This is part 3 of the Los Angeles Times’ series about charter school dysfunction in California, written by Anna Phillips.
Phillips traces many of the problems, especially lack of oversight, to state law.
She explains that the billionaires who fund the rapid expansion of charter schools have squared off against the powerful California Teachers Association, andthe two never agree.
The resultis That a badly flawed lawremains in place.
Phillips quotes several charter school advocates who want to eliminate the role of local school boardsin authorizing charter schools and transfer that power to a single state charter board.
What the advocates never mention is that the school boards have been rendered toothless by the law, which allows charters to appeal their rejection at the local level to the county board. If the county board rejects them, they can appeal to the state board, which has been extremely friendly to charters due to appointments by Governors Schwarzenegger and Brown, both very charter-friendly.
Phillips quotes one charter advocate who points to New York as a model. New York hastwo charter authorizing Boards: the State Board of Regents and the SUNY Charter Institute. Neither supervises the charters they authorize. The SUNY committee consists of appointees of Governor Cuomo, who loves charters and receives big campaign contributions from the charter billionaires and Wall Street charter lobby. When billionaire Merryl Tisch was chair of the Board of Regents, it too was an ally of charters. She is now on the SUNY board. Even now, the Regents continue to endorse charter expansion,despite local objections.
The Network for Public Education, which is not funded by teachers unions, believes that charters should be authorized ONLY by local school districts to meet their needs, not because an entrepreneur wants a school of his own or because a corporate chain sees a chance to grow.
The irony is that the charter billionaires seem already to have captured Governor Gavin Newsom, even though they supported another candidate. Newsom promised charter reform, and he signed a bill requiring accountability and transparency and forbidding conflicts of interest and nepotism. But he may have shackled the charter reform agenda by appointing charter allies to a majority of places on the new state task force to recommend changes to the charter law. Phillips ends her article by mentioning the task force but fails to mention that charter allies were given seven of 11 seats, surely by Newsom.
So this otherwise great series ends for me on a disappointing note. It is far easier for billionaires to capture a single state board or two state boards than to deal with hundreds of local school districts. There is a limit to the number of elections and seats they can buy, even with their deep pockets. One thing has become clear about “Reformers.” They don’t like democracy. They like mayoral control and state control. Local school boards get in their way.
The situation in Hawai’i re: schools is also disgusting.
Don’t Treat Schools Like Cometitve Businesses:
https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/03/dont-treat-schools-like-competitive-businesses/
Some people in positions of authority must have gotten their degrees from Schools of BS.
Billionaires continue to embed all levels of state governments with their Hessian hit squad to make their agenda seem relevant and worthy. It’s not. None of the “reform” agenda is coming from parent groups, teachers or most regular citizens. It is all top down policy imposed by the 1% that can afford to buy politicians and policy.
Particularly egregious- Gates-funded SETDA (State Education Technology Directors Assn.) which has dept. of ed. reprentatives from all 50 states listed, giving the appearance that SETDA’s preferred policies are those of the state’s citizens.
“appearance” — exactly describing YEARS (is it 17 now) of test law smoke screen invasions
posted at Oped News https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/California-The-Charter-La-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Corporate_Diane-Ravitch-190330-689.html#comment729342
I agree, Diane, but I would take it a step further. I should’ve known. The warning signs were there. It’s still the LA Times. One article called the billionaires “philanthropists” and referred to public education as “powerful teachers unions”. That’s ubiquitous corporate language meant to (wrongly) frame charters as scrappy underdogs. Eli Broad isn’t David up against Goliath, especially after the Janus decision. Another article called KIPP and Green Dot “well respected”, attempting to distance them from all the charter scandals coming out. Then, the third article called for independent authorizing. I’m afraid the LA Times is up to its usual corporate propaganda. Very subtle this time, but it seems the overall point of the series was to avoid necessary, proper charter oversight. Hopefully, Gov. Newsom won’t fall for it like I at first did.
LCT,
I noticed the peculiar phrases and the absence of references to the billionaires who float the industry.
It was subtle, and therefore difficult to avoid being hopeful that the articles would be a sea change in the way privatization is covered. I intuited that you noticed but stayed positive about the seemingly good development of reporting about charter negligence. Your writing is always balanced and fair. Mine is quite a bit more aggressively critical when the LA Times is involved. It’s probably because the Times sued my district to publish my name with my bogus VAM ratings. I will never get over that, I think, no matter how many times ownership of the paper changes hands.
You should never get over that. It was an outrage. Neither of the infamous Jasons who published the LA Times articles about VAM is still there. I remember the article vividly because Jason called to ask my reaction to their bold new venture in measuring teachers by students scores, and I saidwithout thinking twice, “It makes me sick to my stomach.” And he printed it.
If the Jasons didn’t make you sick to your stomach, there would have been something wrong with you. They did, and there wasn’t. Have I thanked you lately, Diane, for being a force against the Jasons and the Times? Thank you.
LCT,
There were two Jason’s who wrote that dreadful LA Times series ranking LA teachers by student test scores, a methodology that has been debunked.
One was named Jason Song. I just googled and learned that he is now communications director (PR) for Eli Broad’s “Great Public Schools Now,” the organization Eli created to advocate for putting at least 50% of the district’s students into charter schools. More reason to elect Jackie Goldberg and stop Eli now.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-song-4ba6775
LCT,
The other Jason who created the VAM rating story and published the rankings of LA teachers was Jason Felch.
He was fired by the LA Times in 2014, in a story too convoluted to summarize.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/03/18/los-angeles-times-and-its-fired-investigative-reporter-a-critical-look/?utm_term=.0e8c35ae41d3
So Jason Song and Jason Felch humiliated thousands of LA teachers and possibly contributed to the suicide of one, fifth grade teacher Rigoberto Ruelas, who jumped off a bridge after they publicly labeled him mediocre.
Song now works for Eli Broad. Felch was fired.
Karma is a bitch.
Some very prominent newspapers make examples of a few individuals to make it appear they are doing something about the clear bias in the reporting of the newspaper on the whole (which is directed from the top, not by the individual reporters).
This is also what happened at the NY Times with Judith Miller.
Miller was fired to make it appear that she was just a rogue element operating completely on her own and simply misleading others around her.
Unfortunately for the NY Times, in order to believe their rogue operator story one has to believe that everyone else at the Times was completely credulous, which is simply not credible, in my opinion)
But either way, the LA and NY Times do not come out smelling very good.
Anna Phillips has moved from education reporting to environmental reporting.
The PR gimmick of framing the story as greedy labor vs. altruistic philanthropists was selected because the richest 0.1% knew that painting communities as villains wouldn’t sell. The 99% working to ensure the survival of the local economy and to protect their kids, their taxes and democracy are a sympathetic cohort that’s tough to tarnish.
They are slick. They are sneaky. They are cold blooded. They are greedy. They are relentless. They are Goliath. One day, a slingshot will put a stone to their collective forehead.
LCT, you just summarized my new book (pub date: Jan 2020).
They are Goliath
They are seedy
They are cold
They are greedy
They are bold
They are sneaky and they lyeth
They will end like old Goliath
Or maybe it’s spelled lie-eth
Although it’s “lying” not “lieing”.
Goliath and the serpent that to Eve the apple bade
In unholy union joined, and today’s billionaire was made,
The powerful and slimy laideth ‘twined and they did mate,
And born was Broad and Walton and the heinous Billy Gates.
“Heads, they win, heads we lose”
The coin is double-headed
And flipping doesn’t matter
It’s oligarch-provided
Beholden to the latter
Heads, they win, heads we lose
American politics and injustice, colonialism.
The first I ever heard to cuss the teachers union was Bob Dole in his 1996 acceptance speech of the GOP when he was running for president. Ever since then, a general distaste for teachers has had no effect on the popularity of any politician running for president. Then there were the recent walkouts and the support for them. Is the electorate starting to get a different feeling?
Roy,
The GOP demonized the teachers unions. The rightwing think tanks said over and over that the unions are evil. The media look at teachers and all they see are unions pulling the strings even when there are no unions. The teachers strikes disrupted the usual narrative because the media realized that teachers are respected and underpaid and have individual voices. The kabuki theater of union-baiting was disrupted.
Diane: in an unrelated story, check out an AP article on the resignation of rep David Byrd from the chair of the education committee after he voted against the Lee voucher bill. There might be more to the accusations of sexual misconduct than meet the eye. Or perhaps not. What I read was in our local paper.
Like scientists, teachers have always been respected among the general populace.
It’s primarily the politicians and media who have demonized them and tried to represent them as a cartoon union monster.
As on many other fronts, the politicians and mainstream media have failed miserably to impose their view of teachers on the general public and it drives them (politicians and media) into a rage.
Though it is very sad, it is also very funny to watch some idiot or other having a total meltdown on TV because the public supports the striking teachers rather than them (the rabid anti-union politicians and media.)
The media swallowed the Reformer lie that the best way to gauge what teachers think is to ask a union president. They write articles where they quote three or four highly paid charter lobbyists and one union president and consider this “balanced” reporting.
To the uneducated (on this issue) the series looks balanced and fair. Those that understand all the context see all of the articles’ omissions and white lies.
“…But if those schools keep multiplying, then the union would prefer keeping regulatory authority at the local level, where the association has been able to forge relationships with and help elect school board leaders…”
What a total crock of $#!7.
All too predictably, a pro-charter newspaper’s attempt to reclaim the narrative and decaive the public.
Once upon a time, I was just a teacher. I was oblivious to the creep of standardized testing and privatization. I was even a testing coordinator at my school, trying to force my English department colleagues to give standardized interim (‘periodic’ back then) assessments and to standardize their curricula with total uniformity. Then one day, Michelle Rhee fired a principal on the PBS Newshour and I woke up and changed my thinking like you, Diane, did before me. I didn’t, however, do much other than start paying attention.
What really got me active in fighting disruption was the LA Times. When they published the names and VAM scores of elementary school teachers, I was angry and afraid. I was hurt because I knew I had no control over my students’ scores, and would therefore soon have no control over my reputation or my future. I started commenting on Times articles online. There, I encountered readers of this blog who posted many references to the Washington Post.
I read Valerie Strauss with interest. She made me aware of you and your blog, Diane. I began posting comments here, and before I knew it, I had become a real teacher, and an activist for justice and democracy, fighting to let my colleagues and me have professional autonomy and authorship of our teaching. So I want to thank PBS and the LA Times for their bald faced hatred of me and my profession. Without them, I would still be asleep. And to the Times, I’ll restate what you wrote earlier that made me laugh my coffee out through my nose, Diane, “Karma’s a bitch.”
LCT, welcome to the struggle!