The Detroit Free Press is running a week-long series about Michigan’s charter sector. The first story was about a $1 billion industry with no accountability and poor results. Most charters in the state operate for profit.
The industry’s response? National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter chain, bought up the advertising space around the story to tout their wares. See the screen shot.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s the screen shot:
Wow!
Money smothers Truth (or tries to).
Since we who value the role of Public Education in America appear to be outgunned I think we need to ask What are the measures we need to use to determine a healthy well performing school. Do we have one measures of how many students start the school in September and are still there in February and again inJune? How many students attend every day? How many come to school knowing their colors and shapes? Since our glass sizes make our schools like factories how many children are able to sit for ten minutes at a time? How many students ” act out” distracting the teacher from “teaching.” How many
Children come to school hungry.. Does the school management arrange with the District office to endure breakfast BEFORE school is offered.is there a school nurse at the school daily.? Are art, drama, singing and music classes provided since we know from past successes how children learn and develop parts of their brain from these activities helpful promoting literacy and numeracy?
The AFT proposed Master Teacher programs thirty years ago promoting collaborative relationships NOT competitive so that teachers with know-how and acknowledged
Talent are given time to help probationary teachers Not MONEY.
there is so much more to be measured and testing perhaps 5%
Reviewing the basics before test scores and Then looking at test scores.
I saw the two Gore v. bush attorney’s on Charlie Rose,firmly espousing the
Problem in Public
Education lying solely with teachers…well Charlie Rose is great but he does not interview Diane Ravitch or Randi Weingarten or anyone who has been in the trenches teaching or anyone the teachers have chosen to represent them. These guys do not have dinner parties with classroom teachers. Who they socialize with says it all.
Unfortunately no President or Senator in the
U.S. To my knowledge has ever been a union member so how could they
Believe the kids profit from the teachers having Collective Bargaining in their
Work life?
Marcy Dunne Ballard
Retired English/ Speech/ Critical Thinking Teachet
Former AFT President
dunneballard@gmail.com
Yell a lie long and loud enough it will be believed. Hitler found it to be true. Germany suffered excruciatingly because of it. Will we be next?
And here I thought they might get together and voluntarily regulate their industry.
That seems to be what lawmakers are waiting for. Some unenforceable “best practices” put forth by some completely unaccountable policy group.
Of course, lawmakers have “relinquished”public education, so it’s tough to even get their attention.
It must be a huge shock to ed reformers to find out why we regulated schools at the local level.
They thought we did it to “protect the status quo”
As it turns out, trying to regulate thousands of schools from a state dept of ed was not that smart.
What will they think of next? A… school board? That would be a nifty governance structure! No wonder so many states put them in!
They learn something new every day.
Chiara: it often strikes me as ludicrous how the charterites/privatizers will rediscover the educational equivalent of the wheel, fire or sliced bread and then congratulate themselves loudly on how clever and innovative they are.
Originality? It pales in comparison to $tudent $ucce$$. Now that’s a metric they can get behind…
😎
True dat.
I love how the focus is always on public schools, too.
Instead of giving speeches on how school boards suck and should be abolished maybe they could get a handle on the schools they’re actually running in the unimportant “flyover” states like MI, OH and IN?
Why do I want my public school to imitate this chaos and recklessness? Why don’t they seat a roundtable on how they’re planning on regulating this market they created?
I have a suggestion. How about “local, accountable governance”?
They can start with the state constitution as a primer-level lesson.
Corporate “reformers” despise democracy and they do not want any elected school boards across the country. They like mayoral control and they want appointed school boards, as they have at most charter schools. That way, they can pack the boards with corporate cronies, puppets, friends and relatives, and they can omit the genuine stakeholders in education, parents, educators, student representatives and community members.
Then they can say to the genuine stakeholders, “You don’t like how we do things here? Fine, go shop for another school” (Where there is also an appointed school board because elected school boards have been abolished.)
“Why Do Corporate Reformers Hate Democracy?”
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2014/03/why_do_corporate_reformers_hat.html
Very sad that tax dollars are paying for these ads.
Are you sure this is not a parody a la The Onion?
It’s not.
Why on earth did the Detroit Free Press permit this kind of “product placement” in the first place?
$$$
And therein lies one of the great advantages that charter schools have over public schools in this alleged free market.
As a state-wide entity (with schools in surrounding states as well), NHA can build up a war chest to market anywhere at anytime. They can simply take the profits from the Grand Rapids NHA schools and use them to market for new schools across the state. Their income has mobility.
A traditional public school is geographically tied. Grand Rapids Public Schools gains nothing from an ad buy in the Detroit Free Press. They are locked into their community and only their community. They could advertise in their local region but then parents would claim that money isn’t going to the classroom. The elected board would be criticized.
NHA (and other chains) have none of these limitations. They can expand anywhere and use money from one region to advertise and market in another. (A community near me is watching NHA prepare to open a new K-5 school and they are very specifically targeting certain apartment complexes. This is not a new strategy for them. In another community they have targeted and recruited from a megachurch.)
Charter chains are fast becoming corporate entities that are scaled to regional and national levels. This leaves traditional local public schools and community created charters at their mercy. It’s only a matter of time before this escalates into about a dozen or so chains dominating the market. Sure, there will be some boutique schools that have niches but they’ll be hard pressed to compete.
By the way, private schools should be very wary of this as well. They could easily get pushed out down the road. With the exception of firmly entrenched private schools, many will disappear. Charters will be targeting those families as well. Catholic schools should be especially worried. They’ll still exist but in far fewer numbers as middle class and upper middle class families see the opportunity to stop paying tuition when the charters start promoting their product for those families.
It’s not a fair market in any way. Charters have all the advantages in this system. Caps have been lifted in many states. Expect explosive growth as a result of easy authorization and interlocking promises. More schools = more profit = more marketing = more advantages.
Yep. That’s the way private educorpation gangs throw their(and taxpayers) money away. The reason why corporate-style aggressive marketing/advertising should highly be condemned for screwing democracy and education.
And yet again, the price of education escalates with No Value Added. Shame.