Wendy Lecker is a civil rights attorney who writes often for Connecticut newspapers. I did not see this column when it first appeared, but think it is worth reading now. Locker was first to use the term “gateway drug” to describe charters, meaning that they are the seemingly benign but insidious first step towards privatization of public schools.
She writes:
Betsy DeVos’ nomination brings to the fore some important truths about charter schools. Charter schools are part of a larger strategy to privatize and eliminate public schools. The slogan that charters and choice are part of a “civil rights” agenda is propaganda originating from ultra-conservative white Christian activists disguising their true aims.
In reality, choice in the form of charters increases segregation and devastates community public schools in our most distressed cities. As charters have proliferated in predominately minority cities, children and parents of color bear the brunt of this destruction.
To describe the proliferation of charter schools and vouchers as “the civil rights issue of our time” is both hypocritical and cynical. To see the utter failure of charters to address the needs of children of color, one need look no further than Detroit, awash in charters that have been a diversion from the consequences of structural racism and deindustrialization. Promises aplenty, but no help for the city’s neediest families and students, whose public schools and communities have been gutted by competition with ineffective charter schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Now this is language that matters! The “gateway drug” of privatization should be part of all of our stump speeches from now on.
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Introducing the “gateway drug” of a co-location charter school into a traditional public school building often means slow death for the traditional public school.
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Just from an ordinary person outsider perspective… Do pubic school advocates really want to be associated with propaganda pushing “the war on drugs”?
Just think about that a minute.
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Can ed reform just leave public schools out of it? They have nothing positive to offer us so why not just promote charters and vouchers and drop public schools completely?
It’s not like a single kid or parent in a public school would notice their absence.
I resent being used to promote their preferred systems. Do it without us.
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I’ve been saying this for a while but ed reform’s influence in Ohio is really waning. There was a change in leadership at the ODE in response to a charter score rigging scandal and it’s different:
“The Ohio Department of Education announced in a press release that they intend to delay their submission of Ohio’s ESSA plan until the September deadline. They had originally planned to submit the plan at the earlier April deadline.
As part of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states now have the flexibility to make choices that best suit their needs. States can submit their ESSA templates to the U.S. Department of Education in either April or September. To allow this work to advance and drive needed change, the Department will delay the ESSA template submission to the U.S. Department of Education to September. This also will allow more time to ensure that feedback received on the draft template can be considered carefully.
This change of heart has come about because of withering pressure from parents and educators. When ODE released their original plan, stakeholders were shocked by the lack of substance included in the plan on reduced testing and an evaluations overhaul that they had given as part of their feedback.”
This would never have happened 10 years ago. The idea that any of them would actually listen to public school parents was unheard of – in fact, you NEVER hear from public school parents in ed reform.
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Here’s today’s ed reformer for you to read:
https://twitter.com/PCunningham57
Try to find a single positive mention of a public school.
These are the “liberal” ed reformers! The “agnostics”! The conservatives are even worse. Public schools who hire these people are insane. Would Eva Moskowitz hire and pay people who spend their entire working lives bashing charter schools? No. Of course not. That would be dumb. Public schools shouldn’t either.
You’re not “lesser” than charter and private schools. Stop acting like you are.
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Spring 2017 “Fellows” of Gates-funded Pahara (an Aspen Institute program) include (1) Macke Raymond of Stanford’s Credo (2) Soner Tarim of “Harmony Public Schools”. (The word “charter” wasn’t in his title in the heading at the Pahara site.) (3) from the public university system, SUNY, Susie Miller Carello (4) from the Education Achievement Authority of Mich., Chancellor Veronica Conforme, (5) from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, Eric Gordon (6) DFER’s Shavar Jeffries (7) a guy from the Paulson Family Foundation, etc.
David Koch is on the Aspen Institute board.
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Harmony is part of the Fetullah Gulen Network
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PUKE! Enough said.
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Charter schools are the profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. The call for vouchers was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are 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 a “choice.”
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 1950’s voucher crusade 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. These aren’t onerous burdens on charter schools; these are only common sense requirements to assure taxpayers that their money is being properly and effectively spent to educate children and isn’t simply ending up in private pockets or on the bottom line of hedge funds.
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“irst to use the term “gateway drug” to describe charters, meaning that they are the seemingly benign ”
Well, they are as benign as any parasite or cancer.
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You might want to visit this you tube post. The Bald Piano Guy has a lot of interesting stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsUi6WWELE
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Some of you might find it useful to see/hear what these parents & students of Metro Deaf Charter in St Paul have to say about why the school is a good option for them:
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