Take five minutes and watch as Superintendent Joseph Roy of the Bethlehem Area School District explains how private charters are harming the public schools and the unfairness of the funding formula, which is rigged on behalf of the charters.
This year, private charters will subtract $1.8 billion from the budget of public schools in Pennsylvania.
Governor Tom Wolf has proposed revising the charter law to prevent the defunding of the state’s public schools, which enroll the vast majority of students.
Please take action and show support for Governor Wolf.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pennsylvania is one of the states that really got hit with ed reform, along with Michigan and Ohio. There’s no upside for public school students.
I don’t think it’s an accident. The echo chamber members don’t live in these states so we were subject to every fad, gimmick and rip off that came down the pike. They sold garbage here they wouldn’t have DARED to sell in DC, NYC or Boston.
They have done real damage. Bravo for Wolf for having the courage to finally say what everyone who lives in PA, OH and MI already knows.
Incidentally the Pennsylvania state auditor has said and continues to say charters need to be regulated every single year, and year after year after year he was and is ignored. Report after report.
For some reason the huge flock of lobbyists and academics and various cheerleaders who descend on the states to promote charters and vouchers are nowhere to be found when the problems with their ideological theory appear. They’re long gone. It’s left to public school leaders to clean up the mess they made.
The system of zero accountability and the unfair payments made to charter schools is raising property taxes or cutting services in public schools. Sending public money to private companies while struggling to pay for public schools is not resulting in superior education. It is crippling the capacity of public schools to do their job. Pennsylvania needs to take charge of its public money and be fiscally responsible. For profit education is robbing the public schools to pay for unaccountable private schools.
Edit: Change the is to are in the opening sentence.
Unfortunately for Ohio (unlike Michigan and Pennsylvania), Ohio voters returned the same group of ed reformers we’ve had for 20 years to office.
Predictably, they successfully lobbied for pouring still more funding into vouchers and charter schools, and the public schools in the state continue to be all but ignored.
20 years- we’re doing the exact same thing. This is AFTER Ohio had the largest scandal in the state’s history with ECOT. No one was held accountable at all. The money is just gone. The company closed, thousands of children were shunted back to public schools, and the exact same ed reform lobby is still in charge. The one and only reason Brennan (of ECOT infamy) isn’t still controlling hundreds of millions in education funding in Ohio is because he DIED. I assume his heirs now have all the ill-gotten gains. Ohio doesn’t seem interested in either prosecuting anyone for the fraud or going after the money.
overwhelming to hear this fact over and over in states across the nation: Twenty years and we’re doing the exact same thing. “….thousands of children were shunted back to the public schools and the EXACT SAME ED REFORM LOBBY IS STILL IN CHARGE.”
and this is great news… when the person who runs the schools, the “Superintendent” is tending to the schools and explaining what schools need, and what they do not need.
There may be hope yet if the people IN CHARGE begin to point a finger at the calumny and theft, and talk about the chaos that is being created in the schools, to end LEARNING.
IT IS ALL ABOUT LEARNING , but the media’s narration was about lousey teaching and those bad, lazy teachers. They did it. Now, it is time for the media to reapir the damage.
The rest of this comment is about
GETTING THE ATTENTION OF THE NATIONAL MEDIA.
I begin with a shout you to a real journalist:
“Hey Dan Rather…. remember me, the NYC teacher who brought 12 year old Phllipe Danielides to interview you. I have a letter from you, Dan. When we met, you spoke at length, about your great admiration for teachers.”
I was pushed out of the school which I had helped to put on the NYC “map”– (when Harvard and Pew came calling)!
Much as you were pushed out of CBS for reasons that had nothing to do with your expert journalism.!
We teachers and journalists ‘push’ facts and truth, — so we had to go. Teachers push facts as do REAL journalists.! 20 years later — after the schools and the media have been taken — the power elite have created a “post-ruth era,” of alternative FACTS!
As if using lies and misinformation is beneficial to making decisions.The Media is complicit.
Of course chaos descends. The DEMOLITION of the schools, and the INATTENTION by the NATIONAL media GAVE us a president who wants to buy Iceland — and throws a hissy fit, when such an idea is called “absurd.” How does a real journalist PUSH truth when the top man, spits out contradiction to what he said only yesterday!
Yes , Dan. YOU need to meet me…Susan Lee Schwartz. I would like to talk to YOU about teaching, Dan, , at this moment as alternative facts drive the national conversation! I have a story of how it happened !
The media is still silent about the war on public schools… which makes the war on ObamaCare pale by comparison… of success. ‘THEY, are eliminating education for the masses. —system by system (15,880 separate ones) — state by state.. and THE NATIONAL MEDIA REMAINS SILENT, so NOBODY KNOWS what is afoot.
I tell’ya, Dan, no one I mee t— and I travel — has a clue about the coordinated effort to end the institution of Public Education. Never, nada — nobody knows what is happening in the district next door, let alone in the states across the nation.
It’s that simple.
And it was so easy for them…the billionaires, the power-elite (the cabal) to end shared knowledge — which as you know Dan is the REQUIREMENT FOR A DEMOCRACY.
Click to access hirsch.pdf
You see, because there was not a shred of ACCOUNTABILITY for utterly destroying the careers and lives of hundred’s of thousands of educated, dedicated, experienced professionals. They made war on teachers, soon after we met, Dan. I was blindsided. And so was Lorna Stremcha, and you, Dan have go too listen to her talk about the LAWLESSNESS that ended her career in such a vicious manner.
But, Dan, the other story that NAILS THE BEHAVIOR —the PLOY in the PLOTto end public schools, is the story of Lorna Stremcha… whom you should meet, too. !!!
LISTEN TO THIS ALL THE WAY. It IS the story of the end of the teaching profession!
Listen when she describes how her classroom was demolished, and her GRADES DELETED AND CHANGED. Exactly what happened to me — in that school a few blocks from Gracie Mansion, where Phillipe’s mom was Ms Gulliani’s sec’y. And I was being filmed by the LRDC.
DON’T MISS THIS… AND LISTEN TO THE end, where she makes it clear that she was set up by the principal.—to me raped!
She has the all the depositions because she sued and won.
Lorna Stremcha is the heroine, the fighter.
Of course, she wrote the book, “Bravery, Bullies and Blowhards,” but this was long after her lawsuit, and years after that totally lawless principal SET HER UP to be sexually assaulted.
Dan. back then, Lorna and I didn’t know they were coming after teachers across the city, and nation.
I was teaching my heart out at East Side Middle school, where Phillipe attended; ( he was Andrew Gulliani’s friend… but went to public school, unlike Andrew.) Lorna was in a small town in Montana. When the harassment began , as I also did, Lorna put up her story at the NAPTA SITE. http://www.endteacherabuse.org/Stremcha.html.
There are thousands of stories there; NAPTA’s creator, Karen Horwitz, eventually wrote the book, “White Chalk Crime, ” in order to expose the “reign of error” that was overtaking the administration of American education as Diane’s book explained so vividly.
I was a veteran teacher, in 1990. when I came to teach English and Literacy in NYC;
I was hired for my experience, my talent and education! Ironically, they removed me even as as my curricula work, traveled the nation with Pew Standards research teams.
That ended when the corrupt NYC Superintendent of District 2, wrote a letter (after six months in the rubber room) that said I HAD BEEN FOUND “guilty of corporal punishment” (Yup…no hearings ,no letters to offer a look at allegations… and a blind union… and they took me out!)
Dan, please, meet with me… I will buy dinner!
YOU —t he journalist with an ear for truth, whose camera never as to blink twice — YOU need to hear MY story! For it is one of THE stories that NAILS the moment. I WROTE THIS DECADES AGO. http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
The emphasis on the fact that property taxes are being raised to fund charter schools is a critical piece of information not understood by many people. It is about time that some transparency be brought to charter school financing.