Sarah Lahm tells the story here of how parents and teachers joined together to block the takeover of the St. Paul, Minnesota, school board by Teach for America.
Members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers worked closely with parents to field a parent slate, which was ultimately victorious. There was no out-of-state money in the race. This was a stark contrast with the school board elections in Minneapolis in 2014. That election was a TFA sweep, filed by $300,000 in mostly out-of-state contributions from friends of TFA.
Can grassroots collaboration beat big money? The answer is not definitive. But it seems certain that big money will always win unless parents and teachers stand together.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
2014 Minneapilis school board race was not a swipe got reformers. With all the out state money they got only one out of the two district wide seats. The other district wide seat and the area seats went to candidates supported by the teachers.
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Encouraging news. Yes the can!
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Thank you for highlighting the work of Sarah Lahm. She is currently the only journalist out there who will take on big money in Minneapolis education: http://www.brightlightsmallcity.com
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As Tip O’Neill noted, “all politics is local.” It’s interesting to read that parents and teachers joined together together to block the takeover of the St. Paul School Board by Teach for America.”
Having been deeply involved in this school board election as a parent and community member, working closely with teacher and union officials, my perception is that there was no effort whatever by TFA to “take over” the local board.
The central issues were the local board and superintendent’s disdain for teachers and disrespect for many families. District leadership insisted that it was promoting a agenda to achieve greater equity…but what this meant in practice was millions spent bringing in outside consultants to promoted “courageous conversations” about race issues. Sadly, these consultants offered virtually no suggestions about how to improve what happened day to day in classrooms.
The result was an unprecedented rejection of all three school board incumbents, including the school board chair, when they asked for endorsement of the DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) Party, which had endorsed them in a previous election.
Frustrations with the district leadership led thousands of students to leave the district in the last 5 years. Parents, families and educators joined together to resoundingly reject the incumbents. It had nothing to do with blocking a “takeover of the St. Paul, Mn school board by Teach for America.”
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What’s TFA say? Wait, a former state chair wrote, in an Ohio publication this week, that charter schools are public schools. So, should we believe TFA is truthful? The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that charter school assets, bought by taxpayers don’t belong to taxpayers nor the community, they belong to the charter operator. When G.E. gets a contract from the U.S.A.F., the company doesn’t become part of the public sector and neither do charter schools.
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Linda, we agree that assets purchased with public funds should revert to other public schools if a charter closes. That’s a part of Minnesota’s charter law and is part of the model law that we suggest to others.
Re the GE metaphor…State laws don’t specify GE as part of the public sector. They do include charters as part of the state’s public education system.
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The truth of my analogy trumps your description of a wannabe state law. Private businesses, which own assets, are only indirectly answerable to customers, a description that matches charter schools. The sole power customers have, is to stop buying from the entity. In contrast, public entities are accountable to elected representatives and, by law, held to higher standards of propriety
Charter schools are a abominable contrivance, mined by schemers and politicians, looking for payoffs. The legal construct for private business has, as a foundation, the direct link between its funders and management. Without the creation of costly bureaucratic and enforcement avenues (i.e. profligate spending at taxpayer expense, rife with opportunities for fraud), charters exist in a lawless and unaccountable landscape, which is just what schemers and politicians, looking for payoffs, want.
The primary difference between charter schools and private business, is the vulture foundations, that created the product and bought influence in the national and state capitols to cram it down the throats of unsuspecting citizens.
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Rosa Parks apparently disagreed, as she helped set up charters in Detroit. A vast array of people who have been involved in civil rights efforts have helped start charters.
It’s also true that some very unethical people have been attracted to the charter movement.
Public schools, district & charter tend to attract some of the very best people in the country. They also attract people eager to “make a buck” for whom service to students is not a priority.
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State laws governing charter schools speak out of both sides of their mouths, as do charter touts like Joe Nathan.
The state laws often do explicitly state that charters are public schools, in order to cover up and misdirect away from what they also say, which is that they are entirely private entities funded with taxpayer dollars.
Factor in the practices of virtually all charter schools when it comes to things like teacher unionization efforts, student enrollment and retention, asset ownership, conflict of interest regulations, etc., and Mr. Nathan’s willful naivete (or is it just dissembling?) is exposed yet again.
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Rev. Jesse Jackson, “A report from the Center for Media and Democracy on charter schools…reports that some $3.7 billion in federal money has been larded onto charter schools in the past two decades with virtually no accountability. The result is often a simple rip-off…(The Progressive Populist Dec. 1, 2015).
Did Rosa Parks also oppose worker collectives, as you do?
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I’m a strong supporter of teacher collaboratives. We’ve worked closely with local teacher unions to convince legislators to provide startup funds for teacher led district public schools.
But the key point of this page was about what happened in the St Paul School Board election. A number of people including me, worked closely with the local teachers union to defeat the incumbents on the school board. TFA was not an issue.
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State politicians currying favor with schemers, can call a duck, a moose. It doesn’t make it true.
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