Forget all you have heard about tens of thousands of students on waiting lists for charter schools. That’s a marketing ploy. When people think a product is rare and hard to get, they really want it. When Bernie Madoff said that his fund was closed, people literally begged to get into his fund.
Mercedes Schneider obtained a copy of a guide to marketing charter schools, published by the Colorado League of Charter Schools. It is slick. It tells charter folk which words to use and which to avoid. It advises them to build alliances with their local public schools, the better to poach their children away.
It has the fascination of watching a train wreck in slow motion. That is, it is repulsive. It is consumerism at its worst. Read if you dare.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This should be widly circulated so the hucksterism is exposed. Mercedes and others may also want to look at some of the “promises” made in the applications of would-be charter operators to authorizers. Here is one from 2017 for Rocketship G_1_RocketshipCharterPetition_0.pdf
By the way In 2017, Secretary of Education DeVos sent this ”blended learning” franchise a $12.6 million grant for replication.
http://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/betsy-devos-just-gave-12-6-million-grant-to-rocketship-chart/
LikeLike
I need to figure out how to get on that gravy train. Any hints?
LikeLike
Shameless self-promotion will help…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stop quoting Noel Wilson for starters.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The marketing strategies outlined here are similar to marketing plans in other for profit endeavors. This guide is to all the “smoke and mirrors” marketeers use to lure in customers. It is all hype and spin designed to provide the consumer with the illusion of “value.” It is no accident that many of the drugs advertised on the evening news, the ones where they tell you to “ask your doctor about” are among their most expensive products designed to generate maximum profit. Marketeers do not have consumers’ interest at heart. They are out to generate sales for companies by luring, enticing and sometimes misrepresenting products or services.
LikeLike
One of my personal favorite charter spins is “We’re not restricted to hiring certified teachers, we hire experts in their field.” I’ve had charter parents boast about this to me. Wonder how much someone got paid to think up a way to make cheap unqualified labor a good thing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
wow, great sleight of hand: WHO NEEDS TEACHERS WHEN YOU CAN HAVE ‘EXPERTS…’
LikeLike
Consumerism = THE American Way!
LikeLike
Colorado DEMS are DFERS.
LikeLiked by 1 person
and no matter how hard those in the know try to expose this as being very problematic, it just doesn’t “take” with the public
LikeLike
My favorite subject. Catherine DiMartino and I recently published a book about “edvertising,” for any interested: Selling School: The Marketing of Public Education (TC Press) https://www.tcpress.com/selling-school-9780807758885
LikeLike
I once got a solicitation for a charter school that is 60 miles away. My son was then a 4th grader. I guess the plan was I drive him 120 miles to school and back every day.
Not that it matters. The charter has since closed. I think it was open for a total of 3 years.
That was during the period where the ed reform plan was to “flood” Ohio with charter schools. They were plunking them down all over the place. As usual, the authorizers who are paid to regulate these schools were nowhere to be found.
That might be a good study for some university that isn’t wholly captured by the privatization lobby. Look at the authorizers. How much are they paid? What do they actually do all day to earn a cut of every charter dollar?
They’re completely mysterious in Ohio. No one knows who works there, how many work there, what they are paid, what they do.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Since public tax dollars are being used for these schools, we need much more transparency and the right to know how money is being spent. The public is becoming aware that many government contractors are overcharging the public for their service. When there is little oversight or accountability, this process becomes a normalized form of corporate welfare. Here’s an article about how private contractor CEOs are being paid more that they should be paid. It states that it is the taxpayers’ should not be responsible for inflated CEO salaries. While they are mostly talking about military contractors, the same can be said for the many “takers” that run the charter industry. https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/nation-now/ceo-vs-worker-pay-federal-contractors-have-the-biggest-compensation-gaps/465-c16b5c34-0ab4-4a08-a3dd-782126441dee
LikeLike
The authorizer piece is interesting, because they’re essentially private school boards.
It’s doubly interesting in Michigan because they are often public universities.
How much did Michigan colleges take in last year from K-12 charter funding? That seems like an ordinary question people should ask.
Does that fact that colleges and universities collect money from charters skew their analysis of charters?
Ed reformers smear public schools as “self interested” all the time, but under the ed reform definition aren’t charter schools also “self interested”? Sure they are. So why is this criticism only raised when they seek to silence critics from public schools?
LikeLike
My son has kids from the (closed) ECOT back in his public school this year. He says everyone feels bad for them. They’re way behind.
Weird how Jeb Bush no longer parachutes into my state to sell his garbage online learning anymore. He’s made himself scarce since the catastrophic implosion of the school he sold to tens of thousands of families.
They’re all gone, all the ECOT salespeople, and public schools are quietly taking those kids and working with them.
You won’t read about it on The 74 or at the US Department of Education site. I wonder why?
LikeLike
Chiara, This is the closest thing to an independent audit of Ohio Charter authorizaing, and it is only concerned with a slice of the problem.
http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2018/08/feds-say-ohio-has-no-plan-to-improve.html
LikeLike
One of the interesting dimensions in the “school reform” movement is the cynicism, and the difficulty everyone else seems to have–parents especially, but also the press–in believing how cynical these businessmen are. It’s as if the reality of this privatization mania is so threatening–since it will abolish social security and medicare as well as public education–that people just don’t want to believe it. Privatization has been the name of the game since Ronald Reagan, and still many people simply do not accept the nature of the threat posed by the Republicans and the neo-liberal Democrats. If it looks like a duck…
LikeLike
“. . . in believing how cynical these businessmen are.”
I don’t believe that they are necessarily cynical. They fully believe in the profitability of their “product” otherwise they wouldn’t be in the business.
I do believe that they believe themselves to be providing a social good. Very few act with mal-intentions/evil intent-not that profit making is necessarily either one of those. (Now excessive profit taking is another story.)
You are correct, though about the nature of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative (same thing really) threat to society. What a marketing wonder those forces have accomplished in getting people to believe the self-serving narratives of the last 40 years. Look over there, not here while I tell you a story (and rob you at the same time).
LikeLike
One of the most dangerous things about mainstream economics is that it gives people a pseudoscientific Social-Darwinian rationale for doing things that hurt large numbers of people.
The argument is that there are winners and losers in a market economy and if you are a loser, you are somehow deserving of your fate — lazy, stupid, genetically inferior, etc.
This mentality is perpetuated by economists at the highest levels (eg, at some of our top universities), including some crackpot (fake) “Nobel” prize winners (Milton Friedman et Al)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wait a minute, Duane. I am going to get a bit snarky here. It sounds to me like you are saying that it is okay to promote charters if you truly believe you are providing a social good. Now let me apply that to some of the other ed reform crap. it is okay to support/market testing if you truly believe you are providing a public good. It is okay to support micromanagement of teachers with Danielson/Marzano rubrics if you truly believe it is for the good of the profession. It is okay to market/push for more and more tech in the schools if you truly believe that it improves instruction. BUT anyone who questions such initiatives and isn’t willing to throw themselves under the bus in opposition, is guilty of GAGAism? Your last paragraph sounds more like you, but I have to say I appreciate the Duane who seems to willing to cut some slack for people who may hold different opinions. In my most cynical moments, I can almost compete with you in disgust for the actions of those who can to be totally self-serving or who aren’t willing to self immolate in opposition, but I do like the Duane who sees a little gray rather than just black and white.
LikeLiked by 1 person
No, speduktr, I didn’t mean to imply that just because someone thinks something is a good idea, providing a social good that they should be allowed to do whatever it is that they want.
As far as GAGAism, I use that to speak of those who know the harms involved in implementing malpractices, acknowledge said harms, but continue to inflict those harms on the students through continued implementation of the malpractices. Each individual has to decide for him/herself. I just point out the problem of GAGA. I chose to fight it, and paid the price. So what. Didn’t do a damn bit of good, eh as those malpractices are even further entrenched now. Why are they entrenched? GAGA!
And I see a lot of gray in many areas of life, but one must also learn to distinguish when one MUST see things in black and white, and describe and act on that information. All gray all the time is relativism to the Nth degree.
LikeLike
SDP, “Prosperity Gospel” is fairly popular among black/ hispanic/ white evangelicals (in that order, per stats). Its mentality is aptly described by your depiction of economists. Not sure how big the influence, but those ascribing to its [cynical, pseudo-Christian] ideology would have no problem w/rapacious capitalists running their school districts.
LikeLike
People really need to clean house at the state level on education.
Ohio lawmakers are STILL taking direction from THE SAME clique of ed reform “experts” they have been lockstep following for the last 20 years:
” Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He will be addressing Ohio’s mayors and community leaders Sept. 10 at a forum at The Ohio State University, where he will focus on school quality and how it relates to educational attainment and economic vitality. Participation in the Ohio Educational Attainment Summit is by invitation for Ohio mayors, chamber of commerce and business leaders. Others will be wait-listed and admitted as space permits.”
It doesn’t matter how many of their experiments fail- Ohio signs up for each and every one of them.
We need to find lawmakers who do their own thinking. Enough with the slavish devotion to market-based ed reform. Someone new, please. At the very least invite someone with a DIFFERENT opinion, someone who doesn’t come out of the same ed reform pipeline with the same views, up to and including whole phrases and words.
https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2018/08/ohio_can_play_offense_with_the.html
LikeLike
Privatizers meeting at the taxpayer-funded Ohio State University- one more rip-off, by the exploitive private sector.
LikeLike
It’s not enough to flip a governor when the same profit seeking cronies get elected to the state legislatures. We really need to do some “deep cleaning” to get rid of legislators that serve the charter lobby.
LikeLike
You’ll never guess who’s hosting the event- Dayton’s Democratic Mayor Nan Whaley. Her office has e-mail contact. I asked her to provide balance by getting a speaker who isn’t the voice of the richest 0.1%.
LikeLike
If Hanushek valued GDP he’d focus on the hand that feeds Hoover, the financial sector that drags down GDP by 2%.
LikeLike
From Hanushek: “The only way both for individuals and for the state of Ohio to prepare for the changing economy of AI (artificial Intelligence) is to have a population with the skills to adapt to the upcoming economic challenges.”
His presentation is sponsored, in part, by a “Higher Education Compact,” which is a host to “Say Yes to Education,” and connected to “Thriving Cities.”
The main project of “Say Yes” seems to be organizing moneyed and politically connected city leaders to fund college scholarships for students whose parents earned less than $75.000. I could not find criteria for identifying students.
There is some connection (unclear) to Colin Powell’s America Promise program. Although corporate and non-profit sponsors are acknowledged at the Say Yes to Education website, they are not listed. Some can be found by casting a wider internet search that I have undertaken.
As usual Hanushek is doing some wild extrapolating about the fate of the Ohio economy based on NAEP scores and dubious assumptions that skills related to predicted JOB LOSSES to artificial intelligence can be taught in school.I suppose that students are be trained in some remainder of productive work–as if the exclusive purpose of schooling is to serve the economy and AI is some perfected new paradigm for all things wonderful.
See Hanushek’s promo and op-ed here http://www.newslocker.com/en-us/region/cleveland/ohio-can-play-offense-with-the-ai-revolution-by-investing-in-quality-education-eric-a-hanushek-opinion/view/
This report on the Cleveland Say Yes program shows that local funding is being mustered to offer wrap around supports for students, but there are many not-yet-resolved issues in funding scholarship, eligibility of students, and more.
I think Lebron James could teach these promoters of post-secondary education far more than Hanushek can.
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/05/cleveland_schools_say_yes_to_education_ramp_up_planning_to_offer_free_college_to_all.html
LikeLike
Nature abhors the Hoover Institution”
Hoover’s where he works
And vacuum’s what he makes
A bunch of Hoover jerks
An institute of fakes
LikeLike
“assumptions that skills related to predicted JOB LOSSES to artificial intelligence can be taught in school”
What a whopper, eh?
LikeLike
I have 2 questions:
How much say do local districts have in approving or denying charters in their area?
And are local districts OBLIGATED to share the contact information of their students with charters?
Just because someone ‘asks nicely’ for my wallet doesn’t mean I have to comply with their request.
LikeLike
It differs from state to state.
LikeLike
The whole notion of marketing a school and making a living as “…a strategic consultant in the field of education reform and philanthropy and specializes in collaborating with leaders and organizations to tell their story” is nauseating…. but in the emerging era of choice and charters public schools DO need to heed one piece of advice offered by the Colorado League of Charter Schools: they DO need to “Include parents on your list of those to be nurtured and recognized.” This was a sound practice in the era when I worked in public education (1970-2011), but it is even more important now! In states where choice is advocated by politicians, I think it is safe to assume that parents are getting bombarded with slick brochures written by “…strategic consultants in the field of education reform and philanthropy”. Public schools do not have the time or money to put out slick brochures, but we should have the time to praise and support parents. Failure to do so will increase the bleeding of students.
LikeLike
This week, I talked with a Michigan girl going into 1st grade in Sept. She reported on her assumptions after watching virtual charter school ads. She said she wanted to be home schooled because she would be getting prizes every month.
LikeLike