Peter Greene writes here that the invisible hand of the market doesn’t work well for schools.
There is no magic in the market.
Shelby County in Tennessee is overwhelmed with charters and of course they want more.
He writes:
“Shelby County is running up against two of the fallacies embedded in most charter school policy.
“One is the modern charter policy lie– the notion that you can run multiple parallel school systems with the same money that used to run one system. The other is that charter systems don’t need a lot of regulation because the invisible hand of the market will take care of it all.
“Shelby County Schools in Tennessee has noticed that it has problems with both of those principles.
“The issue was raised back in August when the board considered nine more charter applications– which would have brought the grand total to 63 charter schools in the county. Superintendent Dorsey Hopson put his finger on the problem:
“No surprise, we have too many schools in Memphis,” Hopson said. “If you got 12 schools in a three-mile radius… and all of them are under-enrolled, we’re not serving kids well.”
“Shelby County is home to Memphis, one of the great early charter playgrounds in a state that has always ridden on the reformster train. About 14% of students in the county attend charter schools, and that’s enough to leave some schools feeling a financial pinch (the overhead of maintaining a building does not go down whether you lose one student or one hundred). That’s also before we count schools being run by the state in the Achievement School District (a method of state takeover of school districts with low test scores).
“Nor are the schools well-distributed. Check this map and you’ll see that some neighborhoods have clusters of charter schools, while other areas of the county have none at all. It’s almost as if market forces do not drive charter businesses to try to serve all students, but only concentrate on the markets they find attractive! Go figure. (Note: charters in Tennessee can be run by profit or non-profit organizations or, of course, non-profits that funnel all their money to for-profit businesses.)
“The problem did not happen overnight– a local television station did a story entitled “Charter Schools– Too Many? Too Fast?” back in 2017. The answer was, “Probably yes to both.” But it also included the projection that SCS would some day be all charter. It does appear that Shelby County is in danger of entering the public school death spiral, where charters drain so much money from the public system that the public system stumbles, making the charters more appealing, so more students leave the public system, meaning the public system gets less and less money, making charters more appealing, so students leave, rinse and repeat until your public system collapses.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think some of the “flooding” is deliberate. They flood the market with charters to gain (fragmented) market share and then close some charters, leaving the same percentage of charter school students distributed over fewer schools.
It’s a deliberate play when they’re entering a market. Once they have “the charter share” they can reduce the possible choices.
It comes from the ideological belief that schools are service providers, not community anchors or stable institutions within neighborhoods or cities. They don’t see any downside to the families or children from constant churn. It’s like switching a cell phone provider. A minor adjustment.
The part that baffles me as a parent is how they don’t assign any value to the relationships that children make with ONE ANOTHER. That they would just bust those up every two years and not see any damage to that. I can’t believe the students don’t value these friendships and connections with other students in their school. Mine certainly did. When your school closes the adults scatter but so do the students. Students lose all those relationships with other students, too.
The more charters they allow in a particular area, the more they hobble the functioning of public schools. Hollowed out public schools cannot compete, and that’s their goal.
The guy who made all this possible, superintendent Hopson, is leaving to work for an insurance company
https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/education/2018/11/20/dorsey-hopson-resign-shelby-county-schools/2065867002/
I listen to DeVos and the picture she paints of this deregulated system of service providers is just a fantasy.
People cannot have both. They cannot have a stable, reliable public school system as a kind of devalued, assumed “back up” and also an unlimited menu of contract service providers. Underlying this whole fantasy is that a public school system continues to exist. You see it in ed reform projections. They’ll go on and on about the wonders of choice for 5 paragraphs and then they’ll be the concluding paragraph about how “of course, may people will remain in the traditional system”
What “traditional system”? The one they gutted to create the contract system?
This is a flawed assumption. It’s a lie. It’s a promise they can’t keep. They can’t guarantee anything like that. They have no earthly idea what happens to the “traditional system” under these schemes and they value it so little they never even bother to look.
Incidentally, this is what the new Wisconsin governor is looking at. He’s looking at fragmentation. He’s faced with a situation where they will have a public education system that is so fragmented no one school will have sufficient funding or enrollment to offer anything like a comprehensive K-12 progression.
Ed reformers think he’s targeting their schools- the schools they prefer- but his concern and focus is actually systemic. He thinks they will end up with hundreds of “choices”, all weak, all under-enrolled, all underfunded, and none comprehensive. He’s right.
Those kids could be scattered hither and yon just to cobble together the education they used to get in one K-12 system and one or two buildings. It could be an absolute disaster.
That this didn’t occur to all these free market geniuses is just appalling.
The Shelby Country Schools have been infected by The Walton Family Foundation. Current priorities for startup grants from the Waltons are named. The aim is strip mine public school systems, making ”significant” changes in targeted locations, raiding public school students by “funding new start-up charter schools that will draw a majority of their students from the public schools.”
In addition to the Shelby County Schools in Tennessee, these targeted start-up grants will go to any district in Arkansas (home state of the Walton Family Foundation); selected area boundaries in the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Oakland Unified School District; Denver Public Schools; Atlanta Public Schools; Indianapolis Public Schools; Orleans Parish School Board (Louisiana); Boston Public Schools, Camden City School District (New Jersey); New York City; Oklahoma, any district; Houston Independent School District; San Antonio Metro Area; and District of Columbia Public Schools. The aim is to make public schools in each of these districts struggle, and sooner rather than later disappear.
Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has attempted to micromanage every aspect of K-12 education in Memphis and the Shelby County Schools. Since 2009, the B&MGF has sent $90.6 million to the Shelby County Schools and Memphis City Schools, aiding and abetting chaos under the banner of improving schools for low income and minority students.
The largest grant, about $82 million was based on the assumption every teacher was incompetent (otherwise test scores would be higher). Another grant was sent to “mobilize the faith community in support of effective teaching in Shelby County.” Those funds for the “faith community” were first sent to the Council for a Strong America, then back to Shelby County. The Council for a Strong America is still pushing the Common Core and variants in almost every state.
Effective teaching as defined by the B&MGF is always about meeting standards and improving tests scores in math and reading. Teachers in the Shelby County Schools were also enlisted for the infamous multi-site “Measures of Effective Teaching” project led by Harvard economists and others who spent over $64 million of Gates funds for a deeply flawed study aggrandizing test scores in two subjects, the wonders of a biased student survey, and an teacher observation rating scheme with no validity for every grade and subject or for use on video-tapes of teaching rather than diret observations.
Two B&MGF grants were awarded to steer the work of the Shelby County Education Foundation. Some of those funds were channeled to the Boston Consulting Group, hired to oversee reforms. You can see some of the work that the Boston Consulting Group undertook and how that was connected to the charter-loving Center for Reinventing Public Education here https://sociologyofsystems.wordpress.com/tag/boston-consulting/
Another grant was sent so the Broad Foundation to “support the smooth transition to district leadership, acceleration of instructional improvement and student achievement results for the office of Superintendent of Shelby County.
A prior grant in 2011 was sent to provide training sessions for the Shelby County Consolidated School Board. For more on the history of turmoil in the Shelby Country Schools and how that is/was related to Memphis City Schools see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_Schools_(Tennessee). The most recent funds flowing in from Gates are for “personalized learning.”
Bottom line: If you value public schools and believe they do not need to have outsourced management, you have a clear choice. Do not accept money from the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many more of the billionaires who want to dictate policies and practices in local schools.
Wow, Laura, thanks for this research. I have to reread it later more carefully. I did n’t know about the Walton family in my county at all. Where can I read about these startup grants? Do you know of any grants going to U of Memphis?
The university high admins secretly offered a helping hand in this massive charterization. in the past. But luckily, they got caught.
The Waltons list all their grants on their foundation website.
Education Week is a favorite. Many other supposedly liberal or nonpartisan groups
My God, I see just for 2017 alone
CSGF Memphis Facility Fund LLC 5,000,000
at https://annual-report.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/2017-grants-report
CSGF is
https://chartergrowthfund.org/facilityfund/
This is off topic but proof that Indiana allows virtual schools that do no teaching. Great state!! Underfund public schools and pay teachers horrible salaries and then waste $17 million on this garbage.
………
No-show students and other allegations against troubled virtual schools spark outrage from state leaders
…Last spring, none of the 1,563 students reported as attending Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy for the full year were enrolled in any classes, according to the data analyzed by the district. That year, the school received $17 million from the state.
In fall 2016, none of the 2,372 students reported as attending Indiana Virtual School for the full year earned any credits, according to the district’s analysis.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/in/2019/02/26/no-show-students-and-other-allegations-against-troubled-virtual-schools-spark-outrage-from-state-leaders/?utm_source=email_button
” Check this map and you’ll see that some neighborhoods have clusters of charter schools, ”
That map shows KIPP schools. I thought KIPP left Memphis. Apparently not.
“The problem did not happen overnight– a local television station did a story entitled “Charter Schools– Too Many? Too Fast?” back in 2017. ”
The TV piece is interesting because it was made by Fox 13—I am guessing, it has something to do with the national Fox network?
I know that the state of Indiana doesn’t fund properly. Poor areas don’t have the taxes to support their schools. Interesting article that says, “Funding gap is a vestige of America’s segregated past’. It is sad that brown/black children need more wrap around support and are given less money.
What I learned in grade school about how great this country is, is falling apart. What kind of country votes in a person like Trump? A lot of his appeal was racial bigotry.
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School funding
Add this tidbit to the debate over school funding and equity (or lack of it) in public schools: US school districts with mostly white students get $23 billion a year more in funding than districts in which most students are not white. This stunning — but not entirely surprising — information comes from a report by the nonprofit EdBuild, which promotes equity in public schools. EdBuild found the average “white” district got $13,908 for every student in 2016, while “nonwhite” districts got only $11,682 per student. EdBuild blamed this money gap on the way Americans pay for education, with tax dollars controlled locally. EdBuild’s CEO said local governments should rethink how school districts are drawn and noted the funding gap is a vestige of America’s segregated past.