Steven Singer reviews the panicked reaction of the charter lobby to the report by the NAACP demanding charter accountability and an end to profiteering off the backs of children.
What part of the NAACP was so horrendous and unpalatable to the charteristas?
What is so radical about accountability and transparency?
Shouldn’t local communities have the right to reject for-profit charters? Shouldn’t they have a say in whether a charter opens in their district? At present, charters are foisted onto communities whether they want them or not. That doesn’t seem right.
Charter school cheerleaders like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos call their movement School Choice. Shouldn’t communities get to choose whether they want them there in the first place? If the program is based on the free market, let them make their case to the community before setting up shop. They shouldn’t get to make a backroom deal with your congressman and then start peddling their wares wherever they want.
Moreover, if charter schools are, indeed, public schools, why should they be allowed to operate at a profit? They are supported by tax dollars. That money should go to educating children, not lining the pockets of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers.
The “backroom deal” that Singer refers to is usually not with a congressman, but with the state legislature or the state board or the governor, and it usually is the result of campaign contributions. But why should campaign contributions determine what happens to public schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If anyone wants to read some extreme reaction to the NAACP report from African-Americans in the corporate ed. reform community, go to this article from Erika Sanzi on her pro-charter blog. Sanzi actually does everyone a service by collecting and assembling in one place a dozen such negative reactions:
http://goodschoolhunting.org/2017/07/friends-say-best-black-voices-naacp-lost-way.html
As I point out in my Facebook post just below this piece, the title of the article says this is about how the NAACP “has lost its way,” but the folks whom Sanzi quotes really didn’t address “how'” the NAACP had lost its way, nor did they refute any of the substance of or testimony included within the report. It’s just a lot of paranoid lashing out and ad hominem attacks.
I read your response – it was excellent. Thank you.
The fact that there don’t seem to be ANY charter leaders willing to embrace accountability and transparency and they’d prefer to accuse the NAACP of selling their own children for a cut rate price instead of acknowledging that transparency and accountability are actually a GOOD thing tells you how far the entire charter movement has fallen.
The reform movement was once comprised of people who actually cared about good schools and doing right by ALL children. Their attack on the NAACP’s very moderate proposal for accountability and transparency shows you how corrupt the movement has become. It is filled with people who care only about their own careers and pleasing the billionaires who underwrite their very generous salaries.
In that, the charter movement reminds me of nothing as much as the Republicans in Congress. There was a time, decades ago, where they offered legitimate different ideas. Now, they are there to vote for whatever their billionaire donors tell them to vote for whether it’s good for their constituents or the American people or not.
If the charter lobby had good intentions, they would not feel so threatened by the NAACP’s declaration. Charters have become a gigantic “pay to play” scheme in which the state forces local communities to adopt charters. The state deliberately bypasses the local community, even though local tax dollars have to pay for this top down decision. The NAACP’s recommendations are logical and reasonable. The local community should have authority over education as they understand the needs of the local community. Once the charter lobby becomes embedded in a state or city, it uses a variety of hostile tactics. In Pennsylvania the legislature refused to vote on a state budget to force the governor to agree to charter expansion. These types of backroom deals have nothing to do with improving education for poor students or serving the needs of the community. These are political maneuverings to gain access to public funds. The profit motive has been a driving force for charter growth in many states.
No wonder! How dare those NAACP members ask for transparency and accountability!
You can see if from the pro-charter posters who post here – John and Stephen B Ronan — who had the chutzpah to insinuate that the NAACP couldn’t wait to sell their own children in exchange for a teachers’ union donation. It’s not surprising that the attacks came from the exact same people who said “how dare the NAACP question a white woman who says that 20% of the African-American Kindergarten children in her charter were so unrelentingly violent that she had no choice but to suspend them. It’s true, it’s true, they were violent and we white people know it!” say those critics of the NAACP.
The whole “let’s let the market decide and as long as they treat some African-American children nicely and get them to come who cares what they do to the rest” is the kind of nastiness we saw in the south by the racists who insisted that there was no need for regulations or civil rights legislation.
The MARKET is wrong. Thank you, NYC publc school parent.
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 deceptive call for “choice” and school 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.”
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 developed new tactics to restore racial segregation.
The most successful tactic has been charter schools because charter have attracted 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.
In fact, 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.
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.” Using “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 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.
These aren’t “burdensome” requirements for charter schools — they are simply common sense safeguards that public tax money is actually being used to maximum effect to teach our nation’s children.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
The NAACP report shines a light on corporate charter and management operation profits. Their profits are at risk! And this from the NAACP report hits the charter expansion coffin nail right on the head, “even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education in communities that serve all children.” The charter investors are disturbed because the scent of injustice is in the air. They are starting to smell themselves. It’s a pretty disturbing odor.
“CHOICE” is FRAUD, take it from me a charter school parent since 1994! They charter school profiteers come to our neighborhoods with a broken promise to be our children’s saviors. They claim to educate and serve ALL students. They tell us public educational systems (districts) have failed us so they are the better “CHOICE”! All false until you hit a roadblock and you begin to demand they keep thier promise to the community they have invaded! Parents like me then become The ENEMY! Thanks to the NAACP for standing firm to protect REAL public education and not this fraudulent thing some called “CHOICE”!
“…charter lobby is in a panic.” Ohioans have been “in a panic” to stop contractor schools from fleecing taxpayers, but that plight is not new. Gates and Walton heirs pulled up stakes in Ohio a few months ago, leaving behind their legacy of a corrupted state government.