A team of reporters from ProPublica learned that almost anyone can get approved to open a new private school, regardless of their experience and background. They found out by doing it themselves.
This story encapsulates the downward slide of American education since the first charter school opened in 1992 in Wisconsin. In pursuit of innovation or deregulation or whatever, many states have gone too far, to the point where anyone can open a school. Anyone can teach. No accountability. In Arkansas, the reporters needed only to fill out a form on the Internet, pay $45, and buy an American flag. That’s all! They had their own school and were eligible to get public money from the state voucher program. After January 1, their “school” would qualify for federal voucher money too!
They wrote:
We have no business running a private school.
We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either.
Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.
In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.
We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.
And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.
We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.
And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.
For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.
This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.
Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.
All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?
Open their graphic to see which nine states allow anyone to open a school with no curriculum, no standards, no testing, no experience.
This is frightening. The folks who support vouchers and private schools are the same ones that complain about lowering standards and incompetent teachers.
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We are so doomed as a once great country, now in decline, due of the end of a great public education system. The free, local, egalitarian education system which allowed our country to thrive & turn out so many incredible people who helped create the best economy in history has become a free-for-all. Now, with the fragmentation of our education system, it allows insane things like what is exposed in this article. Charters can teach whatever they want, religious schools can teach that the earth is 6000 years old, home schoolers can teach whatever belief system the parents hold. Oy vey…..I’m not too optimistic about our long term future! Maybe AI will be able to solve all of our problems from now on.
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The U.S. public education system isn’t dead yet.
Researchers Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein analyzed data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). They argued that the raw, middling U.S. average score is heavily skewed because the U.S. has a significantly higher proportion of low-income, disadvantaged students than other post-industrial nations.
he EPI study found that when you break down performance by socioeconomically similar cohorts, disadvantaged U.S. students outperformed or matched their socioeconomic peers in similar wealthy countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom in reading, while performing comparably in mathematics.
Poor ranking on international tests misleading about U.S. performance, new report finds | Stanford Graduate School of Education
U.S. student scores rise in international assessment | American Federation of Teachers
RECENT REPORTS
U.S. students beat international averages in science and reading, new study finds
US Educational Achievement on International Assessments | RTI
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Including the science of reading suggest that the experts have bought into a misguided narrative.
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I agree. While SOR may be wasteful for some students, at least it will not be harmful. As a certified reading teacher I know there are many effective ways to teach phonics, but all students must be able to apply phonics in order to decode effectively.
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I agree. I prefer to see more evidence about SOR before calling it “effective”
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We have gone back to the future. When my father’s first cousin wanted to be a doctor in 1895, he “read medicine with professor Williams.” Luckily, he became a good medical contributor, eventually working on the RH factor research at Baylor. He could just as easily become a quack, common in that day.
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