Do you have 3 minutes towatch a video?
Watch this graphic video and share it with your friends when they ask you what a charter is.
It explains in clear visuals how charters operate and how they hurt public schools by draining away the students chosen by the charter and the resources that previously funded the community’s public school.
The he video was commissioned by the Network for Public Education. Help it go viral. Share it. Tweet it. Put it on Facebook.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Simple also means simplistic. No monopoly in history has ever reformed itself. There are lots of problems with disruption and many charters not up to the the challenge. But many are – it seems to be a wash. 60 years of reform has failed. Urban schools are in crisis. So – how does this video help address the complex challenge of shifting an obsolete, calcified, disengaged and ofter corrupt public school system?
M Rex Miller,
Where is your proof, your documentation that the community based, transparent, democratic, non-profit pbulic educaiton system is corrupt,omelette, calcified and disengaged?
You allege that the public schools are a monopoly. If the public education system in the United States is a monopoly, then democracy is a monopoly.
You are totally wrong because by definition, the traditional public schools are not a monopoly and will never be a monopoly.
Monopoly definition: The exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.
Standard Oil under John D. Rockefeller was a monopoly because it controlled 88% of refined oil flows in the United States. At the turn of the century, the company cotnr9olled 92% of oil production and 85% of its final sales. The U.S. government under President Teddy Roosevelt ended that monopoly in the early 20th century.
You might want to educate yourself about real monopolies.
http://www.therichest.com/business/companies-business/six-enormous-monopolies-past-and-present/?view=all
There is no way in HELL that traditional public educatoin can be a monopoly because of the fact that traditional public education is controlled by each state and not the federal government, corporation or several corporations.
In addition, there are more than 15,000 public school districts in the United States divided up among the 50 states (not counting U.S. territories), and most of those school districts are led by democratically elected school boards. Unlike a monopoly, each school and/or school district makes its own decisions on what textbooks to use and each state has its own education codes to guide those traditional public school districts.
Traditional public schools are democratic institutions where parents and voters have a say. Private sector corporations do not allow that. Private sector corporations are autocratic and not democratic.
But the Common Core Crap and the (PARCC) high stakes testing industry clearly want or wanted to control the entire process for all of those schools where teachers, children and parents have no say on what materials and lesson plans they are allowed to teach. Pearson, for instance, wants to control the entire process so every teacher and every child/student has to use the materials the copyright and profit off of. At the end of the road, there is no choice under the corporate education, for profit, reform movement.
Traditional public schools by law must be transparent.
Corporate charter schools are outside of that law in most if not all states and this for profit industry that is not community based and is not democratic is fighting tooth and nail to stay opaque and behind the laws that were created through the democratic process.
I taught in California in traditional public schools for thirty years (1975-2005) and I witnessed the district where I worked reform itself repeatedly. There was top down micromanaged reform and then there was reform from the bottom up that came from hard working caring teachers who often had the support of parents. In California, reform is mandated by state law. Teachers are required to continue to educate themselves every year on the latest materials and methods. The district where I worked also had its own staff development school in one building on one of the grade school campuses where teachers went to learn new methods and be introduced to new materials that could be introduced into the classroom and lessons that were being taught. A fully funded traditional public school district has wrap around services with nurses, counselor, sports, extra curricular activates, after school tutoring from teachers and other students that volunteered to help students in the library that were being in math and Englsih.
Our own daughter was one of those volunteer student tutors in her traditional public high school in the district where we lived. Our own daughter attended nothing but public schools K – 12 and she was accepted to Stanford where she graduated in 2014.
The traditional public schools in the United States will never be part of a monopoly like Standard Oil was. It would be impossible for that to happen since those schools are community based, transparent and democratic. Even though Arne Duncan as Secretary or State under President Obama attempted to become the first CEO of America’s traditional public schools through Obama’s Race to the Top crap, he failed and the 50 states still decide how their schools work.
Read reporter Doug Livingston’s charter school articles, at the Akron Beacon Journal and, read Plunderbund’s posts. You’ll learn about the fleecing of Ohio taxpayers, by Ohio’s corrupt politicians and their campaign-funding charter school operators. To learn about the charter schools’ abysmal academic performance, go to KnowYourCharter.com, whose data is unassailable.
You want to witness monopoly, read about Z-berg, Gates and Pearson’s for-profit, retailer, Bridge International Academies. A Gates funded organization explained the goal of charter school rephorm. ” To develop charter management organizations that produce a diverse supply of different brands on a large scale.”
I watched this great video and wanted to share it on one or more of my Blogs but, correct me if I’m wrong, it can’t be embedded on another site because it isn’t available on You Tube.
This video sells equity but not excellence. Equity is not excellence. Perhaps that’s what’s missing from the public school pitch (and values), that equity is more important to public schools than excellence, whereas the general public, the ‘consumers’ so to speak, of the education product, set a higher value on excellence than on equity.
Why was Susan Schwartz fired if not for the reason that her administration couldn’t stand the excellence which her classroom practice evidenced?
In my personal experience with public schools there was mostly adequacy, but never excellence, and the deviations from adequacy were notable down spikes rather than up spikes. The 8th grade shop teacher who never taught but left the boys unsupervised while he listened to baseball with the janitor in the boiler room. The superannuated close-to-retirement fifth grade teacher who didn’t teach, but just handed out dittoed work sheets. The third grade first-year teacher so ill prepared to cope with a student thirsty for learning that she had to send him to the library to read on his own to get rid of his vocal disruption in the classroom, something we didn’t learn until March. An AP English teacher who assigned One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest as the last book of the semester and whose ‘final exam’ was to come to class dressed as one of the characters.
These teacher failures are all forgivable in human terms, but not institutionally. Perhaps if the ethos of the public school systems generally focused on excellence rather than equity, the depredations of the charter movement to their funding would meet more resistance. But, my guess is that the public, more hopeful than realistic, says to itself, “Why not try something new (which sounds good) rather than defend what is at best a second rate monopoly operation.”
Maybe even just the freedom of choice of schools makes charters and vouchers seem better academically than they in fact are, when opposed to the image of bureaucratic monopoly which the public school systems exhibit. Big government and bureaucracy and monopoly always leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. The bathroom brouhaha launched nationally last Friday by the Federal Department of Education is the most recent example of government overreach, which sounds fine in principle—to prevent discrimination, an always noble goal—but becomes ridiculous in practice because the regulation for schools is in direct contradiction to the assumption underlying Title IX that sex is real and not a subjective gender identity.
The Detroit Public School system has been all but destroyed by charters which have siphoned away students, and therefore money via state foundation grants, so that in the public system there are now only 49,000 students while the charters in the city enroll roughly 54,000 students. There have been calls in Lansing to charterize the whole district. When the DPS teachers held a two day sick-out to protest threats of non-payment over the summer for staff on a 12 month plan (perhaps a publicity ploy by the emergency manager to put pressure on the state legislature to act on education funding bills), the charters remained open. Whatever way you look at it, the public system seemed a lot less interested in children than in its teachers’ rights, totally legitimate though those rights to get paid for their already done work were.
If the public schools in general had an avowed culture of excellence, as in Finland, perhaps the public would not let the charters get away with what amounts to thievery from the public school systems.
Anecdotes make poor policy. I have found people complaining about their teachers of yesteryear where not the most motivated, respectful, nor responsible students and tend to blame others rather than take personal responsibility. Pressed further, they’ll admit they didn’t do homework, acted up in class, ignored the teachers’ help. Honestly, America can blame teachers all day long for every social ill, but it solves nothing. Learning is a two way street.
America does not want excellent teachers, only cheap teachers. Teachers have not had control over their classrooms since “A Nation at Risk” was published decades ago to stoke American paranoia and fear. If you truly want excellence, support and pay for it.
Granted that good kids do well in public schools, but these episodes all happened to me, my children, or grandchildren. I am merely speculating that my limited number of illustrative anecdotes may tell us something broadly about the priorities of the schools in general and customer reaction to them. Generally, a business strives for excellence FIRST and then gets rewarded for it. Part of the problem may also be the indirect supervision provided by democratically elected school boards (often teacher elected) choosing superintendents, choosing principals, choosing teachers, with excellence being a secondary priority behind cost and social mandates, e.g. diversity.
“Generally, a business strives for excellence FIRST and then gets rewarded for it.”
A business sells a product or service and the customers that reward a business that strives for excellence are not mandated to shop. No one has to shop if they don’t want to.
But k-12 public education is mandatory and there are students, for whatever reason, that do not want to be there and resent being forced to go learn so they rebel by not learning. Excellence is not going to win over many that thinks like that.
There are many excellent, well qualified, dedicated teachers in public education, and there are many excellent public schools. We rarely hear about them because they don’t have their own PR firm or spin doctors on speed dial. Many public schools are dedicated to access, equity and excellence. Not all excellence can be expressed in the narrow form of test scores. Many teachers go way beyond the scope of their contractual obligations to help their students. I have witnessed the work of wonderful art, music, PE, special education, ESL teachers, guidance counselors, school nurses, social workers you will never see celebrated for their “scores.” I have watched them give freely of their time and personal income to help students in need.
The film answers the important questions. Well-done NPE.
Ohio’s charter school grades are much worse than those shown in the film. We have the for-profit, on-line debacles, like K-12 Inc., designed to make men like convicted financier, Michael Milkin wealthy. Charter school- generated dollars come at the expense of kids, communities and taxpayers.
Well done. Just wish there had been a little more explanation of HOW charters keep out the hard-to-educate kids.
Astronauts, Mark and Scott Kelly, just had a N.J. public elementary school named after them. How long will it exist before the community is forced to turn it over to private charter school operators, who can change its name to Bernie Madoff, on a whim?
Our school district renamed Aurora 7 Elementary School (named after local astronaut Scott Carpenter’s spacecraft) in the heady reform days of “focus” schools, when public schools began to compete against one another. The building now houses two schools, a Core Knowledge school, and an “Arts Integrated” school. So I think it is entirely possible for the NJ school to be swallowed by a charter school. Perhaps it could be called “the Borg” (for Trekkie fans).
Reblogged this on rjknudsen.
This video makes a lot of good points, but implies that all charter schools are managed by for-profit corporations, which is not the case.
Yes, some are labeled non-profits that rent from a for profit corporation that controls/owns the non profit charter school, etc.
For instance, Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy is labeled a non profit, but she pays herself about $500,000 annually. Eva managed a staff of about 1,000 and as of mid 2015, her charter schools had about 9,000 students.
For a comparison, the Chancellor of New York City’s non-profit public schools has an annual salary of a little more than $200,000 to manage 1,800 schools with more than one million students with 135,000 full time employees in the New York City’s public schools.
Eva has a great non profit position, and she doesn’t have to pay rent for the public owned spaces she uses to earn her half million dollars a year.
I understand and agree, but this does not speak to my point of how the video paints every charter school as a vehicle to enrich the 1%.
Every corporate or chain charter school enriches someone, and if that school focuses on technology to do most of the teaching, like scripted computerized lessons (that’s what they mean by personalized learning) they indirectly enrich the corporations that produce a product that is designed to replace professional highly qualified public school teachers.
For instance Pearson. Every time a student takes one of their tests, they get paid. And every time a teacher candidate takes their test that the candidate must past to become a teacher, Pearson gets paid.
You must not be a regular follower of this blog. If you were, you’d already know this.
Publicly funded private sector charters are mostly non-union, pay teaches on average, more than $10,000 less annually and require teachers to work longer days.
The 1 percent, or 0.1 percent would be more correct, own most of the stock in and control most of the corporations.
For instance:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/pearson-education-new-york-testing-_b_1850169.html
In addition, “Gates and Pearson Partner to Reap Tens of Millions from Common Core”
http://blog.heartland.org/2014/11/gates-and-pearson-partner-to-reap-tens-of-millions-from-common-core/
Thank you for the reply. The sources you cite do not indicate that the test taking behemoths affect charter schools any more so than neighborhood schools.
I suggest you start reading a few books for the answers that will educate you on the differences between community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public schools and the other education system that came out of NCLB, RTTT, and the Common Core Crap. I’m not going to be your teacher! Do you hear me?
I suggest you start with Diane’s bestselling books.
The other school system I’m talking about is the autocratic, often opaque, fraudulent, that cheery picks students and facts, for profit and non-profit (it doesn’t matter which one someone makes money), often inferior or the same corporate charter schools that uses abusive bully tactics to control children and break their spirit and any chance they will end up loving reading and learning.
Many traditional public schools have been closed and the teachers fired when they are labeled failures based on those Common Core Crap high stakes tests while many failing corporate charters have been allowed to stay open for years regardless of how horrible they have failed. It seems that it takes only an FBI investigation with a court verdict to close these schools, but the traditional public schools can be closed based on secretive tests that profit a corporation like Pearson. The Common Core and its high stakes tests were steeped in secrecy and opaqueness during their develop and after they were used as weapons against the real schools.
Once you finish reading Diane’s books, read “The Teacher Wars” by Dana Goldstein.
When you have finished your homework, I expect a 1,000 word essay that focuses on what you learned. It will not be an Op-Ed. Then I will assign the next list of books for you to read.
Your tone is confusing, at best; belligerent at worst. This to a potential ally attempting to engage in civil discourse who is frequenting a site for the first (and last) time that you obviously care deeply about. Look in the mirror. Peace.
Read the books and then comment.