Mike Klonsky, veteran activist in Chicago, reports that Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill abolishing the state Charter School Commission.
As Mike says, “We count our victories one by one,” and this is a big one. It spells the end to the reckless charter expansion encouraged by Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and Democratic Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, concentrated in Chicago. Rauner and Rahm believed in the magic of privatization.
No doubt about it, the glow is off the charter school hoax. The bloom is off the rose, or as we said in years past in New York City, the bloom is off the berg.
Since 2011, when the Commission was established and signed into law by former Gov. Pat Quinn (yes a Democrat), I’ve worked with several struggling school districts around the state when they’ve had to go before the Commission to plead their case. Together we built a research base which was used to debunk the false claims of the charter operators in an effort to stop invasions by powerful, charter school networks. In some cases we were successful and others we weren’t.
I found the decisions by commission members to be be completely arbitrary and biased. Keep in mind that the commission was originally the dream of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and that the money for the commission’s original staffing and other expenses came from the pro-charter Walton Foundation. The Commission has been riddled with conflicts of interest from the start.
Commission members have been generally charter-friendly political appointees chosen by the governor and approved by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). In the eight years prior to Pritzker’s election, commission members were handpicked by Rauner, a right-wing governor hellbent on starving and ultimately taking over local school systems, including CPS, using charters and school vouchers as weapons.
But Rauner wasn’t the only problem. You might remember when the Commission, acting under pressure from House Speaker Mike Madigan, reversed CPS’s rejection of Concept (Gulen) charter schools’ application at a time when the FBI was investigating Concept’s operations. Records show that the Commission’s Springfield lobbyist, Liz Brown-Reeves, a former Madigan aide, accompanied him on his Gulen sponsored trip to Turkey in 2012….
Currently, there are 140 charter schools in Illinois, 126 of which operate within Chicago Public Schools diverting money, students and teachers away from regular CPS schools. So far there is no evidence that these charters outperform the CPS schools they are trying to replace. In the CPS budget for next year, the district expects to receive $4 million less funding than expected from the state this past school year because “diversions to schools approved by the Illinois State Charter School Commission (SCSC) were higher than expected.”
The power to overrule the decisions of local districts now goes to the state board, which is appointed by the governor.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Since 2011, when the Commission was established and signed into law by former Gov. Pat Quinn (yes a Democrat)…”
The same Democrat who picked Paul Vallas of all people as his running mate, thereby giving us Rauner.
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Now, they have to abolish that voucher program
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Shouldn’t have hit post yet. If Pritzker keeps up, I just may have to eat some of the words I’ve said about him. I would have assumed he’d be another neolib in the vein of Quinn and Vallas, but he’s proving surprising. I’m not taking my eyes off him, but I will give him kudos when deserved.
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Take what you can from him. He is related to Penny Pritzker, and she and family hate unions and public schools. They backed Obama big time.
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oh the painful irony in that sentence: “Hate unions and public schools? Back super ‘progressive candidate Obama…”
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This IL resident agrees, Dienne!
So far…so good.
Yay on the IL C.C. kabosh.
&–notice that I haven’t written ILL-Annoy for quite a while. There’s a reason for that.
(But I will, indeed, do so if Vallas is given any political post; he just will NOT go away. He was on our progressive talk radio station {on 2 shows, I think}, & one of the hosts said that Mayor Lightfoot could use his “economic wisdom.”
Yeah, right…another big taxpayer-funded salary on a huckster who would not earn it (Chicago State University wasted a ton of hard-earned student/taxpayer money on him). He jumped ship as soon as he smelled a political opportunity & ran for mayor. Nice what candidates are allowed to do w/their “war chest” $$$$. (Also, his biggest contributor was the head of Koch Foods in IL–you know, 2 of the chicken processing plant in MS were raided by ICE, &, just the week before last, there was a big protest in front of the IL Koch Foods., accusing the co. of having given up those 2 to ICE.)
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I hope this move inspires other states to push back against the powerful charter lobby. Charter laws are in great need of modification and regulation.
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As I understand it, this means decisions on charters would be made locally (presumably by the local school board)? But there will remain one state entity charters can appeal to?
That state entity will hopefully be independent and not simply a group that favors powerful and rich large charter chains.
It would certainly be good if the SUNY Charter Institute in New York was also disbanded, since it is also packed with people handpicked by Gov. Cuomo, the pro-charter Gov. who got excessive donations from pro-charter billionaires.
Back when charters began and the idea seemed like a good one because they were going to experiment with ways to teach the most disadvantaged at-risk kids in public schools, there was oversight by people whose main concern was helping kids. But those boards seemed to be taken over by people whose main concern was promoting charters. And that’s when it changed from “let’s take a deep dive into what you are doing to see if it is working” to “we don’t care how many kids graduate or do well as long as the percentage of kids is very very high and what you do to get rid of the kids who don’t do well is not our concern.” Good people in education like Pedro Noguera resigned and were replaced by charter cheerleading lawyers on those charter boards.
And the goal changed from oversight to doing whatever was necessary to undermine public schools, with honesty being unimportant and claims of “success” always accepted and all evidence to the contrary dismissed as not worth investigating.
In other words, charter boards have acted toward charters the way the Republican Senate has acted toward Trump. Trusting them to do any oversight when their only goal is to gain power and destroy anyone who doesn’t agree as “enemies” has been the main reason that charter corruption has been able to run so rampant.
I don’t really blame the charter CEOs just because they are so incredibly greedy for money and power and acclaim. I blame the oversight boards that cheer them on when their job is exactly the opposite. Trump could not be Trump if the Republican Senate did not enable him to act as he does because they are getting exactly what they want. And corrupt charters’ corruption is entirely the result of the corrupt boards that do nothing because they are getting exactly what they want.
At best, the people on the SUNY Charter Institute board remind me of Susan Collins. “Tut tut” as she votes to make sure Trump can do everything he wants to do. Her loyalty is to the people who keep her in power, just as the SUNY Charter Institute board is loyal to Cuomo and his pro-charter billionaire buddies. At worst, they remind me of Mitch McConnell. In either case, they should be thrown out of their positions of power.
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Yeah, NYSPSP, this reverts to the ILL-Annoy (oops, have to use it, here) State Bd. of Ed., which can be dicey. I believe some charter school advocates (namely, the head of Advance ILL-Annoy, which has been keeping a low profile…but like a snake in the grass, we all know it’s still there) had been appointed to serve.
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IF, HUMONGOUS IF, charters did what they were supposed to do, provide for the children who find difficulties, for whatever reason, in public school setting, it would indeed be a positive. However, that “ain’t” been the case. How VERY sad. Those children absolutely need special help and being in a situation they find difficult makes it difficult for other children who want to learn. Most of us have had to deal with this kind of a situation.
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