Over the past 25 years of experience with charter schools, we have learned that they claim to be public when it is time to get the money, but in all other respects, they are private. Their management is private. They are exempt from many of the laws and regulations that govern public schools. They do not report to an elected board, or to a board that is in any sense accountable to the public or transparent. At least 90% are non-union.
Tom Ultican, a retired teacher in San Diego, saw that the director of communications for the California Charter Schools Association, the most powerful lobby in the state, wrote a letter to the San Diego Free Press, saying that they had been unfair to charter schools and that their stories contained many inaccuracies, although he did not identify any.
Ultican took him to task for his failure to document any inaccuracies and wrote:
Unfortunately, charter schools have become profit centers for real estate developers and charter management organizations. Instead of fulfilling their original mission to be education innovators, they have too often become fraud infested enterprises lusting after tax dollars. It did not have to be this way…
Calling charter-schools public-schools is false. It is political spin. That is too nice. It is a lie.
When the city of San Diego contracts with a construction company to repair roads, that company is still a private company. When the state of California approves a contract, known as a charter, with a private company to educate students, the company gets paid with tax dollars. It is still a private company and is not required to comply with open meeting laws, elected school boards, much of the state education code and budget transparency like a public school. They are private businesses.
This lie is very profitable to charter school owners:
Whether they are for-profit or non-profit they are private companies and the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is quite obscure. For example, Mary Bixby, San Diego’s pioneer in the strip mall charter school business, puts children at computers running education software. Very little personal teacher-student interaction takes place but teenagers who don’t like to get up in the morning can go to the strip mall and earn credits toward graduation. In 2015, the non-profit Mary founded paid her a “salary” of $340,810 and her daughter Tiffany Yandell received $135,947.
It is easy to take offense at the truth. But, ignoring the daily lies from the highest levels of our government, honesty is always the best policy. When you tell the truth you don’t need a “communications director” to spin bad stories.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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KPBS, which is a SoCal PBS affiliate, ran a “news” report last week where it showed an enthusiastic mom, who was talking about education becoming a commodity and a choice of a school as if it were consumer goods. Her upbeat “interview” seemed very scripted, almost ad-like. Granted, the same segment showed a concerned public school district representative lamenting loss of funding (he called it “revenue”). Still, the segment ended up with another portion of the happy mom’s interview, and the overall feeling of the “news” was “yay! Charters offer us more choice”. Felt very much like a paid promotion. Not surprising considering who funds PBS nowadays.
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a truly most harmful game: getting left-leaning news outlets to promote “choice”
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And who is reading Tom Ultican’s well researched open letter? Thank you, Diane, for publishing it here.
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Ah-ha-ha, the Fordham page that Tom’s blog links to is titled “America’s Charter School Deserts”. Good one.
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Charter schools bill themselves as “public schools”, but Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters and don’t even have to file detailed reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money. Of course, if they have to do that, the public and the media will see what the charter school scam is all about, and charter schools will fade away.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report which warns that, because of their lack of financial accountability to the public “CHARTER SCHOOLS AND THEIR MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATIONS POSE A POTENTIAL RISK TO FEDERAL FUNDS, EVEN AS THEY FALL SHORT OF MEETING GOALS” because of financial fraud and the artful skimming of tax money into private pockets, especially hedge fund pockets.
If nothing else is required of charter schools, there is one thing that must be required so that charter schools are accountable to taxpayers and inform taxpayers as to where taxpayer money is actually going when it’s given to charter schools; that one key thing is this: Charter schools must be required to file the SAME detailed, public domain financial reports under penalty of perjury that public schools file.
Charter schools will cry that this is “too burdensome” — yet public schools file such reports. What would the outcry be if public schools were “freed” of this “burden”? Why, the outcry would rattle the very heavens! So, why is it that private charter schools are allowed to get away with taking public tax money and not have to tell the public on an annual basis how those public tax dollars are spent?
Forget every other strategy to stop charter schools: If you can force them to file the SAME detailed, public domain, annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that public schools file — and why not? — the public school industry will dry up and move on to other privatization scams in other areas to divert public money into private pockets.
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