Denis Smith is a retired school administrator who worked both as a sponsor representative for charter schools as well as a consultant in the state charter school office. In this five-part series, he offers his perspective about charter school governance and how this mechanism designed to provide transparency and accountability for public entities is sorely lacking and may in fact be the “fatal design flaw” of these schools.
Part Three
Ohio charter school governance and management issues aren’t exclusive to national chains like Imagine. Here is a case history of one school that was operated by the founder and who hand-picked the board, treasurer and school staff.
In 2010, an attorney from a law firm in Wilmington, Delaware that represented an educational publisher called to ask my help in collecting payment from a charter school that had an overdue debt of more than $50,000. The attorney also told me the bill was more than three years old.
That’s not the only beef he had with the school. “Do you know how much the school administrator is being paid”? he asked. When I replied that I didn’t know because the state did not maintain a database containing compensation for charter school administrators, he told me. “She pays herself $156,000 to run a school with 175 students and there doesn’t seem to be anything left to pay my client.”
When I looked further into the situation and contacted the school sponsor for more information, a tale quickly unfolded of a school with no internal and external controls. The treasurer, a family member of the school head, had ignored invoices sent from the company demanding payment, and the attorney, who wanted to personally bring the situation to the board, could not find any information about where or when they met to discuss school business.
As it turned out, the president of the governing board was a close friend of the school’s director, as were several other members of the board. When the attorney contacted the school and asked about the board and their meeting schedule, he was denied this basic information. Stonewalled by the school at every turn, it was at that point that he contacted the state department of education.
A phone call to the State Teachers Retirement System soon revealed that no salary information had been sent by the school treasurer to determine payments owed by the school. The school, which had been open for about four years, was ultimately closed by the sponsor.
Although the school was operated by two family members and thus not part of a national chain like Imagine, it still contained the same fatal genetic flaw prevalent in too many charter schools – a non-functioning governing board serving not the students and families but the school directors who appointed them. In the post-mortem conducted with the closure of the school, it was apparent that the board was invisible and displayed no curiosity about how the school director and treasurer – family members – required some observation of their performance as well as collective visioning so that the board itself could affirm its role and purpose. In addition, the long-term friendship between the governing board president and the school director prevented the board from functioning and providing the oversight necessary for guaranteeing a free and appropriate education for the students as well as the stewardship necessary for protecting public funds.
Sadly, the tale related here has occurred again and again in Ohio since the inception of the charter school program more than fifteen years ago. It is entirely possible that some of the board members had no idea about the size and scope of the compensation that two members of the same family received when compared to the size of the school and the share of state revenue it received. But when a person serves as a member of a board, they must accept that as a trustee for the school, they assume several legal responsibilities which include these basics:
Duty of Care – Exercise reasonable care when making decisions as a steward of the school and ensure that all those associated with the school will be held accountable for their actions.
Duty of Obedience – In fulfilling the public’s trust, ensure that the State’s funds will be used to fulfill the educational mission of the school and not for a private purpose.
Duty of Disclosure – Disclose any transactions in which a governing authority member may be involved and where an actual or perceived conflict of interest situation exists.
Duty of Custodian of a Public Trust – Manage public funds for public purposes and not private benefit, comply with Open Meetings requirements and respond to citizen and media request for information about the school and its management.
Duty of Diligence – Determine that deadlines for all required reporting are met, including monthly financial reports, and closely examine reports to determine any trends or variances in the condition of the school.
It should come as no surprise that when problems occur at the governance level – and we have already made the point that by their very design, charter schools contain some fatal design flaws – symptoms of other problems will soon become evident, including poor academic results, financial issues, and staff turnover. Tomorrow, let us examine another case study to see how another governing board fared in meeting its duties and responsibilities.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For Twitter: Just copy, paste and ReTweet often. The short link was created using Bitly and it leads back to this post.
What happens when a private charter school only has 175 students & pays school’s director (CEO) $156,000 annually
http://bit.ly/1f13jPR
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Mr. Lofthouse, I would say ‘physician, heal thyself’ if you weren’t so obviously incurable, (note that this is another cultural inheritance left by the Founder of my ‘one religion amongst many’).
And what makes you exempt from your own advice? You have presented neither argument nor question (and a question and an opinion are not the same, so which one am I guilty of hiding behind?)
In fact, you barely have asserted anything but for asserting your own ‘rightness’ and my ‘wrongness’ with no content (exactly why and where am I wrong, in your mind?) and then called me an fool. Not only do you make vapid assertions of your rightness, but you also make assertions of your greatness. ‘I’ve taught in the inner city for many years and now I collect my pension!’ you say. And that means precisely what? What does your self-appointed and self-professed heroism exempt you from, and what does it qualify you for?
In other words, who the hell do you think you are exactly? Do you really think that you can talk like that and not get mocked? And how did you come to this absurd state of self-worship at which you seem to have now arrived?
Perhaps a clue lies in you dismissal of Christianity as ‘one religion amongst many, that it might have led you to forget that you are one human being amongst many many more.
[Again, do you not think that Christians know that other religions exist as much as they know that the average number of fingers on a human hand is five? What could possibly be the point of such an assertion confused with an argument?]
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Vain Saints,
My response was, read “Reign of Error”. The evidence is all there. If you need more, there are other books and studies—something the false informers do not have. I will not waste my time debating a biased, prejudiced individual who goes by an assumed name using the same tactics that bullies and trolls use.
Earlier I responded to one of your blanket statements based on your own singular experience with the public schools with the fact that there are 13,600 democratically run school districts with almost 100,000 schools with more than 4 million teachers teaching more than 50 million children and that no one can logically condemn all of those schools and teachers from one individual experience. I find it impossible to believe that you had 40 to 50 incompetent teachers and ended up today writing at the high level of prose literacy that may be seen in your comments.
What did you do, you ignored all the facts I mentioned and called me a white knight riding to save minority children living in poverty as if I were a liberal idealist when that is far from the truth.
And you knew nothing about me. You still know nothing about me. And you still ignore what I’m saying. How do you respond: with one logical fallacy after another in your attempt to discredit my own experiences teaching in several schools in mostly one school district in California.
What you don’t know about me is that I was born into poverty. My father was an alcoholic and gambler. Before my mother met my father, she was a divorced mother feeding my other brother and sister with the help of food stamps. My mother and father both dropped out of high school at the age of 14 during the Great Depression so they could survive by finding low paying jobs.
The first house I remember was literary a tar paper house—a frame covered in tar paper with no windows or doors. My mother washed our clothes in a bucket and hung them to dry in the sun. She raised chickens and rabbits in the backyard and butchered them herself.
By the time I was twelve, my father, thanks to a union job that paid more than poverty wages, managed to pull our family out of poverty into the lower middle class. When I graduated from high school, I had no intention of going to college and joined the U.S. Marines ending up fighting in Vietnam. Several years alter, after an honorable discharge I changed my mind about college and use the GI Bill to help pay the way to a BA in journalism.
By definition, I’m not a liberal or an idealist who is a white knight. However, I think you are a biased, discriminating troll who doesn’t have anything but opinions to support what you may think.
Or you are a shill who is paid to haunt sites like this and attack people who are fighting back against the false reformers.
Once, again, if you want evidence that proves the reformers are false, to start, read Diane Ravitch’s “Reign of Error”. That’s my response to your false logic, name calling, bully tactics.
You may also want to read the “Coleman Report” that is still the definitive study that explains the variable factors that influence a child’s education. The Coleman Report identified that schools were only responsible for “one-third” of a child’s achievement in school. The other “two-thirds” comes from factors outside of the schools—mostly the home, parents/guardians in addition to socioeconomic status such as living in poverty.
In addition, a more recent study out of Stanford in 2013 identified that teachers were only responsible for about 9% of the results on standardized tests. When we take that 9% and divide it up between the 40 to 50 teachers a child has k to 12, one teacher’s impact on the results of standardized tests results falls to 0.18% but the home environment is still responsible for 60%.
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Lloyd,
There seems to some tension between the viewpoint that teachers account for relatively little of the learning that goes on by a student and the view that experienced and highly educated teachers are essential for student learning. Here you take the former view, but in other posts you talk about the transformation of a high school that came about by replacing the entire teaching staff and bringing in teachers like yourself. How would you reconcile these two views?
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You claim: “but in other posts you talk about the transformation of a high school that came about by replacing the entire teaching staff and bringing in teachers like yourself”
You must be mistaken, and it was a middle school called Giano in La Puente, California years before standards of any kind.
When did I ever say to fill schools with teachers like me? Please refer to the entire comment or post where I said this—-no pull quotes.
I do not recall ever saying a school should be filled with teachers like me. However, I do recall writing about the principal who hired me into my first full time position in 1978, and how he hired a tough, no nonsense staff of teachers to work with a school full of at risk kids who lived in poverty in a community dominated by violent street gangs. I never advocated that all schools should do the same thing.
In reality, Ralph ended up with a staff full of Tiger Teachers who were tough enough to maintain discipline and control but who used the same teaching methods and strategies the average teacher uses across America in every state and school.
There is a difference between maintaining discipline and teaching and many excellent teachers do not make for tough tiger teacher disciplinarians.
Ralph also created a cooperative team management approach to running the school and he organized the teachers into teams—like what they do in Finland—and those teacher teams ran the school with his support. It worked great while it lasted and it all ended after he had a stroke and was forced to retire.
And what the Common Core standards are implementing as teaching strategies was never used in those classrooms as a regimented lock-step, scripted method of teaching. Ralph encouraged his teachers to be creative and use problem solving methods in teams to solve that one school’s challenges. And under that management style, we did as a team.
There’s a simple equation that explains the education process.
Teachers teach
+
Students do the work and learn
+
parents support the teachers and provide a place for kids at home where they may study and do homework without distraction
When all three of these elements are aligned, kids learn and then education works. But when the kids don’t cooperate or work and the parents don’t do their part in the equation, that usually leads to failure and lower standardized test scores that no matter how powerful a teachers abilities to teach are, will not change.
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Only in America could you find get-rich-quick charter and voucher schemes like this, completely financed by the government, offering up the nation’s children to virtually any non-educator and their uncle who wants to hang a shingle in a mall or their garage and call it “school.”
And if things don’t work out for them in one state, they can just abscond in the night and move on to another, more swindler-friendy state: “Owners of Private Christian Charter School Flee Town with $200k Taxpayer Dollars”
http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2014/01/owners-of-private-christian-charter-school-flee-town-with-200k-taxpayer-dollars-2590692.html
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“Private Christian Charter School”
Does that phrase send chills up anyone else’s spine?
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Nah. It may surprise Dienne, but it is in fact the case that not all of us hate Christians.
And as always with the apologists for Bureaucratic Government Compulsory Monopoly Education (‘Public’ is the general euphemism for this) there is no mention of the vast, monstrous corruption of the Monopoly Sector. Cases of corruption in Charter Schools, frequent as they may be, are presumably to be contrasted with pictures of smiling engaged children being nurtured by selfless public servants.
This sort of corruption is child’s play compared to Government Monopoly Education, where the superintendent doubles in several ghost administrative positions, gets five pensions, and all the contributions he can bag from the contractors from whom he buys another magic pill curriculum every year at taxpayer expense.
The charter school movement is not a reform except in the sense that it is part of a long line of institutional reforms. Ms. Ravitch fails to understand that these presumed attacks on the system are *part of* the system. Otherwise the system would not be perpetually in crisis.
The system that Ravitch defends is what generates these cookie-cutter crises that Ravitch rails against. You can’t attack/defend one without attacking/defending the other. Periodic restructuring based on trumped crises has been baked into the cake from the beginning. It is Ravitch herself who has documented this very well.
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I’m still going with separation of church and state. Otherwise the next thing you know there is some Pastafarian academy using public money to worship the spaghetti gods. No public money for religious purposes.
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So it’s just fine to have no separation between church and state, and to provide government funding, without regulatory oversight, to virtually anyone who wants to open a school as long as it’s YOUR church.
Right. Wait til free-market profiteers are attacked by jihadies grown in government funded Gulan charters –which happen to have more schools than any other charter chain in this country.
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Don’t think there’s much to be gained by trying to have a discussion with someone who talks about “Government Compulsory Monopoly Education”.
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And allow me to say that the reason why ‘hate Christians’ is not a combative overstatement is that it is in keeping with such language of ‘chills down your spine’. For quite a few people, Christianity does not invoke spontaneous responses of nausea. For those who do find themselves so convulsed at the mention of it, I fail to see why ‘hate’ is an inapt word.
A 1st amendment case could be made, actually, against the imposition of Compulsory-Government-Bureaucratic-Monopoly-Schooling (CGBMS), (though it would be a stretch) on the grounds that it makes education much less onerous on those who abide by the state-sponsored religion of American-Bureaucratic-Consumerist-Corporatism than it is on whose who subscribe to other faiths, thus violating religious neutrality. The idea that CGBMS is in any way ‘neutral’ is an annoying delusion of American Consumerists who have internalized the American Religion so deeply that it seems like a baseline reality to them.
These are the sentiments of many who reject CGBMS on principle which are being exploited by the Charter movement, which promotes the *illusion* of choice under terms that are so restricted that it negates the principle and reveals itself to be just another manufactured ‘reform’ (i.e. structural reorganization) of CGBMS on Corporatist Monopoly terms instead of Government Monopoly terms. The real battle over the soul of education is being fought along these lines. Bland panegyrics to the old days of bland bureaucratic Schooling, empty homages to a bankrupt concept and a bankrupt system, pose no challenge to the David Colemans of the world; they are not designed to pose such a challenge. They are designed, on the contrary, to give them the weakest opposition imaginable.
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And yes, I am all for Muslims being able to educate their children according to their values. I’ll take devout Muslims over narcissistic consumerists any day of the week.
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VainSaints, I am all for religious education too, so long as parents pay for it themselves. It is not the job of the public to pay for religious education. That is an old tradition in this country.
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Dim witted followers who don’t even realize that their leaders are the very people who promote ‘narcissistic consumerists,’ like the Koch brothers, are incapable of recognizing that those who do not believe in secular governments, such as the Gulan, do not aim to educate their own but to impose their religion on everyone else. We don’t have to wait for our country to be destroyed by barbarians set to attack on the outskirts. We’re growing our own right here, so it’s very likely to implode from within.
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Ms. Ravitch, I will say that I am appreciative of your taking the trouble to response. My language does get inordinately punchy.
However, we have a disagreement over what constitutes religious education and what constitutes religious freedom. I am happy to disagree as long as the terms of our disagreement are clear.
My position (and it is not just mine) is that all is inherently ‘religious’ in that it promotes certain values over others. Why should those who abide by the religion of Consumerism/Secularism/American Exceptionalism which is promoted in the public schools have a free ride in education while those who consider those values corrosive (adherents of all other religions) have to pay?
That’s my argument from principle. My argument from *substance* is that these bureaucratic values are in fact corrosive. It is incumbent (from my perspective) for anyone who cares about the education of our kids to provide workable alternatives to the system. it was also, by the way, the opinion of John Holt, whom I am sure you are familiar with. I am somewhere between his perspective and that of Ivan Illich.
Our disagreement lies mainly (I would think) in my assessment of American Exceptionalism/Consumerism as a religion. I see no grounds for the exemption of this sort of secular consumerism from this contention, particularly considering that regardless of the nomenculture one applies, this system has indisputable corrosive *effects* on competing faiths. It homogenizes all faiths into the same bland, bureaucratic Americanism.
Our system was explicitly *designed* to do this, as you are indubitably aware. You have documented the Americanist motivations of public school advocates in the 19th and 20ths centuries. You have documented the anti-Catholic sentiment that accompanied this movement. All I am saying is that the people who designed the system in order to homogenize American religious and cultural enclaves and to neutralize competing religious forces were largely successful in doing so. And I am saying that it is to all our detriment and against the spirit of separation of church and state.
You no doubt disagree, which is fine but let’s not pretend that this issue is reducible to a clear-cut case of separation of church and state.
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Should read ‘All *education* is inherently religious.
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I am a Christian and like myself. But the government should not be in the business of picking religions through school funding. If tax money does go to private and religious schools, then I want a say in what they teach and how they are run just like democratically elected school boards answer to voters. The private schools must now be accountable to tax payers. Taxation WITH representation.
For starters, no bad Hollywood Bible movies in the schools.
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What the heck is a Consumerism religion? Is Adam Smith the Supreme Invisible Hand? I think you are simply creating a false equivalence by cherry picking some lesson perhaps taught in a social studies class as an end around to impose what is clearly faith based thinking on the schools. Similar to the Intelligent Design approach injecting creationism as objective science. But if you want your religious beliefs discussed and critiqued in schools, I’m all for comparative religion classes. But you may not like the fact your beliefs are not blindly accepted but challenged.
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MathVale, I, like you, am all for the first amendment. But you seem reluctant to address the disparate impact issue.
The public school system has a curriculum that is fundamentally hostile, by the way it is structured to every way of life except secular consumerism. The fact that they don’t teach Philosophy is just one example of how public schools promote reward-oriented, unreflective, careerist approaches to life.
Secular consumerism is a religion because it inherently promotes and justifies ways of life and ways of thinking that are incompatible with other religions, be they Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, or what have you. (The lack of Philosophy is just one example.) It is also deeply corrosive of these alternate ways of life.
So why should Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Orthodox Jews etc have to pay money and actively fight the system to preserve their beliefs and carry them on to the next generation while secularists get essentially a free ride?
The public schools not only promote secularism and crass careerism, but they do so in a way that dominates the lives of their students. To be stuck in the public school system is for religious parents to have a huge chunk of your kid’s life dominated by influences that are repugnant to your values. Just because your Christianity is compatible with careerism doesn’t mean all Christianities are, and if they’re not, why should I have to work against a system while your religion gets support from it?
That is why something like vouchers, which do not discriminate based on religion, are far more in keeping with the spirit of the 1st amendment than a public school system that was brought to being explicitly to suppress Catholic cultural enclaves.
This is not social studies, it is philosophy. Your simplistic division between ‘normal’ secular life and religion as a private ‘church on sunday’ phenomenon is, sad to say, untenable. It is indefensible. It is only applicable to certain types of Protestantism. There is no such clean line to be drawn.
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What you said, MathVale, You pegged it. Don’t buy any of these absurd characterizations of “consumerist” and “carrerist” “religions.” What a ridiculous, bloviated ploy to try to justify spending tax dollars on religious schools. And BTW, I did study Philosophy in public school, back when there was time for more than just reading and math, before politicians decided to make schools all about high-stakes testing in two subjects.
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ReTeach, before you go about calling things a ‘ridiculous, bloviated ploy’, before you posit yourself as being ex ante more rational, reasonable, or intelligent than others (this is a dangerous assumption) why not actually address the objection? I’ve made perfectly clear several times that the current system has a disparate impact.
It’s similar to what Ravitch said earlier about how the architects of the reorganization of schools are all people who scored highly on their standardized tests and do not seem to understand the plight of those who cannot.
You, ReTeach, find the consumerist/careerist presuppositions of public schools as ‘normal’ and perfectly self-evident and refuse to engage those who do not. You seem to think that the regimented, bureaucratic structure of modern public schools is a given, that lining up single file, responding to bells, and being led by gold stars and carrots and sticks, with the only rationale, the only purpose behind any of it, to be ‘getting a good job’ is a given, and that it is ridiculous to question it. And you don’t seem to relate well to those of us who do not.
ReTeach, let us be clear, if you are defending the *current* system (or at least the recently deposed system against the ongoing onslaught of the Broad Foundation and Gates and company, you are fighting a very lonely battle. You will lose because no one fights for things they don’t care about, and the public schools of the eighties and nineties do not inspire caring. They inspire at best indifference. That’s why David Coleman has had such an easy time of it.
The recently deposed system is only defended by two types of people, those who draw their pay from it, and those who understand that the new way is worse, but whose imaginations are so limited that the old way is the only alternative they can think of. Neither will inspire any broad support, apart from the occasional union-funded astro-turf marches on Trenton.
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Vain Saints,
Someone seems to have pushed your “saintly” buttons.
You claim: “The recently deposed system is only defended by two types of people, those who draw their pay from it, and those who understand that the new way is worse”
First: the system isn’t deposed. The false reformers haven’t had much success until recently and they may be stopped before they gain much more ground. That taste of success emboldened and energized them to push harder recently and spread more bribes among politicians.
There are about 13,600 public school districts with almost 99,000 schools teaching more than 50 million children.
The private sector—by comparison—teaching only 5.2 million children. There are only 5,500 – 6,000 charter schools.
Second: I don’t draw my pay from the public education system. That ended when I retired in 2005 after teaching and working hard (609 to 100 hours a week on average) and succeeding at teaching many of my students for thirty years in a barrio riddled with poverty and dominated by violent street gangs. And I did this in spite of the flaws of the public education system. Many public teachers do the same.
Since August 2005, my pay has comes from CalSTRS. Before you claim that I’m still drawing from the system, let’s make it clear that CalSTRS was funded by teachers paying into that separate retirement system out of their pay checks. For thirty years, 8% of my pay (and a matching amount from the school district) was paid to CalSTRS similar to how a 401k plan works but much better.
CalSTRS is not supported annually by tax payers. CalSTRS has more than $166+ Billion dollars that CalSTRS started collecting from teachers more than a century ago. About $12 billion annually is paid out to retired teachers. Unlike Social Security where Congress spent all the money as it came in, CalSTRS still has the money and invests it so it grows. If the tax revenue that supports the schools stopped today, CalSTRS would still have about 10 to 14 years before it ran dry.
Click to access cafr2013.pdf
Third: No system is perfect. Even Christianity (only another region of many) isn’t perfect or their wouldn’t be several thousand Christian denominations all worshiping the same God but with different messages to their followers. The public schools are not broken. Historical evidence from primary sources shows that the system—for all of its flaws—has worked and improved steadily and slowly for more than a century and continues to improve even with this war being waged by the fake reformers.
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A curse on typos: I meant to say 60 to 100 hours a week.
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So to ReTeaches and to the MathVales, etc.
The old road is rapidly aging.
Times of crisis are times of opportunity. There is much good that can be done, much that can be gained from instability.
The only thing that is *sure* to fail is hanging on to the past, trying to bring back what has been, for very good reason, rejected, trying to breath life into an institution that was barely alive to begin with, and that committed suicide at the first opportunity.
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Jeeze, you sure are out of touch with reality.
During the 30 years I was a public school teacher (1975 – 2005), the system was changing all the time. The problem was that the major changes always came from the local school board, the state capital or Washington DC and teachers weren’t part of that often misguided political process.
Most of those theories forced on teachers failed miserably.
In addition, teacher training—at least in California—-never ends. Therefore, teachers are being exposed annually to new theories and strategies that they may use or adapt for use in their classrooms. I know because I used what I was always learning to adapt the way I taught.
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Mr. Lofthouse, I will give you some observations both as a public school student and as someone who worked in the public school system until he could no longer stomach it.
First, I will gladly accept all of your attestations of your own heroism. I will accept them and then say that they are not of interest to me.
I am interested in systems. You might rejoice in a life well lived saving the poor and the immigrant from barrio poverty, but I see someone who likes to see himself as a white knight in the black and hispanic ghetto. And I see a system that thrives on such futile Quixotic Self-Understandings.
In your eagerness to write up your epic narrative as the White Hero saving the poor blacks and hispanics from the wreckage of ignorance and despair, you have neglected to ask yourself why the system from which you draw your livelihood (forgive me for pushing your who pays you buttons) makes heroes so necessary? Why is there such wreckage in the first place?
Blessed are the poor, Mr. Lofthouse, as the Founder of my ‘one religion amongst many’ has said (and what of your belief system Mr. Lofthouse? One puffed up Don Quixote amongst many I presume?). But let’s not forget the blessings that poverty brings upon Mr. Lofthouse. Because without the poor and dispossesed, what is to become of all the nice, white bureaucrats who draw their pay from their pension plan heroism? Where there is poverty, there will always be a market for self-professed heroes.
And given the conditions of Patterson, of Newark, Camden etc. it seems like the current system offers endless opportunities for such White Heroes to not make a dent and concratulate themselves for their futility.
I hope we are clear, Mr. Lofthouse
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Thank you. I’m very clear on where you are coming from. You don’t know me. Your assumptions are also wrong on every count.
But then we live in a country that is supposed to agree to disagree and I, for one disagree, with your thinking but agree that you have the right to be a fool.
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Oh Mr. Lofthouse! I wouldn’t be this harsh if you didn’t fit in so well with every caricature!
“In addition, teacher training—at least in California—-never ends. Therefore, teachers are being exposed annually to new theories and strategies that they may use or adapt for use in their classrooms. I know because I used what I was always learning to adapt the way I taught.”
Oh! Professional Development Seminars. In case you run one, you might find this link helpful.
http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html
From the link:
Amaze your colleagues with finely crafted phrases of educational nonsense! The javascript code is adapted from Dack.com’s Web Economy BS Generator. I would be remiss if I did not thank my district’s Professional Development staff for introducing me to many of these gems. I have added prepositional phrases to this generator. My inspiration comes from the College Board’s new AP Chemisty framework that includes this gem – “The student can connect phenomena and models across spatial and temporal scales.”
One wonders how there can be any problem in education at all with enlightened bureaucrats like Lofthouse “l transitioning multidimensional guiding coalitions within professional learning communities.”
or “assessing technology-enhanced competencies to close the achievement gap
That, Lofthouse, is where pension fund heroism gets us!
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Oh, and Lofthouse, what exactly do you mean when you say that Christianity is ‘one religion amongst many’? This statement confuses me, as it would confuse you if out of the blue I were to say that the average human being has ten fingers, ten toes, two ears, and one nose.
Do you think that Christians aren’t fully aware of the existence of other religious traditions?
As for the fact that schools are always changing, do you understand that this is exactly what I’ve been saying? Constant crisis, I say again and again, is *baked into the cake*.
You say that the problem is that changes come from bureaucrats in central offices and are imposed onto the teachers. Mr. Lofthouse, *what else do you possibly expect from bureaucratic, centralized, top-down command and control systems*? That is the very point of bureaucratic operations, to make sure that all activity is controlled and monitored so that it never strays from the agendas of central authorities.
This command and control system is exactly what you defend when you defend the current system from corporatisation.
In virtually every case, opponents of the fake reform exaggerate the difference between corporatized schools and centrally planned, bureaucratic schools. In painting privatization as the enemy, they choose not to see that the two systems are far more alike than they are different. Since that is the case, those who seek to understand their animus need to look somewhere besides the concrete track records and effects that the various approaches to schooling have, which are almost identical.
When the schools cut the arts, began to drown kids in oceans of tests, and turned schools into indoctrination centers, teachers grumbled. When the pensions started being threatened, it was a whole different ballgame.
But to be fair, it’s not like the teachers are independent actors, even when they are raising hell. They don’t raise hell unless and until the union gives them the ok. Even in disobedience, they remain nice, obedient workers, just like they tell their children to be. They respond to bullies (like the reformers) in exactly the way they tell their students to respond to bullies. By running and crying to the nearest authority figure.
If the plight of the public schools has one redeeming virtue, it is poetic justice.
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Dear Saintly confused:
You rattle off a shopping list of opinions but offer no support to prove your thinking is right.
In addition, instead of focusing on proving your point, you just ask more questions.
Your comments are usually evidence of someone who has no evidence to support what they think. In fact, many who respond like this are often Trolls who hide behind an anonymous name, Vain Saints.
Troll or not, your opinion is noted, but you are wrong. Read Diane’s book “Reign of Error” for the evidence that proves your thinking is wrong. If you don’t have time to educate yourself beyond your biased opinions, then what I’m writing here is a waste of time.
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Typical charter story. This is going on all over Michigan too. It is the best con ever invented. Vain Saints you are a believer in corporate welfare. Why? I don’t want my tax money funneled into charlatans and cronies.
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Dee Dee: the shills and trolls of the charterite/privatization movement do have a deep faith — in their mantra of “unfettered greed will answer every need.”
Hence, for example, their stunningly vapid and hysterical defense of Eva M’s outrageous salary compared to Carmen F’s.
And they are true believers. One of those old Greek guys had them pegged long ago:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
And to answer once again your question:
“Have they no shame?????”
None.
Absolutely none at all.
😎
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“…how this mechanism designed to provide transparency and accountability for public entities is sorely lacking and may in fact be the “fatal design flaw” of these schools.”
A clarification of the language here. While decent folks might see such lack of oversight and accountability as a flaw it’s important to understand that those who designed and profit from Charters do not see this lack of transparency as a “fatal design flaw” at all- they see this as an attractive and necessary feature of what they have concocted.
Thieves do not like oversight after all.
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Charter chains, and the “Imagine” business plan details this when they state they “want a cluster of schools” – often have separate boards who only have to sign off on that particular school’s Form 990, this is a way for the same people to double and triple dip from the Charter corporation –
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-11-06/news/bs-md-co-imagine-charter-revoked-20131106_1_imagine-discovery-charter-imagine-schools
“Guidestar.org” your local charter corporation, and see the same patterns.
It’s a real tragedy how few media sources shine a light on this stuff.
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Given the variety in state regulation of charter schools, it seems to me that discussions of charter structure and regulation need to be state specific.
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