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Curtis Cardine on the Fiscal Crisis in Arizona’s Charter School Industry

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2019 //
6

Curtis Cardine, former superintendent of both public and charter schools, is the preeminent expert on charter schools in Arizona. He created the Grand Canyon Institute to study education issues, and it keeps a close eye on charter malfeasance.

Cardine has written two books that are well worth reading to learn about the failures of the charter industry in Arizona. He is an expert in school finance, and he demonstrates in detail how charter operators are ripping off the public.

The first was Carpetbagging America’s Public Schools.

I quote that book extensively in my own new book SLAYING GOLIATH.

Cardine’s second book, recently published, is Schooling Alone, in which he compares the atomization of society caused by school privatization, and likens its effects to sociologist Robert Putnam’s classic study of social disintegration, Bowling Alone.

Cardine recently prepared a review of Arizona charter school closures and their relation to the bond debt incurred by charters.

Read his letter to two Arizona state senators here.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization

Steven Singer: Speak Out Now to Reform Pennsylvania’s Charter Law

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2019 //
3

Steven Singer discovered that the Pennsylvania Department of Education invited citizens to comment on the state’s charter law.

Now is your chance to be heard.

Steven has some definite ideas about what needs to change and he tells you where to send your own comments.

He writes:

This is a huge opportunity for residents fed up with the nonsense the school privatization industry has been getting away with in the Commonwealth for decades.

Pennsylvania has one of the worst charter school laws in the nation.

Charter schools are taxpayer-funded but privately operated.

Though there are about 180 of these privatized institutions throughout the state with more than 137,000 students, that represents only about 6 percent of the kids enrolled in public school.


Yet the state funding system pits authentic public schools against charter schools for the financing needed to stay open.

Charter schools siphon money from authentic public schools serving the neediest students creating a deficit spiral. Money gushes out of public districts which have to cut teachers and programs to patch budget gaps which in turn result in even more parents pulling their children out of the public schools and trying to enroll them in charters.

Though the legislature used to help authentic public schools by reimbursing them for 30% of the charter school costs, that funding has been eliminated.

Meanwhile, the charter school law has barely changed at all since it was enacted in 1997.

Gov. Tom Wolf has promised to correct that with sweeping reforms in 2020 – even if it means bypassing the gerrymandered and gridlocked legislature with executive orders.

But before he can begin, he needs to hear from commonwealth voters.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Chicago: No New Charter Schools Apply to Open This Year: Backlash

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2019 //
12

Rahm Emanuel is gone. The boosters of privatization are out of power in Chicago. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has committed to improving the public schools that the vast majority of students attend.

No new applications to open charter schools this year in the city of Chicago.

It is a new day in Chicago, with new leadership.

Yana Kunichoff writes in Chalkbeat:

No new charter schools are applying this year to expand or open in Chicago, a sign of the shifting environment for the independently run, publicly funded schools in Chicago and at the state level.

Last summer Illinois abolished the state agency hearing appeals of charter school denials. Chicago schools, both district- and charter-run, are experiencing an ongoing drop in enrollment, leaving schools competing for fewer students. 

A charter school operator named Destiny STREAM Academy for Girls Charter School initially applied to open a new charter, focused on math and technology education for girls, but then withdrew its application. 

Chicago has more than 120 charter schools; the school district runs more than 500 schools. The number of charter school applications has diminished by half over the past three years, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. 

After more than two decades of expansion in Chicago, charter school growth has tapered off.

Last year, the district denied three new charter proposals.

In 2017, nine schools sent in proposals. One was approved, one denied, and seven schools withdrew their applications. In 2016, there were 10 submissions, one of which was incomplete, and the rest were withdrawn. 

That’s a wildly different landscape to just a few years before, when more than 16 schools threw their hat in the ring for a new charter or expansion in 2014-2015 school year (the majority later withdrew their proposals). 

The district is also recommending that two charter schools be closed: Chicago Virtual Charter School, which offers primarily online classes for elementary and high school grades, and Frazier Preparatory Academy Charter School, a K-8 school in North Lawndale that shares a building with a district-run school.

The virtual school is under investigation by the district’s Office of Inspector General and has “the lowest School Quality Rating Policy score, used to rate how schools are performing, of any charter high school, the lowest Freshman OnTrack rate, and one of the lowest graduation rates in the district,” according to the district. Last year, it received a rating of 2, the second-lowest possible. 

Chicago Virtual Charter School has held a charter with the district since 2006. The district renewed its charter in 2015 for five years. 

The district is recommending that the board revoke the Frazier Preparatory Academy charter because it hasn’t been able to get off the academic warning list, which is for schools who received a low school rating three years in a row. During the 2017-18 school year the board proposed the school’s charter be renewed for three years, with conditions. The board approved a co-location with Theodore Herzl Elementary School in 2014. 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Education Industry, Privatization

Vice: Pete Buttigieg’s Financial Relationships with Charter Advocates

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2019 //
30

Rachel Cohen writes here about the charter supporters backing Pete Buttigieg. 

Billionaire Reed Hastings held a fundraiser for Mayor Pete. Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has given millions to the California Charter Schools Association. He has said he looks forward to the day when there are no elected school boards. He likes schools run by corporate boards. He says they didn’t discuss charter schools, which is one of Hastings’ causes about which he is passionate.

Cohen writes:

Linda Lucy, who has served as the president of the South Bend teachers union since June 2018, told VICE she had never met with Pete Buttigieg, and had “nothing to add” about the union’s relationship with the mayor. “Politicians have hijacked the teaching profession in our public schools,” she said.

Buttigieg does appear to have made time for Heather Willey, one of Indiana’s top charter school lobbyists, who co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg in Indianapolis on October 4, according to an invitation obtained by VICE.

Willey served on the board of the Institute for Quality Education, an Indiana school choice advocacy group, for years, and co-chairs her law firm’s “Charter School and School Innovation” group. In 2019, the Institute for Quality Education, Teach for America Indianapolis, and Charter Schools USA, Inc., a for-profit charter company, all listed Willey’s firm, Barnes & Thornburg LLP, as a hired lobbyist. According to her professional biography, Willey “has been intimately involved in the charter school and school reform movements since the inception of the laws in Indiana in 2001.” She did not return repeated requests for comment.

In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, Buttigieg has also had fundraisers with several prominent charter school supporters.

Satya Patel, a venture capitalist who formerly worked as a vice president of product at Twitter, co-hosted an event for Buttigieg in the Bay Area in late August. Between 2007 and 2017, Patel served on the board of KIPP Bay Area Schools, part of the nation’s largest charter school network, which has received tens of millions of dollars in federal grants. He did not return requests for comment.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Indiana, Privatization

FAIR: How the Media Turn Support for Public Schools into Opposition to Children of Color

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2019 //
14

The charter industry has lobbied for years to promote the idea that public schools and their teachers and teachers unions are uniquely responsible for denying educational opportunity to children of color. Ever since the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman,” produced by billionaire charter supporter (and rightwing evangelical zealot Philip Anschutz), the charter industry has promoted the claim that supporters of public schools are hostile to children of color while they—funded by billionaires like the Waltons, the Sacklers, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and every Republican governor—claim to be champions of civil rights.

”Malarkey!” says FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).

FAIR offers a “close reading” of media bias against public schools and demonstrates how the charter industry has deceptively labeled any opposition to charters as the work of teachers’ unions, never admitting that supporters of public schools include parents, grandparents, and graduates of public schools, as well as members of the public who understand the importance of public education in a democracy.

After thirty years of charter advocacy, only 6% of American students are enrolled in them.  In the only city that is all-charter, New Orleans, the only choice that is forbidden is a public school. This decision was not the result of a vote by the citizens of New Orleans, but a decision imposed by the white Republicans who control the State Legislature. Southern white Republicans are not typically perceived as concerned about the well-being of children of color.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Media, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Valerie Strauss on New NPE Report

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2019 //
12

 

 

Valerie Strauss reviews “Still Asleep at the Wheel” here.

She begins:

“More than 35 percent of charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars, according to a new report from an advocacy group that reviewed records of nearly 5,000 schools.

“The state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

“The report, titled “Still Asleep at the Wheel,” said that 537 “ghost schools” never opened but received a total of more than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding. That was more than 11 percent of all the schools that received funding from CSP, which began giving grants in 1995.

”In Michigan, where the billionaire DeVos has been instrumental over several decades in creating a charter school sector, 72 charters that received CSP money never opened, at a total cost of some $7.7 million from 2006 to 2014. California was second, with 61 schools that failed to open but collectively received $8.36 million.
The Education Department did not respond to a query about the findings. DeVos has made expanding alternatives to school districts — including charters and programs that use public money for private and religious schools — her top priority as education secretary, and has said her metric for a state’s education success is how much they expand school “choice.”

”Casandra Ulbrich, president of the Michigan State Board of Education, said in an interview that she found the new report “extremely troubling.”


“It raises some very legitimate questions about a federal grant program that seems to have been operating for years and years with little oversight and very little accountability,” she said.”

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Network for Public Education Releases Explosive New Report on Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2019 //
14

Last spring, the Network for Public Education published a report on waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program. The report, called Asleep At the Wheel, documented the Department of Education’s failure to monitor the veracity or feasibility of applications for the program or to follow up on what happened to the money spent to launch new charter schools. It found that nearly $1 billion of federal dollars had been wasted on charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening.

Today, NPE released a new report that delves into what happened with federal money from the Charter Schools Program in the states. The findings were even more concerning than last spring’s report.
The new report is called Still Asleep At the Wheel.

An excerpt:

This report, Still Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in a Pileup of Fraud and Waste, takes up where our first report left off. In it, we provide detailed information, state by state, on how federal dollars were doled out to schools that no longer exist or never existed at all.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) published a list of charter schools that received grants between the years of 2006 and 2014. Using that database of 4,829 schools, we meticulously determined which charters that received grants were still open, which had closed and which had never opened, resulting in state by state records of enormous waste. We examine the detailed spending records of some of Michigan’s ghost charter schools that received grants exceeding $100,000. We explain how money moves into the hands of for-profit management organizations and tell the stories of subgrantees that engaged in fraud—sometimes amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars—all beginning with funding from the federal Charter Schools Program.

Major findings of our research include the following:

Documented charter school closures and the waste of federal funds exceeds our first report’s estimations.
We believed that about 1,000 recipient charters were defunct. However, using the 2015 database (active grantees from 2006-2014), we identified 1,779 grantee schools that either never opened or had shut down. The number of non-operational recipients, across 25 years of the program is inevitably in the thousands.
In the first report, we estimated the fail- ure rate for recipient schools to be 30 percent. For schools listed in the database, however, our latest review found a failure rate of 37 percent.

It is impossible to document total waste for the entire 25 year program because the Department never required the states to report the names of funded schools until 2006. However, we have now documented $504,517,391 (28 percent of the total database amount) that was awarded to schools between 2006-2014 that never opened or that have closed. Applying that percentage to the total expenditures ($4.1 billion) of the CSP programs designed to create new schools, approximately $1.17 billion in federal funding has likely been spent on charters that either never opened, or that opened and have since shut down.

The disbursement of over one billion dollars during the program’s first decade was never monitored for its impact or results. There is no record of which schools received the funds.

From 1995 to 2005, enormous funds were pushed out to the states to distribute to schools via subgrants. Yet the Department has no complete record of which schools re- ceived funding during the program’s early years, because it never required the states to report the names of subgrantee schools or their status. The Department’s over- sight ended when the funds left Washington.

During the first decade of the program when states did not have to report where the money went, Florida, a state where nearly half of all charter schools are run by for-profit organizations, received four grants totaling $158,353,525. Michigan, where about 80 percent of all charters are run by for-profit management companies, received four grants totaling $64,608,912. California also received four grants, totaling $190,857,243.
Although the overall rate of failed charter projects was 37 percent, in some states the rate of failure was much higher.

Iowa and Kansas have the largest propor- tions of failed subgrantee charter schools. Eleven charter schools in Iowa received grants. Ten failed, wasting over $3.66 million. As of 2014, the database indicates that Kansas doled out $8.51 million to 29 schools. Twenty-two (76 percent) of those schools either never opened or are closed today–$6,389,964 of the $8.9 million was wasted.

States with a subgrantee failure rate exceeding 50 percent include: Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia and Washington (state). Mississippi had only one grantee and that school failed. Georgia had 75 failures, resulting in over 23 million federal dollars wasted.

The percentage of defunct charter school grantees in Florida was 37 percent ($34.2 million); the Michigan failure rate was over 44 percent ($21 million) and Lou- Asian’s failure rate was 46 percent ($25.5 million).
The most astounding loss, however, was California’s: nearly $103 million was awarded to charters that never opened or have shut down—37% failed.

Five hundred thirty-seven (537) schools list- ed in the database never opened at all. Many received over $100,000 in federal funds.

Since 2001, charter school entrepreneurs have been eligible to receive CSP grants before they have even identified an authorizer or submitted a detailed application to open a school. In total, we identified 28 states that had at least one charter school (537 schools in total) that never enrolled even one student for one day and yet had received federal funds. According to the CSP database, those schools received, or were due to receive when the database collection ended, a total of $45,546,552 million.

Topping the list was the state of Michigan where 72 never-opened schools received grants, most exceeding $100,000. Over $7.7 million was wasted. In California, we identified 61—with waste of $8.36 million.
Other states with large numbers of never- opened schools receiving CSP funds in- clude Arkansas (18), Florida (46) Illinois (20), Maryland (38), Massachusetts (17), New Jersey (23), Ohio (20), Oregon (40), Pennsylvania (41), South Carolina (34), Tennessee (43) and Wisconsin (15).

This report provides details on how several of these never-opened charters in Mi- chigan spent those federal funds.

Although Congress forbids for-profit opera- tors from directly receiving CSP grants, they still benefit by having their schools apply.

Although we could not identify every charter in the CSP database that was run by a for-profit management company, we were able to identify those run by the large for-profit chains including Academica, K12, National Heritage Academies, White Hat and Charter Schools USA. In total, we found 357 schools in the database run by major for-profit chains. These schools had received a total of $124,929,017 in federal CSP start-up funds. Unsurprisingly, most of this money flowed to for-profit run schools in Florida ($46,936,979) and Michigan ($26,452,927). Eighty-three (83) schools run by the Flor- ida-based, for-profit chain Academica received CSP grants, totaling $23,426,383.


Still Asleep at the Wheel also describes why so many charter schools fail, along with the stories of grantee schools that abruptly closed, sometimes with little or no notice to their students and families. Far too often those schools shut down due to corruption and fraud. Our report provides disturbing accounts of grifters and profiteers who took CSP and other taxpayer funds only to enrich themselves at the expense of the students they had promised to serve.

The staggering amount spent on schools that have closed or never opened, as well as those that have engaged in fraud, is nothing short of a national scandal. As public dollars are diverted from public schools, the students who attend their neighborhood schools have fewer resources. It is time to put on the brakes and chart a new course.

We were heartened that after the publication of our first report in March of 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives reduced funding for the CSP program for 2020. However, a small reduction is not sufficient to address the program’s structural flaws.

We therefore strongly recommend that Congress end appropriations for new charter school grants in the upcoming budget and continue funding only for obligated amounts to legitimate projects. Once those grants have been closed, we recommend that the CSP be ended and that charter schools continue to receive federal support only through other federal funding streams such as Title I and IDEA. Students, not charter school en- trepreneurs, should benefit from federal funds.

We also recommend thorough audits by Congress of previous grant awards, the establishment of regulations to ensure grant awards still under term are being responsibly carried out and that misspent money is returned to the federal coffers.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Rhode Island: State Commissioner Approves Renewal of Failing Charter School

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2019 //
10

The state commissioner of Rhode Island has recommended a five-year renewal for a failing charter school.

The New England Laborers Construction and Career Academy has earned a one-star rating, the lowest possible ranking in the state’s school accountability system, for the past two years. Critics have long complained that charter schools are not held to the same standards as traditional public schools.

CRANSTON — The commissioner of education has recommended a five-year renewal for a charter school despite at least four years of failing academic achievement, low graduation rates and a poor track record for placing graduates in construction jobs.

The New England Laborers Construction and Career Academy, a statewide charter that draws mostly from Cranston, opened in 2002 to create a pathway for high school students interested in construction careers. It also offers a separate career strand called the World of Work, which allows students to explore other career options. The current enrollment is 175 students…

The laborers academy has earned a one-star rating, the lowest possible ranking in the state’s school accountability system, for the past two years. For the previous two years, it was listed as a “focus” school, meaning its performance merited substantial help from the Education Department.

Laborers academy students also performed poorly on the latest SATs, with less than 16% proficient in English and 0% proficient in math.

In 2018, not one student earned a state-approved credential for the construction industry.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Rhode Island

Peter Greene: Who Ripped Off the Public Schools in the Chester-Upland District in Pennsylvania?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2019 //
10

Is Chester-Upland School District the frog in the boiling pot of water that is a warning to every other school district in the state of Pennsylvania?

The Chester Community Charter School is a subject of endless fascination. It has absorbed 70% of the elementary school students in the impoverished district of Chester-Upland in Pennsylvania. Its scores are low, lower even than the district schools. It is owned by an extremely wealthy suburban lawyer, who is a major campaign contributor to Republicans in the state. He receives a healthy profit every year from the charter school in Chester-Upland, despite the fact that the school is low-performing. Meanwhile, the school district has been in receivership since 2012, while the charter school is thriving. The district has been bankrupted by payments to the charter school and to cyber charters. That is the way the state law was written by charter-friendly Republicans in the Legislature.

The Chester-Upland School District is a majority-minority district: It is 18% white; 67% African American; 11% Hispanic; the remainder, other groups.

Peter Greene writes here about this district.

The school district is Chester Uplands, and they’ve been in the charter-related news before. Specifically, they were the poster child for how a careful gaming of the charter system in Pennsylvania could result in huge charter profits. As I wrote at the time:

The key is that while all CUSD students with special needs come with a hefty $40K for a charter school, they are not all created equal. Students on the autism spectrum are expensive to teach; they make up 8.4% of CUSD special ed student population, but only 2.1% at Chester Community Charter School, and a whopping 0% at Widener and Chester Community School of the Arts. Emotionally disturbed students are also costly; they make up 13.6 % of special ed at CUSD, 5.3% at Chester Community, and zero at the other two. Intellectual disabilities make up 11.6% for CUSD, 2.8% for CCCS, and zero for the others. 

Speech and language impaired, however, are pretty inexpensive to educate. CUSD carries 2.4% of the special ed population in this category, but the three charters carry 27.4%, 20.3% and 29.8%.

Back in 2015, this helped put CUSD in the astonishing position of giving more money to charter schools than it received from the state.

In 2015, the district made a deal to cut its payments to cyber charters (which are among the lowest performing schools in the state).

Greene writes:

In 2015 the district made a deal for charters to accept less money for students with special needs, but the cyber charters went to court to be exempted– and the court eventually agreed, giving CUSD a huge retroactive bill to pay cyber charters.

The district has long been attractive to worst of charter vultures. Not just the cybers, but for-profit management companies like CSMI, founded by the infamous Vahan Gureghian, charter school multimillionaire and generous GOP donor.

Currently, charters enroll about half of the 7,000 student district population. CSMI would like to have a larger piece of the pie and run all of the elementary education in Chester Uplands, and it has asked the court to hand them over (because the district itself has no say in this). CSMI runs some charters elsewhere, including a school in New Jersey that is the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit. The suit was filed by a former principal who says she was fired for making a fuss over CSMI’s policy of cutting corners to make a buck. Cutting corners didn’t just mean cutting services; it also meant falsifying records and misappropriating funds. Great company.

Open the post to see beautiful pictures of the charter owner’s gorgeous estate in Pennsylvania and his recently sold mansion in Palm Beach.

The lesson, says Greene, is that there is no real difference between for-profit and nonprofit charters. The Chester Community Charter School is “nonprofit.”

It is unclear how much money CSMI would make on the Chester Uplands deal because, as a private business, it doesn’t have to account for its financial activities– even though they are funded by trhe taxpayers. Do you see why, when someone like Cory Booker or Pete Buttigieg starts talking about how only for-profit charters are bad, they are just selling thinly sliced baloney. Chester Community Charter School is a non-profit school–that generates profits for the CSMI management company that runs it, and runs it like a business and not like a school.

The Inquirer quoted the CUSD school board president–his primary concern isn’t the charter takeover of the elementary schools as much as it is the inadequate funding from the state. “Ask them what they have done for 25 years in Chester Upland.” He has sort of a point, but the fact is that this non-weathy non-white district is in danger of losing all local control and voice.

This is what chartering as a tool of privatization looks like. Gut the public schools. Chase the students into profitable charters. Strip every last asset from the public school and strip all the power from the voters and taxpayers. Operate charters like businesses; every dollar you spend on students is a dollar you don’t get to keep. Make some guy a multimillionaire while stripping public education and democratic voice from the members of a poor community.

This chart comparing the charter school to the district’s four elementary and middle-schools was prepared by the Keystone State Education Coalition.

This chart summarizes the PA Dept. of Education’s Future Ready Index reports for the Chester Community Charter School (CCCS) and the four Chester Upland School District elementary/middle schools.

 

Indicator Name CCCS Main Street Stetser Sch of Arts Toby Farms
Percent Proficient or Advanced on ELA/Literature (All Student) 16.3 31 52.3 18.2 12.5
Percent Proficient or Advanced on Mathematics/Algebra 1 (All Student) 6.4 7.6 13.8 10.2 2.3
Percent Proficient or Advanced on Science/Biology (All Student) 22.8 36.7 59.5 59.6 13.7
Meeting Annual Academic Growth Expectations (PVAAS) ELA/Literature (All Student) 63 78 94 76 50
Meeting Annual Academic Growth Expectations (PVAAS) Mathematics/Algebra 1 (All Student) 78 100 77 81 54
Meeting Annual Academic Growth Expectations (PVAAS) Science/Biology (All Student) 50 69 70 97 50
Percent Advanced on ELA/Literature (All Student) 1.2 1.9 15.6 1.2 0.6
Percent Advanced on Mathematics/Algebra 1 (All Student) 1 0 1.8 3 0.6
Percent Advanced on Science/Biology (All Student) 2.8 8.3 16.2 7.7 0.9
Percent  English Language Growth and Attainment (All Student) 22.9 IS IS IS IS
Percent of Students with Regular Attendance (All Student) 48.7 59.2 59.8 53.4 42.1
Percent Grade 3 Reading (All Student) 14.5 24.4 37 20.7  DNA
Percent Grade 7 Mathematics (All Student) 6  DNA  DNA  DNA 1.7
Percent Grade 5, Grade 8, and/or Grade 11 Career Standards Benchmark (All Student) 98 98 98 98 98

Lawrence A. Feinberg of the Keystone State Education Coalition writes:

Flooding from Katrina precipitated the charterization of NOLA schools. Will a historical flood of campaign contributions do the same for Chester Upland SD? PA Department of Education Future Ready Index reports show that 3 of the 4 Chester Upland school district’s elementary/middle schools are outperforming the Chester Community Charter School. Why would the charter school operator want to charterize all the elementary schools in the district? There is no Right-to-Know requirement for private charter management companies like Vahan Gureghian’s CSMI, but the 990 for Chester Community Charter School for last year alone lists $18 million in management fees.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Valerie Strauss Reviews Pete Buttigieg’s Education Plan

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2019 //
38

The media received early copies of Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s plan for K-12 education. Like Warren and Sanders, he proposes a large increase in funding for the neediest children and for early education. He wants to see a reduction in college tuition. He does not propose a wealth tax on the 1%. He is against for-profit charters but, unlike Warren and Sanders, would not eliminate or freeze the federal Charter Schools Program, which currently dispenses $440 million a year, mostly to big corporate chains like KIPP and IDEA.

Mayor Pete’s plan is a centrist program, which could have been drafted by the Center for American Progress, the think tank for the Obama administration.

Valerie Strauss describes the plan here.

She writes:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is unveiling a broad new education plan on Saturday that pledges to spend $700 billion over a decade to create a high-quality child care and preschool system that he said would reach all children from birth to age 5 and create 1 million jobs.

The 37-year-old, openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., also promised to spend $425 billion to strengthen America’s K-12 public schools, targeting federal investments and policy to help historically marginalized students. He would boost funding for schools in high-poverty areas as well as for students with disabilities, and promote voluntary school integration. And he said he would ensure that all charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — undergo the same accountability measures as schools in publicly funded districts…The more than $1 trillion in his plan would be spent over 10 years and would come from “greater tax enforcement” on the wealthy and corporations, according to a Buttigieg campaign spokesperson, who asked not to be identified. He would not impose a new tax on the super-rich, the spokesperson said, who did not detail how much money the mayor believes he can realize from uncollected taxes…

Buttigieg’s new education plan details a push to help communities integrate their schools racially and economically, which research shows is beneficial to black and white students. The mayor pledged to invest $500 million into communities that want to undertake integration efforts. And he said he would reinstate Obama era guidance on the voluntary use of race in state- and district-level strategies to achieve integration, removing current restrictions on the use of federal funds to pay for busing that would be part of integration efforts.

He also pledged triple funding for Title I — the largest federally funded educational program, intended to help schools with high concentrations of students who live in poverty. But that added funding would be targeted to states and districts that “implement equitable education funding formulas to provide more state and local resources to low-income schools….”

Both Sanders and Warren have called for free college tuition for all, while the mayor’s recently released higher education and workforce development plan calls for lowering college tuition and fees on a sliding scale, with free college for those students whose families early up to $100,000. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has topped the polls more consistently than any of the other candidates, has also taken education positions less expansive than Warren and Sanders.

Buttigieg’s big initiative in this plan is around early childhood, for which he has pledged to spend $700 million to create a new system to provide child care and prekindergarten to all children, which he said is more than 20 million, and that would create 1 million new jobs in that sector.

For additional insight on Mayor Pete’s plan, read Matt Barnum and Kalyn Belsha’s account here in Chalkbeat. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Early Childhood Education, Funding, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt
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