National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ Nina Rees talked about congressional efforts to reduce federal funding of charter schools.
— Watch on www.c-span.org/video/
House Democrats want to ban for-profit charter management organizations, as Biden promised. Rees thinks this is terrible. CSPAN quotes the NPE report on for-profit EMOs (Chartered for Profit). Listen to call-ins at the end, which are opposed to charters. One call-in comes from Carol Burris, who wrote the NPE report. Rees makes for/profit charters sound benign. They are not. They are in it for the money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The distinction between “for-profit” and “nonprofit” charter schools is disinformation.
Here’s the major principle behind the typical “nonprofit” charter school:
You get a set fee from taxpayers for every student, and anything from that that you DON’T spend on stuff for students is YOURS. Yup. You get to spend it on yourself–on cars and offices and trips and even airplanes, on fat salaries for you and your “employees” like your mistresses and girlfriends and boyfriends and ne’er do well cousins and golfing buddies.
So, cut the sports facilities and equipment, the art supplies, the science labs, the media centers, the libraries, the nurses, the guidance counselors, the transportation, the textbooks, the nice furniture, the theatre, the auditorium, the teacher benefits, the teacher supplies, the whiteboard projectors, the pool, etc., etc. They want that stuff, let them hold a bake sale! All of the foregoing can be replaced with hype.
Buy a building under the name of a shell company you own and lease it from yourself at a nice profit. It’s important for the building to have a very uimpressive sign outside. So don’t skimp on that. You can have reporters take pictures of you in front of it. You, selfless nonprofiteer. School choice hero. Rescuing children from those failing government schools!
Do this right, and at the end of the year, there will be nothing left, you nonprofit you. And you will be enjoying the equity and the other benefits from all those taxpayer dollars.
cx: a very impressive sign
Use your shell company to buy an old K-Mart. Have the school rent it from you at an inflated price. Build equity! Gut that building. Remove everything. Paint it. Buy cheap, used computer terminals from China by the bulk and place them around the walls. Put an impressive sign outside, preferably with a jingoistic, patriotic name, but at least one that is very positive. Palookaville Liberty Academy. Aspirating Scholars’ Freedom Academy. That kind of thing. Buy canned depersonalized education software from some virtual school scammers to run on these terminals. Hire teachers to be facilitators of this virtual “learning” and train them to keep the terminals working and take attendance. Churn the teachers yearly to keep salaries and discontent down. Nothing like a little fear to keep them in line. Will you be one of the 20 percent canned each year? Keep collecting those per pupil allotments of taxpayer dollars.
cx: Aspiring Scholars Freedom Academy
says it all: “You get a set fee from taxpayers for every student, and anything from that that you DON’T spend on stuff for students is YOURS.”
I always tape this show. I just checked in on that final segment on charters, delighted to find that JQPublic (at least those who called in) seem finally to be getting wise to the cost/ waste of charters. Was delighted Carol Burris called– & it was perfectly timed. Rees was lying her head off in response to interviewer & callers. Her nose was so long it was about to fall off.
Thank you for watching. Almost everything she said was “debatable” or untrue.
For-profits get worse results than nonprofits, as Carol pointed out. How could they get better results when part of their funding goes to investors?
I had to restrain myself from throwing the remote when she said charters serve the same numbers of SpEd as other public schools.
That’s false. Every study—even one by the federal GAO— noted the under representation of SPED kids. When charters take SPED kids, they accept those with the mildest disabilities. I thought it interesting that she mentioned a charter specifically designed for autistic students, but that is not representative of the 7,000 charters.
They take the least expensive students. They provide the cheapest product possible. They pay the teachers like gig workers. The only things they spend on lavishly are executive salaries.
Public schools have to make lemonade out of lemons because charter schools advertise lemons as lemonade.
Left Coast Teacher
Hanna Skandera wrote an article posted at Catholic Education Resource Center which included, “Catholic schools….research shows they do it at less than half of the cost of public schools…” Nina Rees, quoted in the article, also has written about the greatness of Catholic schools which dovetails nicely with the school choice promotion of state Catholic Conferences. At least two of the state Catholic Conferences take credit for school choice legislation in their states, school choice that encompasses non-profit and for-profit entities.
Yes I just watched and noted that she has practiced lines that can be quite deceptive. For example, she cited the percentage of special ed students in charters as comparable (which was news to me) but that ignores severity of disability, ignores whether or not the kid completed the school year (watch when they say “enroll” vs “serve”) and ignores whether all the services in the kids’ IEPs were actually met.
This is what lobbyists are trained in, the art of answering questions and spinning statistics to your benefit, and getting paid handsomely, including by tax dollars. When she talks about charters getting parity in funding with public schools, does that mean public schools can form lobbying groups too?
Rees tries to be convincing spin doctor until the dissenters start phoning in with their facts and concerns about charter schools. Lots of the concerns are about the harmful impact charter expansion has on public schools. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is never a sound way to fund a quality education. The public has felt the denigration of the public schools from all the money that has been transferred out of the schools their children attend.
When public money goes behind the opaque wall of a private company, there is no accountability to taxpayers. Unaccountable EMO or CMOs are part of the problem. Allowing private companies to transfer public property into private ownership is another slick way to cheat the public out of their public asset.
Charters do not accept all students. The select only those that are less expensive and easy to educate. It is no accident that most charter schools are elementary schools. Charter operators do not want to pay for the expertise and physical plant that a high school would require. They routinely reject students that are more expensive to educate..
Overall, the public is not pushing for more charter schools. They want their representatives to adequately fund their public schools. They are tired of being on the hook for other people’s investment.
Rees was so adamant about charters being public schools. She was stressed about it. They’re not public. Nope. McDonalds restaurants are open to the public. That doesn’t make a BigMac public food. Public drinking fountain water is public; CocaCola is not. And like charter schools, Google is free. You will not be overtly charged a fee for googling “charter school fraud scandals”. That doesn’t make Alphabet-Google a public service. Dot gov is public; dot com is commercial, like CocaCola Company. Dot gov is run by the gov, and that’s what makes it public. Charter schools are run by private companies. Public schools are public. Charter schools are charter. Not complicated. Unclench, Nina Rees.
Peter “Curmudgucation” Greene wrote a nice piece about this:
https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2021/07/charter-advocates-chicken-littling.html
Entirely worth reading. Thank you.
Well, Rees is a charter school lobbyist, right? She’s paid to promote charter schools, expand charter schools and secure additional funding for charter schools.
I read a lot of criticism from ed reformers on Randy Weingarten’s salary but I have never seen a single mention on how much any of these charter promoters are paid. We know how much what teacher union leaders are paid- why don’t we know how much ed reformers are paid? Seems like an odd omission.
What’s the combined salary of the tens of high profile charter promoters and marketers who work in ed reform promoting charters and vouchers, and how does that compare to the combined salaries of teacher union leaders?
Just the salaries of the former US Secretaries of Education who are now employed in ed reform ALONE probably exceed the combined salaries of teachers union leaders.
The longer one reads in the ed reform echo chamber the more one realizes that there’s a lot of missing/omitted information. They don’t do any real analysis of their own “movement” or their own schools. They operate almost exclusively as professional public school critics. There’s never any criticism of any of the charter schools or voucher systems they promote.
If they do manage to convince the public that K-12 public education should be completely privatized the first thing the public will realize is how ed reform has no mechanism or process to evaluate ed reform.
I want widespread msm publicity about how much Mike McShane of Ed Choice makes.
All of the leaders of the school choice advocacy groups and TFA make very large salaries.
key point
I think public school leaders at some point have to come to the hard realization that ed reform works for charters and vouchers. They simply perform no productive work of any kind on behalf of public schools or public school students.
We only see these folks when they’re lobbying for additional charters and vouchers or bashing public schools because that’s all they do. They promote charters and vouchers and they act as professional critics of public schools- that’s the job.
We have twenty years of ed reform “results” for public school students and their single contribution to our schools and students is standardized tests. If we had wanted standardized tests we could have hired one of many contractors for that. They’re either irrelevant to our schools and students or a detriment. Invest elsewhere. Take whatever you were going to spend on an ed reform consultant or the latest ed reform gimmick and plow it back into the public school instead. Go your own way. There’s no risk because you’re not getting any reward out of this “movement” anyway.