Carol Burris, the amazing and talented executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote this stunning investigative report on charter fraud in California. It is titled “Charters and Consequences.”
The report details the fraud and financial scams permitted by California’s weak charter law. So weak is that law that it not only tolerates fraud, it encourages it.
As you read the report, you will ask yourself why taxpayers are not outraged. They should be.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OMG.
No one has ever investigated the CA school districts that contract for part time Fuel Ed classes.
For example Fuel Ed charges our local district $26,000 for history classes that are using the Khan Academy and YouTube Ed videos.
Parents are drawn to the free classes.
Students are drawn to the easy classes and learn nothing.
When did that become part of the CA curriculum?
What is the benefit of Fuel Ed online curriculum when the CA Community College system was set up so that high school students could take community college classes for free?
As long as Michael Kirst is at the helm as a former employee of K-12,Inc. this will continue.
Thank you Gov. Brown for ruining the CA Education system.
The NYTimes has another cheerleading article for Summit:
“Inspired by Summit Public Schools, a charter network based in Silicon Valley, Achievement First built its own online platform to teach humanities, math and science, along with vocabulary and grammar. Students are expected to complete online units by certain dates and get weekly progress reports sent home.”
Summit supposedly “partners” with 300+ public schools but they must be silent partners since they’re excluded from any of these ed reform pieces promoting charters. All you ever hear from is the Summit “CEO”. Maybe they’re afraid if there’s a real dialogue that includes public school leaders all the stories won’t be positive, damaging The Summit Brand. I wonder how the Summit/Facebook system is going at the 300 public “partner” schools? I guess we’ll never know since they aren’t invited to speak. Ever.
The public schools aren’t good enough to sit at the table for Big Picture Theory stuff- they just provide students for experimentation by The Best and Brightest in charterworld. Our kids are lucky enough to be the “default” ed reform experimental population that are never heard from. The unfashionable “status quo” that are being “transformed”. Yippee! Lucky us!
The ed reform echo chamber is interesting because it produces weird results. Ohio is universally slammed for crappy ed reform but a lot of California is just as bad yet no one mentions it. Carol Burris is the only person who ever criticizes CA ed reform. Most ed reformers will admit Ohio is a disaster. Why is that? Why the different treatment?
Indiana is as bad as Michigan but Michigan’s massive ed reform failures get covered and Indiana’s do not.
It’s political, I think. IMO. The more lock-step the ed reform capture the less real analysis there is. They’ve captured both Republicans and Democrats in California so there’s no debate anymore. It’s funny because it doesn’t follow Party lines. Ohio is much more Republican than California yet we get lots and lots of ed reform debate and criticism and they don’t.
“Tis a mystery 🙂
Perhaps it has to do with demographics/levels of education?
I posted it at Oped News!
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/NPE-Releases-Charters-and-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-School-Failure_Education-For-All_Education-K-12_Investigative-Journalism-180114-782.html
The depth and breadth of the report are impressive. NPE should send a copy to all the state departments of education and Betsy DeVos. I am grateful to Burris for her hard work and to NPE for their willingness to assemble an overview of the issues and problems surrounding privatization. It is troubling that the states that keep sinking more resources into this failed experiment despite evidence to the contrary. Government leaders seem to have little interest in protecting students from corporate exploitation, fiscal mismanagement or the unfair practices surrounding privatization. In fact, the government is often working with corporations to destroy the democratic institution of public education.
Unfortunately, charters were launched with the idea of doing something new and innovative, but they have morphed into ugly schemes to move public money into private pockets. Charters are backed by too many greedy, complicit politicians that refuse to look at the considerable harmful impact of charters. Backed by dark money, billionaires and complicit elected representatives, charters have become a gigantic mound of political pork established to systematically move public funds to private corporations while public schools and students suffer.
Here’s something to think about, this is coming from California a state that has a Democratic majority in the state legislature and a Democratic governor!
best to put “Democratic” inside quotation marks