In a warning to the people of Massachusetts and Georgia, this parent in Red Bank, New Jersey, explains her community’s fight against a charter school that has drained resources from the town’s public school and increased segregation by luring mostly white students.
She writes:
Many years ago, a small group of Red Bank parents started talking about how upset they were that the Red Bank Borough schools were terribly underfunded and terribly segregated, mostly due to the charter school in our small town.
For years, a group of us did our best to ignore the negative effects the Red Bank Charter School was having on our schools and community. We hoped these effects would go away, and magically we would be properly funded and less segregated. We worked tirelessly on fundraising, asking for community support (for arts, music, etc.) and doing our own recruiting of parents to help even out the segregation issue.
But as time went on, evidence of the negative effects caused by the charter school continued to present themselves — whether it was in annual cuts to our school programs, broken friendships and neighborhoods, or simply being exposed to class pictures from the mostly white charter school.
I tried to turn the other cheek and focus on our schools and making them better. I became highly involved in the Parent Teacher Organization and worked with state politicians on our arts programs and underfunding.
Success was achieved. We restored our string instruments program with the help of our superintendent and many community partners. We also maintained our valuable elective classes such as Chinese, AVID (college-prep) and Project Lead the Way (engineering). We were making great strides through the leadership of our very smart administration, involved parents and community.
Then everything came to a head last year when the charter school asked to expand. We were faced with the already existing negative effects multiplying — less funding, deeper segregation. Our community was floored. But we pulled together to block the expansion. As we did, we had a chance to educate our larger community even more about the negative effects the charter school has on our district.
It was like unpeeling an onion, one layer at a time, and examining the funding model, segregation, student academic achievement, programming, budgeting, school communications, and more. And with each layer, we became more and more astounded and shocked. The data supported our deepest fears: We were indeed living in the most segregated neighborhood in New Jersey — yes, our “hip town,” our cool little town of Red Bank, the same Red Bank that Smithsonian magazine, The New York Times and many others have written about as one of the best small towns in America. The data and information we uncovered was the dirty little secret that creeped below the headlines.
Can we now openly say that so-called education reform and it’s evil spawn, charter schools, are objectively racist, despite the PR/ marketing lies that they represent ” the civil rights movement of our time?”
War Is Peace.
Freedom Is Slavery.
Ignorance Is Strength.
Charter Schools Are Public Schools.
Education Reform Is the Civil Rights Movement of Our Time.
Now, pass me the Victory Gin…
That is the whole point of school reform, charter schools and school privatization: to drain funds and resources from the real public schools, declare the public school a failure factory and then close it to be replaced by a privately run charter school. Charter schools are imposed on school districts without any input or vote from the residents of the school district. The residents have to join together and make a big noise to the NJDOE to get the attention of the commissioner of education and hope that their concerns will be respected.
The last two commissioners Cerf and Hespe were complicit in charter school expansion.
Red Bank is a cautionary tale like many other diverse communities. They have the potential to have a great public school system. If voters keep choosing horrible governors, we will continue to have counter-productive leadership. Jersey Jazzman has studied Red Bank, and he shows exactly what is wrong. The parasitic charters have siphoned off the cheapest and easiest students and left the public schools with the most expensive to teach. With minimal funds left, the public school can hardly keep the lights on. This parent should send a copy of her concerns to Hillary’s campaign, although I don’t know if it would have an impact. Shouldn’t a parent’s choice be a well funded public school? Why should charter expansion compromise the public schools and why should public money go towards promoting segregation? http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/01/charter-school-realities-red-bank-nj.html
Smaller places will really get hit hard because they can’t absorb the blows to the same extent as larger areas.
If all the better-off parents decamp to the charter school what happens to the public school? Does anyone care, or are they just the unfashionable “default”, the safety net for the charter sector?
That hardly seems fair.
In our district, the few still standing all-student-inclusive low-income public secondary schools have been serving more and more as what I think of as “clean up institutions” — only there to house those students who do not fit into the 80% parent-involved mold, and to absorb those students unwelcome at, or turned out by, a deregulated chaos of choice. As these legally PUBLIC schools are finally pushed completely out of the game, many students/parents have no choice but to leave the neighborhood.
“What’s even more perverse about Pierce’s argument is that it is factually wrong. Charters in Massachusetts are not for-profit vehicles. State law prohibits for-profit operators from running a public charter school:
Persons or entities eligible to submit an application to establish a charter school shall include, but not be limited to: (i) a non-profit business or corporate entity; (ii) 2 or more certified teachers; or (iii) 10 or more parents; provided, however, that for profit business or corporate entities shall be prohibited from applying for a charter. The application may be filed in conjunction with a college, university, museum or other similar non-profit entity. Private and parochial schools shall not be eligible for charter school status.”
Ed reformers keep making the same really dumb mistake.
A for-profit operator can’t apply for a charter in Ohio either.
The for-profit management organizations aren’t “the charter”.
They’re hired by the charter entity. Without more, “nonprofit” is meaningless. They’re technically nonprofit as long as they have a nonprofit entity between “the charter” and “the operator”
How can they be pushing these schools if they don’t know this?
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/esquire-writer-hates-doesnt-understand-charter-schools.html?mid=twitter-share-di
This is the Ohio charter school law. It says that the school’s SPONSOR must be a tax exempt entity.
It says nothing about the management company the charter contracts with.
Charter schools are a series of contracts. The “charter” is an agreement between the sponsor and the state. The contracts that follow the initial sponsor/state agreement (the charter) do not have to be nonprofit.
If ed reformers don’t understand this how can they responsibly expand charters?
http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/3314
The ruination of a common good is not surprising. The state of Washington, home to the 1000 lb. gorilla, Bill Gates, is one of only 7 states that has no income tax. Gates favors a consumption tax, which harms the public and allows the income of the richest 0.1%(derived largely from exploitation and tax manipulation), to be un-taxed. Adding another regressive tax, Washington caps its individual property tax at 1%. Seattle’s traffic congestion (evidence of no concern for common goods) is proof of Gates’ tunnel vision and lack of imagination. Schools-in-a-box and digitally-linked standards/curriculum/testing/data analytics are hackneyed ideas lifted from other applications. They don’t add value. They exploit an existing market, Gates’ strong suit.
Why should Gates worry about traffic when he can hop on his tax deductible helicopter and fly to his private compound? Why should he worry about education, when he can afford to buy his own school for his children?
The easily-solved puzzle as to why the US and state departments of ed. do Gates’ bidding … plutocracy.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
CNBC reported today, “The SEC filed insider trading charges against Leon Cooperman and his firm, Omega Advisors.” Cooperman is listed as a board member of Invest for Kids. Years prior, he retired from Goldman Sachs.
One of Cooperman’s fellow board members, at Invest for Kids, is Michael Milken.
Prior to founding his own hedge fund, Larry Robbins (KIPP and Relay boards), was a partner at Omega Advisors.
Step right up and turn our neediest students over to frauds and grifters. What could go wrong?