Rhode Island state officials gave their permission to triple the enrollment of politically connected no-excuses charter chain Achievement First.
As reported here previously, increasing the enrollment of these charters will drain students and millions of dollars from the public schools of Providence.
Thousands of children in the Providence public schools will suffer budget cuts so that a much smaller number may enroll in a dual system under private control.
The final decision is up to the mayor of Providence, who is also chair of the charter chainboard.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“First” means at all costs to children and adults alike, to the fabric if society and to education itself.
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Same for words like Success and Excellence, and Eva and Rhee and Campbell and Betsy DeVoid and John King and Arne Dunderthunker.
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This is a link to an article about NJ charter schools in testimony before the state assembly. One of the authors of the bill creating charters (who is now on the state charter school board) testified that charters were to be schools, not chains of for-profit corporations. http://njpsa.org/assembly-ed-gets-history-lesson-on-charters/
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Tom Smith: excellent catch!
Below are the first two paragraphs from the piece to which you provide a link.
[start]
According to former Assembly Speaker / Senator Joseph Doria – one of the prime architects of the 1995 Charter School Act – the intent of the legislation was for the programs to serve as experimental classrooms, with the staff sharing best practices with traditional public schools. Each school was, generally speaking, intended to operate as single, community-based school, not as part of a national chain that some large networks of charter schools have become.
“It’s not meant to be a system of schools. It’s meant to be a school, a charter,” Doria said.
[end]
If you read the rest of the piece, it is obvious—no surprise—that amongst the enforcers and enablers and beneficiaries of corporate education reform—
It matters not a whit to them if the non-community-based for-profit [disguised or open] charter chains are so common.
Not when the rheephorm mind is set on the notion that there is No Excuse for not reaping as much $tudent $ucce$$ as can be squeezed out from students, parents and communities.
And if folks peruse the article, note that any critique of charters & privatization, regardless of its merits, is met with the sneer, jeer and smear, buttressed [we’ve seen it on this blog too!] with the vacuous “studies show” [but they often won’t show any] argument.
Shameful? Yes, but when you are dealing with folks that shamelessly follow every tenet of DominioMarxism, what do you expect?
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Groucho. Always in their hearts and minds and deeds. That’s why their pockets are always so full and making that jingling sound as they walk to the bank…
😎
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Domino Marxism? Really? That is a theory left over from the Cold War that never happened. That myth that fed the fake fear of millions led to failed wars in Korea and then in Vietnam costing millions of lives and trillions in debt.
What is happening in the United States is “Domino Capitalism”.
Domino Marxism would be socializing the schools into a national public system run by the politburo members at the top of the Communist government pyramid.
Both systems are autocratic but capitalism rules from corporations and communism from a national politburo in the public sector of total socialism where there are no corporations and no private sector.
In other words, both the Communist and Capitalist systems are controlled by a handful of people that were never elected (sham elections in Communist countries don’t count), compared to the community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public schools in the U.S. divided up into about 15,000 school districts that operate under the guidance of democratically derived laws under the approval of the U.S. Constitution by 50 individual democratic states each with its own state constitution that also offers guidance to protect children and keep control out of the hands of the few who are never elected; the few who crave power and worship at the alter-of-greed.
The proper term for today is “Domino Capitalism,” a much larger threat than Communism ever was or ever will be.
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From the linked article: ““This sense of urgency around opportunity has outstripped the emphasis on collaboration,” he [Rick Pressler, NJSCA] said. Yet if you check out a short-lived NJ distr charter I describe below, it was precisely thro collaboration w/the pubsch distr that the charter was opened, then closed as the needs of those families began to be met w/n the tradl pubsch facilities.
The same Rick Kressler ‘decried’ the characterization of a two-tier system: “In fact, public charters are required by law to seek the enrollment of a cross section of the community’s school age population including racial and academic factors. And we do.” Yet those of us who have studied the research/ graphics of “One Newark” on jerseyjazzman’s blog know this to be far from the truth.
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I worked for many years as the science supervisor in East Brunswick Public Schools in NJ – an excellent school district where very few students attended private schools. Several years ago a group decided that East Brunswick needed a charter school. The district was not consulted and the application for the Hatikvah International Academy Charter School was approved by the state. This “Hebrew” (not “Jewish”) charter school was opened with no real need, except for the personal desires of some parents in the town. East Brunswick Public Schools has challenged the school at the state level for violating some of the terms of its charter. Nothing came of it. However, the Solomon Schechter School in East Brunswick (a well-respected institution) closed its doors.
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I’m sorry how that turned out Tom Smith, & it stinks. I remember the hoo-ha at the time, & was hoping the case would succeed.
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We had a truly public charter school in my NJ town in the ’90’s. It was part of the district, set up for elementary SpEd students who needed more than just resource room but less than a full-service out-of-district placement. Much to the disappointment of enrolled families, it could not consistently attract enough students to stay open more than a few years.
Since then, the district has added autistic elementary, & a hisch ‘Bridge Program’ for devpt’lly-delayed. They also have always had in-home tutoring (staffed by district teachers) for the chronically/ periodically ill, & work hand-in-hand w/ the county half-day tutoring/ med-admin facility for those coming out of a spell of hospitalization.
I do not know whether our district elementaries have expanded services (other than autistic classrooms) for those who were well-served by that short-lived charter. But it seemed a good use of charter law: setting up a distr pubsch facility which can be organized fairly quickly on the ground & serves needs otherwise unmet, as a patchthrough until the demand can be accommodated w/n regular pubsch facilities.
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Are there or were there ever conflict of interest laws that would make this illegal because of the connections/links some of the elected/appointed public decision makers have with the autocratic,secretive, often fraudulent and inferior corporate privatization education industry?
I thought when there was a conflict of interest, public officials, elected or appointed, were supposed to recluse themselves from the decision making process, or has this always been voluntary?
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Good point. The mayor being on the charter chain board reminds me of a certain orange man owning hotels and casinos.
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Oh, Lloyd. Just reading on this blog for yrs has educated me as to the multiple & blatant conflicts of interest tolerated in the charter-school-gaga rust belt states (& FL), most of whose govrs or Ed Commishes or otherwise key legislators of charter-school law [or simply the lowly charter-school approvers] are, if not CEO’s of charter schools themselves, at least related directly or in-law to such. I think the question as to whether laws about conflict of interest exist are irrelevant in our current era of $$ in politics. If such laws exist, their enforcement will be de-toothed by underfunded enforcement… or, in the more blatantly pro-free-market states, legislated right out of the constitution.
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Can someone from Rhode Island explain what a “mayoral charter” is?
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I’m not from RI, but I assume we’re talking about these mayoral academies
http://mayoralacademies.org
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This link describes the organization well as it is their marketing piece. Does not address the impact on public school districts that were often “raided” when these charters are approved by the RI Board of Regents – now the the Board of Elementary and Secondary Ed.
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Thanks.
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Does ‘Mayoral academies’.mean these charters operate in districts run by the mayor of a city (as opposed to each district w/n a city run by its own elected board)?
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I’ve been covering this story for a while (https://rimediacoop.org/2016/12/05/zurier-achievment-first/):
The Mayoral Academy name comes from the fact the Mayor sits on the board. He also has final say over the expansion.
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