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Kentucky: Legislators Push Charter Schools While Undermining Racial Integration

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2017 //
11

Kentucky is a Republican state with both houses in the hands of the Republican party and a Republican governor. The Republicans are doing their best to undermine public schools. They were late in passing charter legislation, and they passed it only recently. Now the legislature is intent on undoing the racial integration of public schools in Jefferson County (Louisville).

Gay Adelmann, co-founder of Save Our Schools Kentucky, attended a recent legislative session and reported back on the discussion, which had nothing to do with improving public schools and everything to do with implementing the privatization agenda of ALEC.

The Republican legislators blame busing for all the ills of public schools. They think that ending busing will bring a new day to Kentucky. Obviously, none of them has ever read any research on the benefits of racial integration to both white and black students.

After listening to them fulminate about “those children,” she offered her own suggestions:


Faulty arguments repeated the theme: “Imagine what you could do if you ended busing.”

No, imagine what we could do if you:

Fully funded our schools.

Ended high-stakes testing.

Placed students’ interests above adults.

Protected our public schools from corporate threats.

Asked us how you can help!

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Kentucky, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Nebraska’s Teachers: Why We Don’t Need Charters or Vouchers

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2017 //
47

The Nebraska State Education Association recently paid a visit to the state’s major newspaper and explained why Nebraska doesn’t need school choice:

Editor’s note: In a recent visit to the York News-Times, Nebraska State Education Association president Jenni Benson and executive director Maddie Fennell shared that organization’s thoughts on two hot-button education issues – charter schools and private school vouchers. The NSEA is the union that represents Nebraska teachers. It is the oldest professional association in the state.

The NSEA’s 10 reasons to avoid “private school voucher schemes” are:

1. Nebraska cannot afford to finance private education as well as public education. There would be only two ways to pay for vouchers—take money from already underfunded public schools or raise taxes. Both are unacceptable.

2. Tax dollars for private education won’t fix student achievement challenges at public schools. The best way to assist all low-performing students is by strengthening public schools and addressing individual learning problems directly. Vouchers will siphon tax dollars away from our public schools where children have the greatest needs.

3. A voucher would be a ticket to nowhere for most children. Private schools can choose to accept or reject any student, and many have long waiting lists and only admit top students. On average, parochial schools reject 67 percent of all applicants. Other private schools reject nearly 90 percent of applicants. “Choice” does not reside with parents but with private school admissions committees.

4. Parents have an expanding array of choices for the public school their child attends. Among the many public school options available in Nebraska, parents may choose to send their child to another public school in the same or different school district, or enroll their child in various public academy schools, focus or magnet schools, career academies, or other public alternative schools.

5. Vouchers don’t create a “competitive marketplace.” Competition is based on an even playing field; there is no fair competition when “competitors” play by different rules. Public schools accept all applicants, private schools don’t. Private schools are not required to provide transportation, special education, bilingual education, free and reduced price lunches, and many other programs that public schools provide. They are also not required to meet even basic state certification or accreditation requirements.

6. The State of Nebraska should not spend tax dollars to pilot test a bad idea. Tax-funded pilot projects should only be conducted to test good ideas. Vouchers are a bad idea! A pilot voucher program would not be a “lifeboat” for some students, as claimed. A voucher system would be the Titanic, draining needed funds from public schools where most students would remain.

7. Vouchers would destroy the “private” in private schools. Parents of children in private schools don’t want the status quo disturbed for their children—they want their schools to be truly private. Private schools accepting tax-funded vouchers or private school tax credit schemes would become subject to government regulation. Allowing public tax dollars to be spent on private schools would be mean private schools would have to change admission requirements, implement state-required testing, certification and accreditation, comply with discipline and expulsion laws, and allow voucher students to be exempted from religious activities.

8. Inserting the word “private” doesn’t make a school good. There is no proof that private school vouchers would improve students’ academic performance. In fact, students attending private schools under the Milwaukee, Cleveland and other private school voucher programs did not outperform their public school peers.

9. Vouchers would promote further religious and economic stratification in our society. Private elementary and secondary schools have been founded primarily by two types of entities: (1) religious denominations seeking to teach academics interwoven with their religious doctrine; and (2) wealthier parents seeking to give their children an advantage over other children. Tax-funded vouchers for private schools would increase divisions between rich and poor and among different religions, threatening the future of our American democracy.

10. Public policy should respect parental choice but provide for all students. The best public policy is to provide parents with even more choices within the public schools, which serve more than 90 percent of the children in Nebraska. Nebraska legislators should concentrate on making all public schools stronger, safer, more challenging and accountable. Public tax dollars should be spent only to improve public schools—not to assist the small number of parents who choose to enroll their children in private schools.

NSEA on Charter Schools

The fact is that charter schools are not meeting the need they were created to fill—including to serve as lab schools to develop new teaching techniques—and many are failing their students and families, while squandering taxpayer dollars.

Reports detail fraud and waste totaling more than $200 million of taxpayer funds in the charter school sector. It notes that these figures only represent fraud and waste in the charter sector uncovered so far, and that the total that federal, state and local governments “stand to lose” in 2015 is probably more than $1.4 billion. It says, “The vast majority of the fraud perpetrated by charter officials will go undetected because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”1

The result of charter schools on student achievement just doesn’t live up to the hype. Less than a third of the total charter schools in the U.S. perform better than comparable public schools. The other two thirds are about the same or worse.

Article continued below advertisement

In fact, the biggest proponents of charter schools are Wall Street hedge fund and venture capital firms like JP Morgan, USB, and Liberty Partners. Unfortunately, Wall Street losses on charter schools such as Edison have proven that charter schools are a bad investment. Further, even in places where the public schools don’t come close to the standard of quality we have in our Nebraska public schools, charter schools are being closed for poor performance and irresponsible management.

The facts could not be any clearer: Investments in our public schools yield the best returns.

“The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, And Abuse,” was released jointly by the nonprofit organizations Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy. It follows a similar report released a year ago by the same groups that detailed $136 million in fraud and waste and mismanagement in 15 of the 42 states that operate charter schools. The 2015 report cites $203 million, including the 2014 total plus $23 million in new cases, and $44 million in earlier cases not included in last year’s report.

Some studies regarding private school vouchers and charter schools:

• Vouchers close neighborhood public schools and benefit wealthy school districts and privately run schools (Vasquez Heilig & Portales, 2014) http://bit.ly/EPAAVouchers

• Vouchers as a reform agenda are not viable given a paucity of peer reviewed evidence that they improve student outcomes in a consistent or large way in the US. (Vasquez Heilig, LeClair, Lemke, & McMurrey 2014). http://bit.ly/TCEPvouchers

• When vouchers are applied universally, education inequity is exacerbated. Schools do the choosing (Vasquez Heilig & Portales, 2012) http://bit.ly/IUPRAChileVouchers

• Charter schools have a 40 percent attrition rate for their African American students (Vasquez Heilig, Williams, McNeil & Lee, 2011). http://bit.ly/BREAttrition

• Charters schools are more segregated relative to public schools in their vicinity. (Vasquez Heilig, LeClair, Redd, 2014 Under Review)

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Barclay Key: The Tragedy of Little Rock, Sixty Years After Eisenhower Sent in the 101st Airborne to Protect Nine Black Students

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2017 //
18

In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, accepted nine black students, while white parents jeered and protested. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to safeguard the students and to carry out the order of a federal judge.

That was sixty years ago.

How much has changed? Now Little Rock’s public schools are segregated again. At the behest of the Walton Family (which owns Arkansas), the public schools were taken over by the state. The man in charge is not, never was, an educator. The ostensible reason for the takeover was that six of the city’s 48 schools were “failing.” Since then, three of the 48 schools have been closed. More are on the chopping block, including schools with a long and honorable history.

Barclay Key, a historian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, writes the sad story of the past sixty years here. (What! The Walton family forgot to buy the history department!)

It appears that the Walton family wants to turn Little Rock into the next New Orleans, the next Memphis. It wants to wipe out public schools and replace them with charters. It wants to silence the voice of local citizens and give them no role in determining the future of their schools.

Key writes:

The two most striking parallels between the past and present are the insistence by white leaders that they know what is best for Black families and students and the recurrent role that local white business leaders play in undermining the public school system and prioritizing their prerogatives for the city…

Sixty years ago Little Rock epitomized desegregation struggles in the South, but the city now follows a path worn by New Orleans, Memphis, and other cities wracked by the proliferation of charter schools. Like they have over the past sixty years, politicians and business leaders presume to know what is best for public schools, and their decisions reflect a preoccupation with the latest trends in business rather than research-based pedagogy. The replacement for the elected board, state education commissioner Johnny Key, was appointed by the new Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson despite having no experience as an educator. Key appointed a superintendent who was generally trusted by the city’s white elites, but that superintendent was promptly replaced when he openly criticized the inefficiency of expanding charter schools in a district that has been gradually losing students for years. With the exception of reconstituting one school, the state made no substantive changes at the distressed schools.

“Reflections of Progress” will serve as the theme for the sixtieth anniversary of the desegregation crisis. Things have certainly changed, but the standard is too low if we measure progress by events that unfolded in 1957. Reflecting on progress since 1967 would be more appropriate and sobering. White men again make all decisions for the school district. They act with the support of the Chamber of Commerce and, today, the Walton charter school lobby controlled by the state’s powerful Walton family. Since the state takeover, many of the same bureaucrats have their six-figure salaries. Many of the same children cannot read. Little Rock periodically commemorates the 1957 controversy, but it constantly relives 1967.

The Walton Family Foundation is engraved on this blog’s Wall of Shame. It doesn’t stand alone, but it has a place of pre-eminence on a wall that lists those who have used their money and power to betray democracy, public schools, and the American dream.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Segregation, Wall of Shame, Walton Foundation

Ref Rodriguez: Should He Be Subject to the Same Laws as Everyone Else?

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2017 //
15

Ref Rodriguez was elected to the Los Angeles school board in 2015. He ran against a respected educator named Bennett Kayser and used some extremely negative television ads. Kayser has a physical disability, and one of Ref’s ads showed a shaking hand holding a tea cup, then dropping it. It came as close to stereotyping someone on grounds of physically disability as possible. It was ugly.

Questions were raised about the finances of Ref’s charter chain, about food services.

A small publication called the LA Progressive raised questions about his campaign donations.

Rodriguez’ campaign disclosure filings with the City of Los Angeles show that several staffers of his charter school, Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC), gave small donations in December 2014, before a filing deadline at the end of the year. What is odd and striking about several of the donations is that they come from PUC staffers who first made a very small donation early in the month and then, in the last 3 days of the year, suddenly ponied up the largest donation allowed by campaign ethics laws. Six donated the maximum $1,100. One paid $850.;;;

What is highly irregular about this pattern of donations to Rodriguez, however, is the job category of the PUC employees and the timing of their donations.

A janitor, a tutor, a parent organizer, two maintenance workers, a kitchen manager, and an office manager would not raise eyebrows for donating $25, $50, or even $100 to a candidate, as these seven PUC workers did within days of each other in mid-December 2014.

None of that mattered. He won. He was backed by the usual cabal of very wealthy charter supporters who wanted to put one of their own on the school board.

These donations seem to be at the center of an investigation of campaign finance violations by Ref. A number of charges have been filed against him for breaking the law. He stepped down as LAUSD president, but he did not leave the board. It is unseemly for a public official facing criminal charges to stay in a position of authority, but there he is. Doing it.

Peter Cunningham, who used to be Arne Duncan’s communications director and now runs the pro-charter Education Post, funded by the same people who fund California’s charter schools, wrote an article in defense of Ref. He thinks that what Ref did, if he did it, was a mistake made by a rookie. He thinks that it was unfair to bring criminal charges against Ref when others have done the same things and not faced criminal charges. He thinks that the prosecutors in Los Angeles are persecuting Ref “simply because he was elected board president.”

Up until now, no one has alleged that the district attorney was acting improperly. Ref should not be treated unfairly, but then again, he should not get special treatment just because he founded a chain of charter schools and is beloved of Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, and the California Charter Schools Association.

Justice should be swift and unbiased. Let Ref Rodriguez make his case in court, not in the media.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Los Angeles, Privatization

Harvard Shames Itself by Staging a Koch-Sponsored Betsy Lovefest–No Dissenting Voices Allowed

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2017 //
64

The Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University has always been pro-school choice, pro-charters, pro-vouchers.

But now the PEPG–headed by the General of the School Choice Movement Paul Petersen–has outdone itself.

It is staging a two-day celebration of Betsy DeVos and the Trump agenda of public school-bashing, funded by the Koch Brothers and other rightwing foundations.

There is nary a critic of this radical rightwing agenda, not as a presenter or a panelist.

The conference is called “The Future of School Choice.”

The Charles Koch Foundation is a major funder, but after it became clear that his name was embarrassing, it was removed from the list of sponsors.

How shameful that Harvard would lend its name to a one-sided effort to cheer on the destruction of public education and would give a platform to a woman with no academic credentials.

As the writer for the New Republic, Graham Vyse, points out, the Harvard Institute of Politics invited Sean Spicer and Corey Lewandowski to accept fellowships, so the University apparently has low standards.

Apparently Jeff Sessions is about to give a speech about “free speech” in which he will decry “political correctness” on campus, meaning I assume the refusal to debate issues.

Do you think he will single out Harvard’s PEPG for refusing to hold a debate about the future of school choice and excluding those who recognize the civic importance of public education and the failure of charters and vouchers to live up to their claims?

I’m not holding my breath.

I am adding Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance to this blog’s Wall of Shame for its failure to permit even the most minimal expectations of academic and scholarly fairness, and for turning itself into a propaganda mill for the privatization movement, at the behest of Big Money.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers, Wall of Shame

Ohio: Legislators Consider Revising School Report Cards Because Most Schools Are Failing, Even Charters

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2017 //
24

Ohio legislators decided that it was a nifty idea to give grades to schools, based mainly on their test scores. This was an idea first developed by Jeb Bush, who saw it as a way to identify “failing” public schools and set them up for privatization and handover to his friends in the charter industry.

Most people understood that the test scores would reflect the affluence or poverty of the district, not the efficacy of the school, but legislators ignored what was otherwise common knowledge.

Many Ohio legislators are now unhappy with their school grades, because schools in their own districts are getting low grades.

Most districts…got Cs. And just under 4% of traditional public school districts got As for how their students scored on 26 state tests. More than 80% got Fs in that category.

State school superintendent Paolo DeMaria says report cards show important data, but that the letter grades aren’t the only factor that determines good schools.

“There are lots of things that aren’t measured on the report card – things like art programs, music programs, the school climate, cohesiveness among staff,” said DeMaria.

But the report cards were disappointing to many districts, including where Republican Rep. Mike Duffey lives in Worthington. That district got some of its lowest grades since 2012.

That’s when state lawmakers, including Duffey, voted to replace labels such as “continuous improvement” and “academic watch” with letter grades. On Facebook Duffey called the report cards “utter trash” and “fake news” – because he says they seem to show only that more diverse districts are scoring lower grades.

“Frankly, in my opinion, it’s disrespectful to minorities and it’s borderline racist in the way that it goes about it because it is going to reflect the nature of the district, the socio-economic diversity. It’s not going to show your potential to learn.”

Duffey says he’ll draft legislation to scrap the A-F grading system he once supported, saying it doesn’t result in fair comparisons among districts. He says the cards would still show data on subgroups and student growth, but not an overall letter grade.

House Education Committee chair Andrew Brenner of Powell says the report cards are important, but he’s open to moving away from overall letter grades too.

“The school district is different than a student getting a letter grade on a test or something. If a school district is getting Fs on everything, you know, they need to see something where they’re showing progress and whether they’re improving and they need to focus on the positives and look to see where the negatives are to try to improve those negatives. And if they’re stuck on the report card letter grade they may not be doing any of the underlying corrections.”

Brenner is a non-voting member of the state board of education along with Senate Education Committee chair Peggy Lehner of Kettering. Lehner says she feels improvements could be made, but she says the letter grades aren’t the real problem with the report cards.

“If you look deep down at them, you’re going to find that there’s an increase in poverty in those school districts. And it’s being reflected in some of those scores.”

The Ohio Education Policy Institute’s Howard Fleeter analyzes report card data for Ohio’s traditional public school districts. Fleeter says the highest performing schools have double the median income of the lowest performing districts. And those that got Fs have, on average, nearly 7 times as many economically disadvantaged students as the districts that got As do. Fleeter says for the past two decades, report cards have shown that districts with higher scores have fewer low-income kids, who have a set of needs their higher-income peers don’t face.

“I don’t want people to draw the conclusion that says, low-income kids can’t learn. Districts or schools that have low-income kids are bad schools – they’re not doing their job.’ It’s more challenging. It’s more difficult. I think we need to know this information.”

Fleeter and other advocates for schools have said investing state dollars in preschool and intervention specialists can help lower-income kids catch up to their more economically advantaged peers.

By the way, most of the state’s 276 charter schools got either Ds or Fs in their performance index scores. A spokesman for the pro-charter study group the Fordham Institute says most charters are in urban areas, and have the same challenges the traditional schools in those areas do.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Ohio, Poverty, Testing

Leader of Delaware XQ Super School Ousted by Charter School Board After Winning $10 Million Compeition

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2017 //
9

The board of the Delaware Design-Lab High School sent out a notice to parents that the Head of School Joseph Mock was out, and the search was on for his replacement. Last year, the school won $10 million in Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Super School competition.

Blogger Kevin Ohlandt was stunned to hear the news and assumed that Mock resigned but it appears, says Ohlandt, but it appears that he was ousted.

Here is the beginning of the email to parents. Get a load of the titles:

“From: Design-Lab High School

“Sent: Friday, September 15, 5:20 PM

“Subject: Important Message from the DDLHS Board

“Dear DDLHS Families,

“On behalf of the Board of Directors, we would like to bring you up to date on changes inside school administration as we prepare for the next phase in the process of becoming an XQ Super School in August 2018.

“The Board will begin interviews next week for the position of XQ Project Manager and, shortly thereafter, will begin the search for the school’s XQ Dean of Academic Intensity. These leaders, together with a Dean of Engagement and Dean of College and Career Readiness, will guide us through the XQ process and prepare us for the opening of our XQ Super School next fall.

“As we shift our administrative structure to help us succeed as a Super School, the Board has decided to eliminate the position of Head of School effective Friday, September 15, 2017. As a result of these changes, we are sad to announce that Mr. Mock will be pursuing other opportunities at this time. Mr. Mock has been an invaluable asset to our school since he joined us as Vice Principal/Special Education Coordinator in 2015. Through his tenure as Principal and Head of School, he has navigated some of the most challenging waters a school can face with grace and commitment. We thank Mr. Mock for all he’s done preparing DDLHS to move into this next phase in our school’s history, and wish him well in his new endeavors.”

Translation: Mock is out immediately. His temporary replacement is a member of the board. Something’s rotten in Denmark (er, Delaware).

Lesson #1 for Mrs. Jobs: Schools are about people, not tools. They are not corporations where the personnel are interchangeable. Human interactions create a culture, and the culture supports the people in it and the work they do–or it doesn’t. A school is more than the sum of its parts. Great tools do not a great school make. Commitment, dedication, compassion, and teamwork matter most.

Perhaps that’s what the XQ project will demonstrate.

Categories Charter Schools, Delaware, Technology

Peter Greene: Public Schools Should Not Collaborate in Their Own Destruction

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2017 //
18

Peter Greene read a report published by the Center for the Reinention of Public Education at the University of Washington, a leading advocate for charters, choice, and the portfolio model. The report offers advice to district leaders about how public schools can deal with declining enrollments by working with charter schools and putting them on an equal footing as partners, not competitors.

Maybe I am being a Pollyanna, but I see this report as a sign of weakness, a recognition by privatizers that they must develop strategies to get embedded because the tide of public opinion is turning against them. The opinion poll in the conservative journal EdNext recently reported that public support for charters dropped from 51% to 39% in one year. The NAACP statement criticizing charters undermined their claims about being leaders of the civil rights movement. The almost daily reports of charter scandals in many states is undermining their credibility. Betsy DeVos’s enthusiastic embrace hurts their carefully cultivated public image. Watch for more statements aimed at normalizing charters. They are worried.

Peter reviews the CPRE list of problems and remedies and he is not impressed.

So how do we fix all of these things? CRPE has some thoughts.

Districts need to close schools and negotiate contracts that don’t spend so much money. The closing school solution seems to run up against the “don’t take on long-term debts and costs” solution, as schools frequently manage consolidation of schools by taking on construction projects.

They would like to see more partnership, but their example is “if charters find a way to give cheap retirement plans might encourage public systems to adopt similar systems.” So, yeah, charters that want to pay teachers less could, I suppose, try to convince public schools not to outbid them. That’s cooperation, sort of.

And there would need to be city-level strategy sessions. Which should be a hoot as long as nobody ever addresses the underlying zero-sum game that is charter vs. public schools. But that’s not going to happen, since one proposed solution is that districts “publicly identify” their legacy costs in exchange for a charter funding formula that more closely resembles public per-pupil costs:

For example, charter schools might receive less per-pupil funding under such an agreement but would be able to tell the public, with confidence, that charter and district students received the same classroom funding and that charter schools weren’t contributing to a district’s impending insolvency.

Yeah, that doesn’t even make sense. “Getting same classroom funding” doesn’t equal “not sucking public school dry.” So maybe the suggestion here is that charter’s get their funding and public schools admit that they’re insolvent because their buildings and pensions and teacher pay are all just way expensive. In other words, charters agree to get paid public tax dollars, and public schools agree to publicly say it’s their own damn fault they’re having financial problems. Why would public schools want to enter into this deal, exactly? And would the funding formula include all the “philanthropic” contributions to charters?

CRPE also suggests that public schools be given some limited extra funding to be used only as a means of down-sizing. Or if districts can prove they’re shrinking as fast as possible, charters would agree to a voluntary growth slow down. Or some other grand bargain that basically involves charters conducting business as usual while public schools agree to work harder at dying, already.

CRPE also has a list of Things To Discuss and Research Further. Gather more data about how much financial vampirage charters are really committing, and how much is just, you know, other reasons for districts to lose money. More data about “fixed costs” and just generally how teachers are draining money by wanting to be paid. Figure out the greatest number of students the charters could handle, because that’s the ideal, apparently– as many students taken out of public school as possible. More power for superintendents. They don’t say which power, exactly, but context suggests that old favorite– hire, fire and set salaries without stupid rules and unions. Learning from other sectors like energy and healthcare, because they’re just like schools.

Bottom Line

CRPE is correct in one thing– we do have to look at how charters affect the whole local educational eco-system. But their belief in the inevitable supremacy of charters gets in the way of a useful conversation.

The report seems to boil down basically to “Charters and public schools should work together to make employment conditions worse for teachers. Also, they should team up to help charters thrive and to help public schools die more efficiently and without making charters look bad. For The Children.”

Maybe this is supposed to be an innovative approach to the Socratic method, and public schools are just supposed to take a hemlock bath because it would make life easier for charters. But I don’t imagine many takers will line up to take CRPE’s offer. Not even for the children.

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

D.C. Charter Operators Agree to Repay $600,000 for Missing $3 Million

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2017 //
8

This looks like a good deal for the leaders of a charter school who were accused of misappropriating
Ropristing $3 million for their personal use. No jail time. A payback of $600,000 and pocket change. And an agreement not to lead any other charters until 2020. The fines apparently will be paid by insurance companies, not the defendants.

“The former leaders of a public charter school for disabled and at-risk teenagers have agreed to settle a District lawsuit alleging they sought to enrich themselves by diverting millions of dollars in taxpayer money meant for the school into private companies they created.

“Donna Montgomery, David Cranford and Paul Dalton, all former managers at Options Public Charter School, agreed to a collective settlement of $575,000, which will be paid to the school that now operates under new leadership as Kingsman Academy. Jeremy Williams, a former chief financial officer of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, who allegedly aided the scheme, agreed to a settlement of $84,237 in a separate deal signed last week. The defendants agreed that they would not serve in a leadership role of any nonprofit corporation in the District until October 2020.

“This settlement ensures that more than $600,000 in misappropriated funds will now go to Kingsman Academy to serve disabled students in the District of Columbia, and will deter future wrongdoing,” said Robert Marus, a spokesman for the Office of the Attorney General. “As the referees for the District’s nonprofit laws, our office will continue to bring actions against any who would misuse funds meant for public or charitable purposes.”

“A statement issued by attorney S.F. Pierson, who represents Dalton, said all three former managers “continue to contest the District’s claims and continue to maintain their position that they managed Options to the highest standards.” Pierson said the former school leaders are “not personally paying” anything to settle the District’s claims. It’s common that insurance plans cover litigation-related costs for nonprofit directors or corporate officers.”

This is a big win for the accused, but a loss for the disabled students, who didn’t get the services intended for them.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Deregulation, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Privatization

Delaware: Charter Teachers Call in Sick After Their Principal Was Suspended for Trying to Raise Their Salaries

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2017 //
6

The charter world is filled with surprises. With all the autonomy they get, there is little to no accountability.

In Delaware, blogger Kevin Ohlandt reports that the police removed the principal of the Thomas Edison Charter School, Salome Thomas-El, because he fought to get his teachers a measly pay raise. The board of the charter stood by and watched as the principal was taken out of his school.

The teachers had been promised a raise of $750, like public school teachers in the state, and the board agreed, then reneged. The principal wanted them to get the raise. He had to go.

The school had a surplus of funds from their FY2017 budget to the tune of $534,000.00. The teachers were requesting a 1.5% increase in salary which Thomas-EL asked for from the board. The request was denied. What happened from there I do not know… yet. But to publicly shame a charter leader who is beloved by his staff and the community around him is in very bad taste. Not to mention the appearance this gives to students. This is a school with a low-income/poverty population hovering around 96%. The last thing they need is to see their school leader kicked out of school over what amounts to him fighting for higher teacher pay at a school that is known for having the lowest paid teaching staff in New Castle County. But they can afford to have lavish Christmas parties and send seven people to a charter school conference?

The next day, 20 teachers called in sick to protest.

The Board of Directors at Thomas Edison Charter School are facing a head-on karma collision today. At least 20 teachers called out sick today forcing the school to close for the day in early dismissal. Dr. Salome Thomas-EL has been placed on indefinite leave by the board. Parents don’t know what is going on due to the lack of transparency coming from the board.

Yesterday afternoon, members of the board met with teachers after school. Note to self: find out if there was a quorum because there was no agenda posted for this meeting. Several teachers walked out of this meeting.

I did find out their “Foundation” account is due to the school owning the building. That account is meant for lease and renovation payments to which they receive payments from the state. Whether it is used for that purpose, I cannot say. But it is my hope someone in the state looks into that. My question would be why they need a separate bank account and why those bank statements aren’t available to the public since it is fueled by taxpayer funds.

At this point it is a no-brainer that the Delaware Dept. of Education has gotten involved. Far too much has happened since yesterday morning. I have not found out whether or not a charter school board has the authority to deny teachers a state approved increase in pay. My sense is that they do not have this authority. And is Thomas Edison the only charter denying these increases to their teachers?

Why would a charter school want to be known as having the lowest paid teachers in the state?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Delaware, Teacher Pay
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