Peter Greene writes that Maryland’s new Republican Governor, Larry Hogan, wrote charter legislation to make more charters with minimal regulation, accountability or transparency.
His “bill would let charters hire and fire staff at will (Maryland’s charter teachers are actually employed by the local district). Teachers wouldn’t have to be certified. Charters would have more ability to pick and choose students. Charters would get more money per student and also get a shot at construction funding. Perhaps most importantly, charters would finally have a recourse if mean old local school boards turned them down; they would be able to appeal to the State Board of Education to override the decision of local elected officials.”
The Democratic-controlled legislature had qualms about unleashing free-market charters. It substantially watered down Hogan’s bill. The pro-privatization Center for Education Reform was very upset.
Even better, the legislature eliminated Hogan’s wish to authorize online charter schools in Maryland. This is a top priority for ALEC, as it allows for-profit corporations like K12 (which is active in ALEC) to make big money while producing poor results for students. Studies by CREDO in Pennsylvania (comparing public schools, charter schools, and virtual charter schools, of which the last was the worst) and by the National Education Policy Center, as well as investigations by the Bloomberg News, the New York Times and the Washington Post have found online charters to have terrible outcomes (low test scores, low graduation rates, high dropout rates). Yet every one of the privatization organizations quoted in this article bemoans the legislature’s failure to siphon money off to the for-profit, low-performing sector of virtual charters.
Score one for public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately, the future of certified teachers looks glum. If the reform movement is successful, the professional teachers will be out of a job and amateur hour will reign. They’ll be hiring off the streets (they do that now for substitute teachers where “some college” is a good enough qualification).
So, welcome to the future (or back to the past) where a formal teacher education is unnecessary – after all, anyone can teach. We all have experience – we were once students – so that makes us experts in the field.
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“The School not Taken” (with apologies to Robert Frost)
Two schools diverged in a neighborhood,
And sorry I could not fund them both
And be one bureaucrat, long I stood
And put down public as much as I could
Until it bent from the blunder-growth;
Then took the charter, as much more fair,
And having no doubt the better claim,
Because it was classy and vaunted “career”;
(Though as for that, the grad rate there
Had ranked them really about the same)
And both that morning unequally lay
(For first, “No Child” had trodden black)
Oh, I closed the first for the charter way!
And knowing how pay leads on to pay,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be taking much of the blame
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two schools diverged in a hood, and shame—
I took the one with charter name,
And that has made all the difference.
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Bravo!
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I’d give you a standing ovation, but my corporate overlords would beat me.
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I don’t deserve much credit.
Frost’s “Road” is actually pretty all-encompassing.
All I did was change a few words here and there.
Frost is one of my favorite poets — second only to Dr. Seuss (I bet you couldn’t tell)
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You have a real gift.
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If the revisions of ESEA pass (and that seems likely) then state legislators–with support from ALEC and foundations and various lobbies–will be well-poised to rebrand many current USDE policies that have allowed charters, on-line, and “innovative” programs to flourish, but with even less regulation…or regulations that prohibit public objections and reversals.
Laws that prohibit changing x,y, z, laws function as pre-emptive gag rules and constraints.
There is also the prospect that enthusiasms for Republican candidates will lead to a president and congress eager to support a National Right To Work law. That would kill the fledgling interest in unions by some TFA and charter teachers…indeed the whole labor movement, not just unions for teachers.
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I don’t think any of that “innovation fund” is going to land in an actual classroom, and with the DC disdain for public schools, I doubt any of it lands anywhere near a public school.
Another big slush fund for the 5000 ed reform groups.
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It occurs to me that next week is Teacher Appreciation Week.
May 5 is the official day.
I will be wearing a black arm band to invite conversations about the status of public school teachers and policies for public schools that are designed to label students and schools as failures.
Creatives might have other ideas, but the opportunity should not be lost to point out the GAP between a once a year polite thingy–with marketing of apple- motifs on cards and gifts including apple-shaped paper weights in full sway, also a long-standing favorite for female teachers a little bottle of “Evening in Paris” perfume–and policies intended to demean the work of teachers, reify test scores as if these are unimpeachable evidence of student and teacher success, and the imposition of cuts in budgets while demanding “Results, not excuses.”
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Instead of (or in addition to) an arm band, how about a t-shirt that says “Teach to the person, not to the Pearson”?
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“Teach to the Person”
Teach to the person
Not to the Pearson
Pearson immersion
Is person perversion
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It’s National Charter Schools Week so you know where the Kasich and Obama Administration will be focusing.
We should start something local to celebrate public schools. God knows no one in government is interested, other than having our kids churn out test scores. Since Common Core testing is over and the tests are in the can, we’ll see them return to the laser-like focus on charters/vouchers.
Public schools had that brief moment in the sun when they were delivering “data” 🙂
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Diane – I propose that the next NPE conference be held somewhere convenient for our resident poet to attend and Saturday’s luncheon entertainment could be a poetry slam. And he can have some t-shirts on sale to boot.
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This is a new series out of Ohio that focuses NOT just on charters but on system-wide effects of charters in Ohio. I felt like cheering when I saw it because I don’t know how it happened that public schools, the schools 90% of children attend, became something no one in policy or lawmaking in this state gives ANY consideration to. That’s ridiculous.
“But all the data — and I mean all the data — demonstrate emphatically that Ohio’s charter school system overall is the exact “debacle” national observers have claimed. But it’s not just a debacle for kids in charters. It’s also really bad for kids who aren’t in charters — a story not often told, let alone known.”
We have a nationally-known ed reform group headquartered in this state. One would think they might have looked at what happens to the 90% of kids in this state who DON’T attend charter schools as a result of their laser-like focus on “choice”, but they never did.
Schools are systems. It’s time to look at the effects on the “other” school system- the public one that was here when the reformers arrived. I don’t even care if lawmakers and policy makers don’t especially LIKE public schools. They have a duty to do their jobs and look at system-wide effects of their experiments.
http://www.10thperiod.com/2015/04/ohio-charters-just-dont-work-part-i.html
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Yes, the Maryland legislature – based in Annapolis (a world away) watered down the poison pushed by the education profiteers, but charter CEO’s still pay themselves fortunes of taxpayers money – How many times the living wage does one charter salesperson deserve?
Together with their real estate developer mogul friends (the “non-profit foundations” who support them) they are so willing to “transform” schools, at an obscene profit (and using out-of-state laborers!) when they’ve stood by and allowed Baltimore, and our existing schools, to implode.
In fact, public schools all over town have charters to thank for taking money away from their schools, and helping to further segregation and desperation in every neighborhood.
Cooler heads in the legislature prevailed, this time. Let’s hope it continues despite an overreacting Republican governor who sees us as a place to hyper-police, complete with National Guard troops and de-facto martial law, as he cuts funding for Baltimore’s poorest people.
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This is the fifteenth article I have posted at the current affairs forum at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, labeling it as “information you will not read in the PD”. There is a similar problem with the public radio site, which somehow got taken over by former Post Dispatch big shots Mr. and Mrs. Freidmeyer. The ironic thing is……as they slam (or simply ignore) all attempts to tell what is happening with the privatization and re- segregation of Missouri’s urban public schools………they take pride in how much right wing idiocy they put up with.
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