Archives for category: Charter Schools
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George Joseph: Why Are Reports of Violence Increasing Faster at NYC Charter Schools Than Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2016 //
23

In an article in The Nation, George Joseph notes a curious phenomenon: the reports of violent and disruptive behavior are increasing at double the rate in charter schools in New York City, as compared to public schools.

 

The irony is that this is happening at the same time that the billionaire-backed Families for Excellent Schools has unleashed a social media campaign aimed at discrediting Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to reduce harsh discipline in the public schools. Joseph’s article includes several tweets from FES, calling attention to disorder in the public schools. He surmises that FES–a major backer of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain–is trying to divert attention from the embarrassing video of a SA teacher humiliating a child.

 

Joseph interviews a retired professional who observed both types of schools in a building co-located with a charter:

 

Brenda Shufelt, a recently retired librarian who served public school and Success Academy Charter School students at a colocated school library in Harlem, said that as charter schools rapidly expand, they may be taking in more high-needs kids, many of whom cannot conform to one-size-fits-all disciplinary approaches.

 

“In my experience, what would often happen is that charter school students would be so rigidly controlled that the kids would periodically blow up,” says Shufelt. “At PS 30, some of our kids would have meltdowns, usually because of problems at home, but I never saw kids melt down in the way they did in charter schools. They were just so despairing, feeling like they could not do this. I was told by two custodians, they had never had so much vomit to clean up from kindergarten and elementary classes.”

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline, New York City

Merryl Tisch: I Did It for the Kids

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2016 //
64

Merryl Tisch is stepping down as Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents, ending a 20-year tenure on the board. The New York Times interviewed her about her time in office.

 

Tisch led the state’s effort to win Race to the Top funding. The state received $700 million, promising to increase charters, adopt the Common Core, create a longitudinal database for students, and evaluate teachers by test scores.

 

She promoted high-stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluation, charter schools, and everything expected by Race to the Top. And she didn’t just comply, she truly believes that testing, Common Core, and accountability will increase equity and reduce achievement gaps. She did it for the kids.

 

“She tried to do too much, too fast.

 
“That is Merryl H. Tisch’s appraisal of her tenure as chancellor of the Board of Regents, the top education post in New York State, as she prepares to step down at the end of the month.

 
“Her critics say the same thing.

 
“A champion of the Common Core learning standards, Dr. Tisch, 60, pushed for the creation of new, harder tests based on those standards and for teacher evaluations tied to students’ performance on the exams.

 

“That set off a backlash in which a fifth of the eligible students sat out the state’s third- through eighth-grade reading and math tests last spring. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, once her ally on using test scores in teacher evaluations, did an about-face….

 

““If anything, I fault myself for being ambitious for every child,” she said.”

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Reform, New York, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

Red Queen in L.A.: What’s Wrong with Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2016 //
8

Blogger Red Queen in L.A. has observed the rapid expansion of charter schools in Los Angeles. She knows that billionaire Eli Broad wants to put fully half the public school children in the city into privately managed charters.

 

 

In this post, she answers the question “What’s Wrong with Charter Schools?”

 

She begins:

 

“They foster segregation.

 
“Charter schools are in fact the new face of segregation, the enabling excuse for exclusivity and alienation. The Charter School movement glorifies the illusion of “choice” even while entitling homogeneity.

 
“This is borne out in the numbers and confessed every day via parent-to-parent euphemisms: “this school is a better ‘fit’”, “‘safety’ is my top priority”, “my child only responds to a ‘nurturing environment’”, “smaller class sizes are necessary for my child”, “I want my child immersed in a specialized program”.

 
“So much sorting and selecting sets up a double whammy for segregation. On one level families self-select according to like-mindedness and socioeconomic comfort level. At the same time the very process of school selection siphons highly involved families away from public district schools.”

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Segregation

What Texas Should Know About Charters, from a Floridian

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2016 //
5

A civic leader in Texas asked on the blog whether there was any impartial information about charters and their effects. I forwarded her request to Sue Legg of the League of Women Voters in Florida.

 

Sue wrote the following response:

 

 

We have been studying charter and other choice systems for several years. See: http://lwveducation.com​
In Florida, we have non-profit and for profit management companies. The biggest concern with for-profits are their associated real estate firms that build/purchase facilities and then charge the school excessive amounts for leases. Since the charter schools are privately owned and managed, the facilities are paid for by public tax dollars but revert to private owners if closed. We have relatively few charters located in publically owned buildings.

 

There are issues with charter boards. Most are not independent from the management company. Thus, the business model often depends on high staff turnover and low salaries. There are many regulation problems including conflict of interest and nepotism. Big charter firms create umbrella non profits that receive the charter. Their boards often have overlapping board members. Academica, for example, the largest Florida charter chain created Mater charters, Somerset charters, Doral, and Ben Gamla charters among others.

 

Many small independent charters have inexperienced or profit seeking people who start and then close charters, thus keeping substantial start up money awarded by the state. Some legislation has tried to curb this.

 

Charters in Florida tend to duplicate public school programs. Some do focus on children who need a different approach and many of these are successful. The school grade policies complicate their existence, however. For example, schools that focus on children with dyslexia are chronically called ‘F’ schools because those children struggle to learn even though they do make significant progress. ​

 

Florida has 650+ charters. The evidence of resegregation is clear. The high closure rate has received legislative attention. The practice of selective admission/retention is evident even though the admission process is supposed to be random. Achievement based on test scores does not differentiate charter and traditional public schools if well matched samples are used.

 

We have annual audits of each charter. There are also data on racial and economic demographic characteristics as well as school grades.

 

This legislative session has centered on charter authorization systems that would take even more control away from local school boards. Thus far, these proposals look like they will fail.

 

A Citizens for Strong Schools lawsuit over the failure of the state to support public education begins on March 14th.

 

Let me know if I can help.

 

Sue M. Legg Ph.D.
President, Alachua County LWV
Chair, School Choice Project Florida LWV

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Florida, For-Profit, Texas

Mercedes Schneider: My Three Big Concerns about ESSA

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2016 //
7

Mercedes Schneider has read the new Every Student Succeeds Act, every word of it.

 

She has three major concerns:

 

First, the bill requires 95% participation in state tests. It is vague about parents’ rights to opt their children out of the test. States can ask for waivers, but this puts them, as she puts it, “at the mercy of” the Secretary of Education.

 

Second, she is worried about the security of data that the U.S. Department of Education collects. It has confidential data on every student and teacher. In a recent hearing, Congressmen mentioned that the Department’s data system had been hacked in the past. Why trust them now?

 

Third, ESSA is as charter-friendly as NCLB. Certainly, the Department is eager to shovel millions, hundreds of millions to charters. Mercedes cites the recent decision of ED to give $71 million to Ohio charters, even as the state’s charter industry was experienced a series of charter scandals. Clearly, the Department is good at talking standards, but its own standards are mighty low.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data and Data Mining, Delaware, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Privatization, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Washington State: Charter Advocates Push Legislation to Save Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2016 //
19

Politico Education reports that legislation is moving in Washington State to fund the state’s charter schools. A few months ago, the high court of the state ruled that charter schools are NOT public schools, are not accountable to an elected school board, are under private management, and therefore not eligible for public funding. Since then, the charter industry has tried various stratagems to try to get public funding and to reverse the court’s decision by political muscle and money. Since Washington State is home to Bill Gates, and since Bill Gates poured millions into passing a referendum on charters, the pressure to divert public funds to these nonpublic schools have been intense. As usual, charter advocates are fighting for the 1,000 or fewer children in charter schools, but not for the nearly 1 million children in public schools. They never take “no” for an answer when they lose the chance to drain resources from the schools that serve the vast majority of children.

 

 

WASHINGTON STATE CLOSES IN ON CHARTER SAVE: Charter advocates nationwide applauded Washington state House lawmakers on Wednesday night after they passed a measure to keep the state’s charter schools open. The save, which would use lottery money to pay for the schools, comes at the last minute – the legislature is slated to adjourn today. The schools and more than 1,000 students have been in limbo since the state Supreme Court ruled the state’s charter school law unconstitutional late last year. After heated debate the bill passed on a 58-39 vote. “We celebrate the parents who led this charge, and the school and movement leaders who refused to take no for an answer,” said National Alliance for Public Charter Schools President and CEO Nina Rees. “Their amazing efforts on behalf of Washington’s students has led to one of the most remarkable victories in the history of this movement.” The legislation heads back to the state Senate, which has already approved a similar proposal. The Associated Press has more: http://bit.ly/1TNcIjK.

 

Nina Rees, quoted here, formerly was education advisor to Vice President Richard Cheney and then worked for Michael Milken in his education business.

 

 

 

 

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

Chris Christie Promises to Open More Charters

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2016 //
21

Fresh off the campaign trail, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie promised to open more charter schools in Newark. 

 

If Newark Mayor Ras Baraka gets in his way, Christie said, he would run right over him.

 

So much for local control.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark

Gene Glass: Which Students Do Charter Schools Serve?

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2016 //
6

The eminent researcher Gene Glass notes on his blog that the purpose of charter schools, when they were first launched, was to enroll the students with the highest needs. Now, ironically, those are the students likeliest to be avoided by most charter schools.

 

He writes:

 

The great irony is that the charter school movement was launched decades ago as a solution to the “problem” that special needs students were not being adequately served by the traditional public schools. Charter schools would specialize in serving the needs of that neglected population — or so the story went. How ironic, then, that the modern charter school movement creams the top performing, largely white middle class, sector of the public school population and leaves the poor, the needy, and the minorities back in the traditional public schools.

 

He gives citations to prove his point.

 

Glass adds:

 

And now, irony climbs atop irony. Charter schools that have creamed high scoring students from the public schools are labeling high percentages of the students “autistic” to increase their state allotment from under $10,000 per regular student to about $20,000 per “autistic” student. And then they report no expenditures for special programs.

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

WARNING! Connecticut Considers Bill to Erode Local Control

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2016 //
12

Jonathan Pelto, a former legislator in Connecticut, warns about proposed legislation that would allow the state to take control of local schools, without regard to wishes of local school board.

 

He writes:

 

“A new piece of legislation before the Connecticut General Assembly (H.B. 5551) would be the most far-reaching power grab in state history – a direct attack local control of schools, our democracy and Connecticut’s students, parents, teachers, local school officials and public school.

 

“The legislation would enable Malloy’s political appointees on the State Board of Education to takeover individual schools in a district, remove the control of the elected board of education, “suspend laws” and eliminate the role of school governance councils which are the parent’s voice in school “turnaround plans.

 

“The bill is nothing short of an authoritarian maneuver by grossly expanding the Commissioner of Education’s powers under the Commissioner’s Network. The bill destroys the fundamental role of local control because it allows the state to indefinitely take over schools and even entire districts, without a vote of local citizens.

 

“The bill removes any time limit on Commissioner’s Network Schools. It removes the cap on how many Commissioner’s Network schools can be taken over by the state. It removes the right of the local community to appoint their own turnaround committee. It eliminates the requirement that local parents, through their school governance council are included in the process.”

 

Governor Dannell Malloy is chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association, but the proposed legislation comes from the rightwing group ALEC.

 

 

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reform, Education Reform

Call for Investigation of Gulen Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2016 //
40

California BATS are calling for an investigation of the Gulen charter chain. They invite people to sign their petition. Their post includes a list of Gulen schools, which have different names in  different states but are allied with a reclusive Turkish imam who lives in the Poconos. Fethullah Gulen is a controversial leader of a political movement in Turkey, which is opposed by the Turkish government.

 

There are 155 Gulen schools, which makes the chain either the largest or second to the largest charter chain (after KIPP) in the nation. Gulen schools in certain states have been investigated by the FBI. They have paid for legislators to take trips to Turkey. The boards of their charters typically consist of Turkish nationals.

 

Some people hesitate to criticize Gulen schools for fear of appearing anti-Muslim.

 

But this makes impossible to have a rational discussion of the wisdom of turning over public schools to a chain controlled by foreign nationals. Would it make sense if Russian citizens began operating tax-supported charter schools in the US? Or Ecuadorians? Or Cambodians? Or any other nation?

 

It seems we are outsourcing public education to citizens of another nation, with no public debate about it.

 

Why does it matter? The primary purpose of public education is not college-and-career readiness. It is not getting high test scores. It is not global competitiveness. The primary purpose of public education is to prepare young people for citizenship in American society. That’s why taxpayers are responsible for them. Can schools operated by foreign nationals teach the essentials of American citizenship?

 

If foreign nationals want to open private schools in the US, that’s fine. If parents want their children to attend those schools or schools in other nations, that’s their right. They will pay for it, because it is not a public responsibility to send children to a lycee or a gesampschule.

 

But it is strange indeed to see a chain of schools operated by foreign nationals replacing a community’s public schools and paid for with taxpayer dollars. Public schools should be integrally connected to the society and communities they serve. The Gulen phenomenon is puzzling.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, International, Privatization
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