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Students are flocking to poor-performing online charter schools, straining public school budgets.Superintendents in Pennsylvania are warning that increasing enrollment in online charter schools could strain already burdened public school budgets. “There will be public schools, school districts, in a lot of trouble financially,” said Jeff Groshek, superintendent of the Central Columbia School District. Fox 56
Check out In the Public Interest’s two fact sheets on the widespread poor performance of online charter schools: “Why online education can’t replace brick-and-mortar K-12 schooling,” and “Frequently asked questions about online charter schools.”
“Passionate voucher advocate” joins Tennessee executive branch. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has hired Bill Dunn, a former state representative and passionate private school voucher advocate, to join his administration as a special advisor on education. Chalkbeat Tennessee
Charter school being built across from Florida public school. Jacksonville residents are angry about a charter school being built across the street from their public school. “It’s going to draw resources, funding, and it’s going to bring our student enrollment down, and it could very much possibly affect our teachers,” said Lisa Britt, PTA President at Alimacani Elementary School. News4Jax
Betsy DeVos’s “Voucherland” that could’ve been. Retired teacher and education writer Peter Greene gives us a glimpse of the dystopian future that lay in store for public education had Trump won the election. The Progressive
Some good news… At least some people want to help kids rather than cash in on them. Of the ten largest public bond measures on the ballot on Election Day, six were approved, including a $7 billion bond proposal for the Los Angeles Unified School District and nearly $3.5 billion for Dallas schools. WBAP
And make sure to check it out… On December 2 at 5:00 p.m. ET, join Jesse Hagopian, Denisha Jones, and Brian Jones for a forum to launch the new book, “Black Lives Matter At School.” Haymarket Books
Welcome to Cashing in on Kids, a newsletter for people fighting to stop the privatization of America’s public schools—produced by In the Public Interest.
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These privatizers NEVER stop; they see $$$$$$. SICK.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” is the mantra of the privatizers. New Orleans used Katrina to privatize its public schools. Natural disasters are money in the bank for the disruptors.. The Covid crisis is another opportunity for serial grifters to expand their reach. Despite the failure of cyber education, many privatizers are expanding their programs in response to the pandemic. These grifters, many of whom are aided and abetted by state legislatures and/ or governors, pass secretive charter and voucher legislation behind closed doors, that will enable more tax dollars to flow into private pockets. While regular people are distracted trying to cope with the crisis, the grifters will funnel more money into failing privatization.
a bit like a predator chasing a herd of animals until they are exhausted and then picking off the target when it is in its weakest state
I see that the 74Million is claiming that charter schools are underfunded. The 74 is circulating information from a dubious research report, not peer reviewed, from the Reason Foundation and the Walton-funded University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform’s “School choice Demonstration Project.”
This Report: District-Charter Funding Gap Grows to 33 Percent Less Per Student; 12 Cities Provide ‘A Trivial Amount’ or ‘No Funding’ for Charters… is based on information from eight cities for the 2017- 18 school year.
The researchers offer several charts and graphs purporting to show “gaps” in charter school funding when compared to traditional public schools (TPS). ”Public charter schools received an average of $7,796 less per-pupil than TPS — the largest funding disparity ever discovered by our research. “Further, “a dearth of education funding from local sources was most responsible for the charter school funding gap.”
This study only looked at revenues, not expenditures. Page 5 cavalierly throws in this: “Mandatory spending in TPS is a discretionary policy of decision makers. If it is a cause of inefficiency in TPS operations, relative to charters, then policymakers, informed by our research, could reduce it.” No respectable public school should change policies about operations based on this research, funded by billionaires, and targeting local school budgets as well as collective bargaining for teachers.
The specific “inefficiencies in TPS that this report condemns are” salaries baked into teacher and administrator collective bargaining agreements.” This report mentions, but not address the fact that many TPS must offer special education services to students with special needs while area public charter schools may not. In addition, TPS are often required to provide transportation for charter school students while charter schools “do not have to spend scarce educational resources on that item.”
This analysis refuses to consider these expenditures because “the discretion to spend money as school leaders see fit is definitional to public charter schools because they are expected by statute to have autonomy to be innovative.” Charter schools also assume they should be free to occupy buildings they have not paid for and tap district administrative resources at little or no expense.
Of course this report refuses to examine the fact that charter schools have spawned such “innovative” practices as self-dealing, paying CEOs who never set foot in their schools, perks for administrators and other frauds nation-wide, all well-documented by NPE and widely cited. See for example this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/12/10/new-report-charter-fraud-and-waste-worse-than-we-thought/?sh=739fbfd97a22
The 74 million website circulating this misleading report is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, The City Fund, Charles Strauch, and Walton Family Foundation. These are all longtime supporters of charter schools that are not really public but pretend to be.
Click to access charter-school-funding-inequity-surges-in-the-city.pdf