As we know, the charter school movement began as a way to help public schools by encouraging innovation. However, in the past 25 years, it has evolved into an industry that is bent on privatization and that shamelessly diverts money and real estate from public schools.
The charter movement today is the darling of ALEC, the Koch brothers, and every rightwing governor and think tank.
In this article, Paul Buchheit describes the dark role that charter schools now play on behalf of corporate elites and their determination to privatize public education for fun and profit.
Their most important innovation seems to be their commitment to turning schools for children of color into tightly disciplined boot camps, where they learn the value of unquestioning obedience.
Any prospect of collaboration with public schools disappeared long ago, as it would be a compact between a robber and his victim.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Much (too much) of the charter school movement is based on trashing and demeaning the public schools. The real public schools are sneeringly referred to as failure factories and entrenched monopolies staffed by uncaring unionized teachers. Teachers are demoralized enough, they don’t need this avalanche of calumny from the charter cheerleaders. Elected officials of both parties are all aboard for the charter express which seems to exist for vilifying and punishing classroom teachers.
Buchheit writes good stuff elsewhere, too.
Like Big Pharma, Big Tech depends on the public for its research money, while doing its utmost to avoid taxes. Apple has up to $181 billion in offshore profits, a number that CEO Tim Cook called “total political crap” before claiming that he’d “love to bring it home” if it wouldn’t cost so much in taxes. But Apple’s tax avoidance schemes are legendary.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/04/three-middle-class-killing-industries-2016
In a recent interview with Tim Cook, he declared the reason Apple’s manufacturing is in China is due to the “skills gap” in America. This is the same slight of hand move the charter industry indulges in. Bash and attack in order to deflect scrutiny from your true intentions.
Yes, that skills gap garbage is a total lie and myth that is used to further bash our public school system. The “skills gap” is offered as unquestioned given wisdom. Very few in the media challenge the veracity of this zombie myth that refuses to die.
From truthout: The “Skills Gap” Is a Convenient Myth – “That’s not a skills mismatch or even a labor shortage problem in any meaningful sense,” Marc Levine, professor of history and economic development at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, makes clear. “That’s an effort to secure cheap and docile labor.”
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21611-skills-gap-a-convenient-myth
I am going on gut instinct, based on paying attention to charter schools for more than a
decade. I have seen divergent directions of bad things, because the charter industry
has so much flexibility in the things they are allowed to do to make profits, or gain the
powers necessary to do so.
The most blatant thing I witnessed, was a related series of events beginning in 2003.
Mayor Slay, in St. Louis, seemed to think appointing the school board was one of his
duties, to be routinely ratified by the voters. The local pbs station claims they paid
Roberti only 4.4 million dollars as superintendent, but most sources said five million
in 2004. He wrecked the place.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education-july-dec04-stlouis_8-17/
By 2006, the voters were telling the mayor he could no longer choose the school board
members for them, and they elected Peter Downs and Donna Jones, and took similar action
in 2007. The reaction this provoked in the mayor could be best described as rage. By
2007 Superintendent Bourisaw was essentially a lame duck, when she begged the State board
to please not force a Texas Can charter upon the community, but the 3 people appointed by
the state after they took over said ignore her. A clue to just how right she was, can be
found by examining the archives of the Post Dispatch…they removed the reports of the
dramatic collapse and stranding of several hundred children before the 2008 school year.
That 3 member board is still there. Even after a horrible experience with the Imagine
group of charters, the district is now sort of segregated as much by financial status as
by race, into 10,534 charter students and a less precise number of non charter students
in the 24,000 range. (In Missouri, it is hard to get stats regarding the number of special
needs students.
Missouri has its share of the schools described by Paul Buchhiet among the 59 overseen by
2 separate boards of 15 white people and 3 blacks. (all the students are from KC and St.
Louia.) The three member appointed public board in charge of the 34,000 SLPS students is
outnumbered by the zesty KIPP’s own board of 15 people, mostly white, from the financial
community. Stats are available, though carefully chosen, from a St. Louis media which is
worshipful in their praise.
I am still trying to discern whether there are two different sorts of charter schools. The
ones described by Paul Buchheit to be sure, but also a significant number of cherry
pickers, which are able to bend the rules to achieve a different sort of impression, which
I consider equally damaging to the public schools.
The most maddening thing in St. Louis to me, the media, dominated by the Post Dispatch
advocacy of head in the sand, is routinely denigrated by right wing conservatives, in the
comfortable environment in which that honor is never challenged. The honor of right wing criticism is unearned when it comes to education.
Today…a letter from a billionaire Rex Sinquefield appointee warning us about the waste of pre school and head start as the basis for opposing a cigarette tax increase. pretty much a normal day.
I was only 58 when I started paying close attention to what was developing in St. Louis. I turned 70 in July. Diane suggested I ask Mercedes Schneider to get help…I posted something for her, and I just discovered she is on facebook. I have a mountain of details, and my e-mails have some amazing things which no longer exist in the original archives. Antonio French was a huge source of posts and you tubes, and the variety of voices no longer heard from very often in St. Louis. He is running for mayor, and I do not know how his chances are. If he wins, I hope the state does not decide to take over St. Louis and run if with people appointed by the governor.
I hope that it is not too late to reply to you. Here is my reply to your twisting my words of interaction and civility in classroom , NOT in ECOT = electronic class learning.
m4potw
October 29, 2016 at 1:48 pm
To Jeremy Aker:
You are not any different from reformers who love to twist people’s words to seize an opportunity for your own gain.
Please get straight to the core of an argument WITHOUT twisting the meaning of words.
You can ask your 14 years old daughter a simple question:
“Would you take $2.10 for candy in one minute and give the businessmen $1000.00 from your OWN saving over many days?”
“Is it the smart and benefited trade for your future?”
In reality, the pool of all tax payers money is to cultivate ALL citizens, NOT PARTICULARLY for ONLY your daughter or for a specific few of any group like voucher, religion or charter.
Deplorable authorities can abuse their legal system and “twisted doubled meaning of all sounding words” in order to take in a fraction in amount of donation for their own individual GAIN/PROFIT. But they have gradually damaged AMERICAN excellent Public Education in a whole child concept for ALL learners in the past 20 years.
Do you know that:
1) the deaf is not fearful of the thunder? And
2) the blind is not fearful of the sunlight? And
3) all of reformers are not fearful to the universal law of cause and effect or their Karma which is like the shadow from life to death?
If your daughter is benefited from ECOT system at the expense of 1000 millions of dollars in the pool of taxpayers money accumulated over many generations in order to educate MILLIONS and MILLIONS of learners from many UPCOMING generations, then you are not ONLY deaf, blind and reformer, but also being inconsiderate = NOT civilized = savage = the beast in order to harm the COMMON GOODS to benefit your selfish gain.
I recognize your illogical argument so that I will not continue on replying your next post.I hope that your conscientiousness will be awakened in your heart and mind sooner. May God bless you so that your daughter will be more conscientious than you. Back2basic
In something that appeared to be a reply to my frustrations of trying to have someone write about the history of the development of charters schools in St. Louis, it is addressed to someone named Jeremy Akers who has a 14 year old daughter. I googled ECOT jeremy akers…There is certainly nothing much good I could see about ECOT. Would fraudulent be too harsh a characterization for them?
Hi Joe P.
Please accept my sincere apology to make a severe mistake to reply in your post.
Please forgive me. May
Recognizing that the profit motive is often but not always present, I think of the relationship of public school boards and charters as the relationship of a pray to its parasite.
And, as I believe charters are an existential threat to public schools, collaboration between public school districts and charter school managements would therefore be an oxymoron.
My school board trying to work collaboratively with charters ignores that California’s charter law requires competitive relationship between school districts and school district’s charters.
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 for hedge fund managers to be involved in backing them.
IT’S UP TO EACH OF US NOW AS INDIVIDUAL CITIZENS TO SPREAD THE WORD to our state and local lawmakers and social media friends everywhere because they need to know right now that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals.”
The report documents multiple cases of financial risk, waste, fraud, abuse, lack of accountability of federal funds, and lack of proof that the schools were implementing federal programs in accordance with federal requirements.
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.
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.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money. Moreover, as the NAACP and ACLU have reported, 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; (2) 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.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
The list in Paul’s article is on the money, literally and figuratively.
Readers of this blog probably know that The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) really wants to destroy public education altogether.
The major funders of this non-profit are other nonprofits. Monies flow to CREP from “anonymous,” theThe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation.
Since 2011 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded “District-Charter Collaboration Compacts” in more than 23 cities. These compacts are not identical, but they were marketed as if they could and would initiate a “let’s make nice” process between districts and charter schools. The Gates Foundation started this initiative with a $27 million kitty for grants.
The real purpose of a “District-Charter Collaborative Compact ” was to dilute the authority of elected school boards by enticing districts to share their resources with charter schools and rearrange their central office operations to support charter school expansions.
The Gates Foundation put out the money-bait for districts who entered into these compacts–planning grants of $100,000 and the prospect, not a guarantee, of much more money for compliance with the Gates agenda.
The Gates agenda included, among other wishes, that the district support initiatives such as:
Implementing the Common Core,
Having a unified application/enrollment system for all schools,public and private,
Allowing co-location in public schools of charters schools, exempting the charters form responsibility for capital improvement expenses, and giving freedom to “adapt” the space to fit their needs
Reinventing other operations in the central office to create a “portfolio” of public and charter schools, with new charters located in high-need areas,
Foregoing or changing union contracts with teachers,
Providing charters with equitable funding for special education, transportation, food services and the like–a major subsidy.
Introducing or expanding “personalized learning,” meaning investments in technology.
Providing charter students with access to extracurricular and co-curricular classes and athletic programs.
Many of the Gates Compact districts only received $100,000 for planning. Some received more money in steps, if they were moving toward compliance with the compact they had signed.
Among the districts receiving the largest grants (up to 2015) were Hartford, CN ($5 million); Denver, CO ($4 million); Boston Catholic District Charter ($3.3 million); New Orleans, LA ($3 million); Chicago, IL ($2.7 million); and Spring Branch, TX effectively urban Houston ($2.2 million).
According to researchers at CREP tracking the progress of the grantees, “Just a small number of Compact cities had made significant progress up to 2014.” By 2016, …”collaboration projects have stalled or even regressed among about half of the Compact signatories.”
This is not the first major initiative from the Gates Foundation that has failed to recognize the obvious. Districts are not steady-state entities with little or no turnover in leadership, staff, school boards, and federal and state regulations. The “Gates compacts” had no legal force and they were not persuasive as instruments for change, either for districts or for charter operators.
School districts are part of a political environment where wishful thinking and vague promises of some cash from a billionaire-funded foundation is in competition for attention with specific, immediate, and local concerns.
Districts have plenty of problems without having to “make nice” with charters, especially charter franchises run from afar, financed by deep pockets, and eager to get rid of public education. This “progress” report completely ignores corruption within the charter industry, also flaws in the Common Core (still pushed in every Gates grant to schools).
This report, aptly called “Herding Cats,” offers this conclusion: “After five years of research on Compact cities, we have seen that both districts and charter schools have much to gain from collaborating. But as this paper shows, effective long-term partnerships require more than simply getting sign-off from two ‘sectors.’ Diverse charter politics, missions, and even personalities call for savvy coalition-building efforts and strong leadership. Creating a unified coalition of fiercely autonomous schools led by independent-minded individuals is difficult but definitely not impossible.”
And therein lies the problem: The Gates Foundation and people at The Center for Reinventing Public Education—hired to serve as one of the Gates Foundation’s many operating arms—are unwilling to concede there are real contradictions in wanting “a unified coalition” made up of “fiercely autonomous schools” and led by “independent-minded individuals.”
Gates and Gates surrogates at CRPE have no respect for the fact that most urban districts with taxing power usually have elected school boards for a good reason. Those board members, like most government officials with taxing authority, are directly accountable to voters.
The Gates Collaborative Compact rewards districts if they participate in a scheme intended to compromise their authority and spend funds for charter schools–schools that are structured like a private corporation.
Operators of charter schools want to be subsidized, on the dole, for district funds while also being “fiercely autonomous,” and led by “independent-minded individuals.”
True collaboration is shot through with an ethos of “give and take.”Charter operators and their supporters are on the take, and their supporters are fiercely opposed to public schools, and more generally institutions created for the common good and designed to have democratic governance. See for example the distain for public schools from billionaires, with the Gates Foundation among those creating the illusion of “playing nice” and caring about students, especially low-income students living in urban districts. http://www.alternet.org/education/netflix-billionaire-reed-hastings-crusade-replace-public-school-teachers-computers
(Yes, Trump is worse.)
The President of the Center for American Progress, an organization funded at the $1 mil. level by Gates and 3 anonymous donors, allegedly asked, in one of the recently released, hacked e-mails, “Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private e-mail? And, has that person been drawn and quartered?” If true, a very real concern about who is at the top of the chain of command is introduced. The CAP President is described as Clinton’s advisor-in-waiting.