Archives for the month of: February, 2019
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Pittsburgh: Christian Academy Switches to Charter to Collect Public Money

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2019 //
4

Steven Singer reports that a Christian Academy in Pittsburgh has applied to become a charter school. That would permit the school to collect public money, which is not possible as a religious school.

Under Pennsylvania law, religious schools cannot be funded with public money.

What an idea to declare the school to be a charter school!

Singer writes:

It’s awfully convenient that a school whose mission statement currently includes “We share Christ with our children daily and seek to help them grow into mature Christians” would somehow magically become secular overnight.

 

If Imani’s charter is approved, it would be required to discontinue any religious component in its curriculum. The state school code requires even charter schools to be “nonsectarian in all operations.” The proposed academy would not be permitted to display any religious objects or symbols on the premises.

 

Yet one wonders who will check to make sure this actually happens.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Privatization, Religion

Denis Smith Warns West Virginia: Avoid Charter Schools!

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2019 //
2

 

Teachers across the state of West Virginia walked out last spring. Every school in the state was closed until the teachers got a 5% pay raise and other concessions. Among them, the governor promised to block charter legislation.

Now the Republican dominated legislature is moving forward with legislation for charters, vouchers, and cybercharters. One assumes this is punishment for last year’s actions.

Denis Smith warns the legislators and people of West Virginia that the legislation is an invitation to waste, fraud, abuse, theft, and grifters. 

He writes:

In the last several days, I took some time to examine Senate Bill 451 and its provisions for establishing charter schools in West Virginia. My interest in doing so was based on my previous service as a school administrator in the state, as well as 11 years of experience in Ohio as an administrator for a charter school authorizer and as a consultant in the charter school office of the Ohio Department of Education.

It is this experience in both public education and the charter school environment that allows me to urge West Virginia citizens to do everything possible to halt this odious legislation.

After more than 20 years of growth nationally, it is noteworthy that some of the trend lines for charters are on the decline. This experiment with deregulation has resulted in massive corruption, fraud and diminished learning opportunities for young people.

As a state monitor, I observed a number of incompetent people serve as charter school administrators because Ohio state law has no minimum educational requirements nor any professional licensing prerequisites for school leaders.

In addition, numerous conflicts-of-interest, including a board member serving as landlord and management companies charging exorbitant rents for properties conveniently used for charter schools, are only part of the problem of the charter experiment.

In Ohio, where charters have operated for 20 years, the trend line is down significantly. From a high point of more than 400 schools, 340 are operating today. Moreover, there is a junk pile of failed charters that have closed. The Ohio Department of Education website lists 292 schools that are shuttered, with some closing in mid-year, disrupting the lives of students and their families. Moreover, total charter school enrollment in the state is down by more than 16,000 students since 2013, the peak year of charter operations in the Buckeye State.

The West Virginia omnibus measure allows online schools to operate, as does Ohio and other states. But last year, Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, one of the largest e-schools in the country, closed amid scandal, where the owner and his administrators funneled millions of dollars in donations to friendly state legislators while padding enrollment numbers to gain state education payments.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, there is also a growing scandal involving an online school. The West Virginia Legislature has not heeded these lessons to be learned from its neighboring states that have been in the troubled charter school business for decades.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, West Virginia

California: Governor Newsom Asks for Independent Review of Fiscal Impact of Charters on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2019 //
13

The strike by the UTLA in Los Angeles just claimed an important victory. As California law now is written, the grant of a charter is not supposed to take into account the fiscal impact of a new charter on the fiscal condition of the district where it is located.

Thanks to the UTLA settlement, Governor Gavin Newsom has directed State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond to appoint an independent panel of experts to review exactly that: what is the fiscal impact of charters on the public schools of their host district?

The panel will have four months to look at the issue, and to report back to Newsom by July 1. Thurmond has not yet announced who will be on the panel, but its formation raises the likelihood that California’s charter school laws may undergo revision over the coming year.  This would be the first time there has been an in-depth look at the financial impact of charter schools since passage of California’s first charter law in 1992.

The issue was a concern of Newsom’s even before the L.A. teachers  strike, said Newsom spokesperson Brian Ferguson.

“As Governor Newsom stated in his first budget proposal, rising charter school enrollments in some urban districts are having real impacts on those districts’ ability to provide essential support and services for their students,” he said.

Under a 1998 state law, districts are not allowed to take into account the financial impact of a charter school on a district in deciding whether or not to grant them a charter. Charter advocates fear that removing this prohibition could have a dramatic impact on slowing charter school school expansion in the state.

Newsom’s creation of a panel to look into the issue appears a responseto a resolution approved by the Los Angeles Unified school board last month as part of the agreement it reached with the United Teachers of Los Angeles and its striking teachers last month. The resolution called for a “comprehensive study” of various aspects of charter schools in the district, including their “financial implications.”

The resolution also called for an 8-to-10 month moratorium on new charter schools while the study was being conducted.  So far, however, Newsom has been silent on these latest calls for a moratorium.

In a statement, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, representing 33,000 teachers and other staff in the district, “applauded” Newsom for recognizing what it said was obvious:  that L.A. Unified and other districts across the state are being “financially strangled” by what it called the “unmitigated growth” of charter schools.

But it questioned the need for a panel, saying that an “immediate cap on charter schools is urgently necessary.” Large urban districts, it said, were “well past the saturation point for charter school growth.”

Similar calls for a cap or a moratorium are coming from other districts with a large proportion of students in charter schools. In Oakland, where teachers appear to be on the verge of a strike, the school board also has set as one of its priorities convincing lawmakers in Sacramento to impose a moratorium on charter expansion. And in the nearby West Contra Costa Unified District, which includes Richmond, the board will consider a resolution this week calling for a statewide charter moratorium.

This is a tremendous setback for the charter industry, which has taken advantage of the opportunity to expand without regard to the cost of local public schools, even if it sets them on the path to insolvency.

Last May, Gordon Lafer, a political economist at the University of Oregon, produced a report for “In the Public Interest” estimating what charter schools cost three local school districts. When a student leaves for a charter school, the student takes his or her tuition money but the school still has fixed costs (or “stranded costs”) that cannot be cut, like custodians, transportation, maintenance, and utilities. To break even, the district must cut its budget, lay off teachers, increase class sizes, and eliminate programs. Thus, the majority of students suffer deteriorating conditions so that the charter schools may increase enrollment.

It’s long past time to take a look at this issue and establish accountability, transparency, and limits to charter school expansion in California.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization

Los Angeles: A Student Star Is Born

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2019 //
9

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Lies, Los Angeles, Privatization

Cory Booker: What Educators and Parents Need to Know

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2019 //
48

 

 

Mitchell Robinson of Michigan State University explains why he could not support for Cory Booker for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

He writes:

I really don’t want to be a single-issue voter, but education will almost always be the most important issue for me–and Booker is catastrophically wrong and bad on education. His corporate leanings and pro-pharma stance are just the gravy for me on Booker.

So, if you like for-profit charters, then Cory Booker is your guy.

If you want to privatize public education, then Cory Booker is your guy.

If you think that state tax dollars should go toward vouchers to pay for private and religious school tuition, then Cory Booker is your guy.

If you think that Betsy DeVos’ education policies are making schools work better for kids, families, and communities, then Cory Booker is your guy.

And if you think that scapegoating the “failing public schools” takes the heat off your candidate’s support of a corrupt Wall St., or the crushing costs of prescription drugs, or our nightmare of a health care system, then Cory Booker is your guy.

But if you think it’s about time for the Democratic Party to return to their historic support of public education, and teachers unions, and abandon their somewhat recent neo-liberal dalliance with charter schools, and school privatization, and the corporate reform of education agenda, then look for a candidate who isn’t a charter member of “Democrats for Education Reform” (spoiler alert: they aren’t Democrats, and they aren’t *for* education), and who doesn’t have more ties to Betsy DeVos than her yachts have non-US flags, and who was willing to work with Chris Christie to sell-out Newark’s schools to Mark Zuckerberg.

None of this this is new.

This article appeared in Education Week in 2013. Nothing has changed. Cory Booker is still a supporter of charters and vouchers, no different from Betsy DeVos except she’s a billionaire and he raises money from Wall Street billionaires.

Things Educators Need to Know About Cory Booker

Education Week By Alyson Klein October 29, 2013

New Jersey voters this month picked Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat, to fill the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, also a Democrat, who died in June. Mr. Booker already has a national profile on education issues.

1. ‘Democrat for Education Reform’: Mr. Booker was a galvanizing force in the past decade bringing together a cadre of high-powered, deep-pocketed Wall Street donors with an interest in education policy, to support his early races for city council and mayor. The group eventually became Democrats for Education Reform, now the signature political action committee for left-of-center politicians who are fans of less-than-traditional Democratic policies, including charter schools and teacher performance pay. The group’s founders “knew each other before, but they got involved in politics together to support Cory Booker,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of dfer. The pac poured some quarter-million dollars into Mr. Booker’s Senate campaign, Mr. Williams estimated.

2. Voucher Supporter: Mr. Booker is among a handful of prominent Democrats nationally to support private school vouchers, and championed a proposed New Jersey law that would have created a voucher program in that state. He co-founded Excellent Education for Everyone, a nonprofit organization that sought to promote vouchers and charter schools in New Jersey. The push won backing from other well-known New Jersey Democrats but was ultimately unsuccessful.

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/30/10electionsenator.h33.html

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

A Structural Engineer Explains What’s Wrong with Trump’s Wall

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2019 //
46

 

I tried to watch or listen to the State of the Union. I didn’t have much success because I kept yelling at the television.

I borrowed this post from Andrew Tobias, who writes a blog almost every night. I hope he won’t mind. I give him credit. You might want to sign up for his blog. He is great on every subject except charter schools.

Listen To A Structural Forensicist

Have you seen Amy Patrick’s viral Facebook post?  “Let’s have border security, by all means,” she says, “but let’s be smart about it. [The wall] is not smart. It’s not effective. It’s NOT cheap. The returns will be diminishing as technology advances. This is a ridiculous idea that will never be successfully executed and, as such, would be a monumental waste of money.”

To wit:

I’m a licensed structural and civil engineer with a MS in structural engineering from the top program in the nation and over a decade of experience on high-performance projects, and particularly of cleaning up design disasters where the factors weren’t properly accounted for, and I’m an adjunct professor of structural analysis and design at UH-Downtown. I have previously been deposed as an expert witness in matters regarding proper construction of walls and the various factors associated therein, and my testimony has passed Daubert.

Am I a wall expert? I am. I am literally a court-accepted expert on walls.

Structurally and civil engineering-wise, the border wall is not a feasible project. Trump did not hire engineers to design the thing. He solicited bids from contractors, not engineers. This means it’s not been designed by professionals. It’s a disaster of numerous types waiting to happen.

What disasters?

Off the top of my head…

1) It will mess with our ability to drain land in flash flooding. Anything impeding the ability of water to get where it needs to go (doesn’t matter if there are holes in the wall or whatever) is going to dramatically increase the risk of flooding.

2) Messes with all kind of stuff ecologically. For all other projects, we have to do an Environmental Site Assessment, which is arduous. They’re either planning to circumvent all this, or they haven’t accounted for it yet, because that’s part of the design process, and this thing hasn’t been designed.

3) The prototypes they came up with are nearly impossible to build or don’t actually do the job. This article explains more.

And so on.

The estimates provided for the cost are arrived at unreasonably. You can look for yourself at the two-year-old estimate that you see everyone citing.

It does not account for rework, complexities beyond the prototype design, factors to prevent flood and environmental hazard creation, engineering redesign… It’s going to be higher than $50bn. The contractors will hit the government with near CONSTANT change orders. “Cost overrun” will be the name of the game. It will not be completed in Trump’s lifetime.

I’m a structural forensicist, which means I’m called in when things go wrong. This is a project that WILL go wrong. When projects go wrong, the original estimates are just *obliterated*. And when that happens, good luck getting it fixed, because there aren’t that many forensicists out there to right the ship, particularly not that are willing to work on a border wall project— a large quotient of us are immigrants, and besides, we can’t afford to bid on jobs that are this political. We’re small firms, and we’re already busy, and we don’t gamble our reputations on political footballs. So you’d end up with a revolving door of contractors making a giant, uncoordinated muddle of things, and it’d generally be a mess. Good money after bad. The GAO agrees with me.

And it won’t be effective. I could, right now, purchase a 32 foot extension ladder and weld a cheap custom saddle for the top of the proposed wall so that I can get over it. I don’t know who they talked to about the wall design and its efficacy, but it sure as heck wasn’t anybody with any engineering imagination.

Another thing: we are not far from the day where inexpensive drones will be able to pick up and carry someone. This will happen in the next ten years, and it’s folly to think that the coyotes who ferry people over the border won’t purchase or create them. They’re low enough, quiet enough, and small enough to quickly zip people over any wall we could build undetected with our current monitoring setup.

Let’s have border security, by all means, but let’s be smart about it. This is not smart. It’s not effective. It’s NOT cheap. The returns will be diminishing as technology advances, too. This is a ridiculous idea that will never be successfully executed and, as such, would be a monumental waste of money.

 

 

Categories Education Reform

California: Board of West Contra County Schools Debating Charter Moratorium

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2019 //
2

 

Following the passage by the Los Angeles schoolboard of a request for a charter moratorium, other counties in California are taking a look at doing the same.

 

 

Charter Moratorium to go Before School Board

WCCUSD Trustee Consuelo Lara is bringing a resolution supporting a Statewide Moratorium on the Growth of Charter Schools and strengthening oversight and transparency of current charter schools.

The resolution puts the WCCUSD in step with the recent resolution passed by the Los Angeles School Board joining with the NAACP, the Journey for Justice Alliance, Black Lives Matters and many other organizations and governmental bodies which have demanded a stop to the expansion of Charters at the expense of publicly run schools.

The meeting will be Wednesday 2/6

Lovonya DeJean Middle School
Multipurpose Room
3400 Macdonald Avenue

It is expected that the Charter Schools will use their money and buses to turn out in force to oppose this resolution. Supporters of public schools must be heard.

“Co-location” Means Closing Neighborhood Public Schools

For three years, PublicCore has been warning that continued WCCUSD approval of charter schools will lead to the closure of neighborhood schools. Now that chicken is coming home to roost. Unless neighbors and concerned community members rise up and say “NO!” El Sobrante will lose its middle school.

Pinole Middle School has already been forced to share its site with Voices Charter School as part of a practice known as “co-location.” Across the freeway in El Sobrante, Crespi Middle School has been forced to share its facility with Invictus Middle School. According to Prop 39 (aka “the charter school law”), each February, charter schools must make their anticipated facility needs request to the school district in which they are located. WCCUSD superintendent Matt Duffy has announced that both Voices andInvictus will be asking the district for more space in the 2019 – 2020 school year.

One of the options the district is considering is to close Crespi Middle School, move those students to Pinole Middle School, and allow Voices and Invictus to take over the Crespi site.

PublicCore is vehemently opposed to this option, as it gives public school students and their families fewer choices and takes away El Sobrante’s only middle school.

What you can do:
—Read the concerns of Joseph Glatzer, 7th grade history teacher at Pinole Middle School (see below)


—Contact the WCCUSD Board of Education [tom.panas@wccusd.net, stephanie.hernandez-jarvis@wccusd.net, valerie.cuevas@wccusd.net, clara@wccusd.net, mister.phillips@wccusd.net]


—Attend the WCCUSD Board of Education meeting on Feb. 6 at LaVonya DeJean Middle School


—Attend “Closing Crespi: a Town Hall with Trustee Phillips” at 6 pm onMarch 14 at Hilltop Church of Christ, El Sobrante

Letter from Jospeph Glatzer:

I’m Joseph Glatzer, 7th grade history teacher at Pinole Middle School. I’m here to oppose Voices getting any more of our classrooms and deepening their occupation of our campus. My criticism is with the charter system, not individual families.

I noticed in reading Mr. Duffy’s report that it says our enrollment at Pinole Middle is down. It had been down the past few years due to charter encroachment, but because of the amazing job our staff has done, our enrollment is up pretty significantly this year. Is the board aware of that? Parents are fed up with the lack of actual teaching at Summit, and we get kids coming back from them nearly every week.

Also, we know you’re not trying to close Crespi until 2 years from now, but that doesn’t make it any better.

How much smaller could our classrooms be if we weren’t hemorrhaging money to charter schools for their own profit?

Hiding behind the law and saying you have no choice doesn’t make any sense. Voices is not holding board meetings in Contra Costa County. They’re in violation of their charter and it should be revoked. The dangerous driving, traffic and noise is out of control. Our students are being hurt by a de facto private elementary being artificially wedged into their school.

It’s time for the school board to adopt the NAACP resolution for a moratorium on charter schools, which was just endorsed by UTR. Are you going to be on the side of the NAACP or on the side of a deeply segregated de facto private school which is taking our desperately needed public funds?

The argument has been that if you don’t approve these collocations then we’ll get sued and that’ll cost the district a lot of money. But we’re already losing tens of millions of dollars from approving all these charters and co-locations. We’re going to have severe financial challenges, like we see in Oakland, if something doesn’t change. So we might as well unite with other districts and fight for what’s right.

Prop 39 can be challenged as unconstitutional under the California state constitution, because it guarantees children the right to an education, which charters are endangering.

This is a civil rights issue and a human rights issue. We learned from Gandhi and Martin Luther King that respecting unjust laws is an immoral act.

Don’t take away any more of our classrooms at Pinole Middle. Thank you.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Resistance

Forbes: Can AltSchool “Save Itself from Failure”?

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2019 //
31

Susan Adams, an editor at Forbes, took a close look at AltSchool, a billionaire-funded effort to reinvent American education by putting kids on computers. 

Max Ventillaleft Google tolaunch his startup. He’s raised plenty of dough from the billionaires, but success is thus far out of reach. Successmeans making money.

“We’re two intense hours into an interview in a stuffy, glass-paned meeting room in a former 24 Hour Fitness that is now home to one of AltSchool’s two small private schools in San Francisco for grades pre-K through 8. Ventilla, who left Google to launch AltSchool in 2013, has spent $30 million annually over the last several years while trying to find steady footing for his for-profit education startup, which runs four schools; the other two are in New York City.

“AltSchool’s 240 students, including two of Ventilla’s children—Leonardo, 5, and Sabine, 7—are guinea pigs for a software platform that AltSchool is attempting to sell to hundreds of schools both private and public. So far it has 28 customers. Revenue in 2018 was $7 million. “Our whole strategy is to spend more than we make,” he says. Since software is expensive to develop and cheap to distribute, the losses, he believes, will turn into steep profits once AltSchool refines its product and lands enough customers.

Max Ventilla, CEO and cofounder of AltSchool.

Max Ventilla, CEO and cofounder of AltSchool.TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD

“But as Ventilla admits when he lets his guard down, reaching profitability will be quite a stretch. The story of how AltSchool arrived at this point—burning cash in a failed attempt to create a profitable private-school network and fighting to sell an expensive edtech product in a crowded field—shows that the best intentions, an impressive career in tech and an excess of Silicon Valley money and enthusiasm don’t easily translate into success in a tradition-bound marketplace where budgets are tight.

“Ventilla, wearing jeans, scuffed black leather slip-ons, a faded polo shirt with AltSchool’s logo and a black fleece jacket, has been able to hemorrhage cash because, as he has it, “I’m good at telling AltSchool’s story and I’m good at raising money early.” So good that he has raised $174 million in venture capital at a $440 million valuation, according to PitchBook, more than almost any other startup working on K-12 education. That sum includes a personal investment of more than $15 million from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg initiated two hours-long one-on-one meetings with Ventilla in late 2014, when AltSchool was only 18 months old. “He’s very detail-oriented, and he likes to drill down,” Ventilla says of Zuckerberg.”

The article has little vignettes of a few of the billionaires reinventing education.

 

Categories Billionaires, Technology

Florida: Legislator Wants to Exempt Those Over 65 from School Taxes

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2019 //
36

 

 

Manny Diaz, chair of the Florida Senate Education Committee,  plans to introduce legislation to exempt people over 65 from paying school taxes. This would destroy public education, since its funding depends on every citizen paying taxes for its support, because they are citizens who have a stake in the future of our society.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/lake/lauren-ritchie/os-ne-lauren-ritchie-school-tax-homestead-20190201-story.html

We do not exempt childless people from paying for public schools. We do not exempt those whose children have finished school. We do not exempt anyone from paying what belongs to the public for the benefit of the public.

Should you get a tax rebate if you didn’t call the Fire Department?

Orlando Sentinel columnist Lauren Ritchie writes:

“Never mind that Florida already shamefully ranks 44th in per-pupil spending across the nation.

“That’s irrelevant,” said Senate Education Committee Chairman Manny Diaz, a South Florida Republican who now says that he plans to amend the bill so that the proposed homestead exemption covers only new taxes rather than existing ones…

”An aide for Diaz, whose district covers part of Dade County, on Thursday blamed the department that writes legislation for the sweeping scope of Senate Joint Resolution 344 that would let longtime senior homeowners off the hook for most school taxes…

“Asked who paid for the education of that older population, the senator also brushed that question aside as “irrelevant.”

“Except that it’s not.

Diaz’s philosophy behind this tax cut is a deeply flawed plan that is a slippery slope to chaos: He says seniors who don’t have children in school shouldn’t have to pay for future students or improvements.

“Seriously? This society decided long ago that some important government functions — providing education, building roads, repelling invasion by foreign powers — are key to making the U.S. a strong and healthy country. Everyone contributes to keep it that way.

“If seniors are exempted from paying for schools, why aren’t they charged double for ambulance service? After all, they’re the ones using it most. And what about paying for the nation’s interstate road system? Who here wants to be charged for roads in Nebraska? And police? Those with weapons may argue that they don’t need law enforcement — they handle threats themselves. If you’ve never called 911, should you have to pay?

“This user-fee notion is not just bad philosophy — it’s harmful to public institutions that keep society from crumbling. There is one way and one only to improve Florida schools, which are attended by 90 percent of children: Fund them.”

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Florida, Funding

Is the Charter School Market Over-Saturated? Yes.

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2019 //
16

Remember the stories about the long waiting lists to get into charters?

Baloney.

In Los Angeles, more than 80% of all charter schools have vacancies.

Yet the billionaires are still spending to try to open more charters, in the absence of need or demand.

Please read this article in California-based Capital & Main, which contains a fascinating statistical analysis of charter school saturation.

The evidence suggests, writes Larry Buhl, that charter schools are now stealing students not only from public schools but from other charter schools.

Total student enrollment across the Los Angeles Unified School District has been declining for years, due partly to the high cost of living, which is pushing out families from the city. The latest LAUSD Superintendent Budget showed an overall enrollment decline of approximately 100,000 K-12 students districtwide — at the same time enrollment in charter schools increased dramatically over the past 14 years.

According to the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), 118,820 students are being served at 249 charter schools throughout LAUSD. The CCSA also reports that there are more than 16,000 students on a wait list for charters authorized by LAUSD, and nearly 20,000 on wait lists for all charters in greater Los Angeles. The waitlist estimates are based on reported counts given by charter leaders; CCSA says that its estimates take into account duplicate students applying to multiple schools.

Unless there are a few standout charters that every student is applying to, those wait list figures are hard to square with district data that show widespread under-enrollment across LAUSD charters.

A November 2018 LAUSD interoffice memorandum on charter school enrollment showed that more than 80 percent of the 224 district-authorized independent charter schools were under-enrolled:

  • The aggregate enrollment projections from the schools anticipated that 128,374 total students would be enrolled. The official Norm Enrollment figures show that the actual number of students for 2017-2018 was 112,492 students (or 15,882 fewer students than the schools projected).
  • Approximately 34 of the 224 schools either met or exceeded their enrollment targets, while the remaining 190 did not. This trend appears consistent with both small and large charter operators.

*   *   *

With more charters chasing fewer students, marketing and outreach have become increasingly crucial to enrollment.

More money for marketing means less money for instruction. This is insane. It is very expensive and wasteful to maintain a dual school system.

Want to know which charter schools failed to meet their enrollment target. Look here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Lies, Los Angeles, Privatization
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