Carol Burris has been traveling the country, meeting with educators. Parents, and local officials to learn how charter schools are working, how they affect the local public schools.
She wrote a four-part series about the charter mess in California. This article is about Pennsylvania, specifically about Bethlehem, which has a good school system. The schools have to cut services for the neediest kids because of funding lost to charters.
Burris goes on to detail the startlingly corrupt real estate dealings of certain Pennsylvania charter operators. Not only are the hurting community public schools, but they are ripping off taxpayers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I;m so pleased she’s doing this. My state, Ohio, is treated as an outlier in ed reform but the longer you look at it the more you realize the outliers are the successes, not the failures.
Pennsylvania ed reform is as bad or worse as Ohio’s and so is Michigan.
Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan is a big area. They should probably admit there’s a problem with their theories if we’re looking at failures this huge.
I feel as if Ohio has quietly refocused on public schools after 15 years of abandoning public schools and promoting charters and vouchers. There’s been a distinct shift in this state. I remain hopeful for Michigan and Pennsylvania because Ohio was one of the first “ed reform” states so we would be ahead of the others in assessing the damage and changing course.
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No need for a lot of words here. Broad narrative is what we are after:
Charters and vouchers are how privatizers give public schools cancer so they die.
Done.
A full oncological report is helpful to the doctors. Patients and family need some big picture conversation at some point at least.
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“Oncological” report: A great word to use in talking about the need to expose the larger cancer rather than focusing necessarily, but solely, upon the so many smaller local symptoms.
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I work in a Philadelphia public school that has been ravaged by the effects of underfunding due, in very large part, to charter expansion in the city. Charters in Philly receive around 870 million dollars from the school budget. This is about 1/3 of the total school budget for the city and yet these charters have in no way removed 1/3 of the the cost of running the public schools.
One result of this underfunding is that a neighborhood school near the one I teach in was shut down and half the students from it pushed into ours. Some effects were: a dramatic increase in class size- from on around 20-25, to 28-30 students, the loss of our art room and our science room, (art and science are now served on a cart) the loss of our library, which, while it didn’t have a librarian, did have books and technology that teachers and students used regularly. The library was packed up in boxes and distributed to classrooms throughout the building.
This year we lost a 4th grade teaching position, so that instead of three 4th grade classes with 21 kids in each, we have two 4th grades with 28 students in each, and a third/fourth grade split. These adjustments significantly undermine the quality of experience and education for students and teachers alike.
Half of the charters in Philadelphia perform worse than the public schools, 25% perform about the same, and the 25% that effectively council out the hard to teach students, perform better.
How on earth is this helping students and improving education?
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“Choice” is a tool to allow corporate raiders to profit at the expense of our young people. There should be some way to redress the situation in the courts. Why should someone’s choice hobble the ability of the public schools to do its job?
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Few people understand the consequences of “choice” on public schools. Too much choice can drain a system dry, diminish the capacity of the district serve public school students well and even cause a system to topple. Many Pennsylvania legislators have connections to the charter industry, and they have a interest in keeping the public money flowing into charters. When corporate money buys policymakers, representatives no longer represent the best interests of the state or local community. They act as corporate shills as they are being paid to represent special interests. This is the reality in many school districts and states today. Burris’ last paragraph summarizes the problem with unregulated charter expansion.
” America must choose either a patchwork of online schools and charters with profiteers on the prowl, or a transparent community public school system run by citizens elected by their neighbors. A dual school system with the private taking funding from the public, simply cannot survive.”
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