Jan Resseger notes a few straws in the wind that suggest a lessening of enthusiasm for charter schools.
First, she says, is the close race between Tony Thurmond and Marshall Tuck in California. The usual charter-loving billionaires poured millions into Tuck’s campaign, who had twice as much money to spend as Thurmond. The polls predicted a romp for Tuck, given his name recognition (he ran for the same position four years ago, but especially his money in hand. Early returns showed Tuck winning. But then the results reversed, and Thurmond has been leading. Are Californians waking up to the threat posed by charter schools, where accountability is minimal?
Then there was the legislative elections in New York State. Governor Cuomo had a $35 million campaign chest, largely from the Wall Street-Hedge Fund crowd who want to privatize everything. Cuomo rewards his donors. But woe to the charter industry, Republicans and fake Democrats were booted out of the State Senate, and the New Democrats want to improve public schools, not charter schools.
Important straws in the wind.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters have lost their “new car smell,” and they now wreak with the stench of cronyism, fraud and destruction of public schools. The public is catching on that charters offer very little “value add” to their children’s education, and, frankly, many communities support strong public schools that are the social and cultural hub of the community. More so-called choice is often not better, and many times worse.
I saw an interview with Corey Booker who talked about all the improvements he made as mayor in Newark. While he mentioned improvements in education in vague terms, he did not mention the word charter once. Corporate Democrats are afraid of being associated with a movement that has not only lost momentum, it has lost credibility.
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In Indiana, Booker told a student reporter that he wasn’t a privatizer. Evidently Cory didn’t update DFER. DFER’s list still has him on its page.
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Booker is so fully aligned with DeVos, whose nomination he publicly opposed, that he doesn’t know what a privatizer is. I’m not sure why he voted against DeVos.
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oh that his connections to DFER and other privatizing money gets BIG exposure for his 2020 presidential run: maybe then he’ll finally SEE the problem
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BOOKER is a PRIVATIZER.
Trust me.
I taught seventeen years for the Newark Public Schools.
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If that label gets attached to Booker, he will never be considered for National Office
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When corporate DINO’s stop repeating the lie that charter schools are public, it will be another straw in the wind. The liars’ shame has taken too long to kick in.
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Hopefully, everyone is waking up that Charters and Vouchers are the privatization of a public good. Health care was fully privatized years ago and I don’t think many people now are finding the system to be affordable and accommodating for the masses. Maybe if more teachers started taking a stand, public education could be saved. When privatization was starting in healthcare, I always wondered why the doctors and nurses couldn’t/wouldn’t see what was happening to their professions.
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I’d say no, it is not winding down.
Republican sanctioned privatizers spent the last 20 years building charter schools in low-SES, democratic-held regions. Various forces (bloggers, researchers/statisticians, teachers, the NAACP, etc.) have recently stalled that effort but, even if charterists pull back, they have republican-held neighborhoods, cities and counties to fall back on.
It will take another 10-20 years to drive a stake through this vampire.
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And another vampire has risen to extract blood and rule the night….CBE! It never ends. Greed is a dirty word
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I think ed reform is less popular. It’s really too bad in Ohio though. They still have an absolute lock on our state government.
Another lost decade for public schools in Ohio. None of my grown children settled here and I’m glad. It’s a race to the bottom state. We’re at 28% “some college” and that number will fall, again, with zero investment in public education.
The first thing Ohio ed reformers did when they all retained their seats was convene a commission on charter schools. You cannot PAY these state employees to lift a finger for the public schools in this state. If they aren’t working on charter initiatives they’re working on voucher initiatives. 85% of families have no advocates in state government and we keep hiring the same 15 people over and over and over. They switch chairs. The auditor who covered up ECOT? We’re still paying him. They were rewarded for stealing tens of millions of dollars from public education.
So good news in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Illinois and Wisconsin, but very bad news for public school families in Ohio. We’re ed reform outlier in the Great Lakes states now- which is a shame.
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ECOT probably stole hundreds of millions from the public, not tens of millions.
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Fordham is now designing public school funding in Ohio. They’ll be drafting our new funding formula.
We re-hired the same group of captured politicians so we’ll get the same results- public schools decline.
I am so, so sick of our lazy, entitled political class outsourcing their work to charter and voucher lobbying groups. I have no idea why I’m paying these people. They add absolutely no value to any public school in the state. No one even expects them to do anything for public schools anymore. The MOST we ask is that they not deliberately harm our schools. We’re grateful when they neglect 85% of schools because that means at least they’re not harming them. Talk about low expectations.
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Why would Fordham be chosen to design public school funding for the state of Ohio?
They are advocates for charters, vouchers, anything but public schools.
And they have no expertise in the subject of school finance.
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Fordham’s in charge because there is no shame in Ohio’s capitol.
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Watch for a bait and switch in the ed reform plans for prek. Unless there is new funding they are planning on pulling the money out of existing K-12 public schools.
Ask them about the funding. Identify it. Don’t let them run it through K12 systems- that’s where the cost-shifting happens. If they aren’t carefully monitored you will end up robbing peter to pay paul.
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Ed reform lobbying groups now define the “sensible center” as privatized school systems:
https://www.crpe.org/thelens/its-time-rebuild-sensible-center-education-reform?platform=hootsuite
It’s not a mystery that all of them are “political scientists”- it’s pure politics.
You really have to admire how they all climbed aboard the VOUCHER bandwagon so quickly and in such uniform lockstep. A seamless transition from supporting charters to supporting charters and vouchers.
Still no support for public schools, though. Nothing of value added to any public school in the country, by people who make their living in “public education”.
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Such a lively “debate” in ed reform.
Here’s a professional charter cheerleader promoting Michael Bloomberg in The 74
https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-how-bloombergs-1-8-billion-gift-to-johns-hopkins-will-elevate-the-national-conversation-about-helping-first-generation-students-complete-their-college-degrees/?utm_source=The+74+Million+Newsletter&utm_campaign=be9d662132-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_11_19_11_38&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_077b986842-be9d662132-176203605
It’s circular. The billionaires fund the media outlets and the lobbyists, and then the lobbyists use those same media outlets to promote the billionaires.
If you drew the ed reform “movement” connections it would be a series of lines intersecting, centered on about 150 people. X funds Y who promotes X and then hires Z…around and around and around.
50 million public school students- 150 unelected self proclaimed “leaders”.
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If you believed Bloomberg’s PR, the NYC school system is utopia.
It is not.
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Semi-relatedly, and somewhat belatedly, Eva Moskowitz has finally won her battle against the NYC DOE over its decision to condition pre-K funding on Success Academy’s agreement to submit to DOE regulations.
https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2018/11/20/charter-schools-entitled-to-funding-of-pre-k-programs-ny-court-of-appeals-rules/
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Eva is regulated by no one.
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Yet, the lie that charters are public continues- one of the greatest frauds of the century.
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The notion (I’ll call it a notion rather than a “lie” to frame it neutrally) that charters are public will always persist because the primary meaning that laypeople associate with “public schools” is that they don’t charge tuition and are open to “the public.” Governance is an arcane topic for the vast majority of parents. Even if they understood that charter schools are managed by private corporations, it wouldn’t dent their understanding that charter schools are public schools.
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I don’t agree, FLERP.
Charter schools are experiencing a marked decline, nationally.
The backlash is not limited to NY
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Citizens understand that General Dynamics is a government contractor and as such is a private company. Citizens understand non-profit, private, legacy admission colleges are not public. Citizens understand that Princeton is not public. The public understands that the University of Phoenix is private and for-profit. The difference in the citizens’ understanding is that grifters and the self-serving, richest 0.1%, have paid politicians, think tanks, and media to intentionally lie to Americans about charter schools.
The topic is not arcane. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled charters are private and their assets are not owned by the public. Tuition is not free. Taxpayers pay for the services of companies like ECOT. Public school boards are elected and they follow sunshine laws. If the donor class wasn’t obfuscating the truth, citizens would be informed that main street has lost the multiplier effect of local education dollars spent locally and that communities have lost their democratic rights because men like Bill Gates wanted an American education system characterized by “….brands on a large scale”. His goal which results in greater concentration of wealth was published in Philanthropy Roundtable.
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I doubt very seriously that Democratic city mayors would have “hosted” a mayors event for a Bill Gates’ Impatient Optimist and a Hoover Institute- public school tax slasher if they knew Gates and Z-berg were investors in the largest for-profit seller of schools-in-a- box.
If mayors had the knowledge and hosted the event, theirs was, a deceit by omission. At the expense of their communities, they gained something for themselves.
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Why is it that this moskowitch character seems to get her way every time. These success academy schools are run by pt barnum folks wake up and smell the brew and watch out for this woman who will throw anyone under the bus for her gain.
Moskowitch is a real character and knows how to get her way using people. Parents be aware if you plan on sending you kids to any of the moskowitch schools.
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