Valerie Jablow is a parent and blogger in D.C. who thinks that the city government should take care of all children, not just charter schools. What a revolutionary idea! And she believes that charter schools should be accountable and transparent, which puts her at odds with the charter industry.
She writes here about a recent meeting of the City Council, which demonstrated that transparency is absent from the charter sector.
Members of the public spoke about for transparency and were limited to 4 minutes to testify.
Government witnesses spoke out against transparency with no time limit.
And get this:
–The COO of KIPP raised the need for secrecy concerning charter school real estate (really–check it out), while the executive director of the charter board invoked “trade secrets” as a bar to public knowledge, echoing the “industry secret” standard reportedly invoked by the charter board as a bar to public knowledge.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“while the executive director of the charter board invoked “trade secrets” as a bar to public knowledge, echoing the “industry secret” standard reportedly invoked by the charter board as a bar to public knowledge.”
Cannot believe they still get away with this. “Trade secrets” what was Ohio’s crooked charter empire, White Hat, used to block transparency for a decade.
No one has the courage to tell them they must decide if they’re public or private? That this position they take where they’re public when that benefits them and then private when that benefits them is incoherent and unacceptable?
Why are they given this insane amount of deference? It’s political clout. They are simply considered a superior sector as compared to public schools. They get special treatment.
Ed reform better figure out whether charter schools are public or private sometime prior to the day they reach their goal and replace every public school with their preferred “sector”. There are tens of thousands of them who are paid to work full time on charter policy. It’s all they do. They sure don’t do any work on behalf of public schools.
20 years and they still haven’t nailed down “public or private”?
The charter school operators and “movement” are aware that any “trade secrets” they develop (if indeed they develop any, which I doubt) would belong TO THE PUBLIC, since the public pays all of these people and pays for their schools. Every dollar that goes into one of these schools is public. How do they own “the secrets”?
Add to this the nonsense we’ve been fed for 20 years about how charters would “teach” public schools about how to run a school – how do they plan to do that if it’s all secret?
Let’s just ask this simply and see if we can get a straight answer. Who owns these schools? It isn’t the public, so who is it? Maybe after 20 years we can get a straight answer if we go about this with a process of elimination. Who DOESN’T own the schools? 1. The public doesn’t own the schools. So who does?
Full time, paid charter promoters and lobbyists, like David Osborne (but there are hundreds of them) use DC as an example of how their goal of complete privatization will work when they achieve it nationwide:
“David Osborne
But where charter authorizers do their jobs–only approving teams that have thought things through & have solid plans, then replacing failures with strong operators–we have produced the most rapid improvement in the nation. New Orleans, DC, Chicago, Denver, Boston, Newark, etc.”
They never mention Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania because doing that would introduce some inconvenient facts into their narrative, but DC is THE BEST ed reform city – and look at how nontransparent it is. This is the BEST ed reform can do.
No one knows if these DC charter schools are public or private, or who owns them, or what they’re required to report or not to report. That’s the BEST work these people turn out.
The worst work they turn out is OH, MI, and PA. Which isn’t an accident, I don’t think. The states towards the middle of the country get the junky, for-profit corrupt ed reform garbage, while their “showplace” cities get better treatment. The fashionable places. The places where they actually live.
If the public cannot get public knowledge about where their public dollars go, why should public education dollars be spent on opaque, unaccountable private institutions? States need to start meeting their mandate to provide improved public education, not duplicate private schools that take public money.
Democrat participants in the debates should be asked questions, not of the generalized escape from actually saying anything variety. Those who ask questions will not…unless there is pressure for them to do so. It does not dawn on them that this is something which affects people’s lives, most often in very negative, uncontrollable ways……because the majority of the media does not care. Maybe a candidate could open the discussion.
Charter operators need, especially, to keep the real estate transactions secret.
How, exactly, is a person supposed to be able to undertake graft with all this proposed transparency? Next thing you know, you’ll be suggesting that the Don, Cheeto (“Little Fingers”) Trumpbalone release his tax returns!!!!
Crazy talk.
Contrast this with what Chicago’s new mayor said about the necessity of “transparency” in governing schools:
*“The majority of the work that the school board does is going to have to be in the public,” Lightfoot said. “The days where everything was done in executive session, and then they come out and take a vote, that’s over.”
“Lightfoot’s declaration came Monday morning during a press conference at Hampton Fine and Performing Arts School in the Ashburn neighborhood on the far Southwest Side, where she unveiled her new appointed school board.
“I think every single one of the members here that we are proposing understand that transparency is the cornerstone of legitimacy,” Lightfoot added. “You can’t have legitimacy when you do everything in secret, and we’re not going to operate that way.”
FROM HERE:
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/chicago/2019/06/03/school-board-preaches-transparency/
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is the polar opposite of Rahm. What a breath of fresh air!
CAP enables what Jablow describes. In a July 22 article titled, “Corruption Consultants”, the CAP staff, Malkie Wall, Danielle Root and Andrew Scwartz, decry privatization and enumerate the ALEC abuses against democracy. But, of course, Bill Gates’ anti-democratic, privatization of schools isn’t even mentioned.
Collectively and individually, it appears conscience is in negative territory at CAP and hypocrisy is off the charts.
Stacy Abrams should remove herself from the CAP Board.
CAP’s team “On the Ground in Puerto Rico” included the Director of Standards and Accountability from CAP’s K-12 education section.
Should we assume, standards and accountability are limited to public schools and don’t apply to the charter schools that CAP advocates for?