Archives for category: Charter Schools

Angie Sullivan teaches first grade in a Title 1 school in Clark County (Las Vegas) with large numbers of English learners.

She sends her missives to legislators and journalists in Nevada.

ASD is the all-charter district modeled on Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District. A complete and total failure that Nevada copies.

Angie writes:


We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

__________________

ASD Rebecca holds her annual school grab.

She does not know what she is doing. Do not allow her or Jana to take your school.

Parents may have say in future of Clark County’s failing schools

Parents in Vegas can convert their neighborhood public school into a charter? And that has worked where?

Every successful white person Vegas charter – is sitting next to a successful white person public school. All in white neighborhoods full of five star “choices”. Successful Nevada charters are white. They support segregation and white flight.

The place folks need a real choice – charters do not work.

Get ready Vegas Parents to fight for your school. Our community will not be served by white folks in a white charters. Nor they will be served by young white folks imported into Nevada to do the takeover job.

For profit charters and corporate takeover is a scam.

Non-profit ASD is defunct. Futuro stinks. Agassi stinks. Do not go into that crap. ASD is now the worst district in Nevada. It used to be Nevada Charters were the lowest performers but now it is this new piece of garbage with 100% failure.

Where is the ASD data?

Is the ASD built to hide data?

Everyone involved needs to demand accountability for this new disfunction NVDOE is using to grab schools.

_______________________________

We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

_______________________________

Look at the list closely attached to the bottom of this file.

Keep in mind that Vegas has 349 schools. 39 are struggling – they seem to all be in minority impoverished areas of town. Most serve language learners who research has shown need several years to learn academic English. Not difficult to figure out how to fix a money and support problem. Those schools need money and support. Lower class sizes and supplies.

NVDOE and the ASD will try to grab CCSD schools.

They do not know our students.

They do not love our students.

They will not serve our students.

They will grab schools listed because parents will not be informed.

Spread the word – no to ASD charters.

If they want to give a school money to improve – with research based best practice – great.

Turning any Vegas school into a charter is a scam.

If ASD Rebecca wants to come into your school and show a crappy charter video – tell her to hit the road.

We already know how to read a science book to kids or plug students into the computer. That is not teaching or effective.

Privatization is not education.

___________

We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

__________________

Every year I get angry that our community is targeted while the rest of the state flounders. NVDOE – do your job. You have plenty to grab. Go to these white areas and get it done.

Look at Elko. 100% of its schools are in severe failure. What is happening there? Those schools are along the Carlin Trend and heavily susidized by mining proceeds in a primarily white English speaking area. What is going on?

Look at Washoe which has pages on that list. A heavy heavy percentage of those schools are struggling – with more per pupil than Vegas. And again largely English speaking and middle class areas. What is going on?

Rural Nevada is sinking. When a school fails in a small town – it may be the only school in town. Better address those first. Charter “competition” kills the public schools and does not help small towns. It leaves expensive and hard to educate special education students in public schools and allows “choice” to everyone else.

Again the NV Charter schools are sinking. These schools serve white flight families. They are failing. Severely. That data which at least includes more of their 80+ campuses – is bad – extremely bad considering there are 24 charters and a large chunk are the lowest performers – again. Every year. Again.

It is not Vegas that is the high priority problem.

Folks who are brown do not want to be a target.

This has to stop.

Did not work in New Orleans.

Did not work in Tennessee.

Is not working in Nevada.

How many students have to be hurt to stop this ASD madness?

________________

We want MAGNETS – not disfunctional white flight charters.

Get away ASD.

The Teacher,

Gary Rubinstein reports that the latest Tennessee school rankings were just released. Now we know. The Tennessee Achievement School District was a complete and total failure. $100 million down the drain, which came from Race to the Top funding. The same money might have been used to reduce class sizes in these schools. Instead, it was used to induce charter operators to come to Tennessee and work their magic. It failed.

Would someone tell Bill Gates, John Arnold, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the other billionaires who are still spreading the phony claim of charter miracles?

Spread the word to states like Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, which created their own “achievement school districts” based on the Tennessee model.

Seven years ago, as part of Tennessee’s Race To The Top plan, they launched The Achievement School District (ASD). With a price tag of over $100 million, their mission was to take schools that were in the bottom 5% of schools and, within five years, raise them into the top 25%.

They started with six schools and three years into the experiment, Chris Barbic, the superintendent of the ASD had a ‘mission accomplished’ moment where he declared in an interview that three of those six schools were on track to meet that goal.

But a year later, the gains that led to that prediction had disappeared and it wasn’t looking good for any of those six schools. By the time the five year mark had been reached, in the Fall of 2016, Chris Barbic had already resigned and taken a job with the John Arnold Foundation.

The thing about 2016, though, is that whether or not the ASD schools met the lofty goal could not be determined, officially. Tennessee releases their official ‘priority’ list of the bottom 5% schools every three years. And, conveniently enough, the last one was in 2015. So even though it was clear in 2016 that the original 6 ASD schools would not be in the top 25%, an even more important question — how many of those schools remained in the bottom 5%? — would not be known officially for two more years, in the Fall of 2018.

A few days ago, Tennessee finally released the long-awaited 2018 priority schools list, and for the ASD, the results were decisive and devastating.

Charter operators don’t get rich on tuition, although many have a business model that relies on cost-cutting, low-wage teachers, TFA, and replacing human teachers with technology. Those wonderful computers don’t expect health or pensions. When they break, you can repair them or discard them.

The big bucks are in real estate!

ESJ properties
https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/08/04/aventura-firm-makes-45m-addition-to-its-portfolio-of-school-properties/

It is traded as EPR properties (Entertainment properties in the graph you show

Investing in Enduring Experiences

And they also own the BASIS schools.
https://insightcenter.eprkc.com/basis-schools/

In Arizona, if the school goes under, they get to keep the property, even though the taxpayers have paid for it.

And look at this
https://insightcenter.eprkc.com/education/

This is what is known as “legal graft.”

It is a theft of public assets.

In plain sight.

The bond industry issued warnings against charter schools, because they endanger the financial ratings of school districts and cities.

Mercedes Schneider: Municipal Analysts Call for Charter Financial Transparency

Municipal Analysts Ask Whether Charter Schools Make the Grade

Moody’s: Charters Pose Serious Risk to Struggling Cities

Long, long ago, almost everyone went to the neighborhood public school. The school had a principal, who was overseen by the superintendent. The superintendent answered to a local school board. Those were not idyllic times, to be sure, but no one ever imagined that there was profit to be found in the public schools, or that the public schools would one day be part of “the education industry.” All that is changed now. There are still neighborhood public schools, but now there is an industry that relies on entrepreneurs and market forces. You don’t have to be an educator to manage or operate or start a charter school (think tennis star Andre Agassi or football hero Deion Sanders). There are tax breaks for investors in charter schools. Charter school properties are bought and sold, like franchises or just ordinary real estate. They have no organic connection to the local community. The profit for entrepreneurs is to be found in the real estate transactions.

A recent real estate deal brought this change into focus. There is a buyer and a seller; there are investors. There is return on investment. The world has changed. The charter industry has profits and losses. They open and close. It is not about education. It is a business.

school

[more intro]

A $45 million charter deal suggests profits on the horizon

Graduation mortar board cap on one hundred dollar bills concept
August 09, 2018(Fla.) A private real estate fund, which boasts of pioneering big money investments in charter school properties, announced this week a $45 million deal to buy four schools in three states.

ESJ Capital Partners, based in the Miami area, added the schools to a portfolio that includes a number of more traditional investments, including apartment buildings, medical offices and tourist attractions.

But the firm also owns 28 charter school properties that they say are valued at more than $650 million.

The firm promises to “provide optimum returns for our investors through disciplined procedures, selective investment criteria and structured processes,” according to their website.

Although for-profit investment in charter schools accounts for only a small slice of the movement nationally, there are examples of commercial enterprise within the system.

In some instances, a lender might be able to take advantage of a tax break because of their investment in a school that is located in an economically challenged neighborhood. In other cases, an investor might be interested in the consistent, government-back rent that charters can pay.

There is probably far more invested by a handful  of very wealthy patrons of charters, who view the movement has providing a much needed competition to traditional public schools.

Whether driven by profits or politics, the growing availability of financial support for charters is much needed, supporters say.

In comparison to traditional public schools, charters have much more difficulty borrowing money. The banking community has traditionally viewed charters operators has carrying far more risk of insolvency than traditional public schools.

Charters in most states must also pay for school improvements or new construction out of operating budgets.

A number of big philanthropic organizations have stepped in to improve the fiscal landscape for charter facilities.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has been very active in the Los Angeles area, as has the Gates Foundation in Washington State.

Earlier this year, the Walton Family Foundation—led by the heirs of Walmart founder—announced the creation of two nonprofit entities to help finance the cost of building and maintaining new charter schools. Combined, the investment from the foundation is expected to be close to $300 million.

But there apparently is also money to be made too.

In 2016, ESJ sold five Florida charter schools for $72 million to Charter School Capital, a financial services company specializing in charter schools. The partners did provide the purchase price of the schools.

The partnership’s latest acquisition are schools located in in the Phoenix area, Washington D.C. and Toledo, Ohio.

All of them are operated by Virginia-based, Imagine Schools.

ESJ reportedly has $100 million invested in properties operated by Imagine Schools.

“The Imagine campuses that we just acquired have been open over 13 years and are thriving financially and academically, with consistent high enrollment,” Matthew Fuller, chief investment officer of ESJ, said in a statement.

According to a release from the partnership in announcing the 2016 transaction, ESJ was one of the first investment groups nationally to see the potential in charter schools.

“At the height of the Great Recession, ESJ identified a niche in developing charter schools as an alternative to their traditional commercial investments,” the release said. “The real estate asset management group predicted this asset type would evolve and scale into a mainstream, single tenant investment category, attracting more institutional investors, lenders and bondholders.”

…read more

Mercedes Schneider will lead a workshop at the Network for Public Education conference in Indianapolis on Oct 20-21 about how to be a financial sleuth. Find out who is funding the “rephormers” in your state or community.

In this post, she gives a lesson and unmasks TFA’s drive for political power.

Teach for America presents itself as a wholesome charity and raises money to send fresh-faced, inexperienced young college graduates into needy schools. At its inception, it was supposed to fill vacant positions, but now TFA will cheerfully replace experienced teachers for districts trying to save money. TFA is also the labor force for non-union charter schools (i.e. scabs), with the energy to work 70-hour Weeks and no family obligations.

TFA has a political arm, which is not so well known. It is called Leaders for Educational Equity (LEE),which is deceptively named, like all rephorm groups (which swear they are in this business “for the kids,” for “equity,” to ”close achievement gaps,” etc.).

Schneider investigated the funding behind LEE. You will not be surprised to learn it is the usual billionaires.

“According to the LEE site, LEE membership is free to all TFAers. And why not? The purpose of TFA and its related orgs is to catapult those who taught for five minutes into positions of power and authority over the American classroom.

“Such catapulting requires loads of money– which brings us to those financially-loaded, Leaders in Education PAC donors:

“The PAC is primarily funded by members of the Walton family (note that Carrie Penner is Carrie Walton Penner) and by Arthur Rock. Michael Bloomberg makes an appearance, as does Purdue Pharma-OxyContin first son and venture capitalist, Jonathan Sackler.”

Aren’t you relieved to know that the opioid billions of the Sackler family are being spent on helping TFA grads gain political power, in addition to the expansion of the charter industry?

Wherever you see the name Walton, you can be sure they are pushing non-union charters and a vision of corporate charter chains that reflect the Walmart ideals of cheap and fast and everywhere.

I am in the middle of reading “Winners Take All,” and hear the author’s words in my head. The elites like to destroy public institutions, then offer to step in and solve the problems they created by funding a new institution, under their control.

Teach for America is meant to undermine the teaching profession by offering up eager and idealistic young people who are happy to work for a meager salary that won’t support a family or a decent standard of living. They provide the workers for the charters beloved by billionaires, whose purpose is to drain resources and destroy the public schools.

Be informed. Vote.

Sometimes teachers complain that their schools have too many regulations, too many routines.

This music teacher, a professional violinist who signed up to teach in a charter school in Arkansas dedicated to the arts and dear to the heart of Alice Walton, learned about the perils of teaching in a school where everything was deregulated and there were no routines.

Someone thought that a school where decisions are made on the fly and teachers are always on their own was a good ideal maybe this was someone’s idea of innovation.

No, it was not innovative. It was chaotic. It was abusive in the eyes of this teacher. It was disorderly and unpredictable.

Don’t the arts require practice and discipline? Can teachers flourish when there is no respect for them?

Who thought that an atmosphere of chaos and disrespect was a good idea?

The article begins:

“When I started teaching orchestra at Arkansas Arts Academy High School last fall, I didn’t know much about the state of public education in Arkansas. My entire career — 15 years — had been spent as a performing violinist: concertmaster of the Fort Smith Symphony, concertmaster and principal viola with the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra, composer/director of Storybook Strings, and a freelancer with touring groups like “Book of Mormon” and Harry Connick, Jr. I also had a long history of teaching private lessons, with a background in the Suzuki method.

“What I did NOT have was an Arkansas teacher’s license, or any previous training to become a public school teacher.

“That’s okay!” the principal assured me. “We’re a charter school. We have waivers from teacher licensure requirements, as long as you have a bachelor’s degree and relevant professional experience!”

“Cool,” I thought. “I know music. I teach music. I can learn everything else on the job.” So I signed up to teach, half-time, trusting in the experience and good faith of my administration and fellow teachers to help me learn the ropes.

“The school didn’t give me a contract until 41 days after I was hired. It was my fourth day of teacher in-service before I found out what my salary would be ($21,187.50) or what employment terms I had signed up for. And those employment terms? They were incredibly vague.

“My contract said “190 half-days,” and “at-will employment.” It also mentioned “a waiver granted by the Arkansas Department of Education” that made Arkansas Arts Academy “exempt from certain laws relating to schools, including specifically many of those relating to employees.” But I trusted the school’s good reputation — I had a friend who taught there, and knew families who sent their kids. Plus, what musician wouldn’t root for the success of an arts academy?

“I should have been more careful. If I had gone to the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) website, I would have learned that the “waiver” in my contract was actually a LOT of waivers, and the ADE grants new ones all the time. Currently, Arkansas Arts Academy High School has 51 waivers in effect, including teachers’ rights to planning periods, duty-free lunches, limitations on before- and after-school duties, and the Teacher Fair Dismissal Act. Arkansas Arts Academy is also exempt from having to provide written personnel policies*** to its employees, which means that there is no handbook telling us how to access our classroom funds, what to bring for fire drills, how to interact with the parent organization, or who to talk to if we need help.

“In the absence of state oversight, and without written personnel policies, things quickly became chaotic.”

Hakeem Jeffries is a Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn. He is part of the Democratic leadership team. Some people believe he might be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, the successor to Nancy Pelosi. He is a favorite of hedge fund managers and the charter school industry. He recently was honored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools as an African American charter school leader (why the organization established a racially segregated award is unclear, as it is unclear why Congressman Jeffries would accept it).

It is not “progressive” to support privatization of public services. It is not progressive to support schools staffed by non-union teachers. It is not progressive to support a “movement” that ignores racial segregation and even celebrates it. It is not progressive to support a movement financed by the anti-union Waltons, the DeVos family, the Koch brothers, and ALEC.

Progressives support public schools.

Dorothy Siegel, a longtime activist in the Working Families Party, wrote this comment about Congressman Jeffries:

“I know Hakeem well. I worked very hard to get him elected, first, to the NYS Assembly, and then to Congress, in order to defeat the even worse Democrat Ed Towns. I even raised a bunch of money for him. Then I saw him slip over to the dark side. But, make no mistake, I believe that his embrace of privatization is NOT (as he claims) primarily about wanting poor black and brown kids to get a good education, but about the fact that there is more money and power on that side than on the side of public education. That money, the hedge funders who provide it, and the corporatist establishment Democrats, were the drivers of Hakeem’s political rise. Money and power have totally corrupted him. Hakeem, like Cuomo and Booker, has and will continue to sell out our public schools when they are in the inner sanctum of their party leadership positions. Hakeem’s rise within Congressional Dem leadership is helping him to thwart ALL our efforts to reign in Congressional support for privatization. On education issues, he wis arguably more powerful than all the new progressive congresspeople we will elect in 2018, combined.

“Sad to say, we must recognize that Hakeem is THE ENEMY. He can not be defeated in his very safe Brooklyn seat, so we must all ORGANIZE to EXPOSE him as the corporate shill that he is. We must tell our progressive Congressional friends that it is NOT ok to go along with Dem leadership (Hakeem) on charters and privatization. Believe me, Hakim will have the tools he needs to fight harder for his corporate friends than anyone on our side will have, so we need to be loud and clear. We also have to insist that, for politicians to gain our support, it’s NOT ok to be “progressive” on reproductive choice and Medicare for All, etc, etc, but anything less than TOTALLY AGAINST corporatism and privatization. Time to take a stand!

“BTW, Hakeem was a key supporter of Zellnor Myrie, the victor in one of the races against the IDC traitors we defeated in the NYS Dem primary. We need to watch what Zellnor does in Albany to make sure he doesn’t pay back his mentor by supporting Hakeem’s education agenda. I’m not at all worried about the other five IDC-slayers. They are solidly and deeply pro-public education. Zellnor may be, too, but he will certainly get pressured by Hakeem and that ilk. So we need to let him know that “progressive” means 100% pro-public education.”

Sad.

Seven charter schools are closing due to poor performance on tests.

These are schools that were supposed to “save” poor kids from their “failingpublic schools.”

Who will save the students from “failed charter schools?”

Seven Shelby County charter schools are being forced to close at the end of this school year due to low performance.

The seven schools were listed as “Priority Schools,” meaning they were the most in need of support and improvement.

The State Department of Education designates schools Priority Schools for one of two reasons:

Being in the bottom 5 percent in 2015-16 and 2016-17 AND not meeting the TVAAS safe harbor, which allows schools to not be identified if they are showing high growth.

Having a graduation rate of less than 67 percent in 2017-18.

State law requires that a public charter school agreement shall be revoked or denied renewal if the school is identified as a Priority School for 2017 and beyond.

There were 27 schools placed on the Priority list, including 18 SCS-managed schools. Most will be given time to improve.

Unfortunately, the seven charter schools will have to close.

The seven charter schools that are set to close are as follows:

City University School Girls Preparatory

DuBois ES of Arts Technology

DuBois MS of Leadership and Public Policy

DuBois MS of Arts and Technology

Granville T. Woods Academy of Innovation

Memphis Delta Preparatory Charter

The Excel Center

The DuBois High School of Leadership and Public Policy and DuBois High Schools of Arts and Technology had already closed at the end of the last school year.

Its not “unfortunate” that they are closing. It’s unfortunate that the people of Shelby County were sold a bill of goods.

Will Bill Gates and his billionaire friends be accountable?

No.

Arizona has a Charter Law that ignores nepotism, conflict of interest, Profiteering, frauds, scams, etc.

Now Governor Doug Ducey is in a tight race with educator David Garcia, and Ducey wants to “reform” the charter law! And I have a bridge to sell you if you are that gullible.

Laurie Roberts of the Arizona Republic says that this is hilarious. PS: I love Laurie Roberts and Craig HARRIS of the Arizona Republic, who regularly expose charter corruption (he exposes it, she ridicules it).

She writes, to begin:

“A month ago, Gov. Doug Ducey said he wasn’t concerned that the head of Primavera charter school – which puts just 11 percent of its state funding into instruction — scored an $8.8 million “shareholder distribution” from the for-profit company that runs the online operation.

“I’m not concerned about the CEO,” Ducey told The Republic’s Craig Harris. “That is of very little interest. I’m concerned about the child and the parent and what the child is equipped to do after 12 years of education.”

“Today, Ducey and other Republicans have seen the light and the light is a freight train of public outrage racing right at them as they seek re-election.

“As a result, Ducey is now backing a set of charter school reforms proposed by state Sen. Kate Brophy McGee, R-Phoenix, who like Ducey is facing a fight to get back to the state Capitol next year.

“While I’m certainly happy to see that Ducey and his Republican colleagues at long last might be willing to plug gaping loopholes that have allowed some charter operators to plunder public money, I have to ask the same question I asked when they suddenly saw the need to prioritize public schools as teachers took to the streets this spring:

“Where’ve you been?”…

“Virtually every year, we hear an outrageous story about a charter school operator who has fundamentally failed the smell test, either by shorting kids or lining their pockets – or both.

“Virtually every year, Democrats in the Legislature propose reforms to fix laughable state laws that require hardly any oversight or public accountability.

“And virtually, every year Republicans ignore all evidence of a problem while joining hands and chanting “school choice, school choice, school choice.” This, to the delight of their dark money pals who shovel campaign money their way.

“Indeed, it is a choice to focus only on charter school successes — and there certainly are some — while ignoring problems rampant in the charter school industry.

“Just last fall, the centrist Grand Canyon Institute released the results of a three-year study that found up to up to 77 percent of charter school holders are using public funds on “potentially questionable financial transactions” — often paying themselves or their various relatives to provide goods and services to their charter schools under a price they get to set, courtesy of no-bid contracts.

“The study found that charter school executives earn on average 50 percent more than their school district counterparts while teachers earn 20 percent less. That classroom spending and academic performance are both lower in charters than in district schools.

“Rather than taking a serious look at those findings, our leaders and the charter school industry labeled the Grand Canyon Institute as “anti charter” and did … nothing.”

Florida has about 650 charter schools. Nearly half the charter schools in the state operate for profit. Charter schools on average do not get better results than public schools. Charter schools are rife with nepotism and conflicts of interest. The Leislature favors charter school expansion because many important legislators have ties to the charter industry and engage in self-dealing. Since 1998, 373 charters have closed, indicating that this is an unstable sector.

These are just a few of the conclusions of this important report about the toxic growth of charters in Florida.

The report urges serious review of the charter law. Otherwise the charter industry will continue to strip resources from public schools and create a parallel system that is wasteful, inefficient, and corrupt.

Here is a newspaper article about this report that summarizes it and includes responses from critics.