This teacher read the post about Gulen charter schools and wrote the following comment:
This is so eerily similar to my job-it is a shame that there is poor oversight in these types of schools. I work in a Ohio-based charter school. I’m under great stress due to this under performing school. Misleading marketing leads unsuspecting parents to the school with inaccurate curriculum/academic expectations. Unfortunately, student turn-over is high, attendance/enrollment records are altered and no one ever questions-if you do, you just may lose your job. The principal is a bully and the superintendent is a pushover. Taxpayers don’t deserve for their hard-earned monies to be utilized in such a irresponsible fashion. There is no HR or outlet for employee grievances, no unions, the Department of Education really needs to stop winking at these degrading practices and shut underperforming schools down ASAP.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If the school is on the federal meal program for low income students so they can get free and reduced priced lunches, that’s where the teacher can blow the whistle for altering attendance/enrollment records. The feds are very alert to this practice and WILL take action. With that on record, the state will be much less likely to ignore the fact that the schools is cooking the books, too.
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BTW, the teacher can ask the feds to keep her name anonymous so that she’s protected from blowing the whistle.
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In New York, new legislation has gone through protected “public” charters from being audited. How can you discover if a school is cooking the books without an audit?
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In my experience with schools that cook the books, most teachers know about it. Administrators may ask them to change their attendance records or keep separate books. At one school, when I refused to change my records, an assistant principal did it instead. At another school, the administration kept some kids off my enrollment record in order to look like we were meeting state teacher-student ratio requirements.
Teachers are definitely the ones to ask and many will be glad to have the opportunity to blow the whistle if they can do it anonymously, as I did. (I had no union protections.)
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Cosmic Tinker: exactly why I find it both ludicrous and nauseating when the self-styled “education reformers” blather on about their “data-driven management” and “data-driven instruction” and the like.
Mark Twain was on the right track:
“Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”
It’s just that once the management-by-the-numbers crowd gets busy massaging, torturing, disappearing and inventing their “hard facts” aka numbers—
Getting the stats to support their narrative is the easy part.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Thanks, Krazy,
FYI, This is about schools claiming that there are more or fewer students than there really are, depending upon what they believe is to their advantage. With the federal food program, I’ve heard administrators claim they should be reimbursed for food that kids were not in attendance to eat because they still have the same bills to pay whether kids showed up or not. The bills they spoke of were for overhead though, not food, since the latter cost was in fact reduced.
In a non-profit social service agency that ran several schools, they were caught fudging attendance records for the federal food program –which occurred before I worked there. The feds banned them from the food program. Since the schools served low income families who really couldn’t afford to pay for meals, that meant the agency had to cover the cost of all food themselves. They also discovered that they could not get state funds for other programs due to that track record with the feds.
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Cosmic Tinker: it would seem a waste of time, but given that the shills and trolls for the charterites/privatizers don’t seem to do their homework when they come to this blog…
Their is plenty of criticism to be made of all schools. Unfortunately, too often the charters/vouchers crowd picks up on the worst practices of public schools and plumbs new depths of dishonesty. But no surprise. When the ‘leader’ of a school [edupreneur or educrat, for-profit or non-profit, pick your poison] wants to make himself/herself look good, or keep the student test-score raisers coming to the school via magnet/speciality programs, or make the campus look safe, amazing doesn’t describe how the “hard data” can be manipulated—and since the figures have to pass through the hands of those who have been incentivized to benefit from the fictions passing as facts, well…
How do I know this? Personal observation, talking with students and teachers and school psychologists and counselors and school security staff and, on rare occasions, an administrator with integrity or even on one occasion a LAPD officer assigned to the HS I worked at. Want to make the problem of knives and drugs on campus go away? You know, there’s just SOOOO much paperwork and time involved in dealing with that sort of thing. Why bother? Plus it gives the school a black eye, don’t ya know? And students who’ve just spent months, or a year or more, in juvenile detention [a euphemism for ‘jail for young people’] who are now living in a group home and have just started attending your school? Hey, test ‘em for placement. Gloryosky! They score so low that you can stick them in SpecEd—and nobody, I mean, nobody, aides or teachers or the school psychologist can undo this because the administrator in charge of SpecEd is the contact person between the LAUSD central office and absolutely everything goes through that person—and that person is an exemplar of the edubully [I’m talking Steve Perry-type here] and is far more interested in control and surveillance than education and turning lives around.
Great comments. Keep ‘em comin’.
😎
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Advice to charter school teacher: Stop being part of the problem by working for these scams in the first place.
Abolish “charter” schools by cutting off ALL public funding for them. Let them die or operate as the private schools they truly are and let them charge tuition.
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I have to second what Susan said. I have not worked at a charter school and I never would primarily because of ethics; I find the damage they are doing to our public school system absolutely abhorrent.
Charter school functioning and expansion could be seriously impeded If teachers did not seek to work there. (I don’t think TFA could come up with enough recruits to meet their needs.) Cut the head off the snake and be done with it! I certainly agree about defunding them, too…
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Susan: Please don’t blame the victim here. Sometimes jobs are hard to come by, and a person works where they can to support the family. My husband has been in that position several times. Particularly in a Right to Work State (not sure if Ohio is one, but my state is), salaries are so low that a family must work two or three jobs in order to survive, even with a college degree. My family is proof of that.
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She’s not the victim–she is part of the problem. If you are an ethical teacher, you don’t work for these scams in the first place.
It’s like asking me to feel “compassion” for a TFA. I refuse to do it.
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BTW, don’t tell me about how hard jobs are to come by. I think I know this far better than you. I have been un- and underemployed for SIX YEARS tomorrow, since I was illegally fired by a crooked school district in 2008. I still wouldn’t take a job that undermines public education and teaching as a whole. Ohio is NOT “right-to-work.”
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Being financially supported by a spouse doesn’t count, either, for “financial hardship.” Try living on 300 a month pension and NOTHING ELSE TO RELY ON.
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I’m terribly sorry to hear about your situation, Susan. We’ve been there several times ourselves. We have two children along with my husband and myself.
I admire your principals, and I don’t want to get into an argument with you, but we are all at different places in our lives. While I loathe charter schools, I don’t blame those who work in them. Nor do I (totally) blame the TFA teachers. Now the LEADERS of both of these movements have my utter disdain…
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You don’t just shut down an under performing public, not charter school down, instead you know that the bell curve is very real, and you work to improve every child’s outcome. Perhaps you could shut down a “for profit or not” charter school because this has been their PR from the beginning, that they could realize 100% proficiency in every child, unlike their public school neighbors which was a sham all along.
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Newark, NJ’s state-appointed Superintendent certainly thinks it is OK to shut public schools. See Jersey Jazzman’s and Bob Braun’s Ledger–both excellent blogs.
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Click to access Sept__20__OAPCS_CLawGB_2012.pdf
This link has a timeline of Ohio charter school laws. The schools have been further deregulated every year. The deregulatory policy really expanded beginning in 2009-10, when the Obama Administration policy of promoting of charter schools combined with the election of Governor Kasich caused a bit of a boom in charters, to the point where places like Columbus have a “saturated” charter market.
What bothers me about this is not charters. It’s that there is simply no analysis of the effect on the public school system. I’m baffled why no one is concerned about this. Obviously it’s having some effect on these public school systems.
When school reform was sold in Ohio we were told that it would improve public schools. So where are the public schools in this analysis? Why are we pretending this unregulated charter school sector has no effect on public schools? Does anyone in ed reform care, or is there really this delusion that they can start a huge parallel school system and just not take public school kids into account at all? When does the “improving public schools” part of ed reform begin?
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Charters are scams. They are cash cows that deceive parents, etc.
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I think there are many different charter schools serving different populations. Certainly schools that are scams should be shut down. Schools like the Walton Rural Center Charter School, on the other hand, should be encouraged.
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Fred,
What is your mailing address?
Bill
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 14:01:13 +0000 To: wjo@jhu.edu
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