The Republican-controlled legislature in Missouri has imposed charter schools on the state’s two urban districts (but not their own). The legislature is now considering HB1552, which will financially benefit charter schools. Emily Hubbard, a parent in St. Louis, wrote to ask the Budget Committee to stop expanding and favoring charter schools and to fund the state’s public schools equitably and adequately. She sent this email to the Budget Committee, which I am posting with her permission.
Dear Budget Committee Members,
I am planning to come speak to you in person, so I will keep this email brief.
I am a parent of four children in St. Louis Public Schools. They are amazing kids who have been loved and taught well from our neighborhood elementary school to the magnet middle school my two oldest attend. With my youngest in second grade, I have another decade in SLPS, assuming that the district manages to survive.
Y’all, I am so tired of certain members of the state legislature pitting charter schools against public school districts. I am especially baffled that this bill is sponsored by someone with no charter schools in his district. Who is he representing with this bill? Because of the laws y’all or your predecessors have already made, this statewide law will only affect two cities (and maybe Normandy?), and I know you know these are the cities with the most Black kids (mine included).
My new neighborhood school (we recently moved from Rep. Aldridge’s district to the 81st) is a school that serves students who speak many different languages at home. ESOL services cost money. I don’t know if you have the time to watch this video from the October legislative committee of the Board of Education, but let me remind you that around 20% of SLPS kids do not have stable housing. That’s around 5000 children. This data is 2018-2019 (from this site) , but please look at these numbers:
all SLPS kids: 21,814
all Charter kids: 10,109
homeless population at SLPS: 4,771
homeless population at charters: 470
SLPS homeless percentage: 21.87%
charter homeless percentage: 4.65% (but some have zero, some are high as 13%, some have closed 2019)
SLPS serves a student population with disproportionately higher needs than charter schools, whether it’s through our fantastic ESOL programs; the difficult task of walking through trauma with kids (one of my daughter’s classmate’s mother was murdered over Christmas break); the cost incurred by the desegregation program which doesn’t seem to have done that much to integrate our schools (especially the neighborhood ones) and instead allows white and privileged parents the ability to cluster in the particular magnet schools and hoard their resources for the sake of their already resourced children; or the special education costs which we shoulder alone, not shared like in the county.
And then there’s the whole transportation thing–did you know that some charter schools don’t provide transportation? So you can’t really choose that school if you don’t have a safe way to get your kid to school and home again.
I don’t know anything about the education system in Kansas City, so I can’t speak to that, but please please please consider the effect that passing this bill will have on the children of St. Louis.
I am an evangelical Christian (a pastor’s wife, even), and I have seen our school be the means that does the Lord’s work: they feed the hungry, clothe the naked, take care of the orphan, minister to the foreigners within our gates, not to mention, for our family at least, providing an education that has enabled my children to grow in their faith as we take what they’ve learned at school and use it to glorify God together.
Please don’t take away from funds that enable SLPS to do the work it does, however imperfectly.
And could we just as a state, fund education at a higher rate all together? I know the rural schools are struggling too.
Also if we could alleviate homelessness, do what it takes to end gun violence, prioritize the health of all Missourians, raise the minimum wage, deal with our opioid addiction crisis…there are a ton of non-education things that if addressed, would significantly and positively affect not just our district, but all the districts. Just think about it, okay?
Thanks so much for your time–see you on Tuesday! I’m sorry that this wasn’t brief at all, I just care a whole lot.
With appreciation for the difficult work you do,
Emily Hubbard
Carondelet, St. Louis
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At the end of her letter, Mrs Hubbard gets to the heart of the matter. How and where children live impacts their ability to learn for good or ill. Taking money away from the public to hand over to non-public entities does not address the core issues that affect education. Income. Housing. Safety. These need to be addressed! How convenient it is to say, “Schools are failing.” when it is the communities that are underwater. Schools are like the headache that comes when it is the brain that has the tumor.
Amen to this!
Charters and vouchers are a ruse perpetrated by those who don’t want to address the central issues of poverty, homelessness and the rest because that would undoubtedly mean higher taxes, particularly for the wealthy.
So, they push the “cheap fix” and essentially wash their hands of the whole thing, a “solution” that they are not even paying for, since the money for charters and vouchers is being siphoned off from public schools into the coffers of charters, religious schools and even schools associated with Turkish rulers in exile.
“The Republican-controlled legislature in Missouri has imposed charter schools on the state’s two urban districts (but not their own). The legislature is now considering HB1552, which will financially benefit charter schools.”
Because why perform any work at all that benefits public schools? The entire legislative session should be solely focused on expanding, funding and promoting charter schools and private schools, unless someone submits a book banning law, in which case all works stops until that passes.
It seems a reach to continue to portray this as “work on public education” since they do no work at all on behalf of public schools or public school students, unless of course you count the book banning- yet another punishing, wholly negative ed reform mandate to pile onto public schools.
Through the statistics that Ms. Hubbard reports, she shows that charter schools in the city are doing what is common practice which is called creaming those students that have the fewest problems and the cheapest to educate. The public schools must serve those that have the greatest needs, ie. classified students, ELLs, the poorest homeless and traumatized students. This is not equity. It is inequity, particularly since charters siphon off so much funding and then expect the public schools to serve those with the greatest needs. Charters are not serving the same students as public schools, and their existence puts public schools and students under economic duress along with enhanced inequity.
Ms. Hubbard’s points are highly significant. She makes the case that public schools serve one of the most important purposes of a democratic government- to help its people regardless of national origin, race, sex, disability and religion. In doing so, she shows the readers and legislators that the lobbying efforts of the state Catholic Conferences and wealthy religious privatizers are an offense against American values, one of which is separation of church and state.
Ms. Hubbard is an individual who believes her tax dollars fund a school that does “God’s work”. The belief is a private matter. Students aren’t forced to pray to her God nor to pledge allegiance to her church’s doctrine, as is true in some Catholic schools when they alter the American pledge of allegiance.
Altered Education: the new political stance
Astute comment, Ciede
Agreed, but you have a typo in ” Altared “
Altared Education
Altared Education
Where God is just restored
To place of approbation
On altar of the Lord
Altared Education- great headline
“the difficult task of walking through trauma with kids (one of my daughter’s classmate’s mother was murdered over Christmas break)”
I saw the other day that St. Louis has the ninth-highest murder rate IN THE WORLD. Ranked just below a bunch of Mexican cities, Caracas, and Cape Town.
Baltimore comes in two slots lower, #11.
The more guns there are in a nation, the more murders by gun.
The correlation statistics compared by country make the point dramatically.
St. Louis City is not part of a county. There are way too many murders, but the crime statistic comparison is complicated by the fact that St. Louis City is its own county.
Were you to take into account St. Louis County (a completely separate political entity) and the East Side (across the Mississippi River in Illinois) are not part of figuring the murder rate for St. Louis City (no, I don’t mean the new MLS soccer team as they don’t start playing until ’23) the rate would be a lot lower. As a whole St. Louis City accounts for roughly 300,000 of 2.8M people in the metro area.
Quick question: What do Baltimore and St. Louis have in common in regards to citizens’ religious preference (You’ll love this one Linda) and I ain’t talkin bout the Brown Stockings?
Duane
I don’t study the subject of violence and religion (although, by happenstance, I came across. research from the Bureau of Prisons that found those who were not religious committed fewer crimes).
I document politicized conservative church leadership and school choice legislation and advocacy.
I’m game to hear random info., I guess. What do they have in common?
They both historically have had the highest Catholic school attendance of around 40% in the 60s/70s with it now declining to around 20%.
Prof. Blandine Chelini-Pont’s article, “Catholic Colonization of the American Right: Historical Overview”, places its hope for the future on declining support from the religious electorate. The money of rich conservative Catholics and the power of the Church are aligned with despots like Rupert Murdoch, so Chelini-Pont’s hope is ill-founded. Baltimore Fox News, “New Catholic School Opens in Baltimore as families look for stronger school outcomes (8-6-2021).
Baltimore also has one of the versions of education for the inner city
that receives funding from Walton here/Gates – the Cristo Rey school chain which is in 17 states.
heirs not here
Relative to the education sector-
In 2020, the 6 conservative Catholic Supreme Court justices gave the lobbyists who secured their positions on the Court and their moneyed patrons what they wanted. They forced taxpayers to fund religious schools (Espinosa v. Montana) and, they exempted religious schools from civil rights employment law (Biel v. St.James Catholic school).
It is heartening to see people of faith, as reflected in the posted letter, respect the government’s role and the taxpayers’ rights in education. Unfortunately, what is common in state capitols is lobbyists associated with state Catholic Conferences bragging about the siphoning off of tax funds for their religious goals.
Wow. Awesome, Ms. Hubbard!
Although some charters in St. Louis City provide bus transportation, many do not. The charter schools that do not provide bus service should not get the same funding as a traditional public school district that does.
Our VERY Public High School Students speak up and speak out for each other and the future of public education in public schools!!!
On Wednesday, thousands of students in New York City walked out of class to protest conditions and demand temporarily shutting down schools. Students are also planning a walkout this Friday in Boston, where 4,500 people have already signed a petition calling for a remote learning option. In Oakland, California, over 1,000 students signed a districtwide petition threatening to boycott classes entirely until the school district meets its demands—which include KN95 masks, increased testing, and more outdoor space for students to safely eat lunch.
And in Chicago, where in-person classes have resumed after negotiation with the local teachers union, students announced a citywide walkout for this Friday at 12:30 p.m. to bring increased attention to their demands for “physical, mental, spiritual, and structural safety.”
“We are tired of adult leadership not being able to represent the voice of the people that are affected by the shit that they’re putting into place,” Santiago De La Garza, a 16-year-old junior at Solorio Academy in Chicago who plans to participate in the walkout, told Motherboard. Garza and several organizer-friends watched Omicron cases rise and, after having flashbacks to the nightmare that was last January, formed Chi-RADS, a radical youth alliance of largely queer Black and brown youth from a multitude of high schools and neighborhoods.
On Jan. 10, Chi-RADS released a detailed proposal that includes COVID-19 relief stipends, the funding of mutual aid projects, providing every student with a personal laptop, and ensuring one full-time therapist for every 30 students, alongside implementing basic safety measures, such as N95 masks, rapid antigen tests, and an efficient contact tracing system.
“There is no blanket plan that will work for every school and every student. To try to make one would deny some group, it’s inevitable,” Chi-RADS wrote. “The schools should have their own ability to create plans that work best for their environment and their students. Every school should have a peer pod task force that makes up members of the school body, including teachers, staff, students, parents, and administration to create the school’s specific Covid Response Plan.”
“We’ve had DMs [direct messages] from people from Seattle, New York, different parts of California, from everywhere,” said Garza. “People are saying that they’re reading our letter in their classrooms, and they’re breaking it down. That is so empowering and so liberating to know that we haven’t even been formed for that long, and we’re really already making what feels like history right now.”
Dora Chan, a 17-year-old student at Brooklyn Tech, was one of the students who helped organize the walkout on Tuesday. Chan told Motherboard she estimates around 400 students participated in total at her school, and said students from at least 28 other schools participated.
Vice.com
I love the peer-pod idea. Schools need flexibility to respond to fast-changing covid stats at the bldg level. It’s not good enough to leave this solely in admin’s hands. Admin needs fast feedback from reps of the school and surrounding community to inform decisions, and to provide ammunition against pressure from mayor/ state/ whoever is trying to swing the whole pubschsys dog by the tail of politicized agenda.
p.s. and what a civics lesson for the students!
Students learn that they are commodities ripe for exploitation by profit takers when Missouri legislators approve charter schools.
When Missouri legislators approve vouchers for religious schools, they signal that they want students taught to defer to white men. The message is white men can’t compete on a level playing field. They need a handicap i.e. religion- endorsed patriarchy. If not for that, white male advancement will stall and they will fall behind other demographic segments.
Well, white men are actually worthy of special treatment because,as everyone knows, white men can’t jump.
Larry Bird was a rare bird.
Bird’s skill was in his vision of the court, the ability to see passes that no one else could imagine and then execute said pass.
One might say that Bird was Gretskyesque in that vision category.
But they can Tr… T… Tru… Sorry, can’t do it. I guess all I can write is, white men can Idiot.
But as my hometown hero, Dirk Nowitzki, proved, white men don’t have to jump.
No sweat for the glory… they own the teams.
I did my best to help Jeff Bryant round up a lot of history of what has happened to St. Louis schools……at that time we still had to worry about the bad things done during Obama’s administration….he had one of the worst secretary of education ever—-Trump’s choice would have been even worse, but she was so much of a joke—not taken seriously—-arne Duncan was, by some people. And there was the always idiotic (can’t think of his name…so I typed in “billionaire who thought he knew all about education”…..and it drew 89,000,000, the first of which was “20 Mind Blowing Facts About Billionaire Bill Gates…Jeff Bryant’s article, printed in the Washington Post….was not discussed at all in the St. Louis media.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/09/07/the-sad-story-of-public-education-in-st-louis/ Diane gave him space here, Jeff Bryant: How Are Public School Parents Like Criminals?
By dianeravitch…July 23, 2017. The guy in west Virginia is getting well deserved press coverage of the damage that can be caused by a democrat…..he is not the only one. In my memory, no one in st. louis was as much of a criminal as Mayor Slay.
Unfortunately, Robbyn Wahby, privatization of former Mayor Francis Slay, is still very involved in education privatization. Many people haven’t noticed that Lindenwood University is no longer the sponsor of the Gateway Science Academy [Gulen] charter school campuses. Robbyn Wahby and the Missouri Charter Public School Commission is the current sponsor. Gateway Science Academy campuses do not offer transportation and are in very white neighborhoods.
The mayors following Francis Slay have also been enemies of St. Louis Public School families. The current mayor would probably support the total obliteration of SLPS by merging with surrounding school districts. She attended school in a suburban district school. I believe that she sends her child to a suburban district school.