West Virginia recently passed a charter school law, breaking its promise to the state’s teachers. A new board was created to authorize charters. That board just approved two for-profit online charter schools. One is run by K12 Inc., which changed its name to Stride. The other will be run by Ron Packard’s Accel, which operates low-performing charters in Ohio. Packard was the first CEO of K12 Inc., where he was paid $5 million a year.
Online charters are known for low academic performance, low graduation rates, and high attrition. A study by CREDO found that students in online charter schools learn almost nothing.
While findings vary for each student, the results in CREDO’s report show that the majority of online charter students had far weaker academic growth in both math and reading compared to their traditional public school peers. To conceptualize this shortfall, it would equate to a student losing 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math, based on a 180-day school year. This pattern of weaker growth remained consistent across racial-ethnic subpopulations and students in poverty.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ed reform echo chamber met to discuss “unbundling education” which is just their newest marketing term for universal vouchers:
“Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush opened the summit by stating the continued need to reimagine education. One of the topics he discussed was unbundling the current systems of public, private and charter schools and re-bundling them through the eyes of the parents.
Toward that end, four school choice advocates led the summit on unbundling: Patricia Levesque, CEO of ExcelinED, which hosted the summit, Bernita Bradley, Midwest regional advocate, National Parents Union, and founder of Engaged Detroit, a homeschool co-op, Representative Wendy Horman of Idaho, and Juliet Squire, partner, policy & innovation, Bellwether Education Partners.”
We’ll be able to watch the coordinated roll out in the coming months. There won’t be any dissent or real analysis. Once Jeb Bush weighs in it’s a done deal.
It’s been amazing to watch how quickly the entire ed reform echo chamber have adopted vouchers (lockstep, as usual) and how the vouchers are already expanding to include unregulated public funding of any and all educational products.
Remember back when this started and we were all told they weren’t abolishing public schools and privatizing the whole K-12 sector? Now they all openly embrace complete privatization.
They invite 4 people who are employed full time lobbying for privatization of education, and no public school advocates are invited. How is this even a debate?
https://www.reimaginedonline.org/2021/11/reimagining-education-at-excelined-national-summit/
Unbundling is the right wing causing death by a thousand cuts.
“Voucher” promotion- about the time the billionaires recognized they would need conservative religious to convince state legislators to enact school choice.
I think we found out where the ed reform echo chamber were on for profit charters when they all lobbied for federal funding of any and all for profit charters.
Their committment to “non profit” is about as phony as their committment to “public” was. They dropped “public” first and now they’re also dropping “nonprofit”
They promote and market for profit charters to the exact extent they promote and market any school with “charter” in the name, so constantly.
Ed reform is big business. There’s an entire well-compensated constellation of lawyers and accountants and consultants around the charter sector in Ohio. The schools don’t technically employ all these adults so they aren’t included in the “charter analysis” ed reform churns out, but it’s a huge group of people who are paid from public school funding.
Online For-Profits = good cash cows for legislawhores campaign coffers
sorry … legislawhores’
They stacked the charter review board with charter cheerleaders.
This is their “governance plan”. The same people who promote charters are now solely in charge of regulation and oversight.
This is how they’re “reinventing government”. They put the fox in charge of the henhouse.
The ‘charteristias’ prevail by stacking the deck with charter cheerleaders.
Here’s a typical ed reform article:
https://www.the74million.org/article/wise-a-covid-constituency-of-parents-teachers-voters-wants-learning-loss-addressed-personalized-education-is-1-of-the-answers/
The author of the article promotes ed tech for a living as a consultant. Unsuprisingly perhaps, his agenda for public schools after covid involves lots and lots and lots of ed tech.
This is presented as information. It’s a sales pitch. Why not just sell ed tech and stop presenting this as some kind of contribution to “public education policy”?
It’s a bunch of products. Public schools can either buy them or not, but if they do buy them I hope they aren’t relying on the ed reform chamber for information- this is sales and marketing.
Sometimes the extent of the ed reform echo chamber is genuinely funny.
Here’s an article promoting Democrats for Education Reform that consists entirely of polling conducted by Michael Bloomberg’s daughter’s ed reform echo chamber org, to “prove” that the public wants the ed reform agenda.
Well, I’m convinced! What better validation of the ed reform agenda could anyone ask for than one conducted exclusively by other ed reform echo chamber members!
There’s even one layer beneath that. Michael Bloomberg then funds the ed reform orgs and hires all the ed reformers, who then promote the work of Emma Bloomberg and also Democrats for Education Reform.
There could really only be ONE ed reform organization. They could meld the entire echo chamber into one big org and no one would be able to tell the difference.
Here’s the DFER and Bloomberg collaboration:
https://dfer.org/press/poll-confirms-education-motivating-issue-for-va-voters-in-2021-election-likely-to-be-major-factor-in-midterms/
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
“Online charters are known for low academic performance, low graduation rates, and high attrition. A study by CREDO found that students in online charter schools learn almost nothing.”
Knowing that, why did West Virginia approve two of these publicly funded (that means the taxes people pay to support public schools) for-profit, online charter schools?
West Virginia is a solid RED state except for Purple Joe Manchin, (a hybrid Democrat-Republican), and he isn’t in the state legislature. Manchin is one of the state’s two U.S. Senators who is helping to block Build Back Better. The other Purple Democrat is another corporate, bought, and paid for senator from Arizona.
Odd that West VA, with its history of labor strife and poverty is a RED state. The Governor was elected as a Democrat, then switched to Republican with Trump at his side. Governor Jim Justice is a billionaire.
I don’t claim to be an expert on W. VA, having only driven through the state on a few occasions. It was never a destination. But I did grow up in the South and mostly Louisiana, so I feel like I know something about “red,” poor, and ignorant states. Politics in those areas have never been aspirational, they are built on resentments and making “the other” doesn’t get ahead of me, even if it hinders me. That is now the prevailing trend among almost 50% of the American population.
More charters will be supported unless we fight for systemic change. To show the need for this just ask yourself one question. For those returning to in school learning lagging behind, what grade are they in? Do we pass them without learning , do we retain them as the first step to the school to prison pipeline or do we give them sitting time in summer school and pretend they learned.
I will wait for an answer as to how we do that in the current system.
The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math compared to genuine public schools; yet online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars.
The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate charter school operators that the IG investigation declared that: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals” because of financial fraud and their hidden ways for skimming of tax money into private pockets.
There is NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because they fail to pass the minimum test for being genuine public schools: They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
The racial resegregation of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.”
The catch-phrase “school choice” that propels the charter school industry was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. Public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians.
The lawsuit by parents to stop these charters really should be a slam dunk. The state constitution says voters have a say in the running of their publicly funded schools, and the charters were approved by a newly created, unelected charter approval board. A private oversight board should have no authority to oversee. The state legislature made an unethical power grab, plain and simple. Two of the five appointed board members apparently understood that and resigned or fled ahead of the vote. It’s almost comical.
Apropos of nothing, I just picked up my phone, and there to greet me, first thing, was this message:
Top Beauty Picks for You!
These algorithms know me so well.
Oh, and charters, ughhh
I don’t wear any jewelry. My phone gives me ads for jewelry.
I once did a single post on Facebook in which I used a Russian word. For months thereafter, I got ads for vodka, caviar, sports cars, and silicone Barbies in bikinis whom I just had to meet. Often in Russian. LOL.
Because the failures of ECOT in Ohio were just a mistake or misunderstanding of some sort. Surely they can’t be that stupid and corrupt in W Va? Of course they can and are. Throwing a few kids under the bus (by ignoring debacles like ECOT and the horrors of remote learning during the pandemic) must seem like a small price to pay to advance the war on public education.