to co-locate on the Allan Elementary and Eastside Memorial High School campuses.
The IDEA contract first appeared on the agenda for the AISD Board meeting at the end of October. Subsequently the Board postponed their decision until the special meeting on December 19, 2011, when they approved it.
By January 2012, with that contentious vote over and winter break as a cooling off period, you would think the worse of events had passed. They had not. They had just begun.
In mid-January, AISD sent home a parent announcement that their children had until February 24, to “opt-out” of attending the IDEA charter school. Kindergarten, first- and second-grade students assigned to attend Allan Elementary in the fall would automatically be assigned to the new charter school. Students (on the eastside vertical track) at Allan, Allison, Brooke, Govalle, Metz, Ortega and Zavala elementary schools who would be in sixth grade in the fall would also automatically be assigned to IDEA. Everyone complained that the process worked backwards, that parents should more justly have to “opt-in” for their children to attend the charter school.
AISD Board President Mark Williams even commented, “I do think this “opt-out” provision has created confusion because of the way all other schools work. It seems a little wrong that we’re going to force you to go to IDEA.”
To “opt out” of IDEA, parents would have to complete official district forms and mail them or submit them in person to district headquarters or campus offices. The completed forms would act as a parent’s official request for their child’s transfer to an alternate AISD campus, if that alternate campus appeared on the district list of schools accepting transfers
During February 2012, parent groups set-up “Transfer Fairs” to assist other parents, many non-English speakers, in navigating district paperwork and the bureaucratic transfer process. Parents received notification from district that they could not hold “Transfer Fairs” in AISD buildings or during campus PTA meetings. Insult to injury in February, IDEA representatives usurped the agendas at PTA meetings at Allan and Ortega elementary schools to solicit parents not to transfer their children. AISD also instructed Parent Support Specialists to contact all families about attending IDEA. School administrators instructed teachers to encourage families not to transfer their children to other AISD schools. PRIDE, an eastside parent group, consequently organized a community boycott of the IDEA charter school.
During February, IDEA held recruiting meetings at eastside churches and community centers. They also embarked upon aggressive telephone and walking campaigns in an effort to convince families not to transfer out of the new charter school. However, most parents still felt they could not get their most basic questions answered about IDEA or the charter school.
Will students “opting-out” of the IDEA charter have any options for school bus transportation to alternate schools? How many families/students have committed to attending the IDEA charter school? How many have opted out? When Parent Support Specialists speak to affected parents, do they explain the differences between IDEA at Allan and other AISD schools, specifically the lack of special areas and late-exit bilingual instruction? Do they encourage parents to attend IDEA at Allan instead of other AISD schools like Govalle, Ortega, and Martin? Why are students assigned to IDEA at Allan by default? Why not ask parents who wish to enroll their children in IDEA to opt-in instead of requiring all other parents to opt-out? Why can’t AISD make any or all of the proposed curriculum and operational changes at the Allan and Eastside Memorial campuses without bringing in an outside contractor?
Many parents complained about repeated contacts by IDEA. One parent with multiple children attending another AISD campus said she wanted to file a complaint because she had received four calls from IDEA, repeatedly soliciting her to send her 5th grader to the charter school. Parents in the Allan attendance zone also received multiple calls from IDEA, misinforming them that “Allan as IDEA would remain the same next year with all the same teachers.” AISD teachers at Allan will have to apply, interview and get hired by IDEA in order to teach at the charter school next year, which makes heavy use of Teach for America instructors. So far, no AISD teachers at Allan have applied to teach at the IDEA charter school.
As the February 24 “opt-out” deadline approached, IDEA recruitment efforts intensified as AISD’s contract with IDEA established minimum enrollment requirements for the charter school’s co-location at Allan Elementary. According to the contract approved in December, 336 students must enroll in the early grades and 112 students in the sixth grade. The contract states that if the minimum enrollment requirements have not been met, the district and IDEA have agreed “to determine whether the parties can proceed under this Agreement and to advise the AISD Board of Trustees on or before June 1st of any school year in question.”
On the evening of February 27, 2012, AISD’s Superintendent announced an (the first) extension of the IDEA “opt-out” deadline until Friday, March 9, 2012. As of February 24, the original “opt-out” deadline, half of the 350 families assigned to the new IDEA charter school at Allan Elementary had opted-out. This would leave the Allan Elementary campus severely under-enrolled, an indicator the district has used in the past for considering the closure of a school.
With the extended (March 9) enrollment deadline in place, district announced that IDEA would have to recruit students from elsewhere, outside the Allan attendance zone, to meet its contract obligations. This engendered another complaint among parents and the community as the district’s contract with IDEA specifically includes a “no-compete” clause, which forbids IDEA from competing with other AISD schools for student enrollment.
Up until Monday, March 5, 2012, the school district had not shared enrollment numbers-to-date for the IDEA charter school. At that time, the district announced it “expected” 102 students in IDEA’s sixth grade at Allan and another 81 students in the lower grades.
Per the district contract approved in December, 112 sixth grade students and 336 students in the lower grades must enroll in IDEA.
The new March 9 deadline came and went as AISD closed for spring break the week of March 10 through March 18, 2012. After returning from spring break, AISD announced it would continue to accept student registrations for the IDEA charter school through the end of March 2012.
At that point, parents heard from school officials that only 67 students had actually enrolled for IDEA K-2nd grade at Allan. Trustees heard from parents about their displeasure with the never-ending enrollment deadline. Officials at IDEA charter school began to broaden their recruiting efforts to include TV and radio spots and schedule community walks. They also have posted multiple billboards in eastside communities and continued to solicit AISD families with phone calls and hand-outs. Parents
Meanwhile, Ortega and Govalle elementary schools, directly affected by students who opt-out of IDEA, have to finalize their budgets for next year. Yet, they do not have updated enrollment information from AISD with specific numbers of students that will attend their schools next year and in which grade levels. Parents from Allan Elementary whose children have opted-out of IDEA still do not know which campus they will attend next year. Parents continue to complain that IDEA has up-to-date information, but they do not. The community questions why none of the Trustees who voted (and Superintendent who recommended) to approve the co-location of IDEA at Allan have visited the campus since they
re-purposed it as a charter school.
Finally as the next (March 30) extended IDEA enrollment deadline approached, an IDEA recruiter showed up at an elementary school in northeast Austin, clearly outside the Allan attendance zone. The northeast school compelled its students to watch the IDEA recruiter’s presentation, imploring them to opt-out of their neighborhood middle school to attend the IDEA charter at Allan in east Austin.
Outraged, Judith Hutchinson, a resident of the northeast neighborhood, wrote to the Editor of the local newspaper, “The presentation made them [students] miss 35 minutes of valuable core instructional time the week before the high-stakes STAAR tests.” Additionally, she continued, “The recruiter made questionable promises to these young students, then urged them to have their parents enroll them in IDEA.”
Now, as of April 1, 2012, the IDEA link through the AISD website announces that the IDEA charter school at Allan Elementary will accept student enrollment forms through May 30, 2012.
Clearly IDEA has not met the minimum enrollment requirements of its contract and started to recruit far outside the Allan (its original) attendance zone. Questionably IDEA has begun to directly compete with other AISD schools for student enrollment in spite of the “no-compete” clause in its contract with AISD. Unacceptably IDEA has begun to disrupt the classroom instruction of current AISD students in pursuit of its own business interests. Undeniably the Austin community still does not want IDEA as an in-district charter. Regrettably the list of transgressions outruns this page and the violation of public trust continues to amass in Austin.
Interested outside observer here … IDEA Allan has a library, it is just an unconventional one that tests for reading comprehension called an Accelerated Reading Zone. Reading is very much emphasized in IDEA schools. Please do your research. The AISD board has made an awful short-sighted decision, but the good thing is IDEA is committed to its promise to its 544 students to see them through graduating college and will open another school in Austin.
So evidently IDEA was unacceptable for Austin ISD. What credentials does the newly approved in-district charter have? Is everyone reading this so blind to the obvious?
Clearly this isn’t about in-district charters if 80% of teachers and parents supported the new charter agreement approved by the board. But that was their argument right? So what is it then?
This superintendent is not and has been productive. Where did the $29 million that was allocated for the initial charter schools go? Grants don’t just disappear… People are always going to try and make money off our childrens well-being. The superintendent isn’t any different, as well as these so called trustees. Follow the money trail and you probably won’t like what you find. Smoke and mirrors.
Initially, IDEA Charter schools was never the intent. The intent was to recieve the $29 million dollar federal grant money. That is why IDEA was pushed through in the first place. NOW the IDEA Charter schools didn’t work? Interesting… $29 million is still sitting there waiting to be spent. Soooo, this last second push for an “In District-Charter School” voted is implemented. Again, FIND THE MONEY TRAIL. Somenone is making money. Superintendent and/or trustees. SMOKE AND MIRRORS…