Jackie Goldberg easily led the race for what may be the deciding vote on the Los Angeles school board with 47%. The final tally is not yet in, but if current numbers hold, Jackie will be in a run-off with a Runner up who received about 13% of the vote.
Jackie is a firebrand for equity and public schools. She is the billiinaires’ nightmare.
The Billionaire Boys Club was waiting for a run-off before jumping in the race.
For the future of public schools in LA, Jackie must win outright.
It’s about time. A story in the Los Angeles Times notes that those Democratic candidates who supported charters (and still do) are facing a backlash by their party’s voters. The wave of teachers’ strikes have brought into sharp relief the fact that most families enroll their children in public schools, not charter schools; that charter schools are a priority for Republicans, Wall Street, and far-right libertarians like Betsy DeVos; and that support for public schools is a bedrock principle of the Democratic Party.
The candidate who was most outspoken as a supporter of both charters and vouchers was Cory Booker. He worked in alliancewith anti-union Governor Chris Christie to bring chartersto Newark. He worked closely with Betsy Dezvos and gave a speech to her organization. He was honored by the rightwing Manhattan Institute for supporting school choice. He wanted to turn Newark into the New Orleans of the North, with no public schools and no teachers’ union. He still defends that record.
Michael Bloomberg was a big supporter of charters in New York City and favored them over the public schools he took control of. He’s now out of the race, so no need to worry other than that he will find a Democratic DeVos to fund. He despises public schools.
Michael Bennett of Colorado supported charters when he was superintendent of schools in Denver. Governor Hickenlooper appointed Bennett to the Senate.
Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State did not stand up to Bill Gates after the Washington State Supreme Court decided that charter schools and not entitled to receive public money. Gates persuaded his friends in the legislature to give lottery money to charters, and Gov. Inslee neither signed nor vetoed the law, allowing Gates to get state funding. Not a profilein courage.
The election of 2020 will be a deciding moment, when Democratic candidates are asked to declare whether they support the public schools, or the privately-managed, scandal-ridden charters that enroll 6% of the nation’s students.
Would you put more money into a failing business?
If you were in charge of the charter industry, the answer is yes.
The charter industry in Ohio is lobbying for a 22% increase in tuition, even though 2/3 of the state’s charter schools are rated either D or F.
If they were public schools, most would have been closed by now.
Back when charters started, their advocates claimed they would get better results with less money. They don’t get better results and they don’t save money. Broken promises.
Mike Deshotels, veteran educator, exposes the myth of high standards in Louisiana in this post.
He discovered that John White, the State Superintendent of Education, has systematically and secretly lowered the state standards to make it appear that the state was making progress every year.
The raw scores on Louisiana’s state tests are kept secret from the public and the legislature. Deshotels got them by making public records requests backed up by 4 successful lawsuits that he won against John White for withholding public records.
”The latest NAEP test results which compare Louisiana student performance in reading and math to all other states places Louisiana at its lowest ranking ever. We now rank at the bottom of all state systems. The only area scoring lower on NAEP is Washington D.C.
“Don’t blame the students or the teachers. The fact is the Common Common core standards are so bad, so age inappropriate, so filled with stuff these kids will never use, that the tests should not be used for any purpose, much less the promotion and graduation of students. Meanwhile our students are being denied instruction in real world problems and truly useful reading and writing skills.”
Recently Education Week posted a column claiming that charters and vouchers do not threaten public schools and that concern about privatization is vastly overblown.
Anthony Cody refutes that argument for complacency in this post.
The writer of the article, Arianna Prothero, is a staff writer for Education Week.
Cody writes:
Prothero apparently only consulted one side of this contentious issue, as all the statistics she cites are from the National Alliance for Public (sic) Charter Schools.
When she refers to “most parts of America,” she apparently means rural areas, he says.
She wondered why West Virginia teachers were willing to strike to block charter schools, when, she claims, they are no big deal in a state like West Virginia. After all, legislators only want to start small, with one itty-bitty program with only a few charters.
Cody responds:
Wow. That is quite a conclusion! It would be reassuring if this were not the way that almost every charter school and voucher program began – with just a few schools, or only targeting a limited group of students. And then within a few years, the programs are expanded to include nearly everyone. Reporters covering education should know this history.
Indiana’s voucher program started for limited income students who had attended public schools for at least a year. It expanded to the point that today many students are eligible. Take a look at all the student eligibility pathways. This year, taxpayers will spend $153 million on vouchers for students attending private and parochial schools. Families earning as much as $91,000 a year are eligible.
Voucher programs such as “Education Savings Accounts” almost always start with one group, such as students with disabilities, and then more groups are added every year. That is what happened in Arizona. The program in Arizona started small, and by last year had expanded to make 20% of students eligible. State lawmakers tried to make 90% of students eligible, but last year voters overturned the law. The proposal in West Virginia, for seven charter schools and vouchers for a thousand students this year, would have been a platform for further growth.
Cody shows how charters are undermining the very existence of public schools in some cities.
And he notes:
Mainstream media coverage for the past decade has, similar to this EdWeek blog post, generally downplayed the potential and real harms inflicted by the expansion of charter schools and voucher programs. The experiences of those in places like Oakland, Los Angeles and Pennsylvania serve as a warning to others — whether they are in urban, suburban or rural areas. Charter schools are a costly experiment that so far, has failed to yield much. Those in states fortunate enough to have avoided charters thus far do not need to repeat these failed experiments to learn the same lessons the hard way. Teachers in West Virginia were wise to ward off this danger.
Readers might be interested to know that blog posts in EdWeek bearing the K12 Parent Engagement logo are partly funded by contributions by the Walton Family Foundation, though EdWeek retains editorial control.
The Walton Family Foundation is anti-union, anti-public school, and pro-privatization. They expect a return on investment.
The Georgia State Senate, controlled by Republicans, voted not to create a private school voucher program.
Critics said the program would eventually cost the state half a billion a year, defunding public schools.
Democrats voted as a bloc against it, joined by key Republicans including Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller of Gainesville.
Public school supporters who opposed the bill were astonished.
The fate of the bill by Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, stunned the public school lobby, which had been working overtime against it.
“Pleasantly surprised,” was how Craig Harper, executive director of the 90,000-plus member Professional Association of Georgia Educators put it.
John Zauner, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, said the legislation would have “fundamentally” changed school financing.
Starlee Coleman, CEO of the Texas Charter Schools Association, insists that charter schools should have the right to exclude students they don’t want.
State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat who represents Austin, has introduced a bill proposing that charters act like public schools if they want to be public schools and serve all kinds of students, not just those who are easiest and cheapest to educate.
Of course, the charter lobby wants public money without acting like a public school.
Thank you, Rep. Hinojosa, for standing up for what is right!
If charter schools take public money, as they do, they should be subject to the same admissions procedures, discipline standards, transparency and accountability as real public schools.
But no, they want to get public money while acting like private schools.
Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy notes that even her far-right allies reject Betsy DeVos’ plan for a federal voucher program.
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This is an important article by three scholars. Derek Black of the University of South Carolina, Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, and Preston Green of the University of Connecticut. Please open the link to read it all.
While critics charge that charter schools are siphoning money away from public schools, a more fundamental issue frequently flies under the radar: the questionable business practices that allow people who own and run charter schools to make large profits.
Charter school supporters are reluctant to acknowledge, much less stop, these practices.
Given that charter schools are growing rapidly – from 1 million students in 2006 to more than 3.1 million students attending approximately 7,000 charter schools now – shining a light on these practices can’t come too soon. The first challenge, however, is simply understanding the complex space in which charters operate – somewhere between public and private.
Charters were founded on the theory that market forces and competition would benefit public education. But policy reports and local government studies increasingly reveal that the charter school industry is engaging in the type of business practices that have led to the downfall of other huge industries and companies.
Charter schools regularly sign contracts with little oversight, shuffle money between subsidiaries and cut corners that would never fly in the real world of business or traditional public schools – at least not if the business wanted to stay out of bankruptcy and school officials out of jail. The problem has gotten so bad that a nationwide assessment by the U.S. Department of Education warned in a 2016 audit report that the charter school operations pose a serious “risk of waste, fraud and abuse” and lack “accountability.”
The biggest problem in charter school operations involves facility leases and land purchases. Like any other business, charters need to pay for space. But unlike other businesses, charters too often pay unreasonably high rates – rates that no one else in the community would pay.
One of the latest examples can be found in a January 2019 report from the Ohio auditor-general, which revealed that in 2016 a Cincinnati charter school paid $867,000 to lease its facilities. This was far more than the going rate for comparable facilities in the area. The year before, a Cleveland charter was paying half a million above market rate, according to the same report.
Why would a charter school do this? Most states require charter schools to be nonprofit. To make money, some of them have simply entered into contracts with separate for-profit companies that they also own. These companies do make money off students.
In other words, some “nonprofit” charter schools take public money and pay their owners with it. When this happens, it creates an enormous incentive to overpay for facilities and supplies and underpay for things like teachers and student services.
The Cincinnati and Cleveland charters are prime examples of this perverse incentive structure. In both cases, the Ohio report showed, the charters were leasing property from the subsidiaries of the charter school operators.
In fact, these and other similar subsidiaries were leasing facilities to several other charters in the state. These charters spent twice as much on rent as others in the state.
Thomas Kelley, a law professor specializing in nonprofit law, unearthed similar problems in North Carolina, where charter school management companies obtain “ownership of valuable properties using public funds” and then charge the nonprofit charter schools rent far in excess of what is necessary to cover the cost of acquiring and maintaining the facilities. Because of the self-dealing, he questioned whether the charters actually qualify for nonprofit status under federal law.
The windfalls from these self-dealing practices can be sizable. In Arizona, Glenn Way, a former state legislator, has made about $37 million selling and leasing real estate to a chain of charter schools that he founded and, until recently, directed as chairman of the board, according to local reporting.
What a Business!
The stateof Indiana shells out millions of dollars to virtual charter schools that educate no one.
Even Republican legislators thank this this could be a waste of taxpayers’ dollars.
“Top state education leaders called it a “scandal” and “serious” that two Indiana virtual charter schools are accused of counting toward their enrollment thousands of students who either never signed up for or completed classes.
“This should be a massive alarm bell that outright fraud has been committed against Hoosier taxpayers to the tune of millions of dollars,” said Gordon Hendry, a state board of education member who led a committee last year to review virtual schools. “If this isn’t a scandal, I don’t know what is.”
“The harsh words came a day after Indiana Virtual School and its sister school, Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, were put on notice that their charter agreements could be revoked by their oversight agency, the small rural Daleville public school district. The virtual schools, which purported to educate about 6,000 students, could close if they do not find another authorizer to oversee them….
“The state data paint the scope of the issues at the schools as vast. 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. That year, one out of five students enrolled all year were never signed up for any classes. In each semester of the 2017-18 school year, the majority of students reported as attending the school for the full year did not earn any credits. Nearly 60 percent earned zero credits at the end of the year — a year in which the school received $20 million in state funding.”
Despite the waste of state dollars, some choice advocates defended the fraud, because the virtual schools are a choice that parents make even if their children don’t get an education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 