It is not bad enough that Governor Tom Corbett and the Pennsylvania legislature are starving the Philadelphia public schools of basic necessities. Here comes the charter lobby to launch an expensive media campaign to persuade parents to pull their kids out of the public schools and put them into charters.
Politico reports:
“SCHOOL CHOICE HITS THE AIRWAVES: Proponents of school choice have launched a major PR blitz in Philadelphia. For the next four weeks, they’ll saturate both morning TV and the evening news, on all four major channels, with 30-second spots featuring parents talking about why their kids are thriving in charter schools. Similar messages will pop up on Twitter and in web ads, and organizers are considering adding radio, too. The goal: Prod civic leaders and school officials to open up the system by making it easier for students to transfer among district-run schools – and, above all, by authorizing more privately-run charters. The campaign is organized by Choice Media, a nonprofit news service that focuses heavily on school choice. Executive director Bob Bowdon won’t name his funders; he told Morning Education that he wants to keep the focus on parents and students, not the money behind the (decidedly pricey) campaign. Watch the ads:http://bit.ly/1s9H2rw and http://bit.ly/1pkXhKG”
Bob Bowdon is a choice zealot. in 2009, he produced a movie called “The Cartel,” mostly about public education in New Jersey. He portrayed the teachers’ union as akin to a mafia-type organization and the public schools as rife with corruption. His solution: vouchers and charters. He surely won’t mention the 18 Philadelphia charter schools that were the subject of federal investigation for financial mis dealing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Does anyone know the status of the 18 charter schools under investigation?
Alice, I don’t know. But last I read, the founders of two different virtual charters in PA had been indicted for misuse of millions of $$$$
PA charters are desperate for Tom Corbett to be re-elected governor in Nov. because 1) he adores charters (clearly the feeling is mutual) and 2) Tom Wolf, who is leading in the polls, has promised to restore public school funding and commence some serious charter school oversight. No wonder the charters are running scared. They should be. Their time is up in PA.
cross-posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Charters-Will-Blitz-Philad-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-Schools_Choice_Internet_Politico-140920-884.html#comment512344
with this comment:
15,880 districts in 50 states and they count on YOU not knowing how they ended the US INSTITUTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION which WAS the road to opportunity for all Americans.
Take a look at just a few of Charter Schools across the nation and If you want the whole story, put CHARTER SCHOOLS IN The search field at THE DIANE RAVITCH SITE. (Diane was just included in the Politico list of the 50 most important Americans)
CHICAGO: Rahm Emanuel wants to privatize public education as much and as fast as he can. Aside from closing down 50 schools in one fell swoop, the mayor privatized custodial services to two companies for $340 million over three years, promising cleaner schools and cost savings.But, as reported by Catalyst, a respected journal that covers education in Chicago, principals complain that their schools are filthy and rodent-infested. The corporations have promised to improve.
OHIO: Stephen Dyer has some amazing news in his excellent blog. I recently reposted his analysis of charter school performance in Ohio, which is mostly dismal. Nearly half the charters in the state earned a grade of F on their state report card.An investigation of Concept Schools charter chain in Ohio was expanded, adding two more schools where allegations of test tampering and misuse of public funds have been made.
RHODE ISLAND: Remember Central Falls? That is the small district in Rhode Island where the superintendent Frances Gallo decided to fire every staff member at the high school in spring 2010 because of low test scores>Central Falls has now become a magnet for charter schools. Superintendent Gallo welcomes them, as does the mayor. One-third of the students in the district are enrolled in charters, and more are on the way.
AND look at this alarming post. EduShyster learns about the techniques, strategies, and philosophy of “no excuses” charter schools by interviewing Joan Goodman, who directs the Teach for America program at the University of Prnnsylvania.
Goodman describes how the “no excuses” charters program young children to obey authority without question. ” To reach [their] objectives, these schools have developed very elaborate behavioral regimes that they insist all children follow, starting in kindergarten. Submission, obedience, and self-control are very large values. They want kids to submit. You can’t really do this kind of instruction if you don’t have very submissive children who are capable of high levels of inhibition and do whatever they’re told.”
The charter lobby is in for a hard time in Philly thanks to the leadership shown by Helen Gym and Parents United. And Corbett is a loser. Last summer two schools were targeted by the district to be charterized but the parents organized against the conversions and the schools stayed with the district. Even Hite has been acknowledging the excellent work of the district’s teachers lately. Apparently the lack of adequate resources and a fair funding formula in Pennsylvania brings out the best in teachers even as the phony liberals like Boies and Duncan continue to denigrate us and our unions.
Remember, according to charter advocates, charters are not just LIKE public schools, they ARE public schools! You know, when public monies are to be scooped up in bucketfuls, although strangely [?] they are not those “traditional public schools” aka “factories of failure” aka “dropout factories” when they try to sell them to potential customers because—dontcha know—they’re just so so so much better…
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The charter ad campaign is matched, one must assume, by an equally awesome and expensive ad blitz by the “traditional” public schools, right? I mean, nobody would just steal so much money away from charter classrooms in order to line the pockets of pr people and political consultants and the like? C’mon, we’ve got to get away from self-centered greedy adult interests and make it all for the kids!
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Hmmmm… The pretty charter picture painted above is true on RheeWorld. Rheeally!
But on Planet Reality, it’s not really that way…
And for the inquiring mind: how are we to make sense of this sort of thinking that proceeds out of the Marxist Dialogic approach to wisdom?
Chico: “The garbage man is here.”
Groucho: “Well, tell him we don’t want any.”
¿?
I don’t know either. Maybe we just need to get past “education reform” so we can get on to education reform.
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Diane Ravitch’s latest blog post from Poliltico about the ad campapign that undisclosed charter school advocates are about to launch to recruit students during Philadelphia’s middle and high school application season, is among the most infuriating news I have read in a long time. It reminds me of the day I was in attendance at a School Reform Commission (SRC) meeting last spring when our SRC (Philadelphia’s governor and mayor appointed “school board”) told a charter school CEO to expand his recruitment efforts into more neighborhoods if he wanted to stay in business. And I thought at the time, “Wait, so our public school district SRC is telling a charter school to use more of our public tax $$ to expand his recruitment efforts?” How can that be legal?
Now I am working in a drowning public school, a fantastic place of dedication and talent that has been resource-deprived and is now seeing its students leaving by the dozens as fears of the place shutting down mount and test scores drop precipitously from making AYP every year up until the Philly School District starvation plan began four years ago. Why would you want your child to continue in a school whose doors seem likely to shutter in the near future? Parents are jumping ship to give charters a try.
Purely coincidental to the publication of Politico’s article, our faculty and administrators met last week to discuss how we could tell the world about our wonderful school so that we could increase enrollment. We were trying to think of novel ways to “market” our traditional public school, with no money of course, just a dedicated staff who doesn’t want to see our unique school shut down. With this news of a media blitz by charter school advocates, it looks like we are up against some pretty big odds. Infuriating!
In some ways, the secrecy over these ads tells you all you need to know. I tried to find the donors or backers of Choice Media or PhilyySchoolChoice.com, but there is no information available on most aspects of these organizations. I haven’t even been able to track down their officers or BoD members (which they must have, being non-profit corporations.) I couldn’t even find what type of non-profit entity they are. That void of information should actually tell us a few things, though:
1) You can bet that the donors and backers of these groups are big-money players in the reform movement, though which of the usual suspects it might be (Gates, Walton, Broad, DFER, etc.) is anybody’s guess. It’s the only reason to keep them secret. What Bowdon fears isn’t “distraction” so much as the exposure of the same interference with our schools that much of the public in Philly has now rejected.
2) You can also make a safe bet that the rest of the folks running Bowdon’s little non-profits are also dyed-in-the-wool reformers from the usual sources, for exactly the same reasons given above.
3) This kind of secrecy leads finally to the conclusion that both of Bowdon’s non-profits are 501(c)4 “social welfare” organizations that aren’t required to reveal their donors. If they were a 501(c)3 educational non-profit, that would not be the case. The only reason they’d choose 501(c)4 status is the secrecy, since contributions to them are not tax deductible, which tends to drive down normal charitable giving. But you’ll look in vain for that info on their websites or publications, because they don’t even want people to know that they specifically chose to keep who they are and who funds them from the public.
We’re in a worse bind than most people might think with charters here in Philly (and most people know it’s bad already.) The latest is that the new local cigarette tax that is finally making its way through the legislature (yes, we had to get an act of the legislature to tax ourselves more to pay for our schools) has a provision attached to lift the caps on charter enrollment and allow appeals of charter denials to the very charter-friendly state board that supposedly oversees them. It means that, practically speaking, there will be almost nothing to stop rampant charter growth that will further drain the district’s budget at a time when we can’t spare another penny. It’s just a new backdoor method to try and completely privatize the district.