Joan Richardson of Phi Delta Kappan interviews scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig about opposition to charter schools by the NAACP and other civil rights groups.
He explains that the Trump administration will try to destroy public education:
With a Trump administration, this (NAACP) resolution has more importance than ever before because he’s said that he’s going to pump billions of dollars into charter schools and vouchers, which are really partner market-based school choice approaches.
It’s also important because DeVos’s view of what a charter school means is antithetical to what many “education reformers” support. Trump is supporting forms of parent choice and privatization that are beyond what even the Democratic education “reformers” have been supporting. So it remains to be seen if the reformers move toward Trump or if they continue with their argument that there are some good charters but that these other forms of market-based choice are not desirable.
Charters have not satiated the privatization and private-control proponents. In fact, it has become readily apparent that charter schools were just the initiation of the conversation for private control and privatization in other forms such as vouchers.
Trump’s election may turn the tide in favor of private control and privatization of public education. Donald Trump promised in the campaign that his administration would pass the School Choice and Education Opportunity Act and perhaps spend billions on school choice in the first 100 days. So while the NAACP and many in the civil rights community may be supporting community-based, democratically controlled education, the bully pulpit of the presidency may enforce a new era of private control and privatization of the public education system.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Trump will ignore or attack anyone and anything, even the NAACP, that gets in his way. Everything that existed before Littlefingers Donald Trump moved into the White House is now irrelevant.
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“A third-grade math and science teacher at Columbus City Schools’ Weinland Park Elementary School left work Tuesday $25,000 richer after winning a national education award”
If this was a teacher at KIPP or any of the other Ohio charters every single GOP state rep would be trumpeting it far and wide. It would be splashed across the twitter feeds of every ed reformer from Arne Duncan to Michelle Rhee.
Because she’s a public school teacher the only place you will hear about it will be on Diane’s website.
They’re not agnostics. Go read their stuff yourself. You will never find a single positive mention of any public school- not schools, not teachers, not students. In edreformworld the news on public schools is grim, grim, grim. Our children are all failing and our teachers are all lazy union members who are “self interested”. I don’t know what they think of public school parents- we’re never mentioned at all.
I don’t even mind them not being agnostics! There’s nothing wrong with having an ideological preference for charter and private schools. It’s an opinion. They’re allowed to hold it.
What I object to is how they won’t admit it. That’s deceptive and unfair to kids and parents in public schools who deserve representation and advocates.
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If lying were a crime, if deceptive practices were a crime, the privatizers would be in jail
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The way they manage money, they should probably be in jail already.
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Thanks, Diane! So true!
Makes me ill…honest.
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How many long years, now, have I heard this from our local news outlets: Our schools are broken, our teachers are bad, and our children are failures. Until those who wish to see change in the public school message start aggressively and daily publishing the opposite message, the public will get no smarter.
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The award is from the Milken Foundation. The Milken brothers also run K12 Inc., w/ revenue ~$800 million a year from cyber schools. Michael Milken is a felon; he pled guilty to SEC violations.
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Heilig has a great deal of experience with charters. He has been a part of charters and has followed the evolution from “boutique” schools for a specific purpose to the Wal-Mart chains we have today. The way in which charters have morphed into privatization for profit has distorted the original mission of these schools. Creating separate and unequal schools with enhanced segregation are the opposite of what a democracy should do. We should be focusing on transparent, democratic schools that serve the common good. Public schools cannot function at their best when they lose funding to imperfect experimental schools that are never evaluated or held accountable. Due to lobbying charters’ problems are ignored, and they continue to expand.
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I’d be willing to wager that the overwhelming majority of so-called reformers/DFER/TFA/KIPP/Success Academy types will make their peace with Trump and join in the intensified looting we are destined to see in the coming years. They may emit some empty noise intended to misdirect and suggest they aren’t “all that bad,” but the reality is that they are “all that bad,” and are perhaps worse.
If Trump/De Vos are the smart gangsters I think they are, they’ll quickly offer the “liberal” wing of so-called reform its cut, and they’ll get with the program, far more easily and enthusiastically than most would have imagined.
Underneath the bogus social justice rhetoric and images, their purpose was always to provide a smooth, professional and credentialed veneer to the smash-and-grab essence of so-called reform, and they will reveal themselves to be the gross hypocrites/opportunists they have always been.
If you want a single proxy for what they’ll do, it’s probably a good idea to keep your eyes on the contortions of the execrable Corey Booker.
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Many of the charters will be quiet if they become recipients of a large part of the $20 billion Trump intends to squander on various privatization and/or voucher schemes.
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The entire “education reform/choice” movement has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement, of which charter schools are the profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
The first outcry for resegregation “reform” in the guise 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 still today — 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.
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” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the 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. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
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.
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.
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Thank you for tracing the inequitable origins of the charter movement. Today’s rebirth of charters is equally flawed and unfair. It amazes me that someone as brilliant as Obama failed to understand the racist implications creating separate and unequal schools. I don’t understand why he didn’t push to enforce some level of accountability. I don’t see the point in creating more low performing schools and allowing them to expand at the expense of public schools, if they whole point is about improving schools for poor students. Unfortunately, the main objective today is to generate more profit, and pay the right people to ignore the problems.
Your last two paragraphs should be sent to all members of Congress, and community control is exactly what will never happen under DeVos. If a community is unhappy with a school’s performance, the school board, not the corporation, should have the authority to close it down.
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retired teacher: the part of Scisne’s comments that leapt out at me was the reminder—
[start]
The Washington State Supreme Court, the 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. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
[end]
A while ago a commenter on this blog suggested referring to the chains/outlets of rheephorm heavyweights and trendsetters as “corporate charter schools.”
As others have remarked, some form of truth in advertising/labeling would go a long way in providing accurate information to the general public about the true nature of corporate education reform, e.g., that the snappy pr campaign of the segregationists was based on selling the idea of “choice.”
Thanks to all for an informative thread.
😎
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The whole love affair with “choice” is that people feel they are getting something extra and special. They often don’t realize they are diminishing the capacity of the public schools, and they have no idea they are putting their children under the wing of a corporation over which they have little say. It’s all high gloss smoke and mirrors.
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This all sounds like a bait and switch strategy.
On the surface it sounds good, but the further you dig the more corruption you find.
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