University Preparatory Academy in Pinellas County claimed it would outperform all the local public schools.
But 69 students have left the school in the early weeks of school, complaining of bullying and other problems.
They are returning to their local public schools.
Children are leaving University Preparatory Academy, the charter school that promised to do better than their struggling neighborhood schools.
They are leaving in droves.
Since the school year began, 69 children have withdrawn from University Prep. They are returning to Maximo Elementary, Woodlawn Elementary, Bay Point Middle and other under-performing traditional public schools.
Earlier this month, 20 children left in one week. Eight have left in the past three school days.
Four teachers have quit, along with the school’s curriculum director.
A Pinellas County Schools administrator interviewed parents last month, when 23 children had left, to determine whether University Prep was telling families to leave. But parents said they were pulling their children voluntarily. They were concerned about bullying, missing textbooks and other issues.
University Prep has received initial approval to open a school in Tampa next fall, and has explored campuses in Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Cheri Shannon, the school’s founder and principal, says the St. Petersburg school with just under 500 students is experiencing “growing pains” typical of a charter’s first few months.
Egged on by Jeb Bush and his powerful political machine, Florida has been eager to hand out charters and slow to enforce any quality control.
The end game is to marginalize traditional public schools and eventually to turn over the lion’s share of public education to for-profit charter operators and chain schools.
That way, education will be just another consumer good, not a civic obligation.
And the motto of education will be: caveat emptor.
Take your chances with fly-by-night operators, schools run by ex-cons, schools run by fast-buck entrepreneurs, schools run out of church basements.
That’s the vision.
Florida wants to be first in making it happen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe Jeb can create the National Charter First Weeks of School Growing Pains Alleviation Alliance and they can have meetings.
Reckless adults and kids. Not a good mix.
The reason we insulate kids from market forces is because they’re not adults. Is there any bigger lie than the ed reformers claim that they focus on kids and don’t take the needs of adults into account? They’ve super-imposed an adult market-based system on 2nd graders, with absolutely no regard for the kids who are “churned” like this.
Do the public schools these kids are returning to get some kind of adjustment on their “threaten to close and replace with charter” score? They should. They’re suffering the direct negative results of a charter that wasn’t vetted and wasn’t planned. We may need a new data point! A score deviation based on charters dumping kids back into public schools mid-year. Public schools should demand it.
Chiara: excellent points.
The edufrauds should be forced to adhere to truth in advertising laws: for them, it’s AdultsFirst, not StudentsFirst.
Of course, the adults promoting and implementing this ‘creative disruption’ don’t subject their own children to the same regimen of mandated failure.
😦
We had such a nice event here last night, a “Quiz Bowl” competition between a rural public schools. It’s been going on long enough that my 25 year old son participated and now my 11 year old son is in it.
I’m in the “big” district because I live and work in the county seat, but we’re surrounded by smaller public school districts, so the smaller districts pride themselves on “scrappiness” (beating us) because they don’t have as large a pool of students from which to choose their team. It turns into a real community event because a lot of parents and grandparents attended these same schools, and it’s fun. I think it’s great for kids to see that they can compete and it isn’t grim and terrifying and zero-sum.
So what do you lose when you fragment a system like mine, like they’ve done all over the country? I think we’ll lose a lot, and none of it has anything to do with test scores. I think we’ll regret it.
It’s reckless to bust something up without considering the fall-out.
They can’t remove or partition “schools” from “communities” because that isn’t how children live. They live and move within both “systems”. What does busting up their schools do to their community?
If fragmentation of small districts is a problem, perhaps private schools should be eliminated, catchment lines should reinforce community identities (and the SES segregation that dominates the construction of those communities in most cities and towns) and multiple public high schools in a town should be eliminated. Those are the things that fragment my town.
I am not sure what you mean when you say we “insulate kids from market forces.” If you mean that families and their students should not be able to chose among a variety of schools for their own good, I am not sure how you could support that position. Perhaps I am not understanding your post correctly.
You really need to stop this lie you endlessly repeat about choosing “among a variety of schools for their own good” because it is not true and never will be true. There is no variety of schools in the South Bronx and there never will be. There is no variety of schools in Harlem or the not-yet up and coming parts of Brooklyn or Newark or Chicago and there never will be.
We all know that everything you write revolves around you and your children’s experiences alone but yes, many, many people oppose the Friedmannian lie about choice and all the wonders it supposedly will bring and support that position without hesitation. You can call the rape and pillage of public education choice until you are blue in the face but it doesn’t make it so.
The choice is simply between who offers the biggest political contribution and who has the highest wealthy connections. It has nothing to do with what’s best for families, students, and certainly not children of color. STOP LYING.
I am surprised that students in New York have no options for the education of their children. I live in what the folks on the coasts call a “fly over” state (Dr. Ravitch flew over it on her book tour for example), yet people of means in my town can enroll their children in a Montessori school, a Waldorf school, a progressive school, a catholic school, or a public school.
Granted those in rural areas have fewer options. I have students who graduated in high school classes of fewer than forty students and live in counties that have no stop lights. No doubt they have many opportunities not available to those that live in the city of New York, but I suspect that students in New York have some opportunities not available to students who live in a county seat with fewer than five hundred citizens.
I would argue that many people don’t have the means to send their children to private schools if they are truly saving for retirement. I hope all the people who are going for broke over their child’s K-12 education are instilling the lesson in their offspring that children should support elderly parents.
You know what I’m waiting for? The inevitable situation where public schools have been closed and defunded to the point where parents cannot FIND a seat in a public school to return to.
For all we know that’s already happened.
Is anyone in ed reform tracking “churn” and where these kids end up? I read that Chicago reformers lost a bunch of kids in the last round of “creative destruction”. Did anyone ever find out where those kids are?
It’s already here in Indianapolis. My daughter is one of those kids for her second year. Her small, local, public school teacher organized charter school was closed suddenly last year by the Mayor’s Charter School Office (partly because nearly 30 students had opted out of the state standardized tests, with their scores counted as zeros and added to the fail rate, and partly because the student centered, progressive, real not for profit nature of the school didn’t fit with the Mayor’s vision of “quality” charters). It was 8 months too late to apply to magnets. There was no public school for her to attend. She became what I now know as an over the counter kid.
The neighborhood public school (very close by) has been converted to an inquiry magnet with long waiting lists and a 20 minute recess, for some grades occurring at the end of the day. The teachers and principal are wonderful, but the pressure is on to keep the high test scores that help the urban district survive in its difficult relationship with the reform oriented state and city government. The open entry neighborhood school (further away, since the district has converted most of the schools to limited entry magnets) is heavily test focused, because it is predominantly low income and under strong pressure to raise test scores to keep the school.
My daughter has Adhd and needs physical activity to learn. She struggled to learn to read, with individual attention, and is just now starting to hit her stride. Test prep and pressure will put her further behind. We found a small, private Montessori, but hadn’t planned for the extra budget pressure of tuition.
So, last year we waited, resorted to homeschooling, let her swim and read, and waited some more. We entered the magnet lottery again last December for this fall, and found the funds to enroll her in the private montessori last spring. She thrived, with strong structure and lots of freedom. Her reading blossomed, with individual teaching. She made new friends, played for hours in the backyard, did art multiple times a week, and went on field trips monthly or more. She took one standardized test in the spring, for a few hours, with no pressure from anyone, and the scores were shared only with the teachers and her parents. We discussed it briefly and went on. In short, she did what most public school teachers would want her to do, but isn’t allowed in today’s focus on tests.
She is still waiting. She returned to the montessori again this fall. As middle class parents, we can afford the tuition, though we would far rather be in a public school. As middle class parents, we can navigate the system, though we would far rather not have to spend our time searching for a school. As middle class parents, we can help her maintain some friendships with the friends she left behind. But it’s hard. And most parents in this city cannot do what we have done. This is not the future other cities should have for their children.
You can be sure that CPS didn’t find them–they didn’t bother to, nor do they care. (Oh, wait–they’ll tell us all the kids went to charter schools!)
However, Mike Klonsky found them. Read Mike Klonsky’s blog, “Small Schools.” (Sorry–can’t get a link–just Google him! It was a post about 4 days ago.)
The kids return to the REAL public schools, what about the tuition? Does the charter school keep the tuition or does it return with the child back to the district school? And the Rheeformers are forever saying that charter schools do not drain funds or resources from the actual public schools. Baloney.
It depends on the state. In Utah, if a student is at a charter school on October 1, the charter school receives ALL of the money for that student for that year. If a kid leaves a charter school after October 1 (and it happens all the time), the public school in which the kids lives MUST take the student back, but gets NONE of his/her money. And no charter school will accept kids after October 1, since they won’t get any money.
In North Carolina I believe we still have the ten day rule. Funding is based on however many students are enrolled at a school on the tenth day. If sixty students show up the next day and enroll, their money stays where they were enrolled on the tenth day. I am not sure if the new charter voucher system is part of that but I know that when we had a local charter several years ago that was the case. Lots of charter students were expelled and returned to public school but the funding for their education very conveniently stayed at the charter. It was quite a racket.
Many state budgets are constructed so that charters get to keep the taxpayer monies allotted for individual students for the entire school year regardless of whether the student drops or is pushed out. Charters such as Kipp customarily push out pupils at the beginning of the year with a view to keeping the surplus tuition funds in this way. They are not required to take new pupils throughout the year the way public schools are. It is really a kind of organized thievery.
When 14% of your enrollment picks up and leaves, I think it’s worth thinking about it as something other than “growing pains.” Just sayin’.
There are a lot of double standards in the reform movement, I have noticed.
For example, the new evaluation system (which is part of RttT and will soon be used to determine who stays who goes who gets paid etc) has numerous glitches and plenty of excuses are offered up for that. Whereas, no excuses is the standard everyone else is held to.
I also don’t like the language, while I’m at it, of “students will need _______ for the future because the new world order demands it.” Maybe ifit was genuine I would believe it, but I have smelled a rat since the first time I heard that rationale for the changes in education as of late.
Subtext. We singers understand subtext. What would this song be telling us if there were no words? Take away words and you just have actions. Look at Michele Rhee’s actions. Look at Jeb’s (who organizes groups and has meetings). Their actions say more than their words. I try to just take away words sometimes and watch people that way. Forget what is being said. What is being done?
Eliza Doolittle:
Sing me no song! Read me no rhyme!
Don’t waste my time, Show me!
Don’t talk of June, Don’t talk of fall!
Don’t talk at all! Show me!
Do stories like this change anyone’s opinion about giving parents the opportunity to choose what school to send their children to? I feel like there is a lot of common ground here – school choice is one of the pillars of education reform, and Dr. Ravitch seems to be supporting the right of parents to choose to pull their students out of one school and put them into another. Imagine if parents didn’t have the option of pulling their kids out of University Prep when they realized it wasn’t a good school for them – how unfortunate that would be for them. Don’t all parents deserve to have these kinds of choices? Some more on this line of thinking: http://svartanov.teachforus.org/choice-charter-schools-and-closing-the-achievement-gap/
Maybe they shouldn’t have had the choice to put them *in* University Prep to begin with.
Serge, choice is not a conversation about public schools. “Parent choice” is a conversation about options in education paid for by tax payers–the two subjects have been mixed and now they need to be separated out again. The point here is that it is possible (likely) that a charter cannot do what a public school can do, and so since parents want to send the children back to public school, perhaps the conversation should be about how to make those public schools better. Public schools are pillars of community and democracy.
Your argument is like saying that throwing up is enjoying good food twice.
WTF? Parents already have the opportunity to choose whatever school they want to send their children to. A local public school or a private school. Billionaire advocates of private schooling ought to give their money to private schools so they can provide scholarships to all children who wish to attend. (I would have like to send my children to Choate, but alas, I didn’t have that choice.)
It’s interesting how they’ve moved so seamlessly from “great schools!” to “choice!” as a rationale for this, isn’t it?
Now the quality of the choice doesn’t matter. “Choice” is its own goal.
They can never fail if the goal is “choice” because more “choices” means…success!
They’ve moved the goalpost. We’re no longer seeking “excellence” in all these public, privatized and publicly-funded private schools systems they’re setting up, we’re seeking “choices”.
Thank you Chiara! Exactly what I was thinking but hadn’t been able to put it into words with such clarity. Reform used to be about making excellent schools, now it is ALL about creating choice. Doesn’t matter if it’s bad choices or good choices, just CHOICE.
So you can be direct with that. If people bring up choice when talking about public schools, just ask them if they want to talk about options in education paid for by tax dollars, or if they want to talk about public schools. I don’t care to talk about options in education paid for by tax dollars. I care to talk about public school. It will help redirect the focus of what the states’ responsibilities really include (if it is agreed that the state should have schools).
It’s like trying to have a marching band and instead of rehearsing the music people want to talk about choices of also including didgeridoo, shofar and authoharp in the marching band. Well, yeah. . .we could spend time talking about that and maybe it could add something interesting to the mix. . .but meanwhile a lot of good opportunities for making music are slipping us by.
What a mess. What a frickin mess. Why couldn’t they leave well enough alone without unleashing the “choice” diversion.
I am keeping my focus. I am interested in public schools. Not options in education paid for by tax payers. That is where I am putting my energy.
So true Harold. If philanthropists really want an excellent education for more/all children, either donate to the pricy private schools so that they can enroll more “needy” kids (at $10-20,000 a year there a lot of us that are “needy”) (and for that money NOT be used to build that new multi-million dollar gymnasium with their name on it) OR create public schools in the likenesses of those private schools to which they send their children. Oh, that’s right…no money to be made in that. Yeah, altruism sucks!
Here’s a story out of my state, Ohio, which is an unregulated, corrupt, reform mess that just keeps getting worse. If you state is considering reform, come to Ohio! I’ll take you on a personal tour.
http://www.wthr.com/story/23771440/2013/10/23/columbus-charter-school-likely-to-close
“Imagine your child’s school closing right in the middle of the year. That’s just what happened at a Columbus charter school dealing with a financial shortfall.
Inside the International School in Columbus Wednesday, it looked and felt like the last week of the school year. For these students it probably is – for all the wrong reasons.
“Friday is gonna be a bad day,” said 10th grader Braidon Simmons.
That’s when the International School will close its doors, sending more than 100 students and 22 staffers away.
A vote by the board Wednesday night to dissolve the school confirmed its fate.
The school, which offers an international baccalaureate program for 7th-12th graders, needed $250,000 to keep operating through the end of the year.
Without a major last-minute donation, they now have to surrender their charter back to Ball State University. “We really rely on grants and donations,” Wagner explained. “The grants that have come in over the past four years, they’re drying up.”
Maybe starting a school that relied on “grants and donations” wasn’t wise? Leaving a bunch of kids up to the whims of wealthy donors – a little..reckless, would you say?
In addition to the students leaving in droves, the charter school used an unauthorized bus company after being told by the authorizing school district the bus company could not be used because it did not adhere to government requirements to screen drivers. The charter school used it anyway. One of the buses got in an accident and sent five charter school students to the hospital. The real problem here is that school districts have just been handed this requirement of authorizing and monitoring charter schools without the resources to do it. It is very much like running a parallel school system but the schools pretty much have carte blanch to do what they want. In good ol’ Florida, it doesn’t matter if the school district wants to deny a charter application because we have a state charter authorizer appeal board that pretty much grants anyone a charter. Its like the wild west; no restrictions on guns or charters!
” the charter school used an unauthorized bus company after being told by the authorizing school district the bus company could not be used because it did not adhere to government requirements to screen drivers. The charter school used it anyway. One of the buses got in an accident and sent five charter school students to the hospital. ”
There will be…interesting litigation and lawsuit issues with charters.
Charters have argued that they are NOT public schools in various courts, including before the National Labor Relations Board.
So are they sued as private entities? One could argue they should be, because they themselves have denied they are pubic schools.
Boy, the state and district must have panicked when they realized the charter went ahead with the unscreened drivers. It really leaves them vulnerable to lawsuits.
Great points Chiara. I’m curious as to how this will play out. It should be interesting.
ALL schools have problems. Dr. Ravitch has pointed out the basic societal problems leading to those problems. Interesting too that the great Finnish school leader has pointed out the same basic premises. Looking for quick fixes, for easy solutions, placing blame where it does not belong will not solve the problems. Research shows that instead, counterproductive results are showing.
Tragic. Our children, our nation suffer because of this ineptitude.
Those “lovely” oft repeated words, CHOICE and REFORM, in between the blah, blah, blah and then repeated again ad nauseam. Much like slathering multiple coats of lipstick on a rather obnoxious and pushy pig. Oh me, oh my, the reformers fret, don’t you want parents to have a choice? Well, in NJ, the parents, the tax payers have no choice whether a charter school is dumped in their district or not. If the commissioner of education, charter school booster and czar Chris Cerf, decides that your district will be charterized, that’s the end of that story. No damn choice for you. As if already financially strapped school districts can afford these parallel school systems. Please stuff the “choice” rhetoric somewhere else.
Growing pains. I’m curious. What type of pains cause children to leave wholesale?
Reply to Chris’ 10:37 PM comment way up there: exactly right, Chris–thanks for your reply to te. te’s arguments are tiresome, &, usually, he/she doesn’t listen to anyone, & keeps answering questions not asked. But–seemed to listen to you–didn’t answer your comment at all, because everything you said makes perfect sense.
Unlike the charter school movement, which mostly makes dollars.
My apologies for taking to long to reply to the post by Chris.