A group of leaders in Congress wrote to Betsy DeVos to complain about her Department’s failure to demand accountability from the Charter Schools that win federal funding. She has $440 million to hand out to charters, and she has chosen to shower millions on corporate charter chains like IDEA, KIPP, and Success Academy. All of these chains are super rich. They don’t need federal aid.
The charter industry is angry because the House Appropriations Committee cut Betsy DeVos’s request from $500 million to $400 million. Tough. She uses the Charter School Program as her personal slush fund.
The fact is that the charter industry wants to play a game of pretending to be progressive while sleeping with Trump and DeVos. Sorry, that doesn’t make sense. You can’t be funded by rightwing ideologues and still be “liberal.” You can’t take Walton money and pretend to be progressive. You can’t be anti-union, pro-segregation and claim to be progressive. Nope.
As the charter industry grows more defensive, watch them cry “racism.” Please note that many of the signatories of this letter are Black and Hispanic. Note that one of them is Jahana Hayes, the Connecticut Teacher of the Year who was elected in 2018.
The letter can be found here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have a question about charter school laws. My community is getting one–grades 6 & 7 to start. This was not voted in by the community so there is an effort to get the word out by the organizers. I have listened to 5 people who are on the board speak at various times and they certainly don’t have their stories down pat. There are 13 schools in Washington–primarily in Seattle and Spokane. We are a small city in the center of the state. Each time they claim that they will have the 3rd toughest laws in the country but none have been unable to tell me who number 1 and 2 are to compare what is happening in those places. Perhaps that is what they wish to happen to avoid scrutiny. Do any of you know of those 2 states that have the toughest laws?
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I believe that MD has tough Charter Laws. It is a very unique set up and I don’t know much about it. We have a very strong Teacher’s Union here and I believe that they hold the Charters accountable. Our Charters in MD received a B- overall in rankings recently and I believe that these rankings were posted on this blog within the past 2-3 weeks. If you are in Washington State, I wouldn’t believe anything you are being told….Bill Gates is controlling the narrative and I wouldn’t trust anything that he supports.
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On this blog site. May 16, 2019. NEA report on Charter schools.
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Lisa, this is the post:
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April,
The charter industry always starts small, then the one or two becomes 12 or 15. Your local public school loses students and resources. It is forced to lay off teachers and increase class sizes. Then more cuts and more cuts to the public schools. No charter should be allowed to open without the consent and oversight of the local school board. They quickly become parasites. A recent review of charters in Washington State by the charter-friendly CREDO Organization found that the charters did not produce better test scores than the local public schools. I’m sorry for your city.
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This post deftly captures my concern of a Dem. party in search of itself. We know about the for-profit charter management companies. They’re not whom I fear. The so-called non-profit charters like KIPP are the ones we should watch. On one hand they claim to close the achievement gap and provide educational equity—i.e., a typical progressive (read Dem.) initiative. On the other, they use mega-funding from the DoE AND corporations, foundations & hedge funders to bankroll huge profits for themselves. If you have an hour, read some of the job titles KIPPsters, an offshoot from TFA, use. Incredibly self-serving, if you ask me. At any rate, non-profit neoliberals are giving privatizers the keys to the educational castle w/ their alliances.
They seem so sure they’re doing the right thing by poor children of color. Can we convince them of their duplicity before elections?
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Banning for-profit charters is a good first step. Banning for-profit charter management is the next step. Banning corporate charter chains is the next step. Giving local school districts responsibility for authorizing and supervising charters is the next step.
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Many thanks for the information. I see that there are actually 3 states better than WA. Maryland (B-), Tenn (C-), Kentucky (D+). I would hardly call that bragging rights. All are rated mediocre. I wonder if the supporters know this? The local school board needs educating.
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Kelley Ranch,
I agree with you. Arne Duncan and his pals at DFER would be happy to “compromise” by giving up for-profit charters because they know the real destruction of public education comes from so-called non-profit charters that demand the right to move into communities where their false claims of long wait lists are enabled by oversight agencies run by rabidly pro-charter businessmen and lawyers and a co-opted media of mediocre journalists who probably never took a math class at their “elite” college and whose understanding of statistics and numbers is astonishingly ignorant — those lazy journalists are rewarded for rewriting the press releases handed to them by the charters’ PR firms.
The worry is that candidates in the primary can now profess to be progressive because they oppose DeVos and vouchers while they continue to enable the non-profit charter chains that have done so much harm in democratic states where they are multiplying like wildfires.
None of the candidates will dare to criticize those powerful non-profit charters by name. They will make vague criticisms but will never even try to dispute the lies about charter success that do so much damage to public schools. On the contrary, they often make some remark like “we do love those fantastic high-performing charters that are doing so much good”.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Keep the heat on her.
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I just think cutting federal funding to public school students while increasing federal funding to charter school students is a clear preference and puts paid to the lie that they are “agnostics”.
And it isn’t just the federal government. It’s state and local governments where ed reformers are in power. If they’re charter and voucher advocates they should stop calling themselves “public education advocates” because that is deceptive to the public who then put them in power, to the detriment of public school students.
DeVos admits this publicly. She tells us charter school students are a good investment and public school students are “throwing money at the problem”.
Does anyone but me read these speeches she gives? It’s a droning litany of horror re: public school students contrasted with the miraculous success stories of charter and private school students. This is an inaccurate and blatantly political depiction of our kids. She should be ashamed of herself. She offers them nothing of value, and worse, uses her ridiculous depictions of them as bullying, drug addicted low performers to promote her ideological agenda. It’s 1. not true and 2. not fair. And we’re all paying for this! I’m bankrolling her ludicrous 22 person security team as she travels the country marketing her schools by bashing our schools.
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The charter industry is long overdue for some measure of oversight and accountability. Too many charters have ridden the gravy train of tax payers dollars while public schools have been treated like Cinderella. The charter industry has become accustomed to getting free money, and they feel they are entitled. Public money for charters is not a right of unregulated, unaccountable charters. Public money should come with strings as it is the duty of government to provide good stewardship of public funds. Since NPE’s research has found that roughly $1 billion has been wasted by the federal government on failed charters, representatives should be asking for accountability. The system has become a free market free for all of waste, fraud and embezzling.
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Please note that eight of the 14 members of Congress who signed the letter are Black or Hispanic. I mention this because the Deformers are running a campaign claiming that any effort to regulate charters is racist and harms poor Black and Hispanic children.
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I’m also sick to death of DeVos and the rest of the ed reform echo chamber referring to anything that benefits a public school as designed to benefit “labor unions”. They consistently and constantly refer to public school funding as “unions winning”.
No one in the real world looks at a public school and sees it as a “labor union” other than the echo chamber. I’ve been a public school parent for 25 years in a very conservative part of the country and not once have I heard anyone who actually uses a public school do this conflating of “public schools” with “labor unions”- it’s unique to the echo chamber.
For people who recite slogans that they are “student centered” they look at our schools and don’t see students but instead see “buildings” and “labor unions”? What the heck? It is unimaginable to them that a person could fund public schools because they support public school STUDENTS?
Go look at the ed reform commentary on Bernie Sanders comprehensive K-12 plan. It’s as if students in public schools don’t exist. It’s ALL focused on their promotion of charter schools and their opposition to labor unions.
Leave my kids out of your anti-union politicking. They are public school students, and public school funding benefits THEM. That’s why we support it.
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Brilliant observation. Thank you.
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Rupert Murdoch the Morloch’s Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics and Trumpeteering ran an opinion piece today that played this imaginary race card. The headline read, “Sanders Chooses Teachers Unions over Black Voters.” Unashamedly, it simply ASSERTS that favoring public schools is favoring unions (there’s some truth to that–that’s why the right so wants to destroy public schools), IMPLIES that favoring unions is a bad thing, and ASSERTS that requiring charters to be public and accountable is anti-black. This technique has worked so well for Don the Con that the WSJCAT has been going ALL IN: if you don’t have the facts on your side, LIE ABOUT THEM, but do so with intensity and beg the question. That is, speak as though the BIG LIE were something that everyone already knows to be true.
This technique, btw, has worked very well for right-wingers with regard to immigration. Immigrants, like other people, consume goods and so create demand, and they tend to start businesses that employ others (including small businesses like landscaping services and nail shops) at much higher rates than citizens do. And, they do terrible jobs that citizens don’t want to do, so they are employed heavily, for example, as crop pickers and slaughterhouse workers–that is, in areas where they don’t compete with citizens. So, economists are pretty much agreed that immigration, legal and illegal, is a small net GAIN for jobs. Nonetheless, every time Trump stumps to the chumps, he repeats some version of the “they’re taking our jobs” myth.
This technique has also worked for a long time with regard to minimum wage laws. Several studies have shown that minimum wage laws don’t negatively affect overall employment. Raise the minimum wage, and people don’t hire fewer fast-food workers, for example. But the right has repeated the myth often enough that most people believe it.
It has also worked for a long time with regard to healthcare. Under the US system, where vast amounts of the healthcare dollar are siphoned off into profits for mobsters in the hospital, pharma, and insurance rackets, costs are TWICE what they are in every other industrialized country that has some version of universal, tax-based healthcare, and outcomes are WORSE. But the right keeps perpetuating the lie that universal healthcare is TOO EXPENSIVE. Exactly the opposite of the truth.
And the same thing happened, of course, with the “interventions” in the Middle East, which have now cost American taxpayers 5.9 trillion dollars. That kind of money could have put solar panels on the roof of every business, house, and doghouse in the United States several times over. And the “intervention” was based on a lie about WMDs. It didn’t matter that it was a lie. It was repeated often enough that people believed it, and the war profiteers made, literally, trillions.
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Democrats are going to keep losing elections until they start EDUCATING voters on such issues by, for example, running ads not for particular candidates but ones that CALL OUT THE LIES.
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Someone needs to tell Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal that the nation’s pre-eminent civil rights organization, the NAACP, called for a moratorium on charter schools in 2016. Senator Sanders cited the NAACP in his policy on education. Black Lives Matter agreed with the NAACP. The WSJ is the very last place to look for the views of black families. Next to last would be DFER and EdNext, both Poobahs of School Choice, funded by hedge fund managers and right wingers.
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“But the right keeps perpetuating the lie that universal healthcare is TOO EXPENSIVE. Exactly the opposite of the truth.”
I am not so sure that the difference would be made up in our country. We need to take into consideration that our country is way more diverse, and large portions of the population are way more unhealthy. I think we are way underserving portions of the population, and the commitment we should make to serve our entire country would be more expensive than proponents of a new approach can fathom. That said, we still should work it out and take care of our people.
My father-in-law is now in a situation where the problem of our method of insurance-company-rationing is demonstrably foolish. He is in a facility for rehab after he fell and broke his foot. This occurred just after triple bypass surgery and the beginning of dialysis. He is only partially in the right mind. Because he has “reached a plateau” the medical authorities are sending him home. He will go home, fall again, and cost the system a whole lot more money. The entity that is now caring for him, however, will not suffer bottom line. The entire system, however, will be taxed in negative ways.
Another situation arose about ten years ago that illustrated another problem. There was a very poor day care worker we knew who had pulmonary problems. Since she was without insurance, she had to go along until she developed pneumonia to be admitted to the hospital. This was horribly costly.
Thus it seems to me we need to be spending money in places that take care of things before they get very bad. I do not think we can achieve this without pain, but we should try to achieve it anyway.
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Roy. Stop believing the nonsense. We have poor care here and high costs BECAUSE of the siphoning off of healthcare dollars into private profits. Because of profiteering. WE HAVE THE EXISTENCE PROOFS of systems that work much better than ours do. It’s not as though the Brits are healthier than Americans because of their extraordinary commitment to exercise and careful diets.
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Healthcare as percentage of GDP in the US: 17.9. Healthcare as a percentage of GDP in the OECD in general: 8.6. We pay MORE THAN TWICE as much.
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Here’s Betsy DeVos describing every public school student and school in the country:
“I’m referring to a wall in education that keeps too many students from learning.
It separates wealthy, powerful, or well-connected students from those who aren’t wealthy, powerful, or well-connected. They have about as much education freedom in America today as East Germans had freedom to do anything back then.
Too many students are up against another “empire”—governments, unions, associations of this, and organizations of that. It’s an education cabal that protects the status quo at the expense of just about everyone else.”
Give me a break. This is anti-public school and worse, anti-public school STUDENT propaganda. Who in their right mind would fund or support these schools or students she describes? And this whole political campaign she’s running is publicly funded.
I’m not even asking ed reform to work on behalf of students in public schools. It’s been 20 years and they haven’t done a thing for our students. If they could just refrain from smearing our schools and students it would be helpful.
Why do we have a federal agency working AGAINST 90% of students? Why am I paying for this? What does this “work” contribute to any public school student, anywhere?
https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-secretary-devos-young-americas-foundation-reagan-ranch-center
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Also, maybe the US Department of Education could refrain from repeating the lie that vouchers allow students to attend the schools of the “wealthy and powerful”. It’s nonsense. Unless that voucher is redeemable for 20,000 dollars they are misleading the public. They’ll attend a low cost private school with their 7000 voucher, and all of ed reform know it. There won’t be a “wealthy and powerful” person anywhere in sight at any of these voucher schools. They’re creating and funding a whole new sector of low cost private schools for the lower classes, example- Florida and Louisiana, which is the reason the voucher results have been so terrible across the board.
This talking point is delusional. It’s not true. If anyone would know it’s delusional it’s the DC professional class who promote it, and send their children to the pricey private school vouchers won’t cover.
Just tell the truth. “Vouchers” allow attendance in a narrow band of low cost private schools. In fact, vouchers CREATE a new and exciting market in low cost, low quality private schools. Hence the lousy results.
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Devos will look at this article and smile: “See, what I am doing is working just as I want it to.” It has obviously been her intention from the beginning to privatize schools, regardless of whether this will have any good effect on education. Her demeanor at senate hearings speaks loud and clear of her lack of concern for what anyone thinks. Anyone who is still a Trump supporter at this stage of the game is in favor of all the things he has done, is still doing, and what his cabinet people are doing.
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Devos will look at this article and smile: “See, what I am doing is working just as I want it to.” It has obviously been her intention from the beginning to privatize schools, regardless of whether this will have any good effect on education. Her demeanor at senate hearings speaks loud and clear of her lack of concern for what anyone thinks. Anyone who is still a Trump supporter at this stage of the game is in favor of all the things he has done, is still doing, and what his cabinet people are doing.
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