The arrogance of the charter industry is getting to be boundless. They want the authority to expand without limits, with no accountability or transparency.
If the Democrats don’t stand up to this brazen effort to privatize public education, who will?
Steven Singer writes here about the latest raid on the public treasury in Pennsylvania.
Singer writes:
Fund my charter school.
Come on, Pennsylvania.
Let me just swipe tax dollars you set aside to educate your children and put them into my personal bank account as profit.
Please!
I’ll be your best friend. Or at least I’ll be your legislator’s best friend.
Chances are, I already am.
That’s why lawmakers in Harrisburg are once again looking to pass a school code bill (House Bill 530) that would let charter schools expand exponentially almost completely unchecked and without having to do any of that nasty, sticky accountability stuff you demand of your traditional public schools.
Sure there are a few provisions in there to make charters fill out more paperwork, but the benefits for privatization and profitization of your child’s education are huge!
For me, that is. For your child, not so much.
For instance, the proposed legislation would set up a charter school funding advisory commission. This august body would have many duties including the ability to authorize charter schools in your local school district.
No longer would prospective charter operators have to come before your duly-elected board members and plead and beg to set up shop and suck away hard to come by education funding. They could just appear before the commission and sidestep your local democracy completely.
Who will be on this commission? I’m glad you asked.
We’ve got eight legislators. Got to give THEM a voice. But they’re usually pretty cheap. A few bucks in the re-election campaign and we’ll be golden. We’ll also have the state secretary of education and the chairman of the state board. We’ve got to make the thing look legit, right?
But here’s the best part! We’ll have four public education representatives and FIVE representatives of the charter school industry!
Isn’t that great!? There are significantly more traditional public schools throughout the state, but they’ll have less representation on the commission! It’s stacked with charter friendly votes! The forces of privatization have a built-in majority! Ring the dinner bell, Baby! Once this bill gets passed, it’s charter school time all across the Commonwealth!
Once a charter school is authorized, it can expand as much as it wants, without the local district’s permission. It can even enroll students from outside the district and charge the district!
Worse, the bill authorizes “education savings accounts,” a euphemism for vouchers.
Is the Pennsylvania legislature is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ALEC and the privatization movement.
The Network for Public Education is encouraging people who live in Pennsylvania to be informed and get involved. Don’t let them destroy public education that your community paid for. The schools belong to the public–or they should. Don’t let the privatizers take them away.
If you live in Pennsylvania, please, contact your legislators and ask them to oppose this terrible bill. The Network for Public Education has made it very easy. Just click HERE and you can shoot off a letter to your representatives in moments.
Oppose HB 530. Fight for public education.
People should have tumbled to the game by now.
I called it the Defense Industry Model (DIM).
That spiel about the Nation At Risk should have been our first clue …
This is another harmful bill from Pennsylvania’s corrupt legislature. This bill allows for exponential charter proliferation. While it has some perfunctory provisions on charter accountability, it is all smoke and mirrors. If the legislature won’t do its job, I hope Governor Wolf will veto it. http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.blogspot.com/
Pennsylvania’s charter sector is as bad as Ohio’s charter sector. Ed reform dumps all the garbage in less fashionable states. We get the for profits and the crooks and the cheap “ed tech” experiments.
“For instance, the proposed legislation would set up a charter school funding advisory commission. This august body would have many duties including the ability to authorize charter schools in your local school district.”
In Ohio they’re going to run up against some state law that makes elected representation to levy local taxes mandatory.
School boards aren’t just a theory that ed reformers can pitch in the trash as “traditionalist” and replace with a corporate governance structure. They’re the democratic check on levying local taxes. They get their authority to levy local property taxes FROM the election, FROM the people. That’s where the power comes from.
It’s not just schools either. Our county public health agency can put forth a tax. They can ONLY do this because they have an elected board. School districts can actually conduct tax audits in Ohio. They can audit a business because they are a “taxing authority”. That power didn’t come from an appointed charter management entity. It came from an election.
The (incredibly arrogant) assumption in ed reform seems to be that all these powers and responsibilities came about for no reason, that no one thought this through and grounded it in certain principles and basic ideas, but that’s not true. The hubris is takes to just throw 150 years of lessons learned in the trash and replace it with their “genius” and “disruption” is just amazingly reckless to me.
They better be the Best and Brightest they claim to be since they’re fundamentally reshaping state and local governance. “Unintended consequences” be damned, get out of the way of the innovators!
Reblogged this on Mister Journalism: "Reading, Sharing, Discussing, Learning" and commented:
Diane Ravitch writes:
The arrogance of the charter industry is getting to be boundless. They want the authority to expand without limits, with no accountability or transparency. If the Democrats don’t stand up to this brazen effort to privatize public education, who will? Steven Singer writes here about the latest raid on the public treasury in Pennsylvania. Singer writes: Fund my charter school.
Did lawmakers in Pennsylvania ever get around to passing funding for the unfashionable public school sector, or is it all charters all the time, like in Ohio?
I laughed out loud at Illinois ed reformers. They recently announced public schools will “open” in the fall! Congratulations all around.
Christ. Talk about low expectations. They’re patting themselves on the back for keeping the schools that serve 95% of children “open”. That’s all we can expect out of ed reform- “open”. Public schools will not actually be shuttered in September.
Maybe we should hire some people who are competent at the jobs they’re paid to do and then we can graduate to “innovation”.
Thanks to the NEP. For making it easy for people with little time, perhaps with little savvy, to send messages to legislators.
Ed reform might set some…interesting precedents. Is “no taxation without representation” on the bullet-point list to be done away with?
A lot of these charter management entities are national. Can they take taxes collected for schools in Ohio and build a school in Pennsylvania? Can they borrow on an Ohio taxpayer funded building and build a school in Arizona?
How can a public system in Toledo compete with a “public” system that can build and expand in any state? Or, can public schools in Toledo open a “Toledo Public Schools” franchise in Lansing, Michigan?
The Best and the Brightest might want to slow down and ask some questions before jumping. The echo chamber they’ve created seems to not do a whole lot of thinking.
At the very least the political actors have a duty to warn the public they’ve decided to “reinvent governance” and exclude any democratic interference.
The echo chamber had a terrifying brush with people OUTSIDE the echo chamber when two of the news outlets they read (NPR and the NYTimes) wrote critical pieces on charters.
Apparently none of them read local media, because the Detroit Free Press has been covering the Michigan charter mess for years. It has to make the NYTimes to come to their attention. Not all that surprising, since none of these people live in the unfashionable cities and states they’re “reforming”.
Anyway, the echo chamber troops rallied to demonize the reporters, and they have discovered this:
“I think the education reform community has at times over-promised on what charter schools can do, and this opens charters up to criticism when they don’t meet these promises, even if they are performing better than the traditional system.”
Ya think? You mean 20 years of wildly over-promoting charter success while either bashing or ignoring public schools is a..problem? Running around comparing charter “secret sauce” to “government schools” and “crumbling prisons” was maybe a tad…skewed?
I’m confident media will learn their lesson and publish nothing further that is critical of ed reform, and the echo chamber will remain intact. On to reinventing governance!
https://relinquishment.org/2016/07/04/who-is-the-villain-why/
Quicklink: Pennsylvania Legislators Want You to Foot the Bill for Unimpeded Charter School Growth With Little Accountability | OpEdNewshttp://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Pennsylvania-Legislators-W-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Accountability_Charter-School-Failure_Education_Fraud-160705-496.html#comment605287
My comment (has embedded links at the quicklink)
“Like I have been saying there for many years, the war on public education continues, as the charlatans who run education in this nation sell ‘the marketplace’ as a way to financed education… which by the way– is essential for the’common good’ as the Constitution’s preamble promotes, and which the billionaires ignore.
“Capitalism as an economic system was never meant to put everything onto the market. If they could create a market place for air, they will do it…they already are privatizing water supplies.
The MEDIA which is totally owned by the perpetrators of the destruction…the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
If you are one of my fans, you have heard me say this before: public schools are disappearing and with it the road to income equality as well as a democracy. Shared knowledge is a requirement for a democracy! When Billionaire Koch can write North Carolina’s social studies curricula….. it is OVER!
https://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/07/civics-lessons-financed-by-the-koch-brothers/
See my series on privatization, using information that Diane Ravitch provides
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=PRIVITIZATION
about Reform which deforms public education
https://dianeravitch.net/category/corporate-reformers/
about the state legislatures https://dianeravitch.net/?s=legislature
which are taking over the local schools, with nary an educator on board, and giving them to charters, with not a shred of oversight!
Here is a link to Diane’s posts on charter school corruption https://dianeravitch.net/?s=charter+school+failure