The American Civil Liberties Union issued a blistering report about the charter industry in Arizona, claiming that charters choose their students, instead of the other way around.
The title of the report is Schools Choosing Students: How Arizona Charter Schools Engage in Illegal and Exclusionary Student Enrollment Practices and How It Should Be Fixed
The 26-page report begins:
In the 1990s, Arizona became one of the nation’s rst adopters of charter schools. The vision was to give parents more academic choices for their children and to provide learning environments more tailored to students’ individual needs. In many cases, however, Arizona’s charter school program has had the opposite result: Charter schools are choosing students who fit their mold.
Indeed, more than two decades after charter schools emerged in Arizona, admission policies and procedures at many of the state’s charter schools unlawfully exclude some students or create barriers to their enrollment. Many schools have been able to get away with exclusionary practices for years without accountability.
Though charter schools operate independently, they are part of Arizona’s
public education system and use taxpayer funds. As such, they are required to “enroll
all eligible pupils who submit a timely application.”1 If more students apply than
can be accommodated, schools can randomly select students through a lottery system.2
Arizona charter schools are also forbidden from discriminating against students on the basis of “ethnicity, national origin, gender, income level, disabling condition, proficiency in the English language or athletic ability.”3
But an analysis of Arizona charter schools’ enrollment materials shows many schools have policies and procedures that are clearly illegal or exclusionary. Speci cally, out of the 471 Arizona charter schools that were analyzed,
at least 262, or 56 percent, have policies that are clear violations of the law or that may discourage the enrollment of certain students.
Do you think that Betsy DeVos cares? Will the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights take action to reduce and eliminate illegal discrimination?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The ACLU can’t look to Trump’s federal government to do anything about this. The ACLU will have to take this issue through the Arizona state court system, and if the ACLU wins, the case will be appealed by the destructive reformers and if needed and allowed, those frauds and liars will take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The racial issues in Arizona charter schools is not surprising — it’s the norm nationwide. Many of those young adult racists who marched in Charlottesville are products of that portion of America’s school system that has been re-segregated by the charter schools movement that became widespread at the beginning of the 1990’s…and there are tens of thousands more of them in the segregated charter school pipeline that keeps churning them out.
Racist re-segregation being fostered charter schools is clearly an issue that isn’t even on the radar of Senators Sanders and Warren, and none are at all aware of the racist roots of charter schools or how they are re-segregating the education of America’s children.
The racist roots of charter schools traces back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that required the racial integration of public schools. That triggered “white flight” from public schools and into private schools. But white parents found the cost of private schools was expensive, so the call went out for vouchers to enable white parents to have a “free choice” of schools. In 1959, just before the Court’s deadline for racial integration of public schools, a prominent newspaper in Prince Edward County, Virginia, published the outline for the charter school scheme to resegregate education: “We are working [on] a scheme [with members of Congress] in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to corporations, reopen them as privately operated schools with tuition grants [vouchers] from [the State of Virginia] and from Prince Edward County. Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with [the Supreme Court and non-whites].”
At the same time, a prominent Virginia attorney who was an advisor to Virginia politicians announced a corollary scheme for resegregating public schools by means of standardized testing: “Negroes can be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they can’t maintain. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches [from white parents].” That was the conceptual beginning and foundation of all the standardized testing we see today, many of which tests are are designed with built-in racial and cultural biases to manufacture failure. The test results were and still are used to “prove” that traditional public schools are “failing” — a claim abetted by drastic underfunding of public schools so that they lacked the resources to teach effectively. The “failing” test scores were and are also used to “prove” that unionized public school teachers are “ineffective”.
That’s the beginning of charter schools, vouchers, and testing. That conceptual foundation remains the same today, which is why the NAACP has called for a moratorium on charter schools, which are openly practicing racism. For more details, read the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project report “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards.”
But charter schools are even more insidious: They are also a financial scam. The thoughtful person must ask why hedge funds are so interested in expanding the number of charter schools. It certainly isn’t an altruistic concern for children. Here’s a hint: The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools are a risk to the Department of Education’s 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 and the skimming of tax money into private pockets, which is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
For example: One of the profitable charter school scams is to have the puppet private school boards lease buildings that are owned by real estate investment trusts (REITs) held by the hedge funds. The charter school board members, in exchange for kickbacks, pay lease rates far above the market rate, and the profit goes to the hedge funds. Another incredible scam is that in many states when a charter school buys things like computers for the students, the computers — even though purchased with taxpayer money — become the private property of the charter school. At the end of each school year, they sell the computers, pocket the money, and receive more taxpayer money to purchase new computers…and repeat the process year-after-year.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Court, 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 simply 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 private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
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 operator 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 “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.
Hedge fund groups, such as “Democrats for Education Reform”, provide money for Democratic Party campaigns and President Obama has long ties to the DFR, so the Party is not going to willingly push for financial accountability for the charter school gravy train. But teachers and retired teachers who vote in high percentages are going to continue to sit on the sidelines until the Party actually brings genuine financial accountability to charter schools and ends charter school racism. Teachers and retired teachers know that if charter school operators are required to actually reveal what they are doing with public tax money, the gravy train will grind to a halt and hedge funds will move on to other schemes to get their hands on public money, leaving the charter school movement to wither away.
“Do you think that Betsy DeVos cares?”
She doesn ‘t give a sh!#.
Devos puts the rights of privately-managed or private school operators ahead of students who are are vulnerable (Oh wait, the Trump Admin. just banned the use of “vulnerable”.)
“Will the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights take action to reduce and eliminate illegal discrimination?”
The U.S. Dept. of Ed. won’t do sh!#, as evidenced by Devos’ exchange with Senator Katherine Clark where Devos — after desperately attempting to dodge the question — reluctantly admits that she believes that the right of these charters and voucher-funded private schools to “choose” their students trumps (pun intended) everything, including those same students rights not to be discriminated against.
Again, Devos states that the right of states’ schools — specifically privately managed schools and private schools within states — to “flexibility” to engage in such discrimination is paramount:
If you really want to lose it, watch Devos’ dissembling at Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan’s questioning about Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s failed “choice” system.
Talking to Devos is like talking to a friggin’ wall:
I disagree, talking to a concrete wall would be more productive than talking to BD.
So frustrating that this report is limited to AZ – I would argue that NYC charters have openly and illegallly flouted the law that created them from the beginning. The pertinent language in NY state’s charter law requires them to give “special emphasis” to “students at-risk of academic failure”.
As Arizona showed, just having a law on the books means nothing if there is no enforcement. It took parents complaining to the feds to get relief, but did the state do anything to address the systemic problem?
So this means the squeaky wheels get the grease and the other parents can pound sand. In New York, why has there never been a simple lawsuit asking the state’s charter authorizers what ‘special emphasis’ means and what ‘at-risk’ students means?
Why should Arizona charters be an different than anywhere else? This is how keeps the riff riff out of her schools. If one or two happen to get in, she has ways to get them to leave, and a “got to go” list. Her “teachers” berate the “scholars” and punish them for the smallest “infractions” and, in all likelihood, just for being who they are, and a kid can’t choose his/her status in life. It is no surprise what happens in Arizona; it is commonplace.
Wow, “Eva Moskowitz” totally disappeared from my post. Is Big Brother editing posts (and I do not mean you, Ms. Ravitch; you have my utmost respect). How odd that Eva’s name would disappear. I must have subconsciously wished her to go away.
Strange indeed.
Is it possible if enough of us subconsciously wished Eva would vanish, she’d become a missing person with her mug shot on a milk carton?
It’s important to note the differences between this report and a similar one from the ACLU in California called “Unequal Access”. In the latter, the ACLU admitted that they only found 20% of the charters they examined as having illegal enrollment policies because they did not make requests for information not posted on the charters’ websites.
A clever trick that is becoming more and more common in Los Angeles, at least, is to require parents to sign up for an online account and only then will the enrollment requirements become available. Some ask for the parents to either pick up the materials at the school or personally drop them off. These present opportunities for staff to personally review the application and possibly discourage the parent from enrolling their child.
I’ve been a member for many years! ACLU does an outstanding job of protecting our liberties!
The full report is long but worth reading. It conveys how important the USDOE’s office of civil rights is and why it’s staff should not be cut.