Question of the Day, Week, Year, Decade:
In the face of so many scandals and failures, why do eduvillainthropists continue to throw good money after bad?
Angie Sullivan, a teacher in Clark County, Nevada, poses this question in a recent letter.
Thank you National Public Education Activists for your work which I follow on a regular basis.
Thank you for your work.
I believe our Nevada legislators should notice:
– Nevada Education Leadership in the NVDOE have failed to prove Nevada Charters are a remedy. Yet our current legislation allows charter takeover of CCSD schools.
– Nevada Charters are segregating. In Nevada, charters segregate by race, money, and religion. Each Nevada charter campus has an obvious identity and group it serves.
– Eduphilantrophists financially propping up or expanding Nevada for-profit charters is not good business practice. This is not competition. Nor is it a good return on investment. It is forced. It is also throwing good money after bad.
– Authentic Education Innovation has been replaced by for-profit corporations creating hedgefund or leasing opportunities. 80% of Nevada Charters are for-profit.
– There is significant and severe lack of financial or academic accountability for Nevada Charters. This is very costly to the Nevada Tax Payer as many charters flounder for years in receivership/ bankruptcy. Or national charter chain corporations sue Nevada draining resources rather than educating students.
– Nevada Charter student enrollment practices and student expulsion need to be examined. Authentic reliable and viable research is noticeably non-existent or extremely limited on Nevada Charters. A simple persual of Nevada charter websites which allow racial slur posting and derogatory statements against some students enrolling can be used as evidence to take action.
– CCSD student population is 20% white. Nevada charters reflect nearly the opposite. “Choice” is white flight. IEP and Free-Reduced lunch numbers also show significant under-service in charters.
– CCSD Schools threatened with charter takeover serve communities which are brown. These schools are NOT the lowest performers in the state. There is something racially unfair about charter takeover selection. It is not “choice” if you have to force brown kids into a disfunctional charter district. Folks would go willingly if the charter district was successful in serving communities of color. Frankly some communities are tired of their children being used in education experiments or being used to meet a quota.
Nevada Education Leadership and the Nevada Legislature need to acknowledge that our education money is limited. Nevada Charters are not authentically successful. Public Relations Spin does not make a student graduate. Billions are spent to promote this failed scam. Continuing to spend tax payer money in a segregating and business manipulated manner is harmful to our communities in significantly distructive ways.
In summary, Nevada Charters are not graduating students.
$350 million and growing. 30 years and zero accountability. This mess needs to be cleaned up.
The Nevada Charter Authority needs the ability to close down national charter corporations.
Nevada needs a charter moratorium.
The nation needs a moratorium.
Keep fighting the good fight. Our public schools are worth the effort. Our students need us to speak up. May God hold us in His Hands.
The Teacher,
Angie Sullivan
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Don’t forget- when lawmakers focus on charters and vouchers, existing public schools are neglected and ignored.
The damage is much due to neglect as it is to active opposition to the existence of public schools.
Public schools would do okay under reform governance if it were just promotion of charters and vouchers, because ed reformers don’t offer anything of value to public schools so they’re mostly irrelevant.But it isn’t just promotion of charters and vouchers.
It’s active, deliberate disinvestment in existing systems.
One can see it in Ohio. The ed reform contingent in Ohio government has not offered or provided any added value to any public school in the state. They EXCLUSIVELY promote charters and vouchers. The schools that 90% of kids in this state attend go begging while the public pays thousands of public employees to promote charter and private schools.
It’s ludicrous. They’re a “public education movement” that excludes 90% of public school students.
This is an example, but this is so the norm in ed reform one can read it anywhere:
“In a recent column in the New York Times, David Brooks describes the work of a new centrist think thank called the Niskanen Center which embraces a “free-market welfare state” model. As an example of the Niskanen Center’s moderate approach, Brooks notes:
They want charter schools and wider choice, but within strong government structures to ensure quality. (It turns out that bad charter schools continue to attract students; the education market doesn’t work totally unregulated.)”
Existing public schools do not exist in this “movement”. They offer absolutely nothing to those schools, those students, or those families, and this approach absolutely dominates elite opinion and the federal government.
It is unimaginable to these folks that an existing public school could have ANY value at all- they don’t invest in our schools because they don’t value them and don’t believe they should exist.
Hiring one of these people for a public position is a guarantee your existing public schools will be neglected. It’s baked into “the movement” to such an extent they don’t even see it themselves.
David Brooks believes all charter propaganda that comes his way. It is the world he moves in. He may never have set foot in a public school. Several years ago, he wrote a column attacking me for saying that test scores reflect poverty. He believes passionately in the charter hype and TFA. Great teachers (TFA) can cure poverty, saith Brooks.
his loyalty to this lie is sadly iconic (he represents so many who should SEE but simply choose not to): he has heard to much about how society is falling apart, but simply cannot move toward enlightenment where schools are concerned
I’ve given up on the federal government providing anything of value for or to public schools, but I do hope that with some brand new lawmakers we’ll get a few representatives that aren’t ideologically opposed to the schools 90% of kids attend.
Because that’s ridiculous. The public shouldn’t be paying 10,000 employees who refuse to add any value to the schools 90% of us attend.
I don’t really care if they’re ideologically opposed to public schools. If they’re working in public education they probably have to get over their attachment to the privatized system of their dreams and return some value, or go work for Walton or Gates or Zuckerberg. The public shouldn’t be picking up the cost of their social experiments.
I hope that the feds stay out of K-12 education. Education is a state/municipal responsibility. Citizens should tax themselves at the state/municipal level, and use that revenue to operate the public schools.
They continue to throw good money after bad because 1) much of the money that they are throwing down a rat hole is not theirs — it’s ours, the the public’s and 2) the purpose is not successful schools but the destruction of public schools.
It’s just like all the public school closures and teacher firing under the Obama Regime (eg, by Rahm Emanuel who closed 50 Chicago schools in a single day). The purpose was not to improve the public schools. The latter claim is just completely illogical. How can one improve a school by closing it? How can one I prove a school by firing ALL it’s teachers as was done in Rhode Island with Obama’s blessing?
Obviously one can not.
But improvement was never the goal.
Replacement was/is.