Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, debated Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, about whether for-profit charter schools should receive federal funds.
Here is Burris’s opposition to the proposition: https://fredericksburg.com/opinion/forum-2-no-put-students-before-profits/article_d559232f-aeb1-5b7e-84f3-14f4de78c2aa.html. Burris was the main author of the NPE report, Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain.
And here is Rees’ support for federal funding of for-profit charter schools. https://fredericksburg.com/opinion/forum-1-should-charter-schools-run-by-for-profits-receive-federal-funds-yes-all-charters/article_b612f3f4-b164-56b4-bb02-5c27a9696888.html. Rees was education advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney during the first Bush administration, worked for the Heritage Foundation, and for Michael Milken’s Knowledge Universe.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for this post. Burris goes in great detail that explains how the grifting scammers misuse public dollars in the charter industry. Lucrative self dealing is the main objective of many charter operators and CMOs. All Rees does is insist that charter schools are public schools that get results from all their flexibility and so-called freedom.
Before deform public schools had flexibility as they were largely operated in local communities that served the community needs. Curricula were locally written and implemented. Gradually local control was ceded to the states that required more testing and so-called accountability. “Reform” for public schools has been more about micro-managing public education than improving it, and NCLB high stakes testing was accountability on steroids. If success can be measured in “freedom,” public schools could be so much better if charters didn’t pilfer their budgets, and professional teachers had some degree of autonomy.
How can there be a debate? Take two schools that are equivalent in all ways (students, teachers, facilities, etc.) They can both be charter schools for all I care. Now, one of them is transformed into a “for profit” school, meaning that some of their budget is set aside as profit for, what, investors/the parent corporation/whatever?
How can the setting aside of those funds make the for-profit school anything but a lesser school. It certainly cannot make that school better unless you believe in magic.
Now some corporatists will claim that the magic of competition with make the for profit school better. What competition? If they are competing with that other school that is spending all of its funds on services, then they should lose that competition. In most cases there is no competition or so little as to be negligible.
All of these pro-business arguments for charter schools and for-profit charter schools are just smoke and mirrors. The people truly behind these efforts are antigovernmental, anti-collective action, pro greed idiots (they are willing to sacrifice a pillar of our democracy to make a few bucks). The proof is that the charter industry couldn’t exist without politicians being bought to shunt public funds toward them. Did you observe huge growth in charters before that pattern started? Were they able to acquire start-up money from the usual sources? No? Gee, I wonder why? The investors could see the nonviability of the model.
Charter schools started as experimental schools in which innovation’s could be researched. They have become a stalking horse for plutocrats looking to rake in some of the huge pile of money spent on public schools. And like the rent-seeking players of the financial markets, they contribute nothing, they create nothing, they just siphon public funds into their pockets.
Key words ” …unless you believe in magic.” Where we seem to be in so many ways at this point of governance
So now the non-profit charter organizations have all strongly endorsed giving public funding to for-profit charter schools?
There was a time when they claimed they only supported “non-profit” charters, but it is clear that it was always about endorsing for-profit education.
Every charter network that is part of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is supporting the lobbying and public relations efforts of their organization to direct money to for-profit charters.
It seems that many supposedly non-profit charters who are members of this organization take their marching orders from their funders who want for-profit charters and therefore are complicit in this endorsement of the for-profit charter industry.
Rees says the federal government can’t take money away from charter school students by taking away the slush fund for for-profit management corporations. By her logic, for-profit management corporations can’t take money away from charter school students by profiting. Hypocrisy at its finest.
There’s a simple rule for running a charter school that these charter management folks know well: you get a set, per-pupil amount from the state. Anything that you don’t spend on teachers and students and facilities, you get to keep in the form of salaries, perks, and sweetheart deals for your mistresses, golfing buddies, and n’er-do-well relatives.
And by leasing to the school at above-market rates buildings and property that you own, you can build your private wealth at taxpayer expense.
i.e., this is how to turn taxpayer dollars into private equity
I have a confession to make. For many years, I was a supporter of charter schools and voucher schools. Why? I was horrified by the stultifying bureaucracies in many public school systems. Years ago, when I was a kid, there was real local control of schools. When I first started teaching English, in a high school, back in the mid 1980s, the English teachers in the high schools where I worked (two public high schools and one Catholic high school) made the decisions with regard to what they would teach and how. We held weekly department meetings, and there we had engaging, heated but collegial debates about instructional materials and methods. Both fascinated me. My colleagues and I all subscribed to the English Journal, which ran articles about new materials and methods, some by researchers, some by practicing English teachers, and we tried and debated lots of new stuff—the process approach to teaching writing, sentence combining, instruction in literary motifs and archetypes. We also chose the textbooks and supplemental materials that we taught with. Our administrators were of the opinion that WE were the experts in the teaching of English and were happy to leave these decisions to us. And we took this responsibility extremely seriously. That’s the way workers work in every industry: they do their best work in conditions of autonomy and responsibility. Start micromanaging them, and everything falls off. That’s THE MAJOR LESSON of the quality control/kaizen movements in manufacturing, of course, but it applies everywhere, in every business. English teachers running English departments in schools? And without constant standardized testing to keep them in line? That sounds crazy and radical now, but it’s the way things were, and schools were arguably much more effective then than they are now, after decades of micromanagement from above and standardized testing mania. Interestingly, under these conditions, in which English teachers ran English departments, history teachers ran history departments, foreign language teachers ran foreign language departments, etc., there wasn’t some sort of anarchic free-for-all. It wasn’t a case of “the inmates running the asylum.” Workers with autonomy take their jobs seriously because THEY are taken seriously. The fact is, that under such a regime, there was a remarkable amount of uniformity throughout the United States—dependence by teachers on the tried and true. In every high school in the country, the 9th graders were reading Romeo and Juliet, the 10th graders Julius Caesar, and the 11th or 12th graders Macbeth. In almost every school in the country, the junior year was devoted to a survey course in American literature and the senior year to a survey course in Brit Lit. So, there was a lot of dependence on the habits of the tribe. At the same time, there was room and a built-in mechanism for bottom up, gradual transformation. Young teachers could argue for adding Vonnegut’s Slaughter-house Five to the required reading list.
At the time (back in the mid 1980s), one of the HUGE debates in education in America was between proponents of building-level and district-level control. Who would make the important decisions about matters like textbook purchases, the department chairpeople in a school or the district administrators.
Of course, the district people won. And as a result, we entered a period that we’ve never really left of ever-increasing bureaucratization. Today, I would have to think long and hard about whether I would advise young people to go into teaching. They will spend more than half their time doing ridiculous, district-mandated busy work. They won’t have the autonomy to choose their methods and materials. They will be constantly “evaluated,” often based upon truly ridiculous or impossible metrics, and they will be continually micromanaged. It’s pretty terrible, and the larger the district, the worse it is.
So, given the ridiculous micromanagement of classrooms and teachers by districts—you will submit a two-page lesson plan using this form for every class, you will write these twelve things on the white board before each class (bellwork, homework, standard(s) for the lesson, vocabulary for the lesson, Big Idea, blah blah blah), you will take these 300 mindless hours of online ESL “training” in the first two years or lose your license to teach, you will complete these forms on this schedule for every student with one of these three types of plans, you will have your students do these practice tests for the state exam, you will follow these state lesson plans, you will use these and only these approved texts, and so on—I came to believe that ANYTHING had to be better than what the public school systems had devolved into.
I’ve since educated myself a LOT about charters and voucher programs and about the horror stories of mismanagement and self-enrichment in these sectors, so I’m no longer a fan of these fraudulent “alternatives.”
But the fact remains that even as we oppose the scurrilous attempts to privatize U.S. education, we must do something to counter the bureaucratization that I’ve described above—to get the micromanagers out of teachers’ lives.
Here’s where we could start fixing things: the freaking unions in the United States could actually start representing the interests of teachers and students by taking it to the streets to end the top-down, test-based “accountability” paradigm that has so devastated our schools. Until they do this, it won’t end, and they will be complicit in this child abuse.
This is about as close to what I have been telling people about educational issues as anyone could get. Part of my frustration with the bureaucracy you talk about has been the growing privatization of the various services that a school needs. Reed mentions this reality to justify charter schools. How preposterous! Almost all the relationships of this nature I have experienced have been successful only insofar as they make someone a profit.
When I started teaching, teachers were respected, active, and decisive. Now they are wonderful people looking over their shoulders at tests, being as effective as one can be expected to be. Hardly an improvement.
When I returned to teaching at the end of my career, I tired quickly of wasting enormous amounts of time meeting district mandates and of being micromanaged by administrators who cared only about tests and about checking off lists. The disrespect was routine and palpable and quite shocking. I had not experienced anything like it in decades working in the private sector.
I had spent a lifetime working on English curricula and pedagogy but was routinely told what to do by people who basically knew nothing whatsoever about either. It was, in a word, annoying.
Roy, do you spend enormous amounts of your time doing trivial busy work required by administrators? I did. It was utterly ridiculous. Example: I was required to record my attendance in a paper attendance book, on attendance slips that went to the office, online, on a sheet posted in the teacher’s mail room, and on grade sheets at the end of each marking period. Literally five times, in five places, for the same task. It was a system designed by an insane person, kludge on top of kludge.
I was required during my first year to compile an 800-page book (there were explicit directions for the contents of this book) documenting my teaching, to be submitted to the district at the end of the year. I had to take 300 hours of online ESL instruction that was so bad that in the “reflections” I was required to write for each lesson, I simply wrote lists of the errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, spelling, reasoning, and fact in the “lessons.” But hey, there was plenty of time for that because I only had 185 students in my classes. 185!!!! So, if I assigned each a 5-paragraph essay to write, I would have three novels to take home and edit.
A few weeks into my teaching, boxes of a new literature program were dropped off in my class, accompanied by an email saying that it was mandatory that I use these. This was the My Perspectives program from Pear$on. I had a look at the program and was horrified. It was a busy, incoherent, ignorant mess, full of errors, extremely sloppy. I opened to a two-page spread at random and detailed 50+ errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, and fact on that ONE SPREAD. Then I emailed the analysis to my colleagues and administrators.
I was required to keep all grades in a paper grade book AND to repeat this in an online grading system. There was no rationale at all for the redundancy.
I had seven preps and was required to complete two-page lesson planning forms for every lesson and to keep photocopies of these in spiral notebooks in my class, ready for instant inspection by any administrator who walked into my class. These included attached additional modifications for every lesson for every student with an IP or 504 plan. These had to be submitted each week by Monday morning at 8:00. Simply completing them for all my preps took an entire day and much of the night as well every weekend.
We had biweekly department meetings, but these consisted entirely of the department chairperson reading out the latest mandates from administration and the district.
Before every class, I was required to write out, on the whiteboard, for that class, the Bellwork, Homework, Big Idea, Essential Question, Vocabulary, and Standard(s) Covered for the lesson. Administrators would pop in at random to ensure that this was done, and if any item wasn’t done or was in the wrong order, a demerit would go into my Personnel File. Simply doing this took better than an hour each morning and filled two white boards.
All this is just the beginning. I could go on and on, adding examples. I was required to administer district-mandated practice tests for the state standardized tests and to fill out complex forms analyzing my students’ results, and I was forced to post these in class on a DATA WALL. Then, I was supposed to hold individualized DATA CHATS with my students about their results.
I was required, each marking period, to complete a long, complex Reflection on my teaching that identified my deficiencies and how I was going to rectify those going forward. This document was about 15 pages long.
I’ve just scratched the surface, but I’ll end there. Suffice it to say, there was precious little time for anything else. If I wanted to meet with a student after school, it would have to be after I had completed my mandatory car line duty.
It was as if for decades, every time some administrator had a brainstorm: “We should have all the teachers do x,” it was added to the teachers’ duties until half the job was this crap.
Oh, and not only did the vocabulary for each lesson have to be listed on the lesson plan and on the white board, it also had to be on a separate Word Wall posted in the classroom. Administrators would check regularly to make sure this was done. More busy work. More redundancy. More micromanagement of my classroom.
My younger colleagues simply thought that all this nonsense came with the territory. This was the job, teaching. They had no memory, ofc, because of their youth, of a time when NONE OF THIS CRAP existed.
So, my question was, “Gee, have I taken up teaching, or have I fallen into a Kafka novel? Is this instructing students, or playing the part of the ball in a Rube Goldberg machine?”
cx: I only had 185 students in my classes. 185!!!! s/b I had only 185 students in my classes.
All this is a nightmare. I have been spared most of this kind of bureaucratic crap due to the fact that World history, which I have been teaching these past 6 years, is not a tested subject in Tennessee. Otherwise I would have retired and taken up beating nails for a living.
I believe much of this kind of work comes from top-heavy administration trying to justify its existence. Test and punish, if the administration buys into the narrative, means that oversight of teachers becomes expensive and intrusive. Maybe that is the plan all along: make public schools fail by forcing teachers to spend all their time on frivolity .
One can do worse than beating nails for a living. One of the most enjoyable summers of my life was spent building porches with a friend who was a carpenter and specialized in this. It was mighty satisfying, at the end of a day, to sit on a porch I had built and have a beer or a lemonade. This experience led me to take up lutherie,as a hobby. Extremely satisfying.
I have considered taking up Lex Luthory, but there’s so little call for supervillains these days, what with the current state of the Republican Party. Call it the Trump Glut.
Bob: I know some lutherans. Martin for one.
Well said, Bob. I have mostly fond memories of my school district because we were treated like professionals. It was a smaller district with none of the lame bureaucracy that you describe. Most of the teachers were collaborative, and we mostly supported one another in our goal to do the best job we could do. Most of the administrators were supportive as well. I am fortunate to have left in the middle of NCLB so I didn’t get to see the worst of deform.
Let me be clear about this: I think that public schools are one of the glories of the Earth, and I am deeply, deeply grateful to Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris and the many others to put their shoulders to the wheel, each day, to preserve them.
cx: who put their shoulders to the wheel, each day, to preserve them
The truth is the system that is designed to serve all children will be the best And neither system does that. As an example, for those kids that return to in school learning will be 1. passed without learning 2. retained putting graduation out of site and the school to prison pipeline closer, or 3. pretend sitting time in summer school makes up for time lost. Wrong! My belief is that public school teachers are the only ones prepared to make the necessary changes. That is the only skill that makes a difference. The rest is just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic
BS ” complex reflection that identified my deficiencies…”
YOUR “deficienies”???
A nod is as good as a wink, to a blind horse.
If you somehow imagined you were in charge,
those “under” you must share your imagination,
in order to submit to your directives.
Action-reaction thing.
Do this.
Why?
Because I said so, I’m in charge.
Sez who?
I imagine the body is with the teacher, but the
teacher is not with the body. The teacher is a
social or symbolic function, not a physical thing.
A teacher is no different biologically from his
fellow men, yet he puts on a suit, sits at a
desk and assumes a symbolic position of authority.
Am I supposed to replace my imagination with your
imagination, the pretenses of control and
management?
I can see how those pretenses are working
you.
Why would I want that?
Because I said so, it’s for your own good.
How’s that working for you?