Chris left this comment on the blog so I hope he won’t mind if I post it:
“Florida’s a mess. Here is a story I am working on for Education Matters.
“Gary Chartrand is the chair of the state board of education
“The State Board of Education over sees the Department of Education and hired commissioner Pam Stewart.
“The Department of Education is handing out grants, 3.3 million dollars’ worth to only three winners, to foster partnerships between districts and charter schools.
“Gary Chartrand is on the board of the KIPP charter school in Jacksonville.
“Superintendent Vitti and the Duval County School board (Jacksonville) have applied for the grant. Vitti said, “KIPP is here to stay, and the KIPP expansion will occur with or without the grant,” Vitti said. “If there’s an opportunity to write a grant that benefits KIPP but also the school district, then I think it would be rather foolish financially to walk away from that.”
“Gary Chartrand and the board of KIPP have given thousands and thousands of dollars to six member of the school board and thousands more to have the seventh Paula Wright defeated.
“WJCT Jacksonville’s public radio station did what I consider a puff piece on the district applying for the charter grant that left out a lot of important information. They didn’t mention that last year KIPP was protected by the states rule saying schools could only drop one letter grade, a rule that Chartrand had a hand in developing. KIPP’s real school grades are F, B, C(D) B. They also didn’t mention how KIPP spends about a third more per pupil, has longer days, smaller classes, requires its parents to at least be marginally involved and may or may not be counseling out under performers, only 64 of its first class of 88 finished. The piece made it sound like that KIPP is just better.
“The Chartrand foundation at least partially funds WJCT’s education coverage.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One could find the same rats nest here in Indianapolis with the IPS board elections, all of the mindtruster, tfa, ed reform spin off groups, our appointed school board, our ex tony who was appointed in Florida before having to resign, (does his wife still have her position with the charter company down there? She left her appointed position at Marion (appointed by the State Board of Ed’s appoitned D. Elsener who is president of Marion College and close tony/mitch/t huston friend) when tony lost and moved to Florida). And our tie in through t huston, now an elected state official in a non-contested district, who was on the State Board, then deputy chief of staff to tony, then employee of software company that sold big money product to state doe/tony, then elected official who also works for–the college board-and who pushes common core and all the rest of the college board products in Indiana. And of course the local Indy Star pushes anything charter/choice/voucher as long as it is not research based. A real rats nest. Follow the money.
Beware of anything called “a partnership,”at least in the realm of brokering deals for the education Bid-ness.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
As I am following names and acronyms, I’m finding that it’s a tangled web. MA commissioner of ed. is Mitchell Chester, on the governing board of PARCC, helped develop Common Core, a hero with Foundation for Excellence in Ed. which gets money from Gates, etc., has partnered with TNTP (Michelle Rhee and money from Gates) to come up with the new evals. here in MA which will probably include student evals. attaching to whether a teacher gets to keep their job/license. If you look at our state DOE site, there are footnotes attributed to the Gates Foundation. I could go on and on. It’s incestuous and we can not know who is doing what to us or when. New regulations just pop up, because they were hitched to a former grant and the public just doesn’t know what’s coming. These folks are so in each others pockets.
I think it;s a sad state of affairs that they only way public schools can get any attention from lawmakers is to piggyback on their fascination with and laser-like focus on charter schools.
I think it’s a dereliction of duty, and I don’t much care if our current crop of lawmakers don’t value existing schools and would prefer a charter system. If they want to promote charter schools they can work for one of the 5000 charter promotion orgs. People are paying them, and they aren’t paying them to weaken and (eventually) “defeat” their local public schools. No one signed up for that when we were sold ed reform.
Also, read the fine print and make sure there is at least one person who is actually working on behalf of the public schools in this “partnership”.
A one-time grant that loads the public school system with a continuing duty and expense that will far exceed the value of the grant is no bargain.
Read the terms. God knows the charter will have an advocate at the table. Maybe the public schools could hire one, since the people we elect seem to have gone missing as far as public schools.
So this is what I’m talking about. It’s a grant of 1.5 million to Cleveland Public Schools to administer a Cami Anderson system of school choice.
1.5 million isn’t a lot of money. How much is this going to cost Cleveland Public Schools and Ohio citizens over time? Are public entities taking on all the duty and continuing expense for these “gifts”?
We need real advocates for our schools. People who look a gift horse in the mouth before accepting the money.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/06/clevelands_mingling_of_charter.html
Thank you for featuring this information. Chris Guerreri is a great advocate here in FL and works tirelessly to provide transparency in education. It is nice to see his words elevated. This is a serious issue.
Ditto GatorBonBC