Archives for category: Charter Schools
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Carol Burris: The New Christian Nationalist Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2023 //
29

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about the latest disturbing development in the charter school industry—the growth of charter schools that promote a Christian Nationalist perspective. Her article was published on Valerie Strauss’s blog The Answer Sheet at the Washington Post.

Valerie Strauss introduces Carol’s article:

The religious right scored a win this week when Oklahoma’s virtual charter school boardapproved the opening of the nation’s first religious charter school, which, if it is actually allowed to open as planned in 2024 for grades K-12, will weave Catholic doctrine into every single subject that students take. Given that charter schools are publicly funded, and public schools aren’t supposed to provide religious education (although they can teach about religion), you may wonder how this school could be given permission to exist.

The decision is no surprise to people watching the way some charter schools run by right-wing organizations have been operating in recent years, pushing the boundaries of the separation of church and state embedded in the U.S. Constitution even as Supreme Court decisions have chipped away at it. Details can be found in a new report entitled “A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda.” (See full report below.) It was written by the nonprofit Network for Public Education, a group that advocates for traditional public school districts and opposes charter schools, and has written reports in recent years chronicling waste and abuse of public funding of charter schools.

The network’s newest report looks at charter schools that it says are designed to attract Christian nationalists with specific imagery and curriculum. The student bodies of these schools are largely Whiter and wealthier than in other schools — in the charter sector and in traditional public districts — and have deep connections to people within conservative Christian movements, the report says.

Former U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos, a leader in the movement to expand charter schools and school vouchers — which use public funds for private and religious school education — has acknowledged that her work in the education sphere is driven by desire to advance school choice as a path to “advance God’s kingdom.” Her husband, Amway heir Richard DeVos, who worked with her for decades in the school choice movement, said he was sorry that public schools “displaced” churches as the center of communities.

The charter school movement moved into new territory Monday when the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved, on a 3-2 vote, an application for the opening of a virtual school to be named St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School and run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. The vote will be challenged in court, and as attorney and education policy scholar Kevin Welner wrote on this blog last year, we can expect to see litigation around whether church-run charters can “successfully assert their Free Exercise rights in an attempt to run the school without restrictions on proselytizing and religiously motivated discrimination.” You can read here about howthe Supreme Court has been laying the groundwork for religious charter schools.

The new report by the Network for Public Education focuses on two types of charter schools: classical charters — which use the word “classical” in their names — and those offering “back to basics” curriculum. Diane Ravitch, an education historian and co-founder of the Network for Public Education, said in an introduction to the report that these charter schools are “the lesser-known third part” of a strategy by right-wing Christians to undermine secular public education; the others are vouchers and similar programs that use public funding for private and religious education, and book/curricular bans.

While private classical schools have a long history — emphasizing Eurocentric texts and the study of Latin and Greek — what is new is “the use of taxpayer dollars to fund them when they become or are established as charter schools,” the report said. Founders of classical charters generally reject modern instructional practices and accuse Progressive Era educational leaders such as John Dewey for removing Christian ideals from curriculum.

The Network for Public Education’s report notes that in classical private Christian schools, the curriculum focuses not only on the Western canon — Homer, C.S. Lewis and beyond — but also on scripture. “Classical charter schools emphasize ‘values’ or ‘virtues,’ which stand as shorthand for quoted scripture,” it says, which is especially true of classical charters that have opened since Donald Trump became president in 2017. “From videos posted on websites to crosses shown on the top of the school, we found example after example of charter schools presenting themselves as free private Christian schools,” the report says. It cited Liberty Common High School in Fort Collins, Colo., which celebrates “capstones” representing the “highest order of virtue and character,” including “prudence, temperance, and patriotism,” and the American Classical Charter Academy in St. Cloud, Fla., which promotes eight “pillars of character” and four “classical virtues.”

“Back to basic” schools use red, white, and blue school colors, patriotic logos and pictures of the Founding Fathers, along with terms such as virtue, patriotism and sometimes outright references to religion, the report says, citing as an example the website of the four-campus Advantage Academy in Texas, which boasts of educating students in a “faith-friendly environment.” The Cincinnati Classical Academy, another charter school, does not advertise its charter status on its website, while offering a free education with instruction in “moral character.” The American Leadership Academy in Utah posts videos its choir singing religious songs; one includes the note, “We want to help kids and adults turn to Jesus, or become Jesus people.

The fastest-growing sector of right-wing charters combines both a classical “virtuous” curriculum with “hyper-patriotism,” exemplified by charter schools that adopt the Hillsdale 1776 curriculum, which is centered on Western civilization and designed to help “students acquire a mature love for America,” its organizers say. The curriculum comes from Hillsdale College in Michigan, whose longtime president, Larry Arnn, is an ally of Trump’s and is aligned with DeVos. A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released in 2021 extols conservative values, attacks liberal ones and distorts civil rights history, saying, for example: “The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.”

The Network for Public Education said that it had identified 273 open charter schools that offer a classical curriculum and/or have websites designed to attract White conservative families with for-profit management corporations running 29 percent of them, a percentage nearly twice as high as the entire charter school sector.

The new report looks at Roger Bacon Academy charter schools, run by Baker A. Mitchell Jr., which prohibit girls from wearing pants or jeans to school in order, according to a lawsuit, to ensure they are regarded as “fragile vessels” that men are supposed to take care of and honor, based on a quote from the Bible’s New Testament. (A ruling in a lawsuit challenging the dress code is on appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge ruled in favor of Bonnie Peltier, who objected to the unequal treatment of her daughter.) Students are also required to recite a daily oath committing them to be “morally straight” and guard “against the stains of falsehood from the fascination with experts,” while also avoiding the “temptation of vanity” and “overreliance on rational argument.”

“A Sharp Turn Right” also says one purpose of these schools is “to raise the next generation of right-wing warriors” to fight culture wars. Kyle Shideler, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Muslim organization classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote in a recent article in the Federalist that donors should fund boot camps to train right-wingers in “the political dark arts” of organizing. In the article, he praises Hillsdale College for “the growing Christian classical school movement … for the purpose of forming young minds.”

Shideler is referring to Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative, which stems from the Barney Family Foundation, established by Stephen Barney and his wife, Lynne, in 1998. The report says it identified 59 charter schools that are open or will soon open that claim affiliation to the initiative. While Hillsdale College’s mission is to maintain “by precept and example the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith,” the mission of their K-12 charter schools includes a call for “moral virtue.”

The foundation’s 990s tax forms show that in addition to its health and child-centered charities, it funds right-wing think tanks, foundations and organizations that create conservative legislation on various issued used as models by Republican-led states. One recipient has been Hillsdale College, where Stephen Barney is a trustee emeritus on the Board of Trustees. Between 2010 and 2019, the Network for Public Education identified more than $4 million earmarked for the college from his foundation. In 2010, the Barney Charter School Initiative began with a half-million-dollar contribution from the foundation, and contributions in that range have been recorded every year for which records are available, the report says.

“A Sharp Turn Right” discusses examples of Republican officeholders and party chairs who, like Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), aggressively push the conservative charter school agenda. Republican Heidi Ganahl, who lost to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) in the 2022 gubernatorial election, is a founder of the Golden View Classical Academy. She also advocates for one of the fastest-growing Hillsdale-affiliated charter chains, Ascent Classical Academies, which operates two schools in Colorado, with plans to open four more in South Carolina, three in Colorado and at least one in North Carolina.

Read the report here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Religion, Scandals, Segregation, Separation of church and state

Carl J. Petersen: Why Is LA Building More Schools for Declining Enrollment?

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2023 //
17

Parent advocate Carl J. Petersen thinks there’s something fishy about the school building boom in Los Angeles. It makes no sense. Enrollment is declining. Why so many new schools?

He suspects it’s about making room for more charter schools.

He begins:

Decades of changing demographics have left public schools and charters competing for a share of the shrinking school-age population. This shift was predicted by the LAUSD years before it occurred and should have resulted in dramatic changes to how many new facilities the District planned to build. Instead, Monica Garcia led efforts to greatly expand the number of classrooms available in Los Angeles.

Perhaps by design, Garcia’s building spree has left charter schools with an opportunity to claim “empty “space on District campuses using PROP-39. At one school I visited during my 2017 campaign in BD2, the campus appeared to be built with a separate entrance for a charter school. The waste of taxpayer money was not an accident.

Over 15 years into the demographic shift, the use of scarce education funding to build more capacity has not stopped. A tour of a neighborhood near the intersection of North Vermont and West 1st Street near Korea Town provides an example.

Before charter schools, this small area had two campuses: Virgil Middle School, which was built in 1914, and Frank del Amo Elementary School. Despite the decades-long reduction in the number of school-age children, the Value chain of charters built a brand new building for the Everest Value School. Across the street, the Central City Value Charter High School was opened in what appears to be a converted commercial space. While enrollment declines are continuing in both public and charter schools, the Bright Star charter school chain is building the Rise Kohyang High School across the street from Virgil.

In addition to these five school campuses that will be located within blocks of each other, the Virgil campus hosts two other separate schools. The Sammy Lee Medical and Health Services Magnet is an elementary school operated by the LAUSD. The Citizens of the World charter chain has also forced one of its franchises onto the campus using PROP-39.

Please open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Los Angeles

Peter Greene: Virtual Charters Are a Waste of Time and Money

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2023 //
4

Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about a new study showing the poor prospects of students who attended cybercharters. Numerous studies have shown that students who enroll in virtual charters have low test scores, low graduation rates, and high attrition. There really is nothing positive to say about these “schools,” other than the fact they they make a lot of money for their executives.

As Greene notes, the biggest financial scandals in charter world are connected to virtual charters. ECOT in Ohio collected $1 billion over 20 years before it declared bankruptcy to avoid repaying the state $80 million for phantom students. At last report, the A3 virtual chain had bilked California for a sum between $80 million and $200 million. Oklahoma lost tens of millions to EPIC’s founders. Yet the game continues because politicians are easily purchased. You can also read Greene’s analysis of virtual charters ripping off taxpayers and students in Pennsylvania here.

Greene writes:

Cyber charters’ many issues have been well-documented. Academically, they fall far short of public schools. When the General Accounting Office studied them last year, they found a system of schools that resists oversight, presents “increased financial risks” to states, and produces poor student results. Even leaders in the charter school movement have found “well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools” and called for a radical overhaul (more than once).

Virtual charters are highly profitable, and that pile of money, combined with lax oversight and accountability, has resulted in a number of high profile fraud cases sometimes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Notable cases include the A3 charter school network, Epic charter schools, California Virtual Academy (CAVA), and Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), which owed the state of Ohio $80 million dollars in tuition reimbursement.

But while much has been learned about what happens with students while they’re enrolled, nobody has really looked at what happens to students after their time in cyber charters. Now “Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults,” a new working paper from the Anenberg Institute at Brown University, reveals that the problems of cyber charters extend beyond the school years.

Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor’s degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools.

The study found that virtual charter attendance was associated with a lower likelihood of high school graduation or GED, lower likelihood of college enrollment, and a lower likelihood of employment up to six years after high school—and those employed made, on average, 17 percent less than students from public schools.

The study is looking at samples from twelve to eighteen years ago. The researchers are clear that their results are “providing descriptive evidence rather than as strictly causal estimates.” In other words, correlation is not causation.

Nevertheless, it’s clear once again that when it comes to the quality of virtual charters, the numbers do not look good.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Virtual Charter Schools

NPE Releases New Report about Christian Nationalist Charter Schools, Funded with Taxes

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2023 //
16

The Network for Public Education released a new report today that should concern everyone who cares about public schools and the use of public resources. The report shows that a growing segment of the charter industry is controlled by Christian nationalists, who indoctrinate their students, using taxpayer dollars.

Contact: Carol Burris

cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org

(646) 678-4477

NEW REPORT DOCUMENTS HOW FAR-RIGHT CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE FUELING THE CULTURE WARS

Right-wing Republicans involved in the creation and governance of charter schools

American taxpayers across the country are funding the recent explosion of growth in far-right, Christian nationalist charter schools, including those affiliated with Hillsdale College, according to a new report, A Sharp Right Turn: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda, released by the Network for Public Education (NPE) today.

NPE identified hundreds of charter schools, predominantly in red states, that use the classical brand or other conservative clues in marketing to attract white Christian families. From featured religious music videos to statements that claim they offer a faith-friendly environment, these charter schools are opening at an accelerated rate, with at least 66 schools in the pipeline to open by 2024. While some of these schools, such as the Roger Bacon Academies, are long-standing, nearly half of the schools we identified opened after the inauguration of Donald Trump–representing a 90% increase.

The report exposes how right-wing Republican politicians, including Congressman Byron Donalds of Florida and failed Colorado gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, have embroiled themselves in creating and governing these schools, with some benefiting financially. In fact, NPE found that right-wing charters are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit management companies than the entire charter sector.

According to NPE Executive Director Carol Burris, who co-authored the report with journalist Karen Francisco, “Sectarian extremists and the radical right are capitalizing on tragically loose controls and oversight in the charter school sector to create schools that seek to turn back the clock on civil rights and education progress. These schools teach their own brand of CRT–Christian Right Theory–capitalizing on and fueling the culture wars. As a taxpayer, I am appalled that my tax dollars are seeding such schools.”

Since 2006, the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter School Programs (CSP) has funneled more than one hundred million dollars to begin or expand right-wing charter schools.

NPE President and education historian Diane Ravitch commented, “Few doubt that the religious right has decided to stake its claim on the next generation of hearts and minds with its unrelenting push for vouchers and book and curricular bans. This report exposes the lesser-known third part of the strategy—the proliferation of right-wing charter schools. It should be a wake-up call to those with progressive ideals who have embraced charter schools. A movement you support is now taking a sharp turn right to destroy the values you cherish.”

To learn more about the rapid growth of right-wing charter schools and their connections with right-wing politicians and the religious right, you can read the full report here.

The Network for Public Education is a national advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools for current and future generations of students.

###

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Lies, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, U.S. Department of Education

Oklahoma: Vote on Religious Charter School May Have Been Invalid

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2023 //
8

The board that cast a 3-2 vote to authorize a Catholic virtual charter school in Oklahoma may have been invalid because a new appointee was not supposed to be seated until November 1 and was not eligible to cast a vote.

Monday’s national headline-making vote to give state sanctioning and Oklahoma taxpayer dollars to a Catholic school may have been invalid.

It turns out the state Attorney General’s Office believes that Oklahoma City businessman Brian Bobek is ineligible to serve on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board until November.

But an email to that effect was not received by the board’s chairman and executive director until after Bobek cast the deciding vote Monday to approve state sponsorship for St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.

Long-serving member Barry Beauchamp, a retired school superintendent from Lawton who had been allowed to continue serving after his term expired some months ago, was replaced abruptly on Friday by Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall.

Less than half an hour before Monday’s special board meeting began at noon, Deputy Attorney General Niki Batt sent an email to board Chairman Robert Franklin and Executive Director Rebecca Wilkinson saying that because Beauchamp had not vacated his seat, the law that created the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board doesn’t allow Bobek to take over the seat until November.

Franklin said that if Bobek was ineligible, his vote was invalid.

He is also concerned that a lengthy, written statement that Bobek read during Monday’s meeting, which included numerous legal citations, could have influenced the votes of other board members, including Scott Strawn, who was recently appointed to the board by Gov. Kevin Stitt.

Categories Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state

Randi Weingarten on Oklahoma’s Decision to Fund Religious Charter School

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2023 //
21

An obscure board appointed by Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt voted 3-2 to approve funding a virtual charter school operated by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City abd the Diocese of Tulsa. This violates the state constitution, as well as the First Amendment to the Constitution. Randi Weingarten, who is a lawyer, decried this action. The state will end up spending many more millions in legal fees, as it battles for its decision in the courts. If the decision is upheld, Oklahoma and other states can expect to fund yeshivas, madrassas, fundamentalist schools, even Satanic schools. We don’t need schools that indoctrinate; we need public schools that educate children to think for themselves and to respect others.

AFT’s Weingarten on Oklahoma Religious Charter School Approval
 

WASHINGTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement after Oklahoma approved a taxpayer-funded religious charter school:

“This decision not only threatens to siphon millions of dollars in public money into private hands, it strikes at the heart of our nation’s very foundations. The framers never intended to require public funding of religious institutions or religious schools.

“The combination of the Constitution’s free exercise clause and the concept of separation of church and state is what ensures religious freedom in the United States. This decision turns that idea on its head.

“It also turns on its head the concept that charter schools were supposed to be public schools run in a different way. And it vitiates the distinction between public and nonpublic religious schools in the eyes of Oklahoma.

“It is telling that a bipartisan coalition was opposed to the approval, and that only an obscure, hand-picked board of the governor’s own choosing was able to force it through.

“This ruling will no doubt end up at the Supreme Court. It is a clear and present danger, not only to ensuring public schools are open and accessible to all, but to religious liberty and freedom in our democracy writ large.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Shame

Indiana: Hillsdale-Style Charter Approved Remotely

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2023 //
28

Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld reveals a new charter scam: remote renewal of controversial charter schools. in this case, the charter is affiliated with the Christian rightwing Hillsdale College. Please open the link to finish the post.

Seven Oaks Classical School in Ellettsville received a 5-year extension to its operating charter recently. Well, not that recently. It happened in December 2022. Ellettsville and Monroe County residents may have missed it, though, because the extension was approved nearly 200 miles away.

It was approved by the three-member board of Grace Charters LLC, a nonprofit formed by Grace College and Theological Seminary to authorize charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated. The board met on the Grace College campus in Winona Lake, Indiana.

To meet legal requirements for public meetings, a notice was published in the local newspaper: the Warsaw Times-Union, which probably no one in Monroe County reads. One member of the public attended, according to minutes of the meeting: Seven Oaks headmaster Stephen Shipp.

The situation highlights the tension between public and private in Indiana charter schools. The Seven Oaks website says charter schools are “tuition-free, open-enrollment public schools.” But the school’s authorizer, which sets the terms of its operation and is supposed to hold it accountable, is a private, Christian college with no connection to the community where the school operates.

Seven Oaks is part of a network of charter schools aligned with Hillsdale College, a conservative and politically active private college in Michigan. The Hillsdale charter initiative once cast itself as part of a “war” to reclaim America from “100 years of progressivism” in education. Its president, Larry Arnn, led Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission and its promotion of “patriotic history.”

Grace College has also granted a charter to Valor Classical Academy, a Hillsdale-affiliated school that has stalled in its attempts to open in Hamilton or Marion County.

Along with the Hillsdale affiliation, there are other factors that distinguish Seven Oaks from public schools: for example, its demographic profile. Out of more than 500 students, one is Black and nine are Hispanic, according to state data. Fewer than 20% of students would qualify for free or reduced-price meals if they were provided. (The school doesn’t provide transportation or school lunches).

Bar chart showing percentage of Black, Hispanic and free-reduced lunch students in Monroe County schools.

This chart shows the percentage of students who are Black, Hispanic and eligible for free or reduced-price meals in Monroe County public school districts (Monroe County and Richland-Bean Blossom community school corporations) and charter schools (Bloomington Project School and Seven Oaks Classical School).

Nine of its 38 teachers are Hillsdale College alumni, according to profiles on the school’s website. In 2021-22, the most recent year for which a state teacher statistics report is posted, nearly 40% of its teachers had emergency licenses, compared with 4.6% in local public school districts.

The 24-page Seven Oaks charter extension reads like a standard agreement, with boilerplate language from state law and recommended practices for authorizing. It spells out the duties of each party, the expectations for the school, and the legal remedies if something goes wrong. An attached accountability plan includes out-of-date references to state assessments and, I’m told, is being revised.

The agreement says Grace College gets to keep 2.5% of the school’s state funding as an authorizer fee. That’s less than the 3% maximum that Indiana allows. In 2023-24, the college will net about $93,000.

Grace initially approved a charter for Seven Oaks in 2016 in one of Indiana’s first examples of what’s called authorizer shopping. The school’s founders applied to the Indiana Charter School Board, but it rejected their application. They reapplied but withdrew after a negative recommendation from the board’s staff. Then they took their plan to Grace College, which said yes to a 7-year charter.

At that time, private colleges could authorize charter schools in closed-door meetings with no public notice. Since 2017, they’ve had to use nonprofit authorizing agencies, such as Grace College’s Grace Charters LLC, that are subject to open-meetings and public-records laws. Even so, it can be hard to keep up. I started asking by email about the Seven Oaks charter extension in March; it took until late May to get copies of the December 2022 board minutes and the school’s extended charter agreement.

Transparency is one issue of having distant authorizers for charter schools, but there are others. The National Association Charter School Authorizers cautions against throwing the door wide open for higher education institutions, or HEIs, to authorize schools, as Indiana has done since 2011.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Indiana, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Shame

Fiske and Ladd: North Carolina Is a State at Risk

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2023 //
11

Edward B. Fiske was the education editor of the New York Times and editor of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Helen F. Ladd is a nationally prominent economist of education and professor emeritus at Duke University. They are married, a power couple of American education. This article appeared on the website of WRAL in North Carolina.

Forty years ago this spring a national commission charged with evaluating the quality of American education issued a blistering report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” It cited a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the country’s schools and declared that the country’s failure to provide high quality education “threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

North Carolina leaders took this warning to heart. They began investing heavily in public education and even became a model for other states in areas such as early childhood education. Significantly, the state was making progress toward fulfilling its obligation under the North Carolina Constitution to provide a sound, basic education for all students.

The situation started to change, however, in 2012 when Republicans came to power and began an assault on public education that continues to this day.

When it comes to public education, North Carolina is now “A State at Risk.”

The Republican assault has taken multiple forms, starting with inadequate funding. North Carolina now ranks 50th in the country in school funding effort and 48th in overall funding. Despite widespread teacher shortages, the Republicans have kept teacher salaries low — $12,000 below the national average – and they have failed to provide adequate funding for the additional support staff that schools need.

In addition, they have permitted significant growth in the number of charter schools. Such schools divert much-needed funds from traditional public schools and make it difficult for local boards of education to operate coherent education systems.

The Republican-controlled Legislature is currently working hard to weaken public education by politicizing the process. Pending legislation would regulate how history and racism are taught, give a commission appointed mainly by lawmakers the job of recommending standards in K-12 subjects, and transfer authority to create new charter schools from the State Board of Education to a board appointed by the General Assembly.

The problem is about to get even worse. The Legislature is now poised to expand the earlier Opportunity Scholarship program, which had provided public funds for low income children to attend private schools, into a much larger universal voucher program that would make all children eligible regardless of family income – at an estimated cost of more than $2 billion over the next 10 years.

Given that private schools are operated by private entities typically with no public oversight and no obligation to serve all children, why in the world would it ever make sense to use taxpayer dollars to support private schools?

A common argument has been that voucher systems raise achievement levels of the children who used them. While some early studies of small scale means-tested voucher programs in places like Milwaukee showed small achievement gains in some cases, recent studies of larger voucher programs in places such as Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana consistently show large declines in average achievement — often because of the low quality of the private schools that accept vouchers.

Supporters also argue that vouchers provide more schooling options for children and that having more choices is a good thing. But in the context of education policy that need not be the case. Americans support public education – and make schooling mandatory – not only for the benefits it generates for individual children but also for collective benefits such as the creation of capable workers and informed citizens. What matters is the quality of education for all the state’s children.

An expanded voucher program would lead to a substantial outflow of funds from traditional public schools to privately operated schools, with the potential for a significant loss in the quality of our public schools, and subsequent vitality in the state’s economy.

A strong public education system – from elementary and secondary schools to the nation’s first public university, the University of North Carolina – has long been pivotal to our state’s cultural, political and economic success. We must stop the current assaults on public education and reaffirm our commitment to one of North Carolina’s great strengths.

Back in 1983 when the education system of the nation was “at risk,” President Ronald Reagan – who had earlier been lukewarm in his support of public education — took the warning seriously and began touring the country to talk about the problem. His successors from both parties then took up the cause and continued to make the case that a strong public education system is essential for a vibrant economy, and importantly, to make the policy changes needed to strengthen it.

Let’s hope that our current Republican leaders in this state can muster the wisdom and courage to follow the example of President Reagan and other leaders from both parties in pushing for strong public education. In the absence of such wisdom, we will indeed continue to be “A State at Risk.”

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Competition, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, For-Profit, Funding, Higher Education, Hoax, North Carolina, Privatization, Republicans, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Indiana: More Laws to Stifle Freedom of Thought and Democracy

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2023 //
1

A reader who signs in as CarolMalaysia described the latest education-related laws passed in Indiana:

She writes:

These are some of the new Indiana laws that will take effect on Saturday. [Indiana is run by the GOP and they have NO respect for public schools or teachers.] Gary is a poverty area and they cannot vote for their school board members. 87% of Hoosier children attend public schools and they are continuously underfunded.

Book bans — Every public school board and charter school governing body is required to establish a procedure for the parent of any student, or any person residing in the school district, to request the removal of library materials deemed “obscene” or “harmful to minors.” School districts must also post a list of the complete holdings of its school libraries on each school’s website and provide a printed copy of the library catalogue to any individual upon request. (HEA 1447)

Charter schools — The proceeds of each new voter-approved school funding referendum in Lake County must be shared with local charter schools in proportion to the number of children living in the school district who attend charter schools. Beginning July 1, 2024, all incremental property tax revenue growth at Lake County school districts must be shared on a proportional basis with local charter schools. (SEA 391, HEA 1001)

Gary schools — A five-member, appointed school board is reestablished for the Gary Community School Corp. to eventually replace the Indiana Distressed Unit Appeals Board as the governing body for the formerly cash-strapped school district. Gary’s mayor and the Gary Common Council appoint one member each, and the three others are chosen by the Indiana secretary of education, including at least one Gary resident, one resident of Gary or Lake County, and a final member from anywhere. (SEA 327)

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fascism, Indiana, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy

Pro Publica: How NYC’s Success Academy Deals with “Difficult” Children

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2023 //
33

Pro Publica investigated the case of a child at Success Academy who was disruptive and learned that at a charter school, the chain is free to write its own disciplinary rules. The public schools are governed by regulations, but Success Academy is exempt from those regulations.

ProPublica told the story of Ian, whose mother left work repeatedly to find out why Success Academy had called the police about the child. It seems clear that the school was trying to persuade her to withdraw Ian. But she kept showing up. It also seems clear that Ian’s behavior got worse because of the school’s rigid discipline.

In a panic, if she floors it, Marilyn Blanco can drive from her job at the Rikers Island jail complex to her son Ian’s school in Harlem in less than 18 minutes.

Nine times since December, Blanco has made the drive because Ian’s school — Success Academy Harlem 2 — called 911 on her 8-year-old.

Ian has been diagnosed with ADHD. When he gets frustrated, he sometimes has explosive tantrums, throwing things, running out of class and hitting and kicking anyone who comes near him. Blanco contends that, since Ian started first grade last year, Success Academy officials have been trying to push him out of the school because of his disability — an accusation similar to those made by other Success Academy parents in news stories, multiple lawsuits that resulted in settlements and a federal complaint.

When giving him detentions and suspensions didn’t stop Ian’s tantrums, Blanco said, the school started calling 911. If Blanco can’t get to Ian fast enough to intervene, a precinct officer or school safety agent from the New York Police Department will hold him until an ambulance arrives to take him to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation — incidents the NYPD calls “child in crisis” interventions.

The experience has been devastating for Ian, Blanco said. Since the 911 calls started late last year, he’s been scared to leave his house because he thinks someone will take him away. At one ER visit, a doctor wrote in Ian’s medical file that he’d sustained emotional trauma from the calls.

Citywide, staff at the Success Academy Charter School network — which operates 49 schools, most of them serving kids under 10 years old — called 911 to respond to students in emotional distress at least 87 times between July 2016 and December 2022, according to an analysis of NYPD data by THE CITY and ProPublica.

If Success Academy were run by the city Department of Education, it would be subject to rules that explicitly limit the circumstances under which schools may call 911 on students in distress: Under a 2015 regulation, city-run schools may never send kids to hospitals as a punishment for misbehavior, and they may only involve police as a last resort, after taking mandatory steps to de-escalate a crisis first. (As THE CITY and ProPublica reported this month, the rules don’t always get followed, and city schools call 911 to respond to children in crisis thousands of times a year.)

But the regulation doesn’t apply to Success Academy, which is publicly funded but privately run and — like all of the city’s charter school networks — free to set its own discipline policies.

The consequence, according to education advocates and attorneys, is that families have nowhere to turn if school staff are using 911 calls in a way that’s so frightening or traumatic that kids have little choice but to leave.

“Sure, you can file a complaint with the Success Academy board of trustees. But it isn’t going anywhere,” said Nelson Mar, an education attorney at Legal Services NYC who represented parents in a 2013 lawsuit that led to the restrictions on city-run schools.

Success Academy did not respond to questions about the circumstances under which school staff generally call 911 or the criteria they use to determine whether to initiate child-in-crisis incidents.

Regarding Ian, Success Academy spokesperson Ann Powell wrote that school staff called EMS because Ian “has repeatedly engaged in very dangerous behavior including flipping over desks, breaking a window, biting teachers (one of whom was prescribed antibiotics to prevent infection since the bite drew blood), threatening to harm both himself and a school safety agent with scissors, hitting himself in the face, punching a pregnant paraprofessional in the stomach (stating ‘I don’t care’ when the paraprofessional reminded him that ‘there’s a baby in my belly’), punching a police officer and attempting to take his taser, and screaming ‘I wish you would die early.’”

Powell also provided documentation that included contemporaneous accounts of Ian’s behavior written by Success Academy staff, photographs of bite marks and a fractured window, an assessment by a school social worker concluding that Ian was at risk for self-harm, and a medical record from an urgent care facility corroborating the school’s account that a teacher had been prescribed antibiotics.

Blanco said that Success Academy administrators have regularly exaggerated Ian’s behaviors. When he was 6, for example, Ian pulled an assistant principal’s tie during a tantrum, and school staff described it as a choking attempt, according to an account Blanco gave to an evaluator close to the time of the incident. Each time Success Academy has sent Ian to an emergency room, doctors have sent him home, finding that he didn’t pose a safety threat to himself or others, medical records show. (Success Academy did not respond to questions about the assertion that staffers have exaggerated Ian’s behaviors.)

Blanco knows that Ian is struggling. No one is more concerned about his well-being than she is, she said. But villainizing her 8-year-old only makes the situation worse.

“It’s like they want to tarnish him,” Blanco said. “He’s just a child, a child who needs help and support.”

Blanco chose Success Academy because she wanted Ian to have better education that what’s available in his neighborhood public school.

Success Academy, which has avid support from many parents and is led by former New York City Councilmember Eva Moskowitz, promotes itself as an antidote to educational inequality, offering rigorous charter school options to kids who might not have other good choices. On its website, the network advertises its students’ standardized test scores (pass rates for Black and Latino students are “double and even triple” those at city-run schools) and its educational outcomes: 100% of high school graduates are accepted to college, the network says.

Success Academy administrators say that strict and consistent discipline policies are essential to kids’ learning. Students are required to follow a precise dress code and to sit still and quietly, with hands folded in their laps or on their desks. When students break the rules, the school issues a progressive series of consequences, including letters home, detentions and suspensions.

Once students are accepted through the Success Academy lottery, the network is required to serve them until they graduate or turn 21, unless they withdraw or are formally expelled…

In Harlem, Ian started struggling at Success Academy just a few weeks into first grade. He’d never been aggressive before he started school, Blanco said. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he’d attended kindergarten online. When schools went back to in-person instruction, he was a high-energy 6-year-old who couldn’t follow Success Academy’s strict rules requiring him to sit still and stay quiet. By the end of first grade, he’d been suspended nearly 20 times.

The more Ian got in trouble, the worse he felt about himself and the worse his behavior became, Blanco said. He started falling behind because he missed so much class time during his suspensions, according to his education records. At home and at school, he said that teachers disciplined him because he was a “bad kid.”

At first, Blanco worked hard to cooperate with the school, she said. She was worried by the change in Ian’s behavior, and she thought that school staff had his best interests at heart. But then an assistant principal called her into an office and told her that Success Academy wasn’t a “good fit” for Ian, Blanco said to THE CITY and ProPublica, as well as in a written complaint she sent to Success Academy at around that time. (Success Academy’s board of trustees investigated the complaint and did not find evidence of discrimination against Ian, according to a September 2022 letter to Blanco from a board member.)

“That didn’t sit right,” said Blanco, who is an investigator at Rikers Island and is accustomed to gathering paper trails. She asked the assistant principal to put the statement in writing, but he told her she had misunderstood, she said. (Success Academy did not respond to questions about this incident.)

Several times, when the school called Blanco to pick Ian up early, staff told her to take him to a psychiatric emergency room for an evaluation. But the visits didn’t help, Blanco said. “You could be sitting there for six, seven, eight hours,” waiting to talk to a psychologist. Because Ian never presented as an immediate threat to himself or others, hospital staff couldn’t do much but refer him to outpatient care and send him home, according to hospital discharge records.

Eventually, Blanco found an outpatient clinic that would accept her insurance to evaluate Ian for neurological and behavioral disorders. She said she begged school staff to stop disciplining Ian while she worked to get him treatment, but the suspensions were relentless. Once, he missed 15 straight days of school.

At the beginning of Ian’s second grade year, Blanco reached out to Legal Services NYC, where Mar, the education attorney, took her on as a client.

The school twice reported Blanco to child welfare services as a negligent mother. An investigator came to her home to interview her and Ian. She said she was humiliated.

One month after the child welfare visit, things got even worse. Blanco was in Queens, heading to work to pick up some overtime, when the school called to say that Ian had had another tantrum. This time, she was too late to bring Ian home herself. He was in an ambulance, on his way to Harlem Hospital….

Two weeks ago, Success Academy sent Blanco an email informing her that they requested a hearing to have Ian removed from school for up to 45 school days because he “is substantially likely to cause injury to himself and others while in the Success Academy community.”

Ian would be barred from Success Academy immediately, the email said, even though it could take up to 20 days to schedule the hearing, which will be held at the special education division of the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. If the hearing officer agrees with Success Academy, Ian will miss the rest of the school year..

To Blanco, the hearing seems like just another way for the school to get rid of her son. She thinks about pulling Ian out of Success Academy all the time, she said, but it feels like there’s no good alternative. She doesn’t want to give up on the idea of him getting a better shot than the one she got at a failing neighborhood school.

“I want him to get free of this cycle of disadvantage,” Blanco said. “I want to fight for my son’s rights and let them know that you’re not going to treat my child this way. I’ve made it my mission. You don’t get to pick and choose who you give an education to.”

.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Deregulation, Discipline and Suspensions, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Harlem Success Academy, New York City
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »