John Oliver, who has a regular show on HBO, devoted a big chunk of his program last night to explaining the frauds perpetrated by unregulated and unsupervised charter schools. He also reminds his viewers that the language of competition and choice is a hoax when talking about education. You will see charters opening and closing like shoe stores in a mall. You will see charter owners fattening their bank accounts at the expense of the children. You will see charter operators plagiarizing their applications from others.
Readers of this blog will see some familiar scams–in Philadelphia, Florida, and Ohio, for example–but even you might be surprised by some of the stories he shows and documents.
With enough time, he might have devoted an entire hour to the scams in California, Texas, Indiana, and elsewhere.
But the great thing about his show is that this is the first time that a major media outlet has demonstrated the bipartisan consensus that supports frauds.
Please watch and share with your friends and neighbors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
John Kasich’s “pizza shop” analogy encapsulates the bullshit promoting charter schools. Two decades of so-called competition and their best efforts at “innovation” include, no excuses discipline, got-to-go lists, uniforms and backpacks, highly scripted test-prep lessons,and longer school days.
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And why can’t we find even one “journalist” who could follow up this BS line and ask Kasich or Bush or Gates or Agassi or Gulen or any other charter cheerleader to describe the innovations produced by school competition?
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This is huge, and I’m happy to see Oliver address it. However, if teachers keep carrying, alone, the burden of attempting to teach challenging curricula to students who are not prepared for them, and then must try to deal with the resulting misbehaviors alone, while trying to teach the rest of the students in a classroom, parents will, with reason, continue to ask for more charter choice.
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This is the nut of the problem facing public schools. Public middle schools and high schools have been pressured to reduce suspension rates by the “school to prison pipeline” crowd. Most public school codes of conduct have no limits for the number of referrals written.
There is even a lot of pressure on administrators to limit the writing of referrals, regardless of behaviors.
The solution is to provide alternate learning programs for disaffected, chronically disruptive students – starting in 7th grade. This idea is the perfect opportunity to make use of shared services.
Failure for public schools to deal with the chronically disruptive and dangerous students will continue to enable the selling of charter schools a safe and orderly alternative to the chaos of many inner city schools.
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The sloppy phrase “school to prison pipeline” needs to be retired. It is a slur against public schools and the teachers who work in them. It implies that, by administering discipline, teachers cause their former students to go to prison. It implies, too, that much discipline is gratuitous and often stems from latent racism. The thinking here is sloppy, simplistic and pernicious. The “logic” seems to go thus: disciplining kids makes them feel like criminals, which causes them to break laws when they leave school. Better logic: the same impulses that lead kids to break school rules lead them to break laws outside of school. Those impulses have complex roots –family attitude toward school, psychological issues, peer pressure, etc. Teachers’ efforts to preserve an orderly learning environment is NOT one of those roots. In fact, I’ll bet LACK of discipline at home and school is a bigger culprit than too much discipline. The kid who becomes habituated to flouting adults’ directions with impunity is not well-prepared for following laws when he leaves school. The War on Discipline, of which this loaded phrase is part, is a war on teachers and on education, and ultimately on kids too. We all agree that a kid who breaks a window should be punished, but if the same kid smashes a history lesson to bits, or forces a teacher into stressful and draining pitched verbal and psychological battles every day in order to teach a modicum of material, the student should not be punished. This shows that we value windows more than we value education and teachers. The War on Discipline is a cheap and extremely misguided attempt to show we value kids, especially black kids. It makes teachers scapegoats for unfortunate behaviors whose roots lie outside the classroom.
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Wonderful comment!
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ponderosa,
I think the problem is that simply suspending a child does not help. I feel as if there is this false choice that schools either suspend or say “tut tut don’t do it again”. We haven’t had good discussions about alternatives and when they are discussed — like restorative justice — the rhetoric starts, as if the schools are allowing potential murderers off with a warning.
I do blame charters for some of this. There is a difference between a 6 year old child acting out a 16 year old teenager brandishing a weapon or making very scary threats. In NYC, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina talked about banning suspensions for Kindergarten, first and second graders and were attacked as if they had no concern for children and their safety.
Unfortunately, there is a very expensive public relations campaign going on to try to convince the public that this false choice is the only choice. I don’t think that the union should simply say “okay, we will never suspend 5 or 7 year olds anymore and that’s fine”. But I sure wish they would say “yes, let’s figure out a system for dealing with those very young children who act out so that they remain in school but (temporarily) out of the classroom and with trained adults who have the knowledge to understand their issue.
I am always struck by the child in John Merrow’s PBS report whose charter school disciplinary records were released by Eva Moskowitz in order to convince the public that he was a violent, incorrigible child at age 6 and therefore deserved his multiple suspensions. But reading those, and seeing how his new school approached him, it was clear that he was a 6 year old child constantly berated and punished and labeled a failure simply because of his inability to sit still or quickly adjust to transitions and the more he was told how bad he was, the more he acted out because he felt bad about himself. There is a difference between coddling a child and recognize that some children don’t easily make transitions quickly and are very anxious and the more they are punished as “bad”, the more anxious they become and it’s a vicious circle. In his new public school with an obligation to teach him, and with trained professionals who recognized that there are much better ways to deal with anxious kids, he could cope and even become a “helper” to his teacher. What a change from simply giving up on him because he is just a bad kid and we tried our method of suspending over and over again and he didn’t become a good kid instead.
Obviously suspensions of much older students is a different matter. But I believe that it’s true that low-income kids are often suspended for the kind of things that affluent white kids get away with that aren’t about violence. And I believe there are great discussions to be had — with teachers in a primary role — of how to cope with disruptive older students who just don’t want to learn. Not “let the teacher deal with them and if they aren’t they will be castigated for not being able to control their classroom”. That’s absolutely wrong. But maybe “what kind of system can we set up where a disruptive student is banned from the class and sent to a different place in school to learn – but it is made clear to the child that he is very welcome to return to the class as long as the disruption ceases. And if it doesn’t, trained professionals — not teachers — to try to figure out what is going on.
Finally — I agree with one of the comments above that a huge issue is students being asked to learn and teachers being asked to teach material that many of the students aren’t ready to learn. Sticking 30 kids who struggled in middle school math and demanding they get through the Algebra I curriculum in a year is a recipe for kids to act out. Part of dealing with disruptive kids is school officials figuring that out and not simply saying “we were told these kids should learn Algebra 1, so teach them all Algebra 1”.
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Ponderosa
There is one common denominator in the “school to prison pipeline” crowd: none of them have had to teach 5 classes a day with 25+ students per class, and watch 5 to 10 individual students disrupt those classes on a near daily basis – with little to no support from administrators. These “child advocates” can sit down, one on one, and believe that any one of those chronically disruptive students is really a “good kid” who may be misunderstood. However, they have no clue how that “good kid” can turn on a teacher and his fellow classmates when the one on one dynamic is replaced by the structure of an authoritarian figure (teacher) directing the behaviors of 25+ children. How that one “good kid” can pull in one or two or three more into his (or her) circle of educational destruction. The “school to prison pipeline” crowd has no understanding whatsoever about he group dynamics that can turn that “good kid” into a classroom terror. How when that one “good kid” is absent, everything changes for the teacher and every other student in the room. How the underlying tension that kid brings into the room every single day simply evaporates, and the teacher is free to teach and the students are free to learn. I agree with you 100% regarding the negatively suggestive phrase, “school to prison pipeline”. However, the real answer for the chronically disruptive cannot be an endless stream of referrals and suspension, because that kind of student has no use for the structure and demands of traditional school, and simply doesn’t care. I once read that the person in a relationship with the most power and control is the person that doesn’t care. This is proven day in and day out in classrooms across the country where kids that just don’t care become a relentless disruption for all the rest.
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And a reminder to the “school to prison pipeline” crowd: public school teachers teach everyone. Every saint and every sinner and everybody in between. Failure of the public schools to deal more decisively with those kids that need an alternative setting and an alternative approach to education will continue to fuel the charter movement. And yes, the pressure brought bear on classroom teachers to improve test scores, instead of helping children to improve as people has certainly exacerbated discipline issues in the classroom.
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ponderosa: “The War on Discipline is a cheap and extremely misguided attempt to show we value kids, especially black kids. It makes teachers scapegoats for unfortunate behaviors whose roots lie outside the classroom.”
I understand what you are saying and what you mean, but I thought that the war originally was declared on overly harsh discipline and kids’ humiliation, not on discipline, proper.
There is no learning without appropriate discipline, and the proper amount and kind of discipline varies greatly, from class to class, from kids to kids, from day to day.
Discipline is a necessary tool to keep a kid’s engine of learning running smoothly, and as such, it should never be misused to stop an engine.
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Cone on Mate. You have read my links to the WAR ON TEACHERS that began in the nineties to empty the schools. You are reading the Vergara case.
It is all about silencing the voice of the real teacher,.
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NYC Parent:
While I agree with Rage that an alternative placement for the chronically unruly is the ideal, I am not ready to throw the time-honored practice of suspension under the bus, especially since the alternative placement option is off the table in my district. Suspension is not a panacea, but it has a real effect for most (not all) kids. It is a signal. A signal that what you did is serious and wrong. Developing humans need such signals. Without them, they form awry. Bad behaviors are likely to continue or increase. If nothing else, the suspension ushers in a period of peace and learning in the classroom that he chronically disrupts. That is a real good that comes from suspension. Those who sanctimoniously bleat about the kid losing out on learning time have no clue what’s going on. There is a group of kids who adamantly deflect all efforts to teach them. For whatever reason, their minds are set against learning and on disruption. They lose nothing by being suspended. The rest of the class gains a lot.
Rage,
You articulate brilliantly the sad trap that “child advocates” fall into when thinking about discipline:
“These “child advocates” can sit down, one on one, and believe that any one of those chronically disruptive students is really a “good kid” who may be misunderstood. However, they have no clue how that “good kid” can turn on a teacher and his fellow classmates when the one on one dynamic is replaced by the structure of an authoritarian figure (teacher) directing the behaviors of 25+ children. How that one “good kid” can pull in one or two or three more into his (or her) circle of educational destruction. The “school to prison pipeline” crowd has no understanding whatsoever about he group dynamics that can turn that “good kid” into a classroom terror. How when that one “good kid” is absent, everything changes for the teacher and every other student in the room. How the underlying tension that kid brings into the room every single day simply evaporates, and the teacher is free to teach and the students are free to learn”
Yes! Every education profession should take note of what Rage has written here. This is the truth. Professors, it is your duty to teach the truth about what kids are like. It is your duty not to ignore the unsightly realities of group (mob?) psychology. These things are real. Do not sweep them under the rug because they contradict your Romantic view of human nature. School counselors, take note of what Rage has written. I have rarely met a school counselor who does not fall into the trap he describes. The counselor meets the child one-on-one and sees a decent person and concludes that the teacher is a hot head; an ogre; a cold, unfeeling person. This is a false understanding, and if you care about Truth, you will amend your impressions. You of all people, people trained in psychology, should acknowledge the reality, the realness, of group psychology. It is not just a figment.
Rage, thank you for finally saying what is real and true but has never, at least in my reading, been written or said so clearly.
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Correction: “education professors” not “education profession”.
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Mate
“Discipline is a necessary tool to keep a kid’s engine of learning running smoothly, and as such, it should never be misused to stop an engine.”
And what about the kid who has shut off their “engine of learning”?
The kid who rejects educational opportunities and turns classroom disruption into personal sport? The kid who becomes a one-person educational wrecking crew – just for the fun of it? And what about the other 24 “engines of learning” in the room that lose out every time a teacher has to stop teaching in order to put out yet another psychological fire? These are the realities of classroom life in schools that are routinely distressed by the family dysfunction that gets dragged in for six hours a day.
There is no sugarcoating the very tiny percentage of children that offer the worst behaviors: mean spirited, apathetic, rude, obnoxious, profane, vulgar, defiant, surly, uncooperative, uncivilized, etc.
And no, the teacher is not to blame for their poor classroom management skills. Teachers should not have to be Marry Poppins or Jaime Escalante in order for children to behave civilly in a classroom.
Most of us cannot be flashy entertainers or experts in the psychological jujitsu that seems necessary to bring the persistently disruptive under control. And yes, the children are to blame – they are responsible for their misbehaviors and negative attitudes that pollute the learning environment. And yes, they need to be corrected in no uncertain, and sometimes harsh terms: suspensions and expulsions.
And ideally, what they really need is an alternate learning environment
that effectively removes them from the mainstream – but always provides a mechanism for redemption and return.
Make no mistake, the charter movement has been built on these unruly and disruptive behaviors. Public schools are between a rock and a hard place on this issue. The Pollyanna view of children in the school environment that many adult child advocates have has been a big part of the problem. The only “pipeline” schools offer is a “pipeline of opportunity”, and when that opportunity is shut down on a daily basis by a very tiny minority of very troubled children, well meaning adults should worry less about the disrupters and way more about the disrupted.
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RageAgainstTheTetsocracy, I do not understand your comment. I never said, dispose of discipline, did I? But over disciplining will stop kids’ love of learning. The mistake is to adopt a disciplining system that is tailored to the most disruptive kids because that would screw 24 kids out of 26 just because 2 hopelessly misbehaves.
I also agree with ponderosa that profs don’t teach discipline methods to teachers, and they don’t prepare them properly for a real class room experience.
But the sugarcoating of human behavior starts earlier: with the fairy tales. They all end with “They got married and they live happily ever after.”, as if the wedding would be the most difficult milestone to achieve in a relationship and then it’s all easy afterwords.
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The piece is compromised by not doing two things: 1) not questioning privatization of public education 2) not questioning KIPP’s and other major charter chains statistics. On the whole, all the piece did is make a bad apples argument – Which does need to be addressed, but by not delving any further into the topic of privatization, it entrenches major charter chains because now they look like legitimate actors, and entrenches privatization.
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Geeze Joe…the guy is a comic giving us the satire that reveals the job that the REAL JOURNALISTS NEED TO DO. Oliver’s ‘riff’ points out how the MEDIA fails us.
I wrote Bamboozle them a decade ago.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
It has come to pass as the BILLIONAIRE’S BOYS CLUB, WHICH DIANE HAS SHOWN FOREVER,.
The facts are out there! Oliver does not have to explain it.
The EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX has done its thing, covering up their conspiracy in the media they own…Thank goodness for the internet.
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
I wrote this years ago… it’s fallout there, only he sped of privatization is new.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
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and no where is there the reality of the WAR ON TEACHERS in the nineties… when the civil rights of teachers were trashed,
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
and the corporate criminals looked astonished BECAUSE IT WORKED WHEN THE UNIONS LOOKED THEATER WAY.
The puppet-masters said”;hey this works… lets throw the teachers out, and tell the media we won to write stories about those bad teachers and failing schools” and they did and this happened
and this
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/06/lausds-treacherous-road-from-reed-to-vergara–its-never-been-about-students-just-money.html
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We know there are bad apples in every profession and in every public and private entity. However, what Oliver points out is the complete disregard in our state and federal government to clean up how charters are authorized and overseen. With such a strong charter lobby, the politicians are unwilling to press for changes. In California, our governor, Jerry Brown, has vetoed many if not all bills that ask for these changes.
This kind of public shaming of the charter juggernaut is the first step.
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Ohio just held a publicly-funded charter school “summit” that was a marketing and cheerleading event.
I wouldn’t expect any real reforms any time soon- in fact, with the help of the Obama Administration, they’ll probably vastly expand charters and vouchers while utterly ignoring public schools.
There’s a phrase for regulators who are captured by the entities they’re supposed to regulating- it’s “going native”.
It means they can’t regulate because they have become hopelessly entwined with the contractor that the public entity and the private entity have essentially merged.
That’s what’s happened in this state.
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CHiara, It means they can’t regulate because they have become hopelessly entwined with the contractor that the public entity and the private entity have essentially merged.
That’s what’s happened in this state.
Excellent summary
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I didn’t know this was such a common occurrence in privatization that it’s a recognized pitfall of privatization schemes.
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In NY State, the SUNY Charter Institute does all the regulating. Three white men are charged with overseeing charters serving 10,000+ students and all they care about are whether the charters make them look good by producing high “pass rates”. Not producing large numbers of students who pass — that doesn’t matter. It is the passing RATE that matters, and if you have no moral compass preventing your from achieving high rates by weeding out kids, that’s rewarded the most.
You can’t have an organization whose main purpose is to promote charters as the sole oversight of charters. But that’s what we have in NY State.
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It must be tough for charter promoters when all charters are lumped together as “failing” or “corrupt”.
Unfortunately, that’s the same thing they did to public schools for the last 20 years, so I’m not sympathetic.
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Time to turn up the heat: mismanagement, fraud, waste, and de-facto child abuse – all at the taxpayers expense. And virtually nothing to brag about. Sounds like their days are numbered in the court of public opinion.
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Glad you uses this. It is so sad when we depend on comedians to tells the news!
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Add Idaho to the scam list. https://idahospromise.org/2016/08/21/charter-school-price-now-also-includes-loss-of-voting-for-local-school-board/
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Reblogged this on Matthews' Blog and commented:
Truth emerging about the charter issue?
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“It’s not television…it’s HBO!”
So–that could be why it was covered. Consider, as well, that Bill Maher is always coming up w/stories/uncensored guests that no msm would dare cover/host.
Also, I just recently began watching Democracy Now!–it’s on PBS (they still broadcast Frontline & Independent Lens, in conjunction w/Pro-Publica & other, more independent documentarians/filmmakers {like Kartemquin}), & hosted by the very straight-on Amy Goodman. Sorry I hadn’t watched it before.
Insofar as other corporate owned msm–CNN, MSNBC, Fox & the 3 non-cable networks–meh & bleh.
If you have cable, watch RT, esp. Redacted Tonight!–Lee Camp has been called “the John Oliver of RT!”–he’s incredible! & watch out for him–he’s doing live stand-up in numerous cities (this weekend, Chicago).
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It appears that charter schools are allowed to harvest a 20% profit. This is far above typical retail margins or stock investments and inevitably attracts more greed than altruism.
Frankly, I think privatizing public schools is crazy. At the very least corporate charter chains should be illegal. But given that legislators have drunk the KoolAid, only parents and teachers should be permitted to open alternatives using public funds.
If charters are inevitable, this is what’s needed:
First, allowable profits should be considerably shrunk – at all levels of operation – in order to attract education idealists, not unqualified hedge fund operators and sports figures.
Second, charters should be governed only by elected school boards, not corporate boards beholden only to stockholders.
Third, the feds and states must beef up oversight by officials entirely independent of corporations. Currently, conflicts of interest are blithely ignored, and legislators complain about not having enough staff to properly supervise charters – short of doing it themselves. In my state that would require weeks of travel to reach all the far flung areas accused of getting away with murder.
Fourth, politicians and the public need to understand that the attempt to use charters to raise expectations in inner cities has often lowered expectations in other regions.
Funding problems, especially after the recession, have led small towns and rural areas to turn schools over to corporations promising cheaper operations. The results? Even less spent on books, supplies and buildings. Not to mention not all their teachers are credentialed. Further, the argument for “choice” doesn’t apply when students would have to travel 30-100 miles to find an alternative.
Before the charter invasion, most rural public schools in my state were run by qualified teachers dedicated heart and soul to improving our students’ futures.
Clearly, neither the market-driven nor the “one size fits all” approach work when it comes to education policy.
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I’m THRILLED about this, especially about the “hissy fit” it’s apparently causing among the privatization plutocrats and their paid shills! This demonstrates that Oliver’s piece is VERY EFFECTIVE.
We all need to take a minute to THANK John Oliver and HBO so that he and his bosses know that LOTS of people LIKE what he did here; we all know that the other side has been bombarding him with hate mail and encouraging HBO to “stop him” etc.
Here’s how we contact HBO and John Oliver on this topic and show him support for his Charter Schools piece:
http://talk.hbo.com/t5/Last-Week-Tonight-with-John/Charter-Schools/td-p/526349
AND/OR:
Facebook for John Oliver: https://www.facebook.com/LastWeekTonight/ (I’ve posted a lot here and I urge all of you to do the same.)
AND/OR:
Twitter for John Oliver: https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver
AND/OR:
Twitter for Last Week Tonight: https://twitter.com/lastweektonight
AND/OR:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight
AND/OR:
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/lastweektonight/
If we want to see more of this, we MUST stand behind John Oliver and HBO and let them know that WE are in in the majority—not the billionaires and their paid shills! Please go to these social media sites and support Oliver on this superb work: something we’ve been waiting to see for years! (Right now the “hired hands” for the privatizers are out in force on these sites so please post there ASAP!)
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Holy moley. I always felt that what was needed was a video. This culture thrives on images. Now, we need to convince him to look at how the legislatures are turning the schools over to business people with not an educator at the top.
We have to get him to address THE WAR ON THE PROFESSION , the assault on teachers that led to the failure of the schools!
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