Sing no sad songs for the nine charter schools that are ruled ineligible for public funding by the Washington State Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision.
Mercedes Schneider reports that the charters raised $14 million from their friends in the 1% community, enough to keep them going for a year while their friends figure out a way to circumvent the court’s ruling.
We will see how committed their billionaire allies are to charters after one year, or whether their real commitment is to privatization of public money intended for public schools whose doors are open to all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course if their commitment to charters truly is for the children, then the 1%ers should just donate the money (and take their tax writeoffs). Then they can turn out all the world class test takers they want to. Do they really need to turn public education into an investment scheme too? Can’t it just be a totally feel good moment for them?
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Here’s the thing – the Charter Commission, who actually approved most of these charters, is preparing to shut down. THEIR funding will go away. (They had a telephonic meeting today and discussed this.)
The Supreme Court referred the case back to the lower court it came from for what the final disposition will be. That will happen in less tha 20 days. So the Charter Commission will be shut down by the end of September.
Now if all these charters are getting money from private entities, are they still “public” schools? If the Charter Commission shuts down, where is the oversight?
The State – via the Charter Commission – signed a contract with each school.
Is that still valid? Are they private for one year and then what?
I asked the Attorney General these questions but they are still sussing this out.
It’s a hot mess.
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exactly the problem – what is what? I want every education dollar to go straight to public schools – they need all of it to do their best. I do not want any of my taxes skimmed off in profit or lost in fraud.
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Adding- Wall Street, in 2014, received 18% interest return on charter school debt.
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Citation or link, please?
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John Miller of Nuveen, interviewed for WSJ article, by Aaron Kuriloff, on Dec. 28, “The company holds 1.4 billion of charter school bonds…which have returned more than 18% this year.”
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Lord, Linda, that’s a pretty egregious use of ellipses to mislead the reader into thinking that “charter school bonds,” rather than the Nuveen High Yield Municipal Bond Fund, “has returned more than 18% this year.” You even changed “which has returned” to “which have returned” to make the verb agree with “bonds” rather than “Fund.”
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That article shows that one investment firm holds the majority of its $1.4 billion in charter school bonds in a $11 billion dollar municipal bond fund that returned 18% in 2014.
I doubt that Nuveen holds all the charter school bonds in existence, and the article only provides the return for a bigger fund, not the bonds themselves.
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Tim,
When did public schools become a money-making deal for investors?
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Diane, you are the educational historian, not me, but it appears that the first issuance of municipal bonds for the purpose of constructing public schools occurred at some point in the 1840s. So I guess the answer to your question is about 170 years ago.
The New York City Department of Education’s payment to service capital plan debt is $2.4 billion just in 2015-2016 alone. The interest on these bonds is triple tax-exempt and represents profit for investors, who may be institutional behemoths or individuals looking for a safe place to park their money.
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Flerp,
The point to the parsing?
Tim,
“Triple tax exempt”, is that factored into the numbers in the scarce reports or, is that, at the individual reporting level, e.g. tax avoidance by the richest 0.2% ?
We can agree it was refreshing to have one manager of a large charter school debt fund, summarize 2014 earnings and, the WSJ to report it? Gotham charter school funds stated their returns as 7.8% to 48%? Such an interesting topic! Yet, so little willingness to publicly pin down the numbers? Communities, across the nation, send money to Wall Street for charter school debt. Tim and Flerp, your points are that those taxpayers deserve to know the accurate value of their expenditure, through complete disclosure and review? I agree. You wouldn’t waste your time just to comment, here, on the scarce reporting, “No, that number’s not all inclusive or, not mutually exclusive?”
It makes many people happy to obscure/make inadmissible the amount made by Wall Street on charter schools.
Quoting Robinson Jeffers, “The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.” Apparently that’s accurate about the charter school industry.
The “top 25 hedge fund managers make double the amount of all of the kindergarten teachers in the U.S. combined” (Vox). The amount made is, in part based on “one of the most promising investments”, as Wall Street describes, the charter school business. The financial sector, which drags down GDP, is quite an economic scam. If Vox is in error and the amount is not double but,1.95 instead, mea culpa.
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This – in a nutshell – is exactly the problem with Charter Schools. The same 1% who strive mightily to avoid paying their fair share of taxes can raise $14 in the drop of a crown. No expense is too much if it leads to giving them more control over the society.
They just won’t tolerate being a citizen among citizens – they won’t play if they aren’t in charge.
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Why no love for these charter school parents? They all lost their schools after school started:
“At the beginning of 2013, one long-struggling charter school closed. Over the summer, five more did. And in the fall, 11 more Columbus charters closed their doors, most of them brand new.
That’s 17 charter schools in Columbus closed in one year, which records show is unprecedented.”
Actually Columbus public schools could have used the money, seeing as how they were the schools “disrupted” with an unanticipated influx of students.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/01/12/charter-failure.html
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How did the exemplary Fordham avoid responsibility for accommodating all of the displaced students, immediately, without payment? They promoted charters and their “model” is supposedly without flaw. Isn’t it hypocritical of them to expect the public to pay twice? Isn’t it hypocritical of them to expect the schools they subject to unrelenting criticism, to be disrupted by unexpected students?
There must be a word for reformers, who expect a free ride, risk avoidance, and no responsibility for their business plans.
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“There must be a word for reformers, who expect a free ride, risk avoidance, and no responsibility for their business plans.”
Crooks?
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They could donate to these schools to keep them open- projected enrollment was exaggerated by hundreds of students to get the charter and the funding:
“In the past five years, 56 South Florida charter schools have closed, expelling thousands of students. Five charter schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties didn’t survive three months.”
Or they could just donate to Broward public schools- the public schools that took the students after the charters closed with no warning.
http://interactive.sun-sentinel.com/charter-schools-unsupervised/map.html
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Chiara, are you making a data base of this churn? Do you know of anyone who is doing that on a national scale.
I grew up in Florida and note that the closed charters are concentrated on the east coast, one at Miami Beach, but many are clearly in locations where migrant workers in agriculture and service workers for the tourist industry live, literally out of sight. In any case, thanks for these updates. The Columbus Ohio fiascos are in plain view of the state legislators and the governor who thinks he should be President.
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The Sun Sentinel piece I linked is wonderful. Data galore. Ed reformers have all the data they need to fix the charter mess in south Florida. Nothing happens. The charter schools keep opening and closing and the public schools keep taking hit after hit. How are they supposed to plan surrounded by this chaos? What about the rights of the students in those “receiving” public schools to some kind of order and rational governance?
I think the churn in Ohio and Florida calls the charter “demand” numbers I keep reading into question. If they are pulling those numbers from the claims of charter operators in Ohio and Florida they have bad numbers. They exaggerate the demand to get the charter and the funding and the schools are so poorly regulated no one checks the applications at any level.
It was crazy to think thousands of schools could be monitored at the state level. It will never, ever work. They simply don’t have the staff and funding to do it, even if they wanted to and in Ohio and Florida they don’t want to.
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I live in the most conservative part of north Florida near the military bases, and there are few charters here. One cyber charter, Newpoint, shut down in Pensacola recently. There are poor minorities scattered throughout the area, but the charter vultures are not a big force. The working and middle class parents love their public schools and are not trying to look for anything else. Is this by accident or design?
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” He’s either delusional or a huge liar.”
No need for dichotomous thinking in regards to the Jebster. Like all good Bushies he can be both at the same time-it’s in their blood and upbringing.
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If you read the Sun Sentinel piece the public school superintendents are calling “moratoriums” at the district and county level.
They are protecting THEIR students from the effects of this churn, which is THEIR JOB. Why were their students never considered in all this? How is it possible that the ed reform “movement” in Florida did not consider the effect of this on students in public schools? How do you write policy as a responsible adult and completely ignore 70% of students and focus exclusively on the needs, wants and desires of the 30%? It’s nuts. These are systems. Public school students are a part of this, whether they want to be or not.
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What’s worse Jeb thinks his vision has been a success! He’s either delusional or a huge liar.
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Great thread, Chiara. I have been following your consistently-made slant on ‘what about the public schools?’ for a while, & you really sharpen the pencil-point in these entries.
Charter policy affects the whole public school system not just the tiny minority of students attending them. I would like to see every news bulletin of charters being opened or closed with follow-up articles from the ground, citing the immediate effects on the surrounding publics over the subsequent months. Perhaps if taxpayers read regularly of how a 7% tail raises costs and lowers quality for a 93% school-tax dog they’d see the light quicker.
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“retired teacher
September 10, 2015 at 9:27 am
What’s worse Jeb thinks his vision has been a success! He’s either delusional or a huge liar.”
Their won’t be any real analysis of Bush’s record on ed reform, because the only people who would dispute it would be national Democrats and they share the identical approach. It doesn’t benefit them politically to raise questions about Bush’s record when Bush’s approach is identical to Obama’s and (probably) Clinton’s.
Remember The Texas Miracle with George W Bush? Not only wasn’t it called into question, Democrats helped him take that approach national. “Bipartisan” means it’s not in anyone’s political interest to question any of this.
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“bethree5
September 10, 2015 at 9:50 am
Great thread, Chiara. I have been following your consistently-made slant on ‘what about the public schools?’ for a while, & you really sharpen the pencil-point in these entries. ”
I think it’s an extraordinary omission and an omission that to me really calls into question the whole “agnostic” claim. How does Stanford do a study on charter schools that excludes the effects on the public school across the street? How does that happen? Not one lawmaker in Florida said “gosh, those Broward public schools are taking a heck of a beating in this free market experiment we’ve been conducting for a decade”? They’re just the designated “default” system and any negative effects for the kids in that system are completely disregarded? They’re shifting risk so the entire burden falls on public schools. When did the public school kids sign up for that?
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“They’re shifting risk so the entire burden falls on public schools.”
And the big boys always talk about how their rewards should be great since they are the ones taking the risk. No wonder they salivate over charter schools.
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So this is what a debate that includes the effects on public schools looks like:
“As the president of the Dayton Education Association, I can say that we as a body are not opposed to charter schools, per se,” Romick said during the League of Women Voters event at Stivers School for the Arts. “What we are opposed to is the current situation with accountability and funding in Ohio, which in essence penalizes public schools and costs them money to provide for the charter school system.”
Ohio is finally having one, 17 years after charters/vouchers were put in. It shouldn’t take that long. They can’t make all public schools revolve around the needs of 7% of “choice” schools, no matter how much they prefer choice schools. That’s not fair to 93% of students, even if they have grand designs of eradicating our schools, it’s STILL not fair to public school students.
http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/charter-school-panel-agrees-on-need-for-reform/nnbtY/
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The OLIGARCHY has A LOT to lose. Thus this push. It’s about $$$$$ and power with a lot of narcissicism thrown in.
I believe in the separation of church and state. Many crimes have been committed in the name of some religion. HISTORY repeats itself.
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In a few days, it will be the 1 year anniversary of the oral arguments before the Ohio Supreme Court, in a landmark charter school case. Plunderbund reported today, on a 2013 case, in which 10 charter schools sued their operator. White Hat Management, to learn how state funds for their schools were spent. The bigger issue is use of public property to create private assets. The length of delay for a decision is unprecedented.
In Ohio, too many of the justices do the bidding of their political party and wealthy donors. Pockets open and, blind fold, removed.
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