Readers of this blog have noticed that many states spend far more time legislating about school Choice than about the public schools that enroll most students. Once charters and vouchers are introduced, public schools seem to become an afterthought, despite the fact that most students attend them.
Derek Black, a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, asks whether there are limits to the preference that states show to school choice programs over public schools.
Here is an abstract of his paper:
“Rapidly expanding charter and voucher programs are establishing a new education paradigm in which access to traditional public schools is no longer guaranteed. In some areas, charter and voucher programs are on a trajectory to phase out traditional public schools altogether. This Article argues that this trend and its effects violate the constitutional right to public education embedded in all fifty state constitutions.
“Importantly, this Article departs from past constitutional arguments against charter and voucher programs. Past arguments have attempted to prohibit such programs entirely and have assumed, with little evidentiary support, that they endanger statewide education systems. Unsurprisingly, litigation and scholarship based on a flawed premise have thus far failed to slow the growth of charter and voucher programs. Without a reframed theory, several recently filed lawsuits are likely to suffer the same fate.
“This Article does not challenge the general constitutionality of choice programs. Instead, the Article identifies two limitations that state constitutional rights to education place on choice policy. The first limitation is that states cannot preference private choice programs over public education. This conclusion flows from the fact that most state constitutions mandate public education as a first-order right for their citizens. Thus, while states may establish choice programs, they cannot systematically advantage choice programs over public education. This Article demonstrates that some states have crossed this line.
“The second limitation that state constitutions place on choice programs is that their practical effect cannot impede educational opportunities in public schools. Education clauses in state constitutions obligate the state to provide adequate and equitable public schools. Any state policy that deprives students of access to those opportunities is therefore unconstitutional. Often-overlooked district level data reveals that choice programs are reducing public education funding, stratifying opportunity, and intensifying segregation in large urban centers. Each of these effects represents a distinct constitutional violation.”
The full article is here.
The North Carolina State Board of Education unanimously approved the opening of a for-profit charter school that will enroll more than 2,000 students in Cary. The school will be operated by Charter Schools, USA, a Florida corporation owned by Jonathan Hage, a friend of Jeb Bush. Not an educator, Hage has built a very large business by owning for-profit charters.
The State Board of Education unanimously approved Cardinal Charter Academy West Campus, which plans to educate up to 2,180 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The new school, modeled after the existing Cardinal Charter Academy in Cary, represents the latest effort by charter school operators to target the fast-growing western Wake County area…
Critics say charter schools are targeting the more-affluent families who live in western Wake, where test scores are higher and the percentage of low-income students is lower than the Wake County school district average. Charters are taxpayer-funded public schools that are exempt from some of the regulations that traditional public schools must follow.
But supporters say they’re meeting the need for school choice, citing the long waiting lists for Cardinal Charter and packed parent information sessions.
Cardinal Charter West would be managed by Charter Schools USA, a Florida-based for-profit company that could receive more than $2 million a year from the new school.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article182268141.html#storylink=cpy
At the same meeting of the state board, a charter school in rural Bertie County was closed because of its low enrollment and poor academic standing.
Peter Greene says the New York Times’ Editorial praising the removal of any standards for charter teachers was written while the fact checkers were out to lunch.
“The editorial notes that charter schools “made good on their promise to outperform conventional public schools,” which is a fact-check fail two-fer. First, it slides in the assertion that charters are public schools, even though NYC’s own Ms. Moskowitz went to court to protect her charter’s right to function as a private business, freed from state oversight. If NYC charters are public schools, then McDonald’s is a public cafeteria. Second, it accepts uncritically the notion that charters have “outperformed” anybody, without asking if such superior performance is real, or simply an illusion created by creaming and skimming students so that charters only keep those students who make them look good.
“The Times thinks the warm body rule is “a reasonable attempt to let these schools avoid the weak state teacher education system that has long been criticized for churning out graduates who are unprepared to manage the classroom.” Their support for this is a decade-old “report” by Arthur Levine, and even if that report were the gospel truth, that does not shore up the logic of saying, “I’m pretty sure the surgeons at this hospital aren’t very good, so the obvious solution is for me to grab some guy off the street to take out my spleen instead.”
“The Times also commiserates with charter hiring problems.
“New York’s high-performing charter schools have long complained that rules requiring them to hire state-certified teachers make it difficult to find high-quality applicants in high-demand specialties like math, science and special education. They tell of sorting through hundreds of candidates to fill a few positions, only to find that the strongest candidates have no interest in working in the low-income communities where charters are typically located.
“Oops. There’s a typo in that last part– let me fix it for you: “only to find the strongest candidates have no interest in working for bottom-dollar wages under amateur-hour conditions that demand their obedience and donation of tens of hours of their own time each week.” There.
“But if you want absolute proof that the Times had no access to fact-checking for this piece, here comes multiple citations of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
“If there is a less serious, less believable, less intellectually rigorous in all of the education world that the NCTQ, I do not know who it is. Kate Walsh may be a lovely human being who is nice to her mother and sings in her church choir, but her organization is– well, I few things astonish me as much as the fact that NCTQ is still taken seriously by anybody at all, ever”
In a spectacularly stupid editorial, the New York Times endorsed the idea that charter teachers don’t need to take courses about education or pass certification tests, because a few charters get high test scores.
The Editorial: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/opinion/charter-schools-hiring.html?_r=1
The Editorial justified this position because the State Board of Regents recently reduced the required number of tests that prospective teachers must take from four to three. Therefore, it is okay if charter teachers take no certification exams at all.
There is some special magic that enables a few charters to produce high test scores even though the climate in these schools is so toxic that teachers don’t stay for long, and they can’t recruit enough new teachers without dropping certification requirements.
Arthur Goldstein writes about the arrogance of the Times’ editorial Board here.
He writes:
“Their piece today is utter nonsense of the same variety put forth by Nicholas Kristof, who bemoaned the fact that Merryl Streep and Colin Powell were unqualified to teach in public schools. The fact that they had never expressed to remotest desire to do that, let alone take the spectacular pay cut that would accompany that decision, never entered his mind. If it did, it certainly never entered his column.
“The Times criticizes teacher training programs. I will admit that I took some crappy and useless courses when getting my Master’s. But I also took great courses in my subject area, courses that gave me a very good understanding of language acquisition, bilingualism, and the structure of the English language. We all kind of implicity understand its structure but never really have to think about it.
“The Times thinks I don’t need that sort of training even though I use it absolutely every day in my work.”
The assumption of the Times’ Editorial writer is that teaching is not a profession and no professional education is needed.
The same individual has been writing the Times’ education editorials for 25 years. It is time for fresh and informed thinking.
This is actually a very funny article in The 74, the unofficial voice of the privatization, union-busting movement.
The Republicans in the state legislature want to abolish the State Board of Education (which they don’t control) because of the state’s plummeting test scores.
The legislators do not consider that the state’s total embrace of choice without accountability (the DeVos plan) might be responsible for the state’s decline.
That would require some thought and reflection, which is in short supply in Lansing.
In a move to radically upend Michigan’s governance over schools, Republican lawmakers are seeking to eliminate the elected state board of education. While many believe it’s unlikely the legislation will pass, both its authors and detractors agree that some action is necessary to arrest an alarming decline in local academic performance.
The proposal is spearheaded by state Rep. Tim Kelly, chairman of the House Education Reform Committee and a longtime critic of the state board. He led a similar effort last year in response to its guidance on the needs of transgender students, accusing members of “practicing social engineering with every progressive agenda that comes down the pike.”
That push attracted dozens of cosponsors but ultimately fell short. Abolishing the board would require a constitutional amendment passed by two-thirds of both the state House and Senate, followed by public approval of a ballot measure in the next election. Kelly, recently nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as assistant education secretary under fellow Michigander Betsy DeVos, has assailed the board as a superfluous institution muddling the question of exactly who has jurisdiction over Michigan schools.”
The elimination of districts and the promotion of choice and charters has coincided with a dramatic drop in the state’s performance on the federally-funded National Assessment of Educational Progress.
In 2015, Michigan ranked 41st and 42nd in the country, respectively, for fourth-grade reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — down from 28th and 27th in 2003. It experienced more modest drops in both eighth-grade reading and math as well, fanning worries of a comprehensive downturn in school quality throughout the state.
Michigan is witnessing systemic decline across the K-12 spectrum,” read a 2016 report from The Education Trust-Midwest. “White, black, brown, higher-income, low-income — it doesn’t matter who they are or where they live, Michigan students’ achievement levels in early reading and middle school math are not keeping up with the rest of the U.S., much less our international competitors.”
Some local observers have laid blame for the poor results at the feet of school choice advocates, most notably U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. After the widespread expansion of charter schools and open enrollment across school districts, the quality of Michigan schools is no better than it was two decades ago, and arguably a good deal worse. Analysis from Phil Power’s Center for Michigan has found that close to one-third of Michigan charters occupy the state’s bottom quarter of academic performance. About one-quarter of traditional district schools were grouped in that category.
I wonder what Betsy would say? My guess is that she would respond that Michigan needs vouchers, which voters overwhelmingly rejected in a state referendum in 2000. Betsy and her husband Dick DeVos sponsored the referendum. Then Michigan could have three low-performing sectors, not just two.
Ref Rodriguez founded a charter chain. Most of the charters are in Los Angeles. One is in Rochester, New York.
Ref is in trouble with the law. Until recently, he was president of the LAUSD school board. Faced with felony indictments, he stepped down as chair, but remained on the board. More indictments came, but he refuses to leave the board. The salary for board members was recently raised and is substantial.
Joy Resmovits of the L.A. Times reports that the charter school in Rochester that is part of Ref’s former chain is in trouble.
Unlike Arizona, New York state officials don’t like conflicts of interest.
When the New York state comptroller’s office recently audited a charter school in Rochester, N.Y., investigators found a number of troubling financial practices, including inadequate oversight.
One issue auditors noted was that the local school contracted out its financial management to the national charter network it was part of — and membership on the Rochester school’s board and the school network’s board overlapped.
Rochester’s PUC Achieve is the only school outside California in the 18-school Partnership to Uplift Communities charter school network co-founded by L.A. school board member Ref Rodriguez. Rodriguez and his PUC Schools co-founder Jacqueline Elliot were flagged for being on both of the boards.
“While not prohibited by law, these situations create a conflict of interest,” Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli wrote when the audit was released in May.
Rodriguez has more pressing concerns in Los Angeles, where he faces three felony and 25 misdemeanor charges for alleged campaign money laundering.
But problems in Rochester broadly echo some questions recently raised in L.A. about Rodriguez’s conduct and PUC’s management practices.
North Carolina is undeterred by the abject failure of Tennessee’s “Achievement School District,” which turned control of low-performing schools to charter operators. North Carolina will try exactly the same strategy but will call it the “Opportunity School District.”
School board members are miffed that it is taking so long to select five schools for their experiment. Many likely takeover schools have fought back and resisted, with community support.
The state board is adopting a strategy that has no evidence that it works. It removes local control and gives public money to charter operators. Board member Olivia Holmes Oxendine is certain that what failed in Tennessee will succeed in North Carolina, even though Tennessee had many additional millions in Race to the Top funding.
Since when did conservatives become enemies of local control?
Can’t they come up with a better idea than to copy the plan that failed in Tennessee?
When charter schools were first launched in the late 1980s-early 1990s, it was taken as a given that charters would gain autonomy in exchange for accountability. The promise at the time was that they would save public dollars by having no bureaucracy. So they would cost less, get better results, and be held to high standards of fiscal and academic accountability. As the charters have grown into a politically powerful industry supported by deep-pocketed entrepreneurs, they have increasingly demanded more autonomy, more public money, and less accountability.
The Showdown will come at the next meeting of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board. Billionaires and Dark money have spent many millions to elect a pro-charter majority. That majority hangs by a slender thread since one of its members, Ref Rodriguez, clings to his seat despite being under indictment on multiple charges of campaign finance violations.
At its next meeting, the board will decide what to do about a recommendation by district officials to close 10 charters.
“Charter school leaders, who say they are standing up against regulations they find onerous, won’t back down and will leave it to board members to decide their schools’ fates Tuesday.
“They may get a sympathetic ear because the board majority is the first to be elected with major financial support from charter backers.
The futures of six other charter schools also are at risk over the same issues. All told, there have never been as many L.A. charter schools facing potential closure at one time — certainly never over conflicts they instigated.
If the charters don’t prevail, they still could appeal any denials to the county or state education boards.
Both the district and charter operators say they are looking out for students.
A key point of dispute is the authority of the district’s inspector general to conduct long-running investigations of charter schools. Charter operators want to narrow this power and say state law supports such limits…
The district’s charter division recommended denying renewed authorization to eight Alliance College-Ready Public Schools campuses and two Magnolia Public Schools campuses. Six KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools may be reauthorized on the condition that they demonstrate compliance with district rules in the near future. KIPP administrators have not agreed to that condition.
Three proposed charters, which hope to open in the future, also are at risk in this dispute: one each from KIPP, Equitas Academy Charter Schools and STEM Preparatory Schools.”
The public will soon learn whether the school boards works for the public or for the billionaires who funded their campaigns.
