Jeff Bryant went to Los Sngeles to interview teachers during the strike. He discovered that they see charters as privatization, and as such, an existential threat to public education. A few years ago, UTLA commissioned an independent audit of the cost of charters and learned that they drain $600 annually from the district.
https://www.salon.com/2019/01/25/los-angeles-teachers-make-the-case-that-charter-schools-are-an-existential-threat-to-public-education_partner/
Jeff Bryant reports:
This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
“Isn’t it reasonable to have some regulations on charters?” asked Ingrid King, a kindergarten and dual language teacher at Latona Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles. She and two of her colleagues spoke to me from the picket lines during the recently resolved teacher strike in her city. When she and over 30,000 teachers and school personnel walked off the job, it closed the nation’s second-largest school system of nearly a half-million students for six days and filled the streets with huge protests.The strike ended when the district conceded to give teachers a 6 percent pay raise, limit class sizes, reduce the number of student assessments by half, and hire full-time nurses for every school, a librarian for every middle and high school, and enough counselors to provide one for every 500 students.But the concessions teachers won that will likely have the most impact outside of LA are related to charter schools. The teachers forced the district leader to present to the school board a resolution calling on the state to cap the number of charter schools, and the teachers made the district give their union increased oversight of charter co-locations — a practice that allows charter operations to take possession of a portion of an existing public school campus.
Los Angeles Unified has 277 charter schools, the largest number of charter schools of any school district in the nation. The schools serve nearly 119,000 students, nearly one in five students. The vast majority of charters are staffed by non-union teachers. (Teachers at a chain of unionized charter schools in the city that joined district teachers on the strike are still on strike.) So the quick takefrom some is the teachers’ union made curbs on charter schools part of their demands because these schools are a threat to the union’s power.
But when you talk to teachers, that’s not what they say. They tell you they want to curb charter school growth, not because it threatens their union, but because charters threaten the very survival of public schools.
Read on!0
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Jeff Bryant. This article touches on something severely underreported: the whole charter system saves money because the local school district is who pays for compliance oversight and administration of charters. So not only do the charters remove the revenue from the local district by syphoning students, but they also increase the administration burdens of the local district. See LAUSD and Oakland. Then the charter lobby gets to claim that charters “do more with less”.
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agreeing with your claim, I would add in the words “top heavy” before the word administration: in our district the Test And Punish game came aggressively in the door with a very corporate view of management — so may new levels of control have now been established between Superintendent and teachers.
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Democratic Calf. Rep. Susan Davis is a corporatist who supports K-12 privatization. In September, she was on a panel at the BiPartisan Policy Center, which, based on other panelists like Purdue Global (the former Kaplan) is driving the Gates/Arnold agenda in higher ed. (They sponsored the event.). The event’s description was characterized as the “changing landscape”. Not one student, not one professor and not one at-large community member representing the citizens who built and pay for the public universities was listed on the program’s panel. And, the only university represented was Purdue Global.
Charter-lovers, George Miller and Bud McKeon (Mother Jones, April 2018) self-appointed to lead the higher ed. task force at BPC. Tom Daschle founded BPC and he chairs the Board of CAP (also privatizing advocates).
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This article touches upon the many issues that fueled the teachers’ strike in LA. The teachers in the city had reached a tipping point of frustration in facing unreasonable charter expansion while the public schools have been ignored. Charters in LA and other cities have been given preferential treatment, and the result is a two tiered system, both economic and in many cases racial. It is like having two children. One gets a beat up old Ford Pinto and the other child gets a new Mercedes. Of course, everyone wants to take the Mercedes for a spin. That is what happened in LA. White parents have increasingly signed up for charters that had smaller classes and better resources and facilities while Latinx and black students remain in underfunded public schools. This tiered system places public schools in an unfair competition with ever expanding charters that do not need to play by the same rules. Thanks to the strike the public will better understand the problems and issues confronting the public schools in the city.
Kudos to the teachers of Latona who must be doing great work despite limited resources. They clearly know what to do with ELLs as they have unleashed their potential. Why would the district not support these students that have as much right to a quality education as anyone else? The district should try to replicate what these teachers are doing in other schools in the district with large numbers of ELLs.
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The solution to the charter school problem is not simple. One major piece of the puzzle is for teachers to take back their profession to strengthen traditional public schools. Most charters have been akin to shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. They are still teaching to the test driving students away from critical thinking in every day life.
Whether it is oversite of charters or allowing innovation in traditional public schools, solutions will never come from the politicians at the top. It’s time to strike for small class size and then subvert the system for the best interest of children.
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This is the dictionary definition of privatization:
“Privatization is the process of transferring an enterprise or industry from the public sector to the private sector.”
Which is exactly what they’re doing.
I don’t mind debating the nuances of privatization (for profit, non profit, regulated, unregulated) but the basic definition applies and should be where we start.
If it’s not privatization, then what is it? What takes it out of that definition? A “board”? Well, no, that wouldn’t make any difference. Nonprofit? Nope- still privatization.
We can’t debate this without defining terms. Mine is the standard definition. If ed reformers want to invent a new one they may, but they have to at least do that.
They don’t want to use this term because they think it’s divisive, but often things that are true are very divisive! That doesn’t make them less true, and it isn’t a reason to avoid them. Let’s have the privatization debate, in public, and without the gloss of marketing.
They can be “pro”! If that’s their position they should be happy to defend it.
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Because I don’t think they’re really denying it’s privatization. They can read a dictionary definition like I can.
Instead I think they’re saying it DOESN’T MATTER if public schools are privatized, and I don’t think that’s their decision to make.
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And then the other information we would need would be independently collected and verified wait lists.
Ohio charter promoters claim wait lists too and I’ve received advertising solicitations for charters that are 60 miles away. If they actually have a wait list then they’re wasting millions in taxpayer funds on advertising.
I know they project enrollment when they get the charter, and that’s part of the authorization, and in Ohio anyway those number are ALWAYS too high. They have a huge incentive to exaggerate demand. Reasonable regulation should include verification of what they report.
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“…that they drain $600 annually from the district.”
That number might need to be clarified.
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And any “wait list” justification should include the numbers on wait lists at certain public schools.
If it doesn’t (and it doesn’t) then this is not about “great schools” or “what parents want” it is instead promoting a preferred model.
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Public schools don’t have wait lists with a few extremely rare exceptions. They have overcrowding because they have to take all comers. That’s the fundamental difference between privatized schools and public schools.
Last year my kids’ high school had 3650 kids in building designed for 2500. My oldest is a senior. This is her first year ever where her school didn’t have classes held in trailers (we just opened a new high school). My wife works at the elementary school my kids attended. it’s had trailers for the entire 14 years we’ve lived in our neighborhood. People move here for the schools.
In EdDeform land that isn’t a sign of the health of public schools. It’s a sign that we’re opportunity hoarders and intransigent slaves to the status quo. Their MO is a game of heads they win, tails we lose.
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If anyone needs to see a perfect example of how charter schools/privatization have sucked the money & life blood from the real public schools, there is no better example than Chicago. NO libraries, NO school nurses, NO special ed. programs. The largest # of publics closed at one time in ANY city (& the mayor seemed proud to announce it) under the false pretense of “failing” schools, as designated by test scores on “standardized”
(neither valid nor reliable, so not, & never will be) tests.
AND–these schools were–according to the now jailed Barbara Byrd-Bennett “underutilized schools…also under-resourced.” Yes, both–because the money was/is going to the CHARTER schools.
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The aforementioned info. is from the recently published & must-read book, “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” by Eve Ewing, a lifelong Chicago resident, both a CPS student &, formerly, a CPS teacher (she is now a professor at the U. of C.).
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