Jesse Hagopian, a teacher and civil rights activist in Seattle, writes here about the growing Black resistance to corporate reform. The resolutions adopted by the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives to stop the expansion of charter schools is only the beginning, he says, of opposition to the corporate agenda.
A moratorium would halt the granting of any more licenses to open new charter schools — that is, schools funded by the public but privately run and not accountable to democratically elected school boards. The NAACP announcement has corporate education reformers reeling. Rick Hess, director of education policy at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said that if local governments adopt the NAACP’s proposed moratorium, “It would give a permanent black eye to the sector.”
If the NAACP’s stance on charters would bruise the corporate agenda, then the declaration from the Movement for Black Lives — the newest civil rights coalition, comprised of dozens of grassroots organizations around the country — would flatline it altogether. The coalition released a policy platform at the beginning of August that called for, among other things, a moratorium on all out-of-school suspensions and the removal of police from schools, replacing them with positive alternatives to discipline and safety. It also called for a moratorium on charter schools and school closures, and full funding formulas that adequately weigh the needs of all districts in the state.
Hagopian knows that the high-stakes testing and privatization of public schools is not in the interest of Black students, although reformers claim they are.
Billionaire philanthrocapitalists have upended education over the past 15 years by backing a series of major policy changes — codified in the No Child Left Behind Act, the Race to the Top initiative and the Common Core State Standards. These policies have badly damaged education for all kids and have had particularly harmful effects on Black and Brown communities. Today, increasing numbers of people have discovered that these reforms are in reality efforts to turn the schoolhouse into an ATM for corporate America.
While their program for corporate reform is being eroded by research and rising grassroots movements, the corporate reformers are clinging to one last glossy brochure in the public relations portfolio — the one with photos of Black youth on the cover and promises that all of these reforms are really about civil rights and defending kids of color.
What they don’t want you to know is that their favorite schools have high suspension rates for Black students and are highly segregated. They are, he says, part of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
What the testocracy doesn’t want you to know is that standardized testing is a multibillion dollar industry, with the average student in the American public school system taking an outlandish 112 standardized tests during their k-12 career. They don’t want you to know that many schools that serve Black and Brown students have become test-prep factories rather than incubators of creativity and critical thinking, with testing saturating education at even higher concentrations in schools serving low-income students and students of color. They don’t want you to understand the way high-stakes tests are being used around the country in service of the school-to-prison-pipeline. A review by the National Research Council concluded that high school graduation tests have done nothing to lift student achievement, but they have raised the dropout rate. When one test score can deny students graduation — even when they have met every other graduation requirement — it can have devastating consequences. Boston University economics professor Kevin Lang’s 2013 study, “The School to Prison Pipeline Exposed,” links increases in the use of high-stakes standardized high school exit exams to increased incarceration rates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Finally, civil rights leaders are waking up to the fact that charters schools have failed their children. The charter movement has allowed corporations and billionaires to destroy community schools and neighborhoods by funneling students into charters run by amateurs allowed to conduct endless human experiments on minority students. Test scores alone will not address the needs of our urban students, and neither will blowing up public education. Charters have delivered meager results and have created chaos and destruction in black communities. Black leaders called for a moratorium because they now understand their children are not the main goal of most charters; it is access to public money.
Civil rights groups must continue to apply pressure to to halt the charter menace, which is not solving urban problems, but creating a whole new set of problems for minority youth. They should join with other groups that understand the political and economic consequences of charter growth. Groups such as United Opt Out, Hispanic civil rights groups, teachers unions, BATs, NPE and others must unite. If these groups formed an alliance of concerned citizens, they would be difficult to ignore. Together they can fight the charter lobby that has become a behemoth of greed and corruption continuing to suppress democratic participation.
With all this being said, what will happen to the students and teachers that are now in the system.
Such a dire situation!
“What the testocracy doesn’t want you to know, is that standardized testing is a multibillion dollar industry.” THE TESTING INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
Parents of color, want proof you are being scammed and patronized by the charter industry? Just ask your local charter admissions officer about their “null curriculum”.
Then ask them why its is so much more vast than their “explicit curriculum”. Then ask why their “implicit curriculum” and “explicit curriculum” do not reach beyond the goal of higher standardized test scores. Then ask the why they are using your kids efforts to serve the charter school’s PR team. Isn’t the school supposed to serve the student?
Try telling them you’d like to tour their facility when classes are in session. You want to see their science labs – in action, a theatre stage and sets, orchestra or band – and instrument room, their athletic facilities, their shop classes, robotics team, extra-curricular clubs, and their after school programs.
The answers to all these questions will tell you all you need to know about their actual expectations for your child.
Parents should ask to see their arts programs and library. Charter schools for the most part do not have libraries.
Hope Mr Hagopian can speak to parents in Newark, NJ, where charter school enrollment is now ~30% of school-age children.
The so-called “education reform” movement, of which charter schools are the biggest profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as a key agenda item. The fact that billionaires and hedge funds could pocket tens of millions of public tax dollars from this new kind of segregation was just a bonus. The first calls for “reform” in the form of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then (and now) as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
And yet, private charter schools across our nation are allowed to divert hundreds of millions of public school tax dollars away from educating America’s children and into private pockets. Any thoughtful person should pause a moment and ask: “Why are hedge funds the biggest promoters of charter schools?” Hedge funds aren’t altruistic — there’s got to be big profit in “non-profit” charter schools in order to hedge funds to be involved in backing them.
And even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
One typical practice of charter schools is to pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members or by their proxy companies which then pocket the public’s tax money as profit. Another profitable practice is that although charter schools use public tax money to purchase millions of dollars of such things as computers, the things they buy with public tax money become their private property and can be sold by them for profit…and then use public tax money to buy more, and sell again, and again, and again, pocketing profit after profit.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities; nevertheless, they get public tax money. And, as the NAACP and ACLU have learned, charter schools are often engaged in racial and economic-class discrimination.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. Lawsuits challenging the legality of giving public tax money to private charter schools must be filed in every state in our nation.