Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy forwarded links to Dennis Kucinich’s town hall meetings, where he blasted charter school fraud. Watch and enjoy!
Is he running for governor? Let’s hope so.
Archives for category: Charter Schools
Do you remember back in the old days when the privatization movement began that choice was going to “save poor children from failing schools”?
Well, that slogan is now obsolete. Now the advocates say that the purpose of choice is choice, regardless of results.
That subtle shift has happened because of the many recent studies and evaluations showing that charters and vouchers do not necessarily get better results, and that they may even have a negative effect, as we learned from recent evaluations of voucher programs in D.C., Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos sounded the bugle call for retreat after learning of the poor results of the latest evaluation of the D.C. voucher program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
In the past, she had said that choice would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Now, however, she says, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.” Parents are satisfied, and that is good enough for her, even if the children’s test scores are falling. If you parse this sentence, what she is saying is that when everyone chooses, none of the schools will be better than any others. They will all get the same results, even if they are dismal. The purpose of choice is choice.
Results don’t matter. Only parent satisfaction matters. If poor kids are moved from a “failing public school” to a “failing charter school” or “failing religious school,” that’s fine. An opinion piece in a D.C. paper suggested that we should not pay attention to those studies, because critics of school choice twist their findings anyway, especially if their findings are negative.
Karen Wolfe is a parent activist in Los Angeles who fights for public schools against the behemoth that is the California Charter Schools Association and even against the Los Angeles Unified School District.
She recently discovered that the school district was considering spending $24 million to install a Unified Enrollment system. She became curious and began digging. After all, Los Angeles was the district that (almost) committed to spend $1 billion on obsolete iPads loaded with Pearson content.
The decision will be made on Tuesday at a board meeting.
Karen smelled a scam in the making. She was right.
The first thing she learned was that a common enrollment system is being pushed hard by the charter lobby, because it puts public schools and charter schools on an equal footing. The cheerleading for unified enrollment, where students have “one-stop shopping,” was funded by the Walton Family Foundation in New Orleans and Denver, which tells you almost everything you need to know.
The next thing she learned was that in a unified enrollment system, the school makes the choice, not the student. This also works out well for the charters.
Third, the OneApp system (as it is called in New Orleans) increases inequity and segregation.
Karen did research and wrote three posts. You should read all of them. The third post in the series has links to the other two.
Perhaps most alarming, Karen learned that the unified enrollment proposal was being pushed by insiders who were connected to the Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation.
She writes:
In this post, as promised, we’ll introduce the privatizers who have infiltrated the school district to advance the interests of the charter lobby.
Conspiracy theory? Hardly. This just looks like the new business model. Since the iPad scandal, privatizers have had to find new ways to move their agenda. The scandal made direct corporate lobbying behind the scenes too risky. But there’s no need, if you have managed to plant your sales force inside the school system itself.
The District personnel pitching the Unified Enrollment scheme are not just any LAUSD employees. They are Broad and Walton acolytes, trained and placed in the school system to move the corporate reform agenda forward from the inside.
Peter Greene wrote about these “cyber shenanigans” here.
Just goes to show that you can neither slumber nor sleep when the charter industry is seeking a new angle to legitimize privatization and money.
Great job, Karen!
Tennessee created the so-called “Achievement School District” in 2012, to take over schools in the lowest 5% of the state, based on test scores, and hand them over to charter operators. The head of the ASD at the time, Chris Barbic, who had run the YES Prep charter chain in Houston, promised that these low-performing schools would be in the top 20% within five years. The five-year mark is approaching, and none of the schools is in the top 25%. It is not clear that any of them have moved out of the bottom 5-10% (moving to the bottom 10% would be progress, though not much). Gary Rubinstein called ASD the “Underachievement District.” See here for his 2016 post. Barbic left before the five-year marker, and the ASD carries on. Unfortunately, despite the meager (or nil) results of the ASD, several states have created their own versions of the ASD. If it failed in Tennessee, why notcopy it in Georgia and Nevada?
The latest news from the ASD is that it is laying off 29 employees. This is not a sign of good health.
The state-run Achievement School District is losing 29 employees including 13 who are involved in the direct running of the first schools in Frayser taken over by the district in 2012.
The changes, which include another 16 positions in the central office, are the most significant change to the district for the bottom 5 percent of public schools in the state in terms of academic achievement.
All but two of the 33 schools in the ASD, including two alternative schools, are in Memphis.
As expected, management says that this move will strengthen the organization for future success. They are “right-sizing” and “streamlining” the organization for the future.
Although the ASD consists of charter schools, parents did not choose them. Their local public schools were taken over without their consent, and that takeover is certainly not school choice. Consequently the ASD has faced considerable parent and community hostility.
Ryan Heisinger is teaching in Newark. He is in his fourth year. He loves teaching. He wants to spend his career as a teacher. But he and everyone else in Newark has been subjected to constant disruption, on purpose.
For me, this year is mainly speeding by because of how much I’ve enjoyed it. This school year has reinvigorated me, further convinced me that I want to spend my career around kids. But after four years of teaching at three different schools with four different principals, I’d love to find a school at which I could settle in and make a long-term difference. The education landscape in my city, however, has left me worried that no such opportunity exists.
I’ve noticed a similar concern among many of my friends who became teachers around the same time I did. Indeed, my friends and I—and we’re not alone—feel that to stay in urban education and make a meaningful impact, we must make a major sacrifice: leave behind the kids who need the most support or forfeit our job stability.
These concerns are relatively new, the products of an alarming trend in urban education through which public school systems have become increasingly unstable as charter schools continue to take up a greater share of students in cities…
Lasting relationships with teachers and peers aren’t forged over just a few months. An amazing arts program takes years to build. It takes a long time to develop a wide variety of student-led extracurricular opportunities. School pride comes when students feel they are a part of a community in which they’re able to express themselves and show off their talents. But in a marketplace in which schools compete for test scores, narrowed priorities and school closures erode the stable soil teachers and administrators need to put roots down and grow an enduring culture of success and school community and pride.
I began my teaching career in a public high school just down the road from my current school, and while I remember it fondly and miss it in many ways, I have no illusions about the education my kids were receiving there. It was a mess. But the higher-performing charter I taught at last year had no art, no music, and no physical education, yet somehow the network was lauded as a model for urban schools. Indeed, in the marketplace, this is the model.
So while reformers tout my city as a school choice success story, I know the improved reading and math scores they cite as proof have come at a tremendous expense. The very system that produced those higher test scores is also denying my students and others like them across the city vital experiences and opportunities.
There must be a better way.
Earlier I posted Larry Lee’s post about the overwhelming defeat of a charter bill in Alabama.
I asked him for more details on charters in the state because I knew that Alabama already passed a charter law. Why was this bill defeated?
This was the response I received:
“What did the bill propose?
“The bill proposed several changes to the original law passed in 2015 – a law that was touted as one of the best charter school laws in the nation.
“It greatly diminished local school board control. In Alabama’s existing charter law, while the State Charter School Commission can overturn a local board’s decision, they do have to give deference to the board’s position. The amended language would have allowed the commission to reweigh the application with no deference to the school board’s original decision and would have given the Commission a very broad definition to use when overruling a local school board.
“The bill also made some timeline changes in the application process and created a staff for the State Charter School Commission.
“Why was it voted down?
“It was voted down because most legislators believe that their community school boards know what their community schools need and believe that decision should be a local board decision, not a state commission decision. They understood that a state commission could never understand the nuances, needs, and priorities of individual communities better than the communities themselves.
“How many charters does Alabama have now?
“Alabama does not have any charter schools currently open in the state. However, a charter school is set to open for the 2017-18 school year in Mobile, Alabama. This charter school was fully vetted by local community stakeholders and was eventually approved by the Mobile County Board of Education with the cooperation of the Mobile County Education Association, a local affiliate of the Alabama Education Association.
“Two charter school companies applied to open charter schools in Birmingham, both applications were unanimously denied by the Birmingham Board of Education. The charter companies appealed the decision to the State Charter School Commission and on Tuesday the Commission overturned one of the denials. Birmingham is now set to have a charter school open in the 2018-19 school year. That will give Alabama two charter schools by 2018.
“What did Collins want to change?
Rep. Collins said she brought the bill to clarify language, tweak the timeline, and create a much-needed staff for the Commission. She denied that it diminished the control of local school boards. An independent group, the Alabama Law Institute, was contacted by a republican legislator for an interpretation of the language that was in question. The bill further diminished local control by adding yet another layer for the State Charter School Commission to overturn local board decisions.”
Nationally, more than 90% of charter schools are non-union. That is the main reason that the Walton Family Foundation (of non-union Walmart) subsidizes so many of them. So, it is newsworthy when charter teachers ask to join a union. But in this case, it is newsworthy for other reasons.
The Los Angeles Times reports that a majority of teachers at the St. Hope charter chain in Sacramento have signed a petition to join the Sacramento Teachers Association. This charter chain was founded by former Mayor Kevin Johnson, husband of controversial Michelle Rhee. Johnson is no longer associated with the chain, but Rhee heads its governing board.
Kingsley Melton, a teacher at Sacramento High School, which is part of the St. Hope network, said some teachers had decided to unionize after attempts to resolve disputes with the organization’s leadership failed. He said frequent turnover of teachers and administrators and a general “lack of transparency” had fueled the push.
“Our desks are old, we have to fight for resources for kids — and when we asked where the money’s going, we never get a full answer,” he said.
Alabama has a solid Republican majority in its legislature.
Yet, Larry Lee reports, an effort to expand the number of charters in the state was overwhelmingly defeated.
Alabama has a lot of small towns and rural districts, represented by Republicans. They know the public school is part of the fabric of their community. They don’t want charters, though they are fine with opening them in Birmingham. Not all Republicans are free market zealots. Some are old-fashioned conservatives who want to conserve their community, not disrupt it.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote an analysis of the major problems with school choice that advocates refuse to address.
She begins by writing that privatized school choice directly threatens public education:
Privatized school choice is the public financing of private alternatives to public schools. Examples include charters run by corporate boards, private schools funded by vouchers, online learning charters and publicly subsidized home schooling. Then there are the disguised voucher plans such as Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, which give taxpayer money on debit cards to parents with little oversight as to how it is spent.
Privatized school choice, in its various forms, has been rapidly gaining ground in many of our states. The thinly veiled agenda of privatized choice is the destruction of public schools, which Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her allies refer to as “government schools.”
What the privatizers never talk about is that every dollar that goes to school choice is taken away from public schools. To adjust for the loss of revenue, public schools have to lay off teachers and close down programs. So the great majority of students are injured so a few can attend a charter or use a voucher.
Voucher programs almost always begin small–targeted at poor children, or children with disabilities, or foster children, or military children–but then expand to apply to all students. Sometimes the privatizers admit that they are pursuing a camel’s nose-under-the-tent strategy, but usually they claim to want “only this small program.”
Unaccountable, unsupervised privately-managed schools waste taxpayers’ dollars with bloated administrative salaries and overhead. In these conditions, without public oversight, fraud and corruption go undetected, and when a whistleblower complains, we learn that hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars were squandered or stolen.
She writes:
When we turn our backs on our public schools, we turn our backs on our most profound American values. We are not embracing conservatism; we are embracing consumerism. It is as simple and sad as that.
I would put it somewhat differently. I would say that the privatizers’ goal is not only to destroy public education but to encourage us to think as consumers, not as citizens. As citizens, we support public services that are for everyone, even if we don’t use those services. Thus, childless people pay taxes for public schools, even though they don’t use them, as do people whose children are grown. But consumers take care of themselves only. In the future, if this movement for privatization prevails, taxpayers may well reject bond issues because they don’t want to pay taxes for private choices. If we think only of ourselves, we lose the sense of civic responsibility that a democracy requires in order to protect and serve the interests of all its citizens.
Jeannie Kaplan watches with amusement as the corporate reform-led Denver School Board tries to distance themselves from Betsy DeVos.
She says, “They can run, but they can’t hide.”
You see, Denver Board of Education and superintendent, once the drip of privatization as characterized particularly by choice and charters starts, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to stop. What starts as a drip quickly becomes a flood that is almost impossible to control. You may truly not believe in vouchers, but you have fostered an atmosphere in Denver where vouchers could be the logical outcome of Choice and Charters, intended or not. And while DFER, too, tried to separate itself from parts of the Trump/DeVos agenda, it simultaneously sent out a notice congratulating “Betsy DeVos on her appointment as Secretary of Education, and we applaud Mrs. DeVos’s commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools.” Further, Betsy DeVos has given money to DFER which in turn has given lots of money to DPS campaigns including the Committee for Denver’s Kids cited below. You can’t always have it both ways, and even the best public relations departments cannot always convince you of their stories.
This is a problems for all the Democrats who have cheered on “school choice,” but thought they could draw the line at vouchers. Like Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, who is a major supporter of charters. Like Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who wants to be President and has been a major supporter of charters. Like California Governor Jerry Brown, who never saw a charter he didn’t like. Like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who voted against DeVos, but advocates both charters and vouchers.
Once you jump on board the school choice train, it is hard to explain why you only meant charters, not vouchers.
