Texas has five million public school students. It has 356,000 charter school students. The latter matter far more to the Governor, the Legislature and the State Education Commissioner than the former.
This report came to me from Austin, where officials are trying to remove any “barriers” to charter. The local school board has no say in whether a new charter should open in their district. Local folks may be strong supporters of their public schools but they are not allowed to veto new charter schools.
To show how nutty this embrace of charters is, one legislator tried to slip in a proviso giving charters the power of eminent domain. Imagine the Jones family sitting down for their evening meal, and someone knocks at their door to inform them that a KIPP or IDEA charter needs their lot for a playground; they are given a few days or weeks to vacate their beloved home.
On the third reading of the bill—-SB 28– the eminent domain power was deleted, but the bill continues to be a direct assault on local control and democratic governance. When the big money comes calling in Texas, those ideas don’t matter any more.
From my friend in Texas:
Note amendment to allow charters eminent domain was defeated on third reading.
Bill now goes to House Public Ed Committee, chaired by Harold Dutton, D-Houston, who filed a companion bill to SB 28. With a R dominated committee and House, we have some challenges ahead.
Onward!
Karen
—–Original Message—–
From: peveritt888@gmail.com
To: peveritt888@gmail.com
Sent: Mon, Apr 19, 2021 3:56 pm
Subject: Summary of SB 28
THANKS to many of you who contacted your Senators on SB 28.
I’ll keep you posted as SB 28 and similar bills move forward. The first section is a short summary of SB 28 – but see more detail in Section 2 if you’re interested.
SB 28 Approved by Texas Senate
Important: An amendment to give charter schools the power of
eminent domain was corrected by Sen. WestSection 1: Summary
- The Texas Senate gave final approval to SB 28 on April 15, 2021 in a 16-14 vote with all Democrats except one, and two Republicans (Senators Seliger and Nichols), voting NO.(Sen. Lucio was absent for the final vote but voted in favor of SB 28 on earlier votes).
- SB 28 is one of Lt. Governor Patrick’s priority bills and is strongly supported by the Texas Charter School Association. It limits state and local authority over charter school expansion including the requirement for a supermajority vote by the State Board of Education to veto new charter school applications.
- Sen. Bryan Hughes slipped in an amendment to give charter schools the power of eminent domain without ever stating what the amendment would do.
- Importantly, Sen. Royce West corrected this amendment the next day with an amendment that was passed by the full Senate stating clearly, “An open-enrollment charter school does not have the power of eminent domain.”
- Please thank Senators who voted NO on SB 28.
- We’ll monitor SB 28 as it moves forward, along with the companion House bill – HB 3279 which still eliminates the SBOE from the charter approval process – and HB 1348 which now includes much of the language in SB 28 and includes eminent domain.
Section 2: For the Record – Read More About SB 28
SB 28 (authored by Sen. Bettencourt) takes away the authority of state and local elected officials to approve new charter schools. It originally eliminated the elected State Board of Education from the approval process for new charter applications and gave all authority to the appointed Commissioner. A vote to suspend the rules which would allow consideration of the bill was opposed by all Democrats (except Sen. Lucio), and one Republican (Sen. Seliger). It was approved narrowly by only one vote.
Extensive concerns were raised by legislators and the public about the elimination of the SBOE role in charter approval. The Senate passed an amendment by Sen. Bettencourt that kept the SBOE in the approval process but changed the SBOE vote required for a veto from a simple majority to a supermajority (9 of 15 SBOE members). The amendment also added four additional considerations that the SBOE may use as a rationale to veto a charter application to the five that were included in the committee substitute (total of 9). Many education organizations did not support the requirement for a supermajority. They supported continuing the simple majority vote because it is a more democratic and inclusive process. In addition, Senate accepted only nine considerations that could be the rationale for the SBOE veto, excluding other important considerations submitted by the SBOE.
An amendment proposed by Sen. Bryan Hughes to give charter schools the extraordinary power of eminent domain passed (17-14). His amendment would give eminent domain to the private organizations that operate charter schools which have self-selected governing Boards that are not elected by voters.
Sen. Hughes did not mention the words “eminent domain” in his summary of the amendment to inform members of the Senate. He stated that the amendment simply “covers these topics in more detail than the language in the bill. The intent is the same. The amendment gives more clarity to make sure that everyone knows what the rules are moving forward.”
Importantly, Sen. Royce West fixed this issue with an amendment the next day that ensured the charter schools do NOT have the power of eminent domain. Sen. West stated that Sen. Hughes told him that the amendment applied to TEC Sect. 12.103(c) which in fact, addresses charter exemptions from zoning laws in cities with 20,000 population or less – with no mention of eminent domain. Sen. West stated that he did know of a private corporation like a charter school that had the authority to exercise the power of eminent domain. Sen. West’s amendment was adopted by a voice vote with all members deemed to have voted YES (Sen. Lucio was absent). The amendment clearly stated, “An open-enrollment charter school does not have the power of eminent domain.”
Amendment 2 is consistent with the purposed of this bill.
An important part of Senate Bill 28 of course is zoning equality provisions to make sure that political subdivisions, that is municipalities, counties, special purpose districts, among others, to make sure that they treat all the schools alike – the charter schools and our traditional public schools.The Education Committee heard testimony that this doesn’t always happen.So this amendment covers these topics in more detail than the language already in the bill.The intent is the same.
Public school supporter Patti Everitt summed up the advantageous state of charters compared public schools with elected boards:
Authority to approve new charter schools
School districts have no authority over the approval of charter schools.
For new charters that are seeking to operate in Texas, the Commissioner makes an initial approval and the State Board can veto his approval by a simple majority vote.
However, SB 28 seeks to change the majority vote to supermajority vote and limits the reasons that the SBOE can veto a new charter applicant.
For charters that are currently in operation and seek to open a new campus through the “amendment” process, the Commissioner has the sole approval authority.
Once an existing charter meets certain TEA criteria (which the Commissioner can waive and often does), the charter can apply for an unlimited number of new charter campuses anywhere in the state, expanding its geographic boundaries and maximum enrollment cap. The Commissioner has approved over 500 new campuses through the amendment process in the last six years alone. Charter amendments are an administrative process that do not require a public meeting or public notice. Schools districts and legislators receive a notice of amendments proposed in their districts but usually only as the amendment is filed with the state.
School districts may submit a “Statement of Impact” form to TEA for both new applications and amendments that documents the impact of the new charter on the district. The form allows only a small box for comments, but we have worked with districts to submit a comprehensive assessment to TEA that documents the fiscal, academic, and program impact of the new charter. However, TEA is not required to consider fiscal impact in its approval process.
Funding
School districts lose per student funding when a student transfers from the district to a charter school. Districts cannot cut costs dollar-for-dollar to the loss of revenue because charters . Charters draw students from multiple district schools, grade levels, and classes which makes it difficult for districts to reduce variable costs, such as teachers, who are still needed in each classroom to serve remaining students. In addition, fixed costs for expenses such as utilities, building maintenance, janitorial services, and transportation remain largely the same with little or no savings possible. As a result, charter schools have a significant fiscal impact on school districts, draining resources from all district public schools and often requiring cuts in academics, programs, or staff.
In addition, charter schools receive an average of about $1,150 more per student from the state’s Foundation School Program than what the same student would have cost in their home school district – a total of $25,300 more per typical elementary classroom of 22 students on average. This is because all charters – regardless of size – receive the average of the small-to-mid-size allotment even though this allotment is intended to help small districts with 5,000 and fewer students address costs related to economies of scale.
The Texas Legislative Budget Board estimated that the state would have saved $882 million over the prior FY 18-19 biennium if charter schools received the same per-student funding as the districts where charters have the highest enrollment (estimates based on pre- HB3 state funding).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As long as the public continues to vote for right wing ‘nuts,’ we will continue to see more bills and laws that undermine public education. There is a push in many red states to neutralize local school boards and send the tax dollars directly to the state and allow states to decide where the money goes. They plan to override local control of local property tax dollars. Peter Greene also reports that in Texas Governor Abbott is refusing to distribute $17.9 billion dollars to aid earmarked for public schools. Abbott would like to starve the public schools out existence.http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2021/04/tx-governor-still-holding-on-to.ht
From now on, the power to build anything he wants will be given to Bill Gates. Bill Gates will have eminent domain, and be able to tear town whole cities and states in order to build the world’s biggest umbrella, permanently blotting out the sun. All hail the Bill Gates umbrella for ending global warming once and for all!
Gates is now the #1 land owner in the country. He is buying up large lots of farmland across multiple states.
“The principal danger of private farmland owners like Bill Gates is not their professed support of sustainable agriculture often found in philanthropic work – it’s the monopolistic role they play in determining our food systems and land use patterns.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland
That is right. He’s a strange bird, and that land is likely to become a private Area 51, in my opinion. In 2014, he proposed using airplanes to put chemicals into the atmosphere to blot out the sun. The oligarchs have too much money, too much property, too much power, and too much psychosis. That goes for the billionaires in Washington, the ones in Texas, and everywhere else.
Bill Gates is a very scary man. I don’t understand why so many people seem to hang on his every word and worship at his alter? He’s no tech guru….he’s a thief and a liar with a slick tongue and great marketing skills.
since Gates presumes a future where we are all mole people living indoors, spending our days looking at computer screens
From Cloaking Inequity, the state of Texas has spent $1.21 billion (with a B) over two years on 9 charter chains that graduated a total of 56 black students. 56. Let that sink in. IDEA continues to market their schools with the usual “99%” grad rate lie; a cursory glance at the enrollment data shows that the schools artificially boost grad rates by shedding unacceptably large numbers of students from the 9-12th grade cohort. In many IDEA schools, the 9-12 grade cohort loses from about 30%-40+% students by the time they enter 12th grade. In these examples, IDEA actually uses a 6-12 grade model for their secondary schools; predictably, the attrition rates from 6th grade onward are even worse. Since charters don’t normally backfill their students, the cohort just shrinks, and they can base the grad rate from a 12th grade cohort that’s almost half the size of the original. Clearly IDEA is playing this grad rate game to market their schools to unsuspecting families who have no idea that they have barely a 40-50% chance of “success” in IDEA before they are shown the door. In my opinion, any charter that boasts of having nearly 100% grad rates is following this attrition model to cherry-pick students. That is the secret sauce of IDEA’s “success”.
https://cloakinginequity.com/2021/03/25/more-than-1-billion-for-56-black-charter-graduates/
That is utterly appalling. And it’s not just Texas. If IDEA was in NY, the SUNY Charter Institute would be rewarding them with more charters. The NY media would be extolling them as performing miracles. Neither the NYT nor the SUNY Charter Institute cares how many students disappeared — they just care about whether the charters they overpraise and support can brag loudly enough about near perfect graduation rates or state test passing rates.
If IDEA was in NY, probably the president of Harvard University would speak at their graduation just like he did when a charter network in NYC graduated an abysmally low percentage of the students who were in the 9th grade cohort 4 years earlier. The white businessmen and lawyers who serve as Cuomo-appointed trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute would be giving them outrageous amounts of taxpayer dollars taken right from the budgets of public schools teaching the most disadvantaged students.
Imagine having a 9th grade class of 191 students and every single one of those students — every single one — was ONLY allowed to be in that 9th grade class because the charter had educated those students since early elementary school — many of them since they were 5!
Imagine that 9th grade class consists entirely of 191 students only allowed to enroll in a charter high school because the people running the high school had been responsible for their elementary and middle school education, too, and certified them ready.
Imagine that only 98 of those 191 9th grade students graduate 4 years later. Imagine that the NYT and the SUNY Charter Institute and all the people who are supposed to notice and provide accountability instead celebrate and exclaim the miracle that 100% of the graduates are going to college!
Imagine that the lazy education reporters who are supposed to cover K-12 education never even bother to check the data and therefore never even notice that not only were there 191 students in 9th grade 4 years ago, and yet only 98 are graduating, but there were 124 students who were in the senior class in October and only 98 were in the class in May!
How can those reporters fail to do basic journalism and look up data and notice that more than 20% of the students in the senior class in October were not graduating? If a person doesn’t notice that 20% of the students who started senior year aren’t graduating in the spring, is that person a journalist or a PR hack? And if the answer is “that person is a PR hack”, then no one would expect someone who doesn’t notice when 20% of the seniors go missing to notice that nearly half the 9th graders from 4 years ago aren’t graduating. Education reporting in major media is an embarrassment.
So it’s not just Texas. NY is just as bad.
Just once I’d like to see a reporter ask that charter network if their very own elementary and middle schools are to blame because half of their 9th graders seem to be so unprepared for high school work and only half of them graduated 4 years later.
But that would require education reporters who had some journalistic skills and even more important, reporters who had some integrity.
Maybe one of the Texas newspapers had real journalists covering education because in NYC, reporters seem content to blindly report the charter narrative regardless of how misleading it is.
Sounds like Success Academy.
The ed reform/charter lobby are moving to control all vocational education too:
https://www.newsweek.com/lets-multiply-non-college-career-pathways-young-americans-opinion-1585458
There are thousands of public vocational high schools in the US, but they are ignored in the ed reform echo chamber in favor or promoting, marketing and funding charters.
Do we really want a “movement” that is funded and directed by billionaires to direct career training for young people? We’re going to outsource vocational schools to the Walton family employees?
It would be a real shame if vocational education was also captured by this lobby. For one thing they’re all aggressively anti-labor union, and a lot of successful vocational programs are operated with the cooperation of labor unions- ed reformers are ideologically forbidden to support labor unions.
Do we really want the ed reform echo chamber running yet another sector of education?
The privatizers are vultures that are looking for new prey. They attack a public good and dream up a variety of financial products that replace traditional instruction. They exploit the working class to gain access to public money. Unfortunately, too many corporate Democrats are part of the problem as well.
The Biden administration purports to support unions. Biden needs progressive advisors that can explain the economic consequences of many of these “public-private partnerships” that are generally about allowing the wealthy to socialize their risk while they privatize profit. The working class is often a casualty of such financial schemes like the private college loan racket and this job training program.
It’s just weird not to talk about the thousands of public vocational schools that already exist.
Once again we get supposed “education policy” that is really 100% about promoting privatization of K-12 schools.
Are ed reformers forbidden to mention public schools? Do they lose their cushy think tank positions if they veer from the party line?
Not only are there public vocational high schools, there are also vocational work-study programs sponsored by the trade unions that result in good paying jobs without any obligation to having to pay off wealthy sponsors for the rest of your life as in this neoliberal scheme.
I think I need some different links to understand the neoliberal movement you & retired teacher are talking about. There’s not a doubt in my mind: the people who brought us charters and vouchers will be chewing on the next available publicly-funded ed soon if they aren’t already.
But I have no problem with what’s discussed in the Newsweek link. This isn’t about charters; it’s just that the featured student was from NOLA which is 100% charter. The program she attended looks like P-TECH, also mentioned. It’s a 6-yr program (hisch + assoc deg) including industry mentoring and paid apprenticeship. Not vo-tech, which leads directly to workforce &/or trade apprenticeship after hisch. This is “multiplying pathways” per Newsweek caption, i.e. adding pathway to what Gov Murphy calls “no-collar” hi-tech work needing only some college. We have 4 pilots across NJ started in the last 2-1/2 yrs; industry partners are in IT, design/survey/ inspection for land devpt, and 2 diff types of industrial mfg. The programs are placed in existing public hischs (one was already a magnet for earth & space science) with state & fed grant $.
If you look at graphics of edsystems in Euro countries they too have vo-tech, hi-tech mfg, & 4+yr engrg pathways. We of course have no overall planning involved, it’s scattershot, leaving plenty of room for privatizing predators. Those countries have organized their ed pathways so that you can move laterally or diagonally among the tech pathways, and it’s all part of the publicly-funded ed system [K-16+ !]
Here’s an economist at yet another ed reform charter/voucher promoting think tank opining on US vocational education:
“Our education system should aim to provide more graduating high school students with the options that Kathryn had—to either pursue a college education or to start working with the prospect of a successful career.”
Apparently none of these education experts are aware that there are thousands of PUBLIC vocational high schools that already exist- once again public schools are ignored in favor of promoting and marketing charters.
They all discovered vocational ed when it became fashionable in their circles, last year.
“…one legislator tried to slip in a proviso giving charters the power of eminent domain.”
I bet that same legislator has waxed philosophical on many occasions about the harm done by an all-powerful government. This is the same old story. Government is bad until it supports my narrow interest. Then, suddenly, it is fine.
The autocratic, libertarian, disguised theocracy private sector, greed-based “reform school” movement will not be stopped. Inch by inch they keep moving forward. Defeats do not stop them. When they are blocked, they find stealthy ways to subvert the legal process and still gain another inch.
The only thing that can stop the billionaire incursion into public education is to change policy away from so-called choice laws. What is happening now has little to do with choice. It is a stealth takeover and destruction of the common good in order to make more money for the already wealthy.
“Billionaire incursion” can only be stopped by eliminating billionaires. As long as our laissez-faire capitalist govt policy keeps spawning them, they will keep buying self-serving govt policy.
This article, from ed reform echo chamber publication The 74, is a really good example of how the echo chamber works:
https://www.the74million.org/article/battle-over-charters-providence-takeover-divides-democrats-in-deep-blue-rhode-island/
The article is supposedly about how ed reformers are lobbying to open more charters in Rhode Island. No surprise there- lobbying to open more charters and put in vouchers is the only actual work they do, but read it to see how ridiculously biased against public schools this “movement” is- the charter lobbyists are depicted as heroes while the public school lobbyists are depicted as villains.
Only in the echo chamber would this pro-charter/anti public school propaganda be considered a “news story”.
Ridiculous that they won’t admit this.
Why are people who lobby on behalf of public schools demonized in ed reform?
They all lobby exclusively for charters, as they’re doing in Texas.
Public school students aren’t permitted to have their own lobbyists and advocates? Why not?
There should be ed reform lobbyists promoting charters and ed reform lobbyists promoting vouchers but public school students should have no one at the table working for them? Why would we accept that? It’s grossly biased and unfair.
Ripofflichen pols don’t really give a hoot about students in or out of charters, of course — it’s all about sending public dollars to private profiteers who have guaranteed in advance a hefty percentage of kickback to the pols’ own coffers.