Capitol & Main reports that the Healdsburg school district in Sonoma County in wine country was worried about white flight, so it opened a charter school and put it in the same building with the public school. That’s called co-location.
However, the two schools in the same building have very different demographics.
Taking advantage of California’s co-location rules regarding charters, 266 charter school students share the same campus with the public elementary school’s 323 kids. The two student bodies aren’t exactly similar, however. The public school is 89 percent Latino, while Latinos only account for 36 percent of the charter’s enrollment. The divide vividly extends to learning achievement…
Last year only 23 percent of the public elementary school’s students in grades three to five met or exceeded state math standards, while the figure was 55 percent for Healdsburg Charter kids in the same grades. A full 88.5 percent of the public school students were socioeconomically disadvantaged, compared to just 33.5 percent of the charter school students. And 70.6 percent of public school students were English-language learners, while only 13.7 percent of charter school students were ELLs.
One school mostly for white kids, another mostly for Latino kids. One for the middle-class and affluent, the other for the farmworkers’ children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This post illustrates the highly segregative nature of privatization. Latinx students get a separate and unequal education from middle class white students in the same building. In doing so they negate what could be a great opportunity for an integrated public school in which poor students benefit from the positive “peer effect” that so many of my poor minority students did in their diverse public school. Instead, we are shamefully using public money to promote segregation. This is so wrong.
Splitting students into two separate entities makes both schools less efficient. It would make sense to hire one ESL or bilingual education teacher for all the ELLs in both schools, and the same can be said for any other special area subjects. One school would make a more efficient use of staffing for all subjects. I am assuming this arrangement includes a separate administrative staff for what are essentially two small schools. One school for a population of 589 students would be far more cost effective as they are duplicating far too many services.
the UNEQUAL part of “choice” is now obvious in our heavily reformed city: if your parents are middle class and dominant culture, you likely attend a school with all the services, all the courses, all the sports, all the music and arts classes, all the clubs and activities associated to a traditional school. But, if your parents are not so wealthy and you live in an area of town largely NOT dominant culture, you likely now attend new “choice” schools with few of these things.
I am curious if folks think that the worry about “white flight” is reasonable, and if so, is a charter school a reasonable response? There are other responses.
“One school mostly for white kids, another mostly for Latino kids. One for the middle-class and affluent, the other for the farmworkers’ children.” All on the same public school campus sort of like that Russian doll with other Russian dolls inside the one you see before you open it up.
It seems to me that all they did was find a way to divide the test score results and help some con-man make a lot of money from his corporate charter school.
I wonder how those charter school teachers feel when they know the public school teachers in nearby classrooms are getting paid thousands more for the same job and have a union to represent them so it is not as easy to lose their jobs.
Public school teachers have due process rights when it comes to being fired. Corporate charter school teachers do not have any due process rights and can be fired for any reason or no reason at all.
Q In the last ten years, only 91 teachers out of about 300,000 (.003 percent) who have attained permanence lost their jobs in California. Of those, only 19 (.0007 percent) have been dismissed for poor performance. Is it possible that Golden State teachers are that good? Such an astronomical permanence rate doesn’t square with the performance of California’s fourth- and eighth-graders, whose scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests persistently rank near the bottom.END Q
see
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2014/04/21/number-of-tenured-teachers-in-ca-fired-for-poor-performance-in-last-decade-19-n1826813
Maybe more tenured teachers should be shown the door.
Charles,
I see you are quoting a rightwing rag again.
California has a very large teacher shortage.
Why don’t you take a pay cut and offer to teach?
I do not think Charles would survive in a school like the ones where I taught.
More than 70 percent of the students lived in poverty and the community around the schools was dominated by violent street gangs. I suspect if Charles doesn’t already have PTSD from his government contractor jobs throughout the world where he told us he saw someone blown up by a bomb, it wouldn’t take long for those students to cause him to end up with full-blown PTSD or make his PTSD worse if he already has it.
If a teacher cannot manage an unruly challenging classroom, then no matter how well they know the subject they are teaching, they won’t be able to teach.
Charles, a child’s test scores cannot measure how well a teacher does his or her job. You are regurgitating one of the false claims that the fake-reformer vampires repeat in their propaganda as they attempt to close public schools and replace them with corporate charter schools so they can profit off the public dime.
Since test scores cannot determine if a teacher is doing an adequate job, that’s why teachers are observed by other teachers and/or administrators who turn in written reports and sit down with the observed teacher after school to go over what they witnessed and suggest where improvements could be made. When teachers need to improve, there is a process they must follow to learn how to improve and then demonstrate that improvement. Even after I had taught for more than twenty-five years, I was still being observed and attending the follow-up meetings after school.
Then it is a fact that 10-percent of new teachers leave in the first year. New teachers in every state have to earn their due process rights. Since all new teachers do not have that due process job protection for the first few years they teach, many of those teachers might have been given the choice to leave on their own or be fired. It doesn’t take long for a new teacher to realize this profession is not for them, because a weak teacher will be eaten alive by the students until the stress breaks them. I’ve seen that happen to. One new teacher broke the record and quit the first day he was teaching before he finished the day. When lunch arrived, he walked in the officer, turned in his keys and quiet. He had two more classes to teach and the principal had to scramble to find someone to cover those classes. In another case, a new teacher was fired on the spot when students turned him in for teaching them how to cheat on tests. That new teacher was fired before he finished the first semester.
I taught for thirty years and I know for a fact that all of the new teachers that left the schools I taught in before the fifth year left because they couldn’t survive in the classroom. It didn’t matter if they knew the subject they were teaching. What counts more than knowing that subject, is managing a classroom full of children or adolescents. K-12 students know when a teacher doesn’t have what it takes and they drive them out of the profession helping explain why such a small ratio of teachers are fired from their jobs after they have earned due process protection — because they quit before they could be fired.
There is another trick administers can use to get rid of a teacher after the probationary years are over and that is to assign a teacher that is burned out and can no longer do the job they did in the early years five or six classrooms with five or six different preps. I knew of a few teachers who had been around long enough to earn due process job protection who then burned out a few years later (there have been a few studies that revealed many teachers end up with PTSD because of the challenges they face managing a classroom) and lose whatever edge they had before the PTSD affected their ability to function as a teacher. In both cases, those teachers quietly left the profession and never returned.
I came back from Vietnam with PTSD and often felt like teaching was a battlefield because of the stress. Instead of bullets and bombs, a teacher deals with challenges that distrust the learning environment everyday and often in every class. Good teachers quit early too because the demands and stress are overwhelming.
From We Are Teachers dot come, we learn Why Good Teachers Quit Teaching.
One: Challenging work conditions
Two: Not enough support, not enough respect (lack of respect from students was the word I heard the most when new teachers that teaching on their own.)
Three: Testing and data collection
Four: No longer looking out for kids’ best interests
Five: In the end, the family takes priority
https://www.weareteachers.com/why-teachers-quit/
To learn how many teachers leave the profession on their own, there is this:
“The longitudinal study, “Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First Five Years,” found that 10 percent of new teachers in 2007-08 didn’t return the following year, increasing cumulatively to 12 percent in year three, 15 percent in year four and 17 percent in the fifth year. The totals include teachers who were let go and subsequently didn’t find a job teaching in another district.”
https://edsource.org/2015/half-of-new-teachers-quit-profession-in-5-years-not-true-new-study-says/83054
Not all teachers that quit the first few years can teach, and that helps explain why so few are fired years later. But many of those who are fired probably were fired after they ended up with PTSD and couldn’t do their job anymore.
I shared that comment by Charles because I knew others would answer it far better than I.
He has made the same point many times. Not enough teachers are fired, he says. Proof that more must be fired.
Charles must agree with Bill Gates that stack ranking (using one number method or another) is the only way to discover the best people working for you and then you fire the bottom ten percent annually and get rid of those that do not work the longest hours and produce the most profit. If they are not deemed productive enough, out they go until fear rules your entire workforce because no one feels safe.
Using this method, no one knows when they will drop to the bottom. With stack ranking of any kind, a teacher can be #1 one year and then drop to rock bottom the next year depending on the students the teacher is working with.
For education, that means using high stakes rank and punish test scores to discover who ends up on the bottom every year. And that means teachers that work with the most challenged and/or poorest children are almost always going to be ranked at the bottom and end up losing their jobs.
There are a number of reasons behind the public school teacher shortage in California. The cost of living there is high, and teacher salaries have not kept up. That is a problem for the California state assembly to solve.
I am an engineer, not a teacher. What does my observation that very few teachers are terminated, have to do with my giving up my career? I am not interested in being a teacher. And I certainly am not interested in moving to California.
The point of the article, and I agree with that point, is that very few underperforming teachers are ever terminated for this reason. I am astounded that so few teachers are terminated in California.
Why do you think there are underperforming teachers in California? How many teachers in California quit teaching because working conditions were poor? How many doctors in California lost their license? How many lawyers were disbarred? When did you become an expert about California? Why do you believe every bit of drivel you pick up from right wing rags like TownHall?
How do you know “that very few underperforming teachers are ever terminated”?
And how are those alleged underperforming teachers evaluated – with high stakes, rank and punish test scores from tests that are kept a secret so no one other than the corporation that’s making a profit off that tests knows the details of each test?
ascd.org says, “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality … For several important reasons, standardized achievement tests should not be used to judge the quality of education. The overarching reason that students’ scores on these tests do not provide an accurate index of educational effectiveness is that any inference about educational quality made on the basis of students’ standardized achievement test performances is apt to be invalid.
Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon. Tablespoons have a different measurement mission than indicating how hot or cold something is. Standardized achievement tests have a different measurement mission than indicating how good or bad a school is. Standardized achievement tests should be used to make the comparative interpretations that they were intended to provide. They should not be used to judge educational quality. Let’s look at three significant reasons that it is thoroughly invalid to base inferences about the caliber of education on standardized achievement test scores. … Educators should definitely be held accountable. The teaching of a nation’s children is too important to be left unmonitored. But to evaluate educational quality by using the wrong assessment instruments is a subversion of good sense. Although educators need to produce valid evidence regarding their effectiveness, standardized achievement tests are the wrong tools for the task.”
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar99/vol56/num06/Why-Standardized-Tests-Don%27t-Measure-Educational-Quality.aspx
Charles, do you remember the Vergara trial in California that was an attack on teachers designed to strip them of their due process rights?
The fake reformers out to destroy public education even hired two alleged education experts and flew them from Harvard to testify for the side that wanted to take away public school teachers Constitutional due process rights.
According to Concord Law School, because public school teachers work in the public sector and not the private sector, they are protected by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment provides that a state may not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It applies to public elementary and secondary schools, as they are considered to be state actors. In 1954, the Supreme Court interpreted the Equal Protection Clause’s requirements in Brown v. Board of Education. In perhaps one of the most famous and important cases issued by the Court, it stated: We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs…are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”
https://www.concordlawschool.edu/blog/constitutional-law/14th-amendment-protects-rights-education/
Now, Charles, back to those two Harvard professors who were hired to be expert witnesses for the fake reformers that want to destroy public education.
When they were on the stand, they both said that it was their guess from years of classroom observations that 1-to-3 percent of the public school teachers were incompetent.
If you took the time to crunch the numbers, you would discover that there are more public schools in California than alleged incompetent teachers. That means thousands of public school in California would not have even one alleged incompetent teacher to fire.
Charles, you also ignored my previous comment that pointed out how many teachers leave the teaching profession in the first year (10 percent) and never return to education. By the fifth year, that number is up to 17 percent) Instead of having to seek out and prove teachers are incompetent, most of them leave on their own because teachers who cannot manage their classrooms will be devoured by their students and the stress drives those teachers out or it breaks them and gives them PTSD. There is no need to have a witch hunt based on high stakes standardized test scores to find alleged incompetent teachers to fire because most if not all of them quit before that could ever happen.
“PTSD in Teachers: Yes, It’s Real?”
https://theeducatorsroom.com/ptsd-in-teachers-yes-its-real/
Our combat vets with PTSD get free mental health treatment from the VA in addition to 300 vet centers across the country.
Why can’t these teachers who don’t leave in time to avoid getting PTSD also get free mental health care? Why are public school teachers in the United States being treated like trash by people like Charles?
Lloyd,
Incompetent teachers typically don’t get tenure and leave before they are fired.
I agree. You kept it short and simple.
But with many more words and links, that was what I was attempting to communicate to Charles. My comments were probably too long for his attention span.
Teaching is a challenging, tough job and incompetent teachers seldom survive long. The kids make sure of that. They don’t get fired. They get pressured out mostly be the children that take advantage of a new teacher’s lack of classroom management skills.
It doesn’t matter how much a teacher knows about the subject they teach, if they can’t manage a classroom full of children, they will not last long, and if those teachers are dumb enough and do not improve, they will probably become basket cases and end up in a hospital ward.
For instance, in my first full year of teaching after earning my credential through a year-long urban resident program, I was substitute teaching and ended up being hired to finish out most of the school year in a long-term substitute teaching assignment. It was a fifth-grade class and I didn’t know it as the time but I was the 13th sub in 13 days.
Two weeks later, I was still there and was offered the long term position for the rest of the year. I accepted and stayed all the way to the end of that school year.
Nineteen of the boys in that class of 34, had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a chronic condition that affects millions of children and often continues into adulthood. ADHD includes a combination of persistent problems, such as difficulty sustaining attention, hyperactivity and impulsive behavior. I survived because I managed the class like I was a Marine drill instructor.
Lloyd
Thanks for pointing out that the situation is far (several orders of magnitude) more complicated than some people make it out to be.
For far too many, the standard approach is to assume the issue is simple and propose a silver bullet to fix the claimed “problem”, without even really understanding what the real problem is.
Mathematician Cathy ONeil has some great things to say about silver bullets
She talks about the VAM silver bullet starting at about 11:30
In Sonoma that means one school for the workers and one school for the owners. Figures.
There is a part of this that suggests a color blind approach to the question, but the degree to which socioeconomic factors segregated the Sonoma schools is not addressed. If it was, I bet the charter would be found to be a place where children who are of a “decent” social class can learn. Others who are not of that group need not apply or can expect to be asked to choose to leave. I have seen communities do this wi magnet schools as well. City school have done it to insulate themselves from country schools. In some ways, charters look like a continuation of the attempt by those who would create a class society in the country.
Holy cow….JIM CROW is well and alive.
Exactly right. The bigots are pretending not to be.
That is one terrible charter school at which I would be particularly saddened to be employed teaching. So, let’s talk about white flight. In 1846, the United States Army invaded Sonoma, California. Mexican officials had been increasingly concerned about the influx of American immigrants to the region, and their concerns proved justified. Ralph Waldo Emerson opposed the War with Mexico. Maybe the war was manifest destiny, or maybe Emerson was right and it was manifest imperialism. I tend to side with Emerson who was right about abolition too.
Today, Mexican Americans have somewhat returned to Sonoma. It would seem their manifest destiny to be able to live peaceful lives in one of the most temperate, beautiful regions in the world, where Mexico once was sovereign. So-called white Americans should welcome Latinx neighbors. If not, white Americans are perfectly welcome to engage in white flight. Let them fly away. Maybe it was their destiny to leave.
I taught many Latinx students and found them to be wonderful, kind children. They could teach some of the entitled American children manners.
More than seventy percent of the student population at the schools where I taught were Latino/Hispanic. Only 8 percent were white/Caucasian and over time I learned that the immigrant children were often the nicest students to work with.
Some of the most challenging students came from families that had been in the U.S. for generations. I think some of these kids was a challenge because their parents taught them to think they were privileged or something. Too many of these children thought they should earn As just for showing up and from their confrontational parents, I think the parents thought that way too. If a kid refused to do the work, the parents thought it was because the teachers were boring … and said so in the parent conferences.
I can’t help it. I have to point out something I hardly read anyone mentioning (actually I’ve never read it from anyone else, ever). It’s like Native Americans don’t count. They are the invisible minority.
And California still has some native Americans left, and their ancestors were here a lot longer than any other humans.
In fact, evidence of human occupation of California dates from at least 19,000 years ago.
Spanish and British explorers didn’t’ show up in California until the mid-16th century.
Too bad, California’s native Americans can’t grow their numbers until they are a large ratio of the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_California#History
I’d never heard of this before. There is a movement for a conservative 51st state. The US is a ‘Christian nation and is under siege by atheists and communists’.
Is there something truly wrong with this country? Two separate schools in one building and now a movement for a conservative state. Bet its planned to be ALL white. I wonder if they’d want Trump to be their governor.
A bake sale to get another state? I really don’t think that is going to be a reality.
……
Supporters of Christian conservative 51st state hold bake sale to raise money
MAY 24, 2019
SPOKANE VALLEY, WASH.
Proponents of creating a 51st state held a bake sale to raise money for their cause.
The Spokesman-Review reports that supporters of the proposed Christian conservative state, which would span parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, raised money by auctioning pies and other desserts.
The Liberty State Gala drew about 200 people in the city of Spokane Valley on Thursday evening.
Speakers included Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, a Spokane Valley Republican who has championed the Liberty State movement.
Shea spoke of the cultural and political differences between eastern and western Washington, denied the existence of global warming, and claimed the United States is “a Christian nation” under siege by atheists and Communists…
Read more here: https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/article230791949.html?#storylink=cpy…
What these people!e need is not another state but another planet. I say we give them Pluto.
Oops, Pluto’s not a planet any more.
So maybe Jupiter. That’s all gas, which would probably suit these gasbags just fine.
I vote for Mercury. Let the conservatives move to the closest planet to the sun so they can bask in the heat or chill out in the cold since only one side of the planet faces the sun and the other side doesn’t.
To the moon, Alice… Walton!
For a Walton like her, I think the moon is to close. I’d rather she was at least a hundred light years away so her e-mails and phone calls would take much longer time to reach her minions.
Conservates already hold a majority in 19 U.S. states, and in Mississippi, 50 percent of the population is listed as conservative vs 12 percent liberal.
If they want a state with no liberals, what are they going to do, shoot 12 percent of Mississippi’s population or force them to leave the state?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/247016/conservatives-greatly-outnumber-liberals-states.aspx
Could we throw in a few southern and midwestern states to the new nation?
The three liberals in Tennessee might leave.
There is actually a gated housing development outside Dallas known for only selling to fellow conservatives. They said they feel more “comfortable” living with “their own kind.” It should be called Stepford Village.
How about calling it Trumpford Village – then it would be filled with stable geniuses that don’t like to read and lie a lot?
53% of US schools are in need of repair. I wouldn’t count on Congress and I certainly wouldn’t count on Trump to care.
I know of a school in NW Indiana, Gary, in which children had had enough and went out in the snow and protested about the boiler that didn’t work, water fountains that were turned off and that water was in some of the hallways. There was mold in some of the rooms. The protest did work and the state eventually came up with the money to buy a new boiler. That didn’t fix the other problems. This is a poverty area.
…………………………………………………
‘Borderline criminal’: Many public schools teeter on the edge of decrepitude
May 25 at 4:55 PM
…Substandard conditions can compromise students’ attendance and performance, leading to absenteeism and lower achievement, studies show. Parents, students and teachers in some states have sued over neglected school buildings and inadequate resources, arguing, with mixed results, that poor conditions undermine students’ ability to receive a public education…
Some relief could come from the federal level: Congress is considering a plan to invest $100 billion over a decade to rebuild public schools.
The investment is badly needed in broad swaths of the country. A 2014 federal study found that 53 percent of schools needed repairs, renovations or updates and that $197 billion was needed to bring schools to “good overall condition.” Other projections peg construction costs even higher, with the National Council on School Facilities estimating that public school buildings are in need of $542 billion in upkeep…
“Our schools should convey the notion that we, the adults, love our kids when they walk into them,” said Kamras, who built his career in D.C. Public Schools. “And our schools convey the notion that, at best, we are indifferent and, at worst, we don’t care.”…
https://wapo.st/2wlOshc?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.e448499b7fff