Texas Public Radio describes Betsy Devos’s audacious plan to overwhelm San Antonio with charters created by two corporate chains: IDEA and KIPP.
Some of the new charters will open in middle-class areas with good public schools.
Apparently, DeVos just wants to torpedo public schools in a major Texas city.
Camille Phillips of TPR reports:
San Antonio’s largest charter school network is gearing up for a fast-paced expansion over the next three years. IDEA Public Schools plans to add 15 schools in Bexar County by 2022, doubling its local enrollment to nearly 24,000 students.
It is part of an ambitious larger plan by the Rio Grande Valley-based charter network plan to add 120 schools in Texas, Louisiana and Florida by 2024. IDEA has gotten a big boost to help make that plan happen: four federal grants in five years worth more than $211 million combined.
This year, the U.S. Department of Education awarded IDEA its largest grant yet: $117 million to expand classrooms and launch new charter schools.
“We cast a vision for our growth plan, and then it has to be paid for somehow. So this just gives us confidence that what we envision in terms of growth will actually become a reality,” IDEA regional director Rolando Posada said.
When Posada came to San Antonio seven years ago, he said he made it his goal to have an IDEA school less than 10 minutes away from every family.
“We realized that this was one of the biggest cities in the country with one of the biggest needs. And so my vision was to put a school everywhere on the map of the city of San Antonio,” he said….
Several of IDEA’s new schools will likely be located in the Northside school district, one of the region’s wealthier and higher performing districts.
Northside Superintendent Brian Woods said he finds it interesting that charter schools are no longer limiting themselves to areas where the traditional public schools are struggling.
“If you have an area that’s being served extremely well, why would you need to introduce a duplicative service?” Woods asked.
DeVos gave KIPP $88 million, and it too plans to expand its presence in Texas.
Mark Larson, chief external officer for KIPP Texas, said KIPP is creating a growth plan to determine where to expand next in the state, but “a sizeable chunk” of the $88 million awarded to the national KIPP Foundation is reserved for Texas.
“We have full intention to continue to grow and continue to grow in the San Antonio market,” Larson said.
DeVos gave $15 million to another charter network to open new schools in Texas.
One of our readers, who identifies herself as Chiara, recently explained why charters rely on federal funding to expand.
She says they know they would never be funded by popular vote as public schools are. The purpose of the federal funding is not only to help charter schools (like KIPP, funded by billionaires like the Waltons), but to bypass democracy.
She wrote:
“The second of 20 San Antonio IDEA Public School campuses is headed to the South Side and and is scheduled to open in fall 2019.
”The new campus — which has yet to be named — will be built on an eight-acre plot of land on the corner of South Flores Street and West Harding Boulevard.”
If IDEA had to go to the public and ask for facilities financing to build and operate each of 20 new public schools, the public would reject all or some of the new schools, because they would (rightfully) ask why they’re replicating a system they already have. There would be a long public debate on public investment. They would have to scale back plans or scrap them completely.
Charters know this, so they use federal and private financing. If they used local facilities funding they would have to get the consent of the public.
When ed reformers say they want local facilities funding remember that if they had local facilities funding the approval process would have to go thru the public, and the public would object to funding 20 new school buildings that replicate schools they already have. That would make it impossible to plunk down 20 new charter schools.
Posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Betsy-DeVos-Funds-IDEA-and-in-General_News-Betsy-Devos_Charter-Schools_Corporate_Diane-Ravitch-190817-470.html#comment742264
IDEA’s expansion in San Antonio looks like a plan of “selective segregation,” aided by federal tax dollars. Why is the federal government using public money to promote more segregation is the question taxpayers should be asking themselves? The government should not be using federal money to build schools that will likely serve middle class white students. These students are not poor, and they are not trapped in “failing” schools. These middle class students are the cheapest and easiest to educate. This should not be the mission of charter schools. If IDEA siphons off the middle class into their selective private schools, it will leave the poorest ELLs and classified students in impoverished public schools. This agenda is a shameful misuse of tax dollars in a country that prides itself on providing opportunity for all.
Well-funded, balanced, comprehensive public schools can do a much better job serving all students with options and equity, but this will never happen if charter schools can target middle class students. DeVos is creating a big problem for the San Antonio public schools by sending federal money where it really shouldn’t go.
NCLB, RttT and ESSA perfectly described: SELECTIVE SEGREGATION
I thought the ranking of KIPP schools in New Orleans was interesting. They aren’t highly ranked among those charter schools. I thought the whole point of having giant national chains of charter schools was “scaleability”- they were supposed to be able to reproduce results reliably. That’s the whole “secret sauce” nonsense ed reformers parrot. They could plunk down these formulas anywhere, with any group of students, at any level and funding and the chain would be superior.
So why is KIPP so spotty? Even after being given the huge advantage where they pick and choose where they locate and pull out of places where they don’t do well?
It occurred to me too in Detroit. In one of the ed reform “reinventions” of Detroit- the 2012 reinvention, specifically, the outside managers solicited some of the “prestige” charters – KIPP and Uncommon and the schools declined to locate there. Detroit funds their schools at a lower level than either NYC or Boston, so this is itself a kind of cherrypicking.
There are so many angles of charter schools that are simply not studied in the ed reform echo chamber. They don’t ask obvious questions. I think this is because they are funded by the same people who fund the charters. They don’t ask because they don’t want to know.
Charter chains choose where they want locate. This is fundamentally different than public schools, it’s an advantage for charter chains, and it should be included in any honest academic comparison, yet it isn’t.
The same can be said about Kipp in Houston. Some excel while others “fail.”
Has anyone done a study that would compare the longitudinal attrition rates of those KIPP schools that get better results and those that don’t? To do that a researcher would examine all the original lottery winners and see how many of them remain in the school and advance with their cohort to the last year of school and how many disappear.
I suspect you would find a difference in attrition rates between the KIPP schools with good results and the ones that don’t have good results. I also think high attrition would be accompanied by outrageously high suspension rates (even of 5 and 6 year olds) and an extraordinary drop off where huge numbers of lottery winners somehow give up their seat in the first place because they are discouraged from attending.
Even in NYC, the top performing charter network has significantly higher attrition rates and Kindergarten and first grade suspension rates than most other charter networks – including KIPP which is a failing charter compared to the top performing network.
Because ed reform is an echo chamber and the “research” is limited by the fact that all of the researchers are funded by advocates for charter schools (and are often advocates themselves) we simply don’t get good questions about the schools.
If we’re putting in giant privatized chains of charter schools, and we are, shouldn’t someone be looking at the chains as a whole? This is a radically different government scheme than that used for for public schools. There are no “national” public schools.
It impacts everything from competition (advantage- charters) to questions about scaleability, yet ed reformers don’t study it, because to study it would be to admit they started large chains of charter schools, and they want to insist these schools are “local”, for political reasons.
There are lots of charter schools in NYC. Why does Eva Moskowitz’s chain produce such higher test scores than the stand alone schools or other chains? What factors are in play there? Ed reformers don’t want to know.
They’re imposing a radically different system of “public schools” and they aren’t studying anything that might limit the downside risk to the public as a result of adopting their preferred system. That’s reckless. If they get wish and public schools are eradicated all the things they neglected to ask questions will occur, but it will be too late. We will be stuck with what could be a worse system and all kinds of downstream consequences no one in ed reform even considered. I understand it with the lobbyists- they want more privatized schools- but how can the academics justify this? They are paid to ask questions. They don’t ask any about charter and private schools as a system replacement for public schools. That’s just irresponsible.
“There are lots of charter schools in NYC. Why does Eva Moskowitz’s chain produce such higher test scores than the stand alone schools or other chains? What factors are in play there? Ed reformers don’t want to know.”
Ed reformers don’t want THE PUBLIC to know. They already know, which is why their desperation to hide the very information that anyone who was was doing a proper study would need to have before they could even know if a proper study was possible.
The stubborn insistence in ed reform NOT to look at system effects must be political, because it doesn’t make any sense as “scholarship”.
They are advocating privatizing a huge existing public system! They cannot ignore the effects of their efforts on existing public schools! That’s just nuts.
The “plan” seems to be to push as hard as they can to do it before, I don’t know, the public notices and THEN study what they’ve done. That isn’t public policy. It’s a an incredibly reckless and aggressive marketing strategy.
I listen to Betsy DeVos and I don’t know what world she lives in, where she claims she can pass out vouchers to every private schools and there will be NO effect on existing public schools and public school students. This is a fantasy- it’s a lie. is she innumerate? Does she not understand the concept of economies of scale? Public schools WILL limit their offerings, because they will have to. They will be SMALLER. We already know this because we HAVE small public schools. They don’t offer a lot because they can’t- they don’t have the students and the funding.
It will be impossible to replicate a comprehensive high school in this fragmented, privatized nirvana they envision. That isn’t practical for most people. Geography ALONE makes this ideological dream impractical in vast swathes of the country. Why is the US Department of Education promoting a lie and better question- why are we paying them to do it?
Chiara,
You don’t understand that the goal is DISRUPTION.
They don’t care what happens next.
I read ed reformers and they are just now beginning to grapple with the realities of transportation for the privatized systems. They’re ONLY dealing with this reality in urban areas (because it will make NO sense in areas that are NOT urban).
20 years of thousands of paid advocates and lobbyists and they are just now thinking about how to get children to their schools? The same people who go out and lobby every day to privatize the existing system just now realized they have to get students from A to B and they probably can’t shove that whole problem off on parents if they want to insist they have a “public system” at all?
That’s WHY we invented school buses. Because the entire country is NOT, actually, “Boston”.
They will now announce that they have reinvented school buses and they’ll probably get 100 million in federal funding to do it.
I realize the federal government is captured by ed reformers, lock stock and barrel, so I no longer look for anything of value offered to any public school out of the thousands of public employees I’m paying.
I do have a request though. Perhaps they could see their way clear to refraining from depicting our students as violent, low performing drug addicts when selling the charters and private schools they prefer.
It’s not fair to public school students. Spend every workday on the public payroll promoting the schools you prefer. But just leave our kids out of it. Leave us alone. Stay in DC. Smearing STUDENTS to reach a desired political result is unfair and shameful. Cut it out.
Someone explain how it is possible to promote over and over again the foundation you created while Sec of Ed?
In the Trump administration, there are no laws or ethics, except for the little people (us)
In the end, it is about money. Charters are raking it in regardless of results. IDEA Public Schools in Texas is a B district with two D schools – one in San Antonio and another in Austin. They talk as if they have figured something out that the traditional ISDs have not. They haven’t. It is and always will be: a great teacher in every classroom. Period. The only thing they have, that is different than ISDs, is a way to manipulate their numbers (curate their enrollment) and the means to spend a lot of money on marketing. It is a model that skims from the surrounding districts. It is a brilliant business model to become millionaires and that is what Tom Torkelson is doing. IDEA has A schools, B schools, C schools and D schools. So how are they different? They are laughing all the way to the bank.
Public Schools have PUBLICLY elected and accountable school boards. For-profit charters do not. NO tax-payer money should go to corporate charters. This is another corporate welfare handout to the wealthy, just like the prison systems. These entities are publicly funded segregation and institutional racism.
San Antonio Independent School District Superintendent, Pedro Martinez, Pahara Fellow (2018)
Pahara’s founder also claims to have founded or co-founded TFA and New Schools Venture Fund. Gates bankrolls Pahara. Pahara’s founder identified the goal of charters, “…brands on a large scale”.
Pedro is a Broadie and he was Arne Duncan’s CFO in Chicago schools.
Diane, I am the founder of IDEA. I was a classroom teacher and wanted to escape the bureaucracy and red tape of working in a school system and I was hoping to help my students graduate from college at higher rates. 89% of our students come from low income homes; while we are not perfect, our students are attending and graduating college at rates that are approaching what affluent kids are doing. I invite you and your readers to go on a tour of one of our schools, talk to students, meet with parents and judge us on our merits. I’ll host you and buy you each dinner so that we can talk about real solutions to real problems. My two children attend our schools (and they ride the yellow IDEA school bus!). I would much rather we educators band together to get more public money into every classroom and more strangling regulation out: imagine the difference we could make if we worked together. Tom Torkelson, Founder or IDEA Public Schools
Dear Tom,
Thank you for writing.
I assume you are aware that every dollar that goes to one of your IDEA charter schools is a dollar subtracted to the public schools that most children attend. This is not sensible, equitable, or wise.
Are you at all embarrassed to be a favorite of Betsy DeVos? She has made clear that her goal is the destruction and elimination of public schools in America.
I think the public should have a chance to express their views by voting on whether they want their tax dollars to go to your charter schools or to their public schools.
Don’t you think that is fair? Put it to a vote. That is the democratic way that we are supposed to resolve conflicts.
Diane
Diane,
There are many ways that representative government works. Our elected state representatives and elected state school board members oversee charter school policies, along with our Gubernatorialy appointed State Commissioner. We are public and we are publicly accountable, just not in a way that you prefer.
In Texas, when a child attends a private school, that money also leaves the school district–of course it doesn’t go to the private school, but it leaves (or is never given) the school district, nonetheless. Should we ban private schools?
Should only parents who can afford private school have a choice? And don’t magnet schools run by districts syphon money from the existing neighborhood schools? Should we ban magnets? And when a family moves across the state, the money follows the family to the new district (in Texas, at least). Ought we ban families from moving across the state if it harms the other district?
I understand that public schools are under attack–we are public, and we are under attack by you! I want all schools to thrive. In fact, most of our schools are on the border, just meters from this border wall, and we are doing our best to help those families. I want all schools to get more funding. Please, let’s not make this an us vs. them debate.
My offer for the tour and dinner still stands. And I would love to debate these issues in a public forum because debate is the highest form of democracy and I think that together we could get more people to focus on public education. And I respect you and think it would be a lot of fun!
With respect,
Tom
Tom,
When a child goes to a private school, he or she usually does not expect the school district or the state to pay tuition. But when a child goes to a charter school, the money that would have gone to the public school leaves and goes to the charter.
I am all in favor of choice, so long as parents pay for it themselves. When they expect the government to pay for their private school tuition, they are robbing public schools.
I am a graduate of the Houston public schools. My schools were not constantly threatened with closure or state takeovers.
Charter schools are privately managed; you are not created or supervised by an elected school board. Public schools are subject to supervision by elected school boards, but charter schools are not.
In the few instances where voters were asked if they wanted to expand charters, they overwhelmingly said no.
Charters are now infiltrated by entrepreneurs, amateurs, fast-buck profiteers, and all sorts of scam artists, including rock stars and sports stars with zero background in education.
Back in the 1990s, at the beginning of charters, I was a supporter because I believed the hype.
I don’t believe it anymore, and having dinner with you will not persuade me otherwise.
Thanks anyway.
Diane,
You are in favor of school choice as long as parents pay for it themselves. That means that you are in favor of affluent, disproportionately white students exercising a choice that poorer, disproportionally children of color don’t have. White folks deciding what is best for black and brown parents, to summarize your position.
Your only consistent argument seems to be that elected school boards are superior to legislative oversight or that of an elected state school board, but you don’t state why that form or democracy is better. Nor do you cite evidence that that form or oversight leads to better outcomes or happier citizens.
We are a nonprofit and subject to the same state accountability as a district. I don’t argue that there are not scammers out there; but I don’t understand why you insist in lumping in the good actors with the bad. One should be pro-kid and pro-evidence, rather than tied to a political philosophy or ideology.
As for dinner, let’s skip that and go right for the debate. What are you afraid of? If truth, data, and logic are on your side you should have no problem dispatching me.
Sincerely,
Tom
Tom,
The results are clear.
When the public pays for students to leave public schools, the public schools are harmed. They lose teaching positions, they must increase class sizes, they must eliminate programs in the arts and other subjects, just so a small percentage can attend a private charter like the ones you run or religious schools wheretheir teachers are usually uncertified and the curriculum is based on the Bible.
You have recently received over $200 million from Betsy DeVos to invade and strip mine school districts in Texas and Louisiana. Aren’t you just a little bit ashamed?
There is always something very disturbing about people who run non-profits insisting that they must have their outrageously generous salary and perks as if they want us to believe that if you only paid them $200,000/year they would never care one bit about those children.
One article said Tom got a country club membership and car and other expensive perks and I guess it didn’t matter to him that that money –and at least $200,000 from his salary — could have been spent on the children he says he cares about.
Diane,
We received funding from the Obama and Trump administrations through a program that has bi-partisan support and a very rigorous application process. We did not get money from Betsy DeVos personally, and trying to demonize us by association is a dirty trick and something that I would think is below your dignity.
In every community where we have opened, we have done well by our kids—89 percent of our schools are rated A or B and nearly all go on to college and graduate from college. What’s more the performance of kids in district schools is also improving. That’s what I call smart, accountable public policy.
Your broad attacks won’t gain traction because they are rooted not in fact, but in emotional, non empirical rhetoric.
You are in favor of school choice as long as you get to do the choosing. You have absolutely no obligation to the child as a charter school and your system incentivizes charters to dump kids who are not cost-efficient for whatever reason to teach. That is the system you are fighting to keep. You only want to teach the kids who will thrive in your charter which makes you no different than any private school that takes vouchers.
You could be fighting for a magnet school that does what your charter does. Why don’t you? Would it be too hard to dump kids?
Would you not be able to make outrageously misleading statements about how you are teaching the exact same kids that failing schools do but working miracles? “nearly all go on to college” — shameful of you to use that kind of “we are so superior and all our students thrive”.
You can pretend that Betsy DeVos is rewarding you because she really wants to reward good people. Were you one the ones lobbying for her to be Secretary of Education, too — I heard charter CEOs like you demanding that the public believe that she is a terrific choice because after all, she IS a terrific choice for you. And that seems to be all that matters.
Why do you need to promote yourself as a savior of poor children – at least the ones you believe are worth saving? Why not work to make things better for ALL students and open your schools as magnets?
You think that helping the few at the expense of the many makes you some kind of ( generously compensated) savior. It doesn’t. It simply makes you no different than Trump.
Your inability to speak honestly about charters and their unwillingness to really grapple with the problems of the truly at-risk students makes you popular with the right wingers. I guess you don’t want to give up the rewards that come with that.
By the way, you also insisted at age 24, after 3 years of teaching, that you were so brilliant as to know exactly how to teach all students in poverty and turn them into high performing scholars.
I wonder if you did what other charter CEOs did and destroyed young people’s lives by making them feel terrible about their academic struggles because you didn’t want them in your charter. Did you do that? Did you blame the kid or blame his family for his own struggles because you would never at admit that you in your 20s were not the savior of all students that you presented yourself as.
What made you so brilliant at 24 as to know exactly what poor kids needed? Your innate intelligence that is so superior than Diane Ravitch’s? Or is it the rich people who backed you?
I’m sorry – you can call this attacks, but it takes a lot of chutzpah for you to insist that at 24 with your 3 years of teaching you were some savior who knew far more than Diane Ravitch or any experienced teacher about what poor and disadvantaged kids need and it just happens to not involve directing more funding to public schools.
^^^Also, I read this about your compensation:
“At IDEA, for example, Tom Torkelson earns an annual salary of $325,910 and last year collected another approximate $70,000 as a performance bonus. That’s a total of $395,910. (Four years ago his base pay was $248,850). Add to that his perks: a country club membership (McAllen); a million-dollar life insurance policy (IDEA pays the premium); health insurance for him and his dependents (IDEA pays the premium); and a monthly car allowance of $800, and it all adds up to some serious change.”
That quote is from an article published 9-15-2015, in the Advance News Journal
Did you REALLY get a country club membership as part of your compensation? Please reply and tell me that it wrong that you spent money on a country club membership instead of on students! A car allowance?
At the rate your overly generous salary increased in the 4 years before 2015, how much do you earn now? No doubt you believe you are very much worth it and even underpaid just as you knew at 24 that you knew best what works for kids.