This has been possibly the very worst week in the history of charter schools, which have existed for almost 30 years. It is fitting that this week coincided with Public Schools Week, reminding us of the importance of public schools, which are democratically governed, open to all who apply, and accountable, financially and academically, to the public.
Consider the trajectory of the charter idea.
What began as in idealistic proposal–experimental schools-within-schools, created and operated by teachers with the approval of their colleagues and local school board, intended to reach out and help the struggling and turned-off students—has turned into a libertarian’s dream of deregulated, even unregulated industry replete with corporate chains, entrepreneurs, billionaire backers, highly segregated schools, and a battering ram against collective bargaining.
Charter schools in the initial version were supposed to collaborate with public schools to make them better or to learn from failed experiments. That was charter 1.0.
That didn’t last long. Entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to profit from guaranteed public funding while skimping on teacher pay. Grifters saw a chance to get rich with land deals and leases. Ideologues like the Waltons and the Koch brothers saw a way to get rid of teachers’ unions.
Democrats were duped by the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools,” which was spouted by Obama, Duncan, Romney, Trump, and DeVos.
But this week, all the flowery rhetoric melted.
First came the report from the Network for Piblic Education, revealing the waste of nearly $1 billion in federal funds awarded to charters that never opened or soon closed.
Then began a three-part series in the Los Angeles Times by Anna Phillips on charter corruption and a state law that invites charter waste and abuse.
Then began a series jointly sponsored by Northjersey.com and USA Today on the ways that charter operators use public funds to build charter facilities that are privately owned, not public. Legal theft, you might call it.
Even the Onion chimed in, with a satirical piece about an innovative charter school that accepts no students.
Will the charter spin machine recover or are we seeing a new boldness on the part of the press?
Perhaps the new attention to charter scandals was encouraged when a team of reporters at the Arizona Republic received the prestigious George Polk Award for its exposes of charter scandals in that state.
The mask has fallen away.
Lets give credit where it’s due. Betsy DeVos has made crystal clear that she loves charters, hates accountability, and welcomes profit making. Thanks, Secretary DeVos, for explaining the end game of privatization.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters were supposed to be subject to less regulation to test innovative learning techniques. So why are they less regulated when it comes to financial accountability? Far too many taxpayer dollars have been lost on this failed experiment. Time to declare failure and move on!
The mainstream press and charters is the story of The Little Red Hen.
Who will help me mix the dough?
Who will help me bake the bread?
Not i! Not I. Not I
And who will help me eat the bread?
I will . I will. I will!
I read this from EPI this morning Worries me.
Seems to be that the DEFORMERS worked towards “creating a teacher shortage.” Then online everything … not exactly what is GOOD for anyone. There is way too much time spent online and that screen is a distraction and the infrastructure fo online everything costs tax payers…what a SCAM.
The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought
The first report in “The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market” series
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-shortage-is-real-large-and-growing-and-worse-than-we-thought-the-first-report-in-the-perfect-storm-in-the-teacher-labor-market-series/?utm_source=Economic+Policy+Institute&utm_campaign=ea34032b08-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_02_22_11_12_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e7c5826c50-ea34032b08-55936345&mc_cid=ea34032b08&mc_eid=3142a4d4ad
Marvelous summary of a complex and totally shameless history of private looting of public schools. Thank you. Question: were the Democrats “duped” into becoming charter champions or do the Dems simply follow the leader and coterie of insiders? So far, no strong public education advocate has emerged in the large field of Dem pres. candidates. Wondering what it takes for an aggressive campaign to put the looting charters out of business to become a central Dem plank.
I think Dems were following the money.
Like a dog follows a trail of biscuits across a highway.
Its hard to see the approaching Mack truck when you have your nose to the ground.
Yes, they were probably following the money. But one can only imagine the tactics used to lure politicians to act on the side of the rich. It may just be that the rich privatizers actively pursue politicians using an array of tactics which ultimately catch some weaker politicians.
It’s not expensive to buy a state legislator. The for-profit K12 Inc. paid a legislator in Massachusetts only $5,000 to get a bill allowing them to operate in the state. Many of us could put our pennies together and buy our own legislator.
I’ve been looking for what he thinks of K-12. There must be something somewhere.
Found this bit about abortion.
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Buttigieg has not made abortion rights a major focus of his campaign. But he has spoken on the issue. Asked in February for his thoughts on a New York state law lifting some restrictions on abortion, he identified himself as pro-choice.
“These questions ought to be resolved by women in consultation with their doctors, not by the intervention of male politicians putting politically motivated restrictions on women’s health care,” he said.
And in an appearance last Saturday in Greenville, South Carolina, he said, “You’re not free if your reproductive choices are being dictated by male politicians in Washington.”
NPE is working on it. The first positive sign is that no Democratic candidate boasts about charter schools. Now we have to make the Association with privatization toxic.
They don’t boast about it but Beto’s wife is a charter school administrator. That kills it right there for me.
Diane wrote: “Democrats were duped by the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools,” which was spouted by Obama, Duncan, Romney, Trump, and DeVos.”
Were the DEMS really “DUPED?” or did the DFERS (Democrats for Education Reform) know exactly what they were doing?
I found this one:
President Clinton’s Leadership in Establishing The National Education Goals
NOTE who were asked to shape this.
America WAKE UP!
I think we the public are the only ones who were actually duped — by our Democratic “leaders”.
And it’s worth noting that they are STILL trying to dupe us.
Since it has become less popular to defend charters, the Demo dupers have chosen to remain silent and act as if the issue of charter corruption did not exist
Yes Dems worked with Reps on this from the start. But the ’89 efforts the article describes led to the path imposed on traditional publics: NCLB > CCSS> RTTT > ESSA. I see the charter school path as running parallel at first, then sinuously zigging in & out w/ the stds/assessments path as various agendas jumped onboard. We Dems cannot escape our role in both. We trumpted stdzd assessments as a way to shine a light on underserved majority-minority schools, stupidly assuming Reps would keep handshake bargain to fund their improvement. And we threw our weight behind charters as a way to bandaid the problem when they wouldn’t.
It’s ironic that we couldn’t have asked for a better Secretary of Education than Betsy DeVos. My opinion at least.
I agree. As long as “our guys”, good “liberals” Arne Duncan and John King were doing the same things, nothing ever would have changed. It took Betsy DeVos to reveal the evil behind the pretty words of rephorm.
DeVos is the gift that keeps on giving. A hard shell, moss backed conservative who loves charter schools.
Stripped away the mask of “progressive” charter schools.
Agreed. She ❤️ charter schools. Her 💗 is the 💋 of ☠️.
Watch closely for a resignation coming soon – – – The Special Olympics flap is going to give the clueless president an excuse to dump her.
The only good news is he ignores any credible advice so he’ll appoint someone who knows nothing about education, never set foot in a public school, someone who has a boat load of money, and ripe for the next indictment.
“Democrats were duped by the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing schools,” ”
Duped, or cynically willing to use the beliefs and preconceptions of a misled public for their own political power?
Bingo.
The Democrats are still officially supporting standardized testing and “public charter schools.” In light of the billion dollar blunder of waste and fraud, I think it is time for the Dems to step away from privatization. The problem is they love the Silicon Valley and Wall St. money so it is easier for them to sell out the teachers. The problem is it was a failed strategy in 2016.
I just sent this article from the EPI to my state Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Rep. Chyung [D-IN] along with a curt message regarding what is happing to education in Indiana due to politicians. Chyung knows that public schools need more money. Niemeyer is stuck on the ‘wonderful Indiana budget’ which is happy to underfund everything.
…………………………………………………….
Teacher strikes blanket the nation as a labor of love meets economic hardships
…While teaching has long-required forgoing the additional income that teachers could earn if they pursued other careers with similar educational requirements, that income loss has grown substantially in recent years. As our colleagues Larry Mishel and Sylvia Allegretto have shown, in 1994, the pay gap between public school teachers and their comparably educated peers was negligible: teachers earned only 1.8 percent less in wages. In 2017, the teacher pay gap was 10 times that, 18.7 percent. Even accounting for teacher pensions and other benefits, which are often cited as substantially boosting educators’ real compensation, the compensation gap is still large, 11.1 percent in 2017. It should come as little surprise, then, that fewer people are choosing teaching as a career and more teachers are leaving.
That kind of situation is never good news. But at a time when the number of students who need teachers is growing, and when those students are more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse than ever before, but also more disadvantaged in terms of poverty, it is extremely bad news. We should all be alarmed at the failure of our school systems and our country as a whole to support educators on the front lines who make it possible for students to thrive…
https://www.epi.org/blog/teacher-strikes-blanket-the-nation-as-a-labor-of-love-meets-economic-hardships/
“What began as in idealistic proposal–experimental schools-within-schools, created and operated by teachers with the approval of their colleagues and local school board, intended to reach out and help the struggling and turned-off students—has turned into a libertarian’s dream of deregulated, even unregulated industry replete with corporate chains, entrepreneurs, billionaire backers, highly segregated schools, and a battering ram against collective bargaining.”
I think it was inevitable.
Ed reform consists of two groups- ideological zealots who oppose public schools and combine that with their opposition to labor unions, and “agnostics” who claim not to prefer one set of schools over another, but who are completely ineffective as advocates and always get rolled by the zealots.
Too, “choice” is incompatible with “accountability” and will only become more so. It was always incoherent, and as ed reformers work to expand vouchers this will become more and more clear. There won’t be any “quality” component. That will give way completely. It has to. They won’t be able to regulate tens of thousands of contractors – they can’t even properly regulate the charter schools they have now.
I try to focus on the much-maligned and unfashionable “public sector” schools so my big question is how all this affects PUBLIC schools. I wonder if there will be a return to politicians working on public school issues. I hope so. It’s long overdue. We’re on our third anti-public school US President in a row. That takes a toll.
As ed reformers focus more and more narrowly on promoting, expanding, funding and cheerleading charter and private schools I think they become more and more irrelevant to public school families.
I’m hoping that leads to public schools hiring fewer and fewer consultants who come out of the ed reform echo chamber. They haven’t been good for public school students, probably mostly because they don’t believe public schools should exist. That inevitably affects students IN the public schools they work to eradicate.
Hire people who value your schools and your students, instead of people who don’t. That’s a no brainer.
GREAT IDEA: “I’m hoping that leads to public schools hiring fewer and fewer consultants who come out of the ed reform echo chamber. ” Imagine putting money paid to test, charter and choice consultants/coaches/facilitators/supervisors/managers back into the classroom budget.
I listen to the political appointees from the US Department of Education and I really wonder at their cluelessness. They repeat over and over that the only “good” public schools are schools in wealthy areas. That’s the “choice” mantra- that one has to be wealthy to live in an area with good public schools.
This simply isn’t true, and I think it was adopted as truth in ed reform because they all live in wealthy areas. There are solid public schools at all levels of income in Ohio. They’re not that hard to find. I can buy a house in an A rated district here for 70k. I can rent a house or apartment for about 600 a month.
How do you live in this country and believe this? It’s nonsense. Because THEY all live in areas with incredibly high housing costs and astronomical rents they believe we all do.
I’m supposed to reject out of hand every single public school that is not in a wealthy suburb? Do they know this belief has no connection to reality?
It is about time that the mainstream press is starting to publicize all the crooked, wasteful schemes associated with the charter industry. All these problems are systemic to the industry, and they have been going on for years. “Reform” has hidden behind the civil rights rhetoric while they pick the pockets of taxpayers and public schools. It is about time that the “gag order” is gone, and the public can see what privatization really means: public school vandals, grifters, thieves and liars. We are waiting to see them “get hoist by their own petard.”
I had no idea New Jersey was such a wild west.
Even in heavily regulated states charters seem to have gotten a complete pass.
I assumed most of the lack of regulation in Ohio and Michigan had to do with conservative policies that are deregulatory and that influenced charter laws. But California and New Jersey charters also aren’t regulated and there’s no reporting or transparency there either. They literally do not know who OWNS the property in NJ. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to expand this sector and there isn’t a single person who can tell us who owns the schools- the mayors don’t know, the governor doesn’t know, it’s just a mystery. Remarkable.
That’s clout. Ed reformers are really politically powerful. They got millions and millions in public funding with no strings attached at all.
New Jersey was an early adopter of this failed policy starting with Edison Schools. People like Booker helped to sell it as a “solution” for students born into the wrong zip code. Booker continues to claim that Newark was a great success, but most people know otherwise. It is time for the people to break out the pitchforks and torches unless they enjoy paying for a whole lot of nothing.
I’m waiting for the public to demand that ed reform provide some measurable or returned value to PUBLIC schools.
I think we probably get there. Charters and vouchers are just one side of the equation. The story of ed reform for PUBLIC schools is they haven’t improved our schools, and in many ways and in many areas of the country they have harmed our schools.
They simply haven’t provided or even offered anything of value to the 85-90% of children who attend public schools. This is probably unsustainable as a political proposition. We can’t continue to hire and pay public employees who refuse to work on behalf of 85% to 90% of students, teachers and families, and I suspect we WON’T continue to hire them.
As a public school supporter, graduate and parent when I listen to DeVos or the rest of the echo chamber what always strikes me is how they offer absolutely nothing to children in public schools. It’s such an echo chamber they don’t even feel the need to offer anything. We simply don’t exist, except as a tool to sell charters and vouchers.
This is anecdotal but I believe public schools in Ohio have benefited from the (increasingly) narrow focus of ed reform, where “the movement” exclusively promotes charters and private schools.
We’ve gotten a kind of respite from the tens of gimmicks and fads they promote and impose. They’re now so focused on privatization they haven’t had time to bother with our schools at all. Since they don’t add anything of value anyway, that has been a net plus. Support would be better than neglect, but neglect is better than active animosity and actual harm 🙂
As long as they don’t cut funding again I don’t think anyone in a public school will notice their absence.
Chiara,
Watch out, Ed reformers are adopting “personalized learning” (online) and social-emotional learning. They are still trying to figure out how to monetize the latter.
;You may be able t o fool some of the people all the time or some of the people all the time but it is difficult to fool all the people all the time.
This is ABOUT TIME that it is being discovered the, what I would term criminal taking away from public schools moneys that they could really have used to enrich special interests. MAYBE this will take place in other areas in our politics also.
How about this doozy? Edison Learning took over Gary, IN schools and went from a D to an A in one year. There has to be something missing in this story.
………..
Gary’s Roosevelt celebrates first state-awarded A grade in school history
December 13th, 2018|
GARY — Roosevelt College and Career Academy staff, students and alumni came together Wednesday afternoon to celebrate what some said the school could never do — earn an A.
“I’m extremely excited about this moment in the history of this great school,” EdisonLearning CEO Thom Jackson said, addressing a mostly full school auditorium…
After five years of working to bring change in the school learning environment, Roosevelt improved to a D in last year’s assessment. Then, this year, the school jumped to an A.
“This is a long time in the making,” Principal Ian Miller told the auditorium Wednesday. “It’s truly been a community affair to get to where we’re at today.”
https://www.nwitimes.com/high-school/gary-s-roosevelt-celebrates-first-state-awarded-a-grade-in/article_2e4486ae-9b9c-576d-9026-4e80390ae6c4.html
That looks strange and smells rotten.
From blog: “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.”
I would add – – “Charters authorized ONLY by local school districts IN STATES WITH ETHICS COMMISSIONS REQUIRING FULL DISCLOSURE OF LOCAL AND STATE OFFICE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS INCLUDING REAL NAMES OF DONORS (not LLCs or some phony corporate title)
THE DARK MONEY boys are buying up even the most remote state legislators and suburban school board seats.
The SUNY Charter Institute’s very favorite charter CEO Eva Moskowitz on Betsy DeVos:
“Thrilled to see such a passionate leader selected for such an important role. I know Betsy will continue to be an advocate for all children.”
“I believe Betsy DeVos has the talent, commitment and leadership capacity to revitalize our public schools and deliver the promise of opportunity that excellent education provides, and I support her nomination as U.S. Secretary of Education.”
Moskowitz’ “strong” criticism of DeVos after months in office:
“I believe her heart is in the right place” (FYI – anyone with a brain here believe that DeVos heart is in the right place or has ever been??)
The SUNY Charter Institute was no more concerned about Eva Moskowitz passionate support of Betsy DeVos as they are Eva Moskowitz’ passionate explanation about why one of her schools serving only Kindergarten and first graders needed to give out of school suspensions to 18% of their students! (It won’t surprise anyone to know that the school where so many 5 year olds absolutely needed to be given out of school suspensions had virtually no white students).
Every time I see those memes of Betsy DeVos/Dolores Umbridge together I remember that they both remind me a lot of Eva Moskowitz.
Her heart?
Well, DeVos did talk about small class sizes not being worth the money, and that’s something that Moskowitz has often talked about — happily giving her supposedly “expert” opinion to aid those who think giving the most disadvantaged students the small class sizes that private school students get is a huge waste of money. After all, if Moskowitz can cherry-pick children who can learn in large classes and dump them if they can’t, why shouldn’t all schools be able to do it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cost-of-small-class-size/2011/03/03/AFPGSkkB_story.html?utm_term=.994666706714
https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956184/school-founder-says-class-size-doesnt-matter
If you saw the video from this week where the Congresswoman asked DeVos where her evidence that class size wasn’t important came from, and DeVos non-answer, I would not be surprised if DeVos just listened to her admirer Eva Moskowitz, who believes the same (as is clear from the above links).
Whenever I see Betsy DeVos doing something awful, I always remember how grateful DeVos must be that Eva Moskowitz worked so very hard with all her might to convince the Senators to confirm DeVos.
And Moskowitz has never once admitted she was absolutely wrong. (Reminds me of Trump in that way).
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
Charters are opening fast and furious here in FL. Desantis and the self-serving FL legislation and newly installed commissioner of ed, ethics violating (his wife owns charter schools) Corcoran are expanding unconstitutional vouchers here in FL starving our public schools. Desantis appointed 3 new judges to ensure the voucher scam is not found “unconstitutional” again. They stacked the deck. They have and continue to create a separate dual school system of unaccountable, for-profit charter schools. Half the FL legislators own charter schools or have family members who do. Privatization is in full swing here in FL. Jebucation is in full force.