Enrollments in the Cleveland Independent School District in Texas was growing rapidly. Voters passed bond issues, but it wasn’t enough. The superindent turned to the state for help. Sadly, Governor Gregg Abbott and his hand-picked State Commissioner Mike Morath are obsessed with charters, despite the fact that their academic results are below those of public schools.
Here is the sad story of Abbott and Morath’s devotion to charter expansion.
TEXAS MONTHLY BREAKS STORY ON FAST-TRACK CHARTER EXPANSION IN EAST TEXAS
Texas Monthly, October 6, 2021
Texas Monthly writer Bekah McNeel breaks the story of how Commissioner Morath fast-tracked the approval of five new International Leadership of Texas (ILT) charter schools in Cleveland ISD within only three business days, skirting TEA’s own rules and process, and despite concerns raised by 12 area Superintendents whose districts will be affected.
The Superintendents co-signed a letter to the Commissioner that questioned ILT’s track record, especially with low-income students who are English Learners, and TEA’s rapid approval of the amendment application without input from the affected school districts.
The article also reinforces the concerns that local communities and school districts have been raising for years: The Commissioner ignores the impact of new charter campuses on local school districts and communities when he approves an unlimited number of new charter campuses without public notice or opportunities for input from the public.
The article is attached.
Link: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-charter-school-expansion-cleveland/
Key Excerpts:
- Instead of offering funding and flexibility to the public schools…the state fast-tracked the expansion of charter schools that aren’t held to the same standards of community accountability or required to find a seat for every student regardless of ability or disciplinary status.
- Public school advocates worry that the process circumvents public accountability. Charter growth is driven by decisions made in Austin and charter network headquarters, not by the communities where those schools will be located or their elected school boards.
- Kevin Brown, the executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, said that when decisions are made in a public school district about anything from curriculum to adding new schools, democratically elected boards create a conduit for parents and community members to offer their views. Charters, by contrast, whose appointed boards often do not live in the cities and towns whose students they serve, do not need a community’s approval to open a new school next door. “To a local community, it often feels like an invasion from outsiders,” Brown said.
- On that same day, Conger and ILTexas chief financial officer James Dworkin broke the good news of their expansion on a call with investment managers. “If somebody’s looking for ‘where’s the local school?’ they’ll be pointed to an ILTexas school,” Dworkin said. “That is a change to the charter industry as I’ve seen it in my time here, and I’m proud to be part of ILTexas leading the way.”
- In response to concerns that ILT is allowed to expand under state rules even though it currently has 2 F rated campuses and 6 D rated campuses out of a total of 32 campuses, State Board of Education member Pat Hardy from Fort Worth responded, as Texas Monthly wrote: “Hardy accepted that the policy allowed expansion, but pushed back: ‘I really think that any charter school that has an F should not have the privilege to expand.’ Morath advised her, politely, to take up the issue with the Legislature.”
- For the record:
- 884 new charter campuses have been approved between 2010 – 2021 in Texas through charter expansion amendments approved solely by the Commissioner of Education.
- 586 new charter campuses have been approved since 2015.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Texas is vying with Florida to see who can do reckless and undemocratic better. Top down decisions without public approval are how governors that want to dismantle public education operate. it is no accident that both Abbot and DeSantis appoint like minded education commissioners to carry out their anti-democratic agenda. Neither really cares about ELLs. They know the parents are unlikely to complain. They are not concerned with the low ratings of the charters they bring in as their main goal is to move as much money as possible out of public schools to further undermine them.
I think it’s been clear for a long time that the ed reform movement advantages charter schools over public schools and prefer ANY charter over ANY public school.
Their policy objective is to replace public schools with privatized systems. Supporting or investing in public schools doesn’t help them toward that goal, so they don’t do it.
Academic results don’t matter at all- they’ve investing in charter schools and not investing in public schools because charter schools are privately-owned and managed and public schools are not. It’s pure ideology.
The most interesting part of the article to me is how the charter owner/operater makes no effort at to work with the public schools or even pretend to be part of the school system.
I think ed reformers have encouraged this attitude among charter owner/operators, where they offer no cooperation or community involvement and see the relationship as purely one of puttting the public schools out of business. Adversarial. This giant charter operator hopes to gain market share and shutter the local public schools.
Ed reformers set their “vision” (if one can call it that) as a commercial venture and no one should be surprised that it behaves like one. It’s a shame. They’ve turned public education into just another consumer service provider. It’s a loss. The public education idea was much bigger. They’ve given us a cheap, hollow “school services” rather than community schools.
Ohio had a massive charter school scandal that was never prosecuted but Ohio citizens were told state government would start regulating charter schools. The ed reformers at the state level all promoted the idea that it was a new day in Ohio and the charter sector would finally be regulated and there would never be another giant scandal:
“In 2018, the same year that Bill Lager’s ECOT was shut down, Brennan sold off his charter school holdings and later died. Charter school management quieted down after that, but the quality didn’t improve, and the profits continued to flow to the man (and his partner investors) who bought off much of David Brennan’s empire—Ron Packard. Packard was the founder of the for-profit online giant, K-12, but he left K-12, when it was under a cloud for misleading investors and poorly educating its students. By 2014, Packard had founded Accel Schools, another for-profit chain of charter schools, which was owned and operated by something called Pansophic Learning.”
All they did was rearrange the deck chairs. They simply transferred ownership of the publicly funded schools from one operator to another.
It’s just as bad now as it was before the ECOT scandal. Phony, unenforceable regulations that were designed to regulate nothing but instead we just put in to appease the public and assure them ed reformers were handling their own corruption problem.
It’s Potemkin regulation- a facade. Written by charter lobbyists and intended to protect these huge for-profit franchises they have built using public dollars.
a very good description for the larger game: Potemkin regulation, a facade
This is so much more than just the public schools being systematically dismantled. I think the anti-vaccine and anti-mask movements are other elements of a master plan by the likes of ALEC, Bill Gates, Facebook, Alice Walton, Charles Koch, et al to dismantle the United States and that includes an end to public education.
If this keeps up and isn’t stopped, the United States is going to eventually shatter into hundreds if not thousands of tribes at war with each other, a repeat of what life was like in Europe after the Roman Empire collapsed.
strangely, though, this “perfect storm” of chaos is being built exactly in times when climate disasters are threatening more and more massive intrusions: will we continue to fight each other about petty issues when we are struggling to hold off our own physical demise? It is such a strange reality show…
Absolutely agree. And all strategy should be fashioned from this understanding.
Please take another look at Harmony public schools which were featured in the documentary Killing Ed. I’m teaching at a Harmony school and it is insane how horribly run these schools are currently. I have information, documentation demonstrating my position. The most recent insanity is hiring the Sinclair customer metrics firm to pay mystery shoppers/actual parents/spies to show up in our classrooms with hidden cameras and ‘shop’ our customer service skills. To be clear, random, paid parents and others will be wandering our school spying, recording and reporting on their targets. They won’t be identified and we can’t ask them to identify themselves. WRONG WRONG WRONG on so many levels! One level is the safety and security of teachers and students from the standpoint of strangers walking around unidentified. Another level of wrong in this era of the Covid pandemic is the complete lack of any Covid safety protocols. No masks, no vaccines, no rapid testing, don’t ask don’t tell reporting or non reporting of positive cases, no quarantine after exposure, NO social distancing! (I have 25-28 2nd graders in a windowless room that measures 22 feet in length and width) Help me find a way to get this and so much more information out to the public.