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North Carolina: Public Blames Legislature for Closing Popular School

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2016 //
40

I previously posted about the death of a beloved community public school in Haywood, North Carolina, due to state budget cuts and the opening of a charter school.

 

Members of the community rallied to support the school, and they put the blame where it belongs: on the politicians in Raleigh, who are responsible for the schools’ funding and for authorizing charter schools to compete with neighborhood public schools. They also recognized that that the charter is funded by out-of-state right wingers whose goal is not to improve public education but to destroy it.

 

The voters will remember in November. That’s the good news in Haywood. A school board member plans to run against the Republican incumbent.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Reform, North Carolina

Connecticut: Gov. Malloy Appoints Charter Operator to State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2016 //
10

Governor Dannell Malloy can’t do enough for the charter industry. He forgives their malfeasance, he gives them more money than the public schools that educate the vast majority of the state’s children, he puts their leaders on the state board of education. The hedge fund managers of Greenwich have been the governor’s reliable financiers, but maybe that is mere coincidence.

 

The latest appointment raised eyebrows not only because the gentleman runs a charter but because the state department of education system pays him over half a million dollars a year for his services.

 

Jonathan Pelto thinks that is a conflict of interest. 

 

Charter representatives on the board should recuse themselves in any decision affecting charter schools.  Will they? Don’t count on it.

 

By the way, Malloy is chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

 

 

What at do you think?

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Education Reform

George Joseph: The “Got to Go” List Goes International

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2016 //
31

Success Academy’s public relations firm (Mercury LLC) must be working overtime to try to outrun the stories about the charter chain’s tactics. While critics have alleged for years that the chain produces high scores by a combination of suspensions, attrition, and high-pressure test-prep, the mainstream media–led by the New York Times– is now all over the story.

 

George Joseph writes in the Guardian (U.K.) about Eva Moskowitz’s “got to go” list–the kids who need to be suspended and pushed out to protect the brand and the other allegations swirling around the high-test-score boasting charter chain.

 

Joseph writes:

 

A Guardian analysis has found that the school system loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared to the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.

 

The analysis compared Success and traditional public school populations in high poverty neighborhoods and therefore excluded data from one Success Academy site on the Upper West Side where only about 25% of students were classified as “economically disadvantaged”. This school’s relatively well-to-do student population features the only example of a Success Academy class that grew in size from second to fourth grade.

 

According to Jeff Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chance alone cannot adequately account for these enrollment drop differences. “Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.”

 

Eva believes that the media is piling on, but she has made herself and her charters a media sensation. Once you set yourself up as the sine qua non of “excellence,” a model of the perfection that can be attained by everyone, you also set yourself up as a target for skeptics. The biggest problem for SA is not its critics, who could be easily ignored, but the former teachers and parents and administrators who spill the beans.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization

Drum Roll, Please: The Annual Bunkum Award for Shoddy Research

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2016 //
5

Drumroll, please!

 

The National Education Policy Center announces that the Bunkum award for the shoddiest research of 2015 goes to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Take a bow!

 

 

Bunkum Award Announcement

 

 

National Alliance for Public Charter Schools awarded top prize for shoddy research
Find Documents:
Press Release: http://tinyurl.com/gua9vmv
Bunkum Award Presentation: http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2015
Contact:
William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net
BOULDER, CO (February 23, 2016) – With the Oscar celebration next week, and the Emmys and Pulitzers on the way, the National Education Policy Center announces this year’s winner of its Bunkum Award. We invite you to enjoy our 10th annual tongue-in-cheek salute to the most egregiously shoddy think tank reports.

 

 

It’s not easy to laugh when data are manipulated and made to fit foregone conclusions or when the research literature is misrepresented or ignored and low-quality or dishonest “evidence” has real impact on policy and on children. As best we can tell, polar bears aren’t laughing at reports from the American Petroleum Institute.

 

 

Yet “humor is one of the best ingredients of survival,” according to Aung San Suu Kyi—whose travails have been far weightier than ours. So we will persevere in our commitment to having a bit of fun each year with the evidentiary farce-lympics.

 

 

The Think Twice Think Tank Review Project arose as a response to the often-outsized policy influence of glossy, well-publicized reports that have not been vetted by peer-review. These reports regularly wrap themselves in the veneer of research, but they are frequently little more than propaganda masquerading as social science.

 

 

This year’s awards announcement, available on the NEPC website, is hosted by Dr. David Berliner, the Regents’ Professor Emeritus and former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State University. Berliner is a member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and a widely recognized scholar of educational psychology and policy.

 

 

The 2015 Bunkum Winner

 

 

This year’s winner is the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, for Separating Fact from Fiction: What You Need to Know about Charter Schools. The National Alliance (NAPCS) describes itself as “the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement.” Separating Fact from Fiction is a fetching, sleek publication adorned with 15 charming photos of smiling children keeping watch over 21 easy-to-digest, alleged “myths” followed by responses that the report generously describes as “facts.” Yet Separating Fact from Fiction might more honestly be titled:

 

 

Playing 21 with a Stacked Deck
or
Blackjacked! 21 Attempts to Club Sound Policy.

 

 

Before turning to a small sampling of the report’s problems, however, we’ll offer a compliment: To the credit of the report’s authors, the 21 so-called myths do a good job covering many of the important issues raised by the rapid growth of the charter school sector. Alas, this comprehensive coverage is wasted. The framing of the myths is often so crude as to merely set up a straw man, and the presentation of facts in response to those myths is often outright misleading or unresponsive to the report’s own question. The report’s Blackjack-playing authors (who chose not to identify themselves) decided to bamboozle their readers using several celebrated techniques: the palmed card, the false cut, and the sucker’s bet.

 

 

The Palmed Card. The first myth listed in the report is “Charter schools are not public schools,” and it’s answered as follows: “As defined in federal and state law, charter schools are public schools.” Indeed, this is a technically true statement. A reader of the report, however, is distracted from the palmed card. The reader would never learn that charter schools live in a highly nuanced and ambiguous part-public and part-private niche. Charter schools receive public funding, students receive a no-tuition education, and charters are subject to certain non-discrimination and testing laws—so they’re public in some respects. But they’re private in other respects. As explained in the NEPC review (internal citations omitted):

 

 

Most charter schools are governed by nonprofit boards. It is increasingly the case that charter school buildings are privately owned by the charter’s founders, by an affiliated private company, or by a private trust.
In schools operated by private education management organizations (EMOs), the materials, furniture, and equipment in the schools are usually privately owned by the EMO and leased to the school.
Except for a small number of states that require teachers to be employees of the charter school, it is common for teachers to be “private employees” of the EMO.
Although most charter schools have appointed nonprofit boards intended to represent the public (i.e., taxpayers’) interest, a growing portion of charter schools are operated by private EMOs, and key decisions are made at corporate headquarters, which are often out-of-state. [About half of the nation’s charter school students are enrolled in schools owned and operated by private EMOs.]
Public schools, like other public entities, are subject to transparency laws. Charter schools and their private operators increasingly refuse to share information and data in response to public requests.
False Cuts. Other “myths” discussed in the report falsely suggest that proof is being offered when, in fact, all that’s offered is a bald and sweeping claim, a proclaimed truth or a glowing affirmation. These False Cuts never really rebut the criticisms of charter schools; rather, they simply assert that their self-described myths are not true. For example, when answering the charge of “less qualified teachers,” the report says, “charter leaders aim to hire talented, passionate, and qualified teachers who will boost student achievement and contribute to a thriving school culture.” Similarly, their defense of the “myth” that the charter movement is “anti-union” is that the schools are actually “pro-teacher.”

 

 

So they aim to hire good teachers, and they’re pro-teacher as well. One can only imagine how relieved the readers of this report were, particularly those who worried that the NAPCS would announce that charters were anti-teacher and, in fact, aimed to hire untalented, unmotivated and unqualified teachers.

 

 

In fact, the report as a whole suffers from evidence getting lost in the shuffle. Its use of the research literature borders on the cartoonish: in examining its 47 endnotes, our reviewers found exactly one article that had been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In contrast, almost two-thirds of the citations were to publications of advocacy organizations. Keeping in mind that charter schools have been as extensively studied as any policy over the past decade, these omissions are astonishing; a search in Google Scholar for “charter schools” yields 41,500 results. As the report has no methods section, the reader is left adrift as to why the report selected the biased set of documents it did and why it ignored a vast and easily accessible body of scholarly literature.

 

 

The Sucker’s Bet. Three of the report’s first four myths concern money: “Charter schools get more money than other public schools,” “Charter schools receive a disproportionate amount of private funds,” and “There is a lack of transparency around charter schools’ use of funds.” The gist of the authors’ arguments in response to these “myths” is that charter schools are responsible stewards of unfairly small allocations of public money.

 

 

They’re inducing readers to make a Sucker’s Bet—to go all-in because of the amazing efficiency and payoff that charters supposedly deliver. These readers are never told that the key research relied on for these claims had already been debunked. As our review noted, the lesser public funding received by charter schools “is largely explained by charter schools spending less on special education, student support services, transportation, and food services.” There’s nothing nefarious here, except perhaps some deceptive and incorrect calculations. Our reviewer explained:

 

 

When comparing public funding of charter schools with that of district schools, it is critical that the portion of ‘pass-through’ funds to charter schools from school districts be subtracted. Otherwise, the district revenues are erroneously and vastly inflated. For instance, if a public school district has the responsibility of providing transportation of charter school students, then the taxpayer funding for that transportation should be attributed to the charter schools, not the public school district. But sloppy calculations do not do this. … Nevertheless, Charter schools can receive … additional (categorical) funding if [they wish by, for example, serving] more children with moderate or severe disabilities and if they start offering programs such as vocational technical programs that would qualify them for targeted funding.

 

 

It’s one thing to count your money while sitting at the table—it’s quite another to miscount it and the money of the other player, which is essentially what the study did that the NAPCS relied on. It incorrectly attributed the provision of district-funded activities (e.g., transportation) to the charter, and it incorrectly attributed the revenues spent on these services to the district.

 

 

And so on it goes for 21 “myths.” The result is a series of rudderless assertions, insisting that there is nothing to be concerned about in the charter school world, except of course that charters are being unfairly treated. Yet as the NEPC review explains, the actual picture is much more nuanced. The charter sector includes many good people doing good things, many cases that are highly troubling, and a very real need for improved practice and regulation. With charter schools, just as with any policy issue, whitewashing the record does nothing to advance sound public policymaking or to help the charter sector move forward.

 

 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools earned this year’s Bunkum Award, as the worst example of educational policy research in a think tank report, in part because of the report’s sweep—because of the sheer acreage it unashamedly covers. In a repetitive fashion that fatigues the reader, it sets up and knocks down myth after myth, pretending that it is engaging in a truth-telling mission. This is a shame. Over the years, NAPCS has vacillated between being an honest purveyor of research evidence to being a blind advocate. This time, a useful report was not in the cards.

 

 

Watch the 2015 Bunkums Awards video presentation, read the Bunkum-worthy report and the review, and learn about past Bunkum winners and the National Education Policy Center’s Think Twice think tank review project, all by going to
http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2015.

 

 

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) Think Twice Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org) provides the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org
The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu

Categories Charter Schools, Hoax

North Carolina: Another Legislative Trick to Bankrupt Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2016 //
22

A reader comments on the post about the closing of a beloved elementary school in North Carolina, due to competition from a charter school and state budget cuts:

 

 

I want to point out a specifically horrible aspect to this. In NC, if a home schooled child decides to attend a charter school, the public schools district in which they live is required to tranfer funds to the charter school, even though they NEVER RECEIVED THE FUNDS FROM THE STATE since the child was never enrolled in the district. This was the case for a number of students in this case making the financial impact worse.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, North Carolina

Gene Glass: Is THIS the Best High School in the Nation? No Way

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2016 //
33

Gene V. Glass, one of the nation’s most eminent researchers, has a passion for honesty. And it outrages him that two BASIS charter schools are listed among the “top ten high schools” in the nation by US News & World Report.

 

How does BASIS get those high test scores? They admit many students and winnow them out by imposing academic demands that most students can’t meet. They admit hundreds of students in each grade but end up with only a few dozen graduates. If your idea of “best” is the school with the highest scores, then this is the school for you!

 

Glass publishes a lengthy account from a mother of a student at one of the celebrated BASIS charter schools. Although he is a straight A student at BASIS, she is thinking of switching him back to the public schools. Why?

 

She writes:

 

His classes consist of taking notes and then spitting them out on exams. There is no time in any of his core classes for any meaningful discussions about the subject matter. It’s a race to copy the notes and then study the notes to then take the weekly exams given in all core subjects. Two February’s have passed and not one teacher has made mention of Black History Month. Recently we had our very own Arizona astronaut launch into space; again no mention of this. His Language Arts class consists of weekly packets that are not gone over in class yet the kids are expected to complete them on their own at home and then take the unit exam at the end of the week.

 

What we have found at BASIS is that only the strongest survive. The kids who leave behind all their extra curricular activities and focus solely on their academics. Very smart kids are leaving the school so that they may have a better balance of school and life outside of school. We also have found that the BASIS kids have no idea of current affairs, what’s going on in the world now. They also do little to no community service.

 

Why are we thinking of taking our son out even though he is a top performer? Because life is short and there is more to life than studying 24/7. We want him to be well rounded. To understand about the world he is growing up in and to care enough about it to grow into a person who wants to make it a better place. It was great for him to go there for 5th and 6th grade because his other charter school could’t keep up with his level of advancement from year to year. He needed the advanced math and sciences. Now that he is going into the 7th grade the Chandler School District can accommodate his educational needs. He’ll be able to be in advanced, honors and AP classes. Even better, he will have a choice of what subjects he will take his AP’s in instead of being forced to take AP exams that are mandated by BASIS. If he stays on the path is on he will still graduate with as many AP classes as the students at BASIS but it will be in subjects he is interested in and at a pace that will allow him to also grow into a responsible person who understands that life is more about what you scored on a exam.

 

Gene Glass asks:

 

How long will the State of Arizona continue to pour millions of dollars annually into this “business” known as BASIS charter schools? How many times will US News & World Report blindly publicize this pathetic imitation of a school?

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

British Educator: US Charter Leaders, Stay Home!

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2016 //
16

Robin Alexander, head of the Cambridge Primary Review and prominent British educator, learned that the conservative Education Minister wants to bring a US charter leader to run the British school inspectorate, called Ofsted. He was not happy. He knows what corporate reform is, and he doesn’t want their leaders in Britain.

Alexander writes:

“A check on the touted names makes it clear that the search is less about talent than ideology. The reputation of every US candidate in which the Secretary of State is said to be interested rests on their messianic zeal for the universalisation of charter schools (the US model for England’s academies), against public schools (the equivalent of our LA-maintained schools), and against the teaching unions. This, then, is the mission that the government wants the new Chief Inspector to serve.

“Too bad that the majority of England’s primary schools are not, or not yet, academies. Too bad that Ofsted, according to its website, is supposed to be ‘independent and impartial’; and that Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills is required to report to Parliament, not to the political party in power; and that he/she must do so without fear or favour, judging the performance of all schools, whether maintained or academies, not by their legal status or political allegiance but by the standards they achieve and the way they are run. Too bad that on the question of the relative efficacy of academies and maintained schools the jury is still out, though Ofsted reports that while some truly outstanding schools are academies, many are not. And too bad that the teaching unions are legally-constituted organisations that every teacher has a right to join and that, by the way, they have an excellent track record in assembling reliable evidence on what works and what does not.

“When we consider the paragons across the pond who are reportedly being considered or wooed in Morgan’s search for Michael Wilshaw’s successor, mere ideology descends into dangerous folly. One of them runs a charter school chain in which the brutal treatment of young children in the name of standards has been captured on a video that has gone viral. Another leads a business, recently sold by the Murdoch empire (yes, he’s there too), that having failed to generate profits in digital education is now trying to make money from core curriculum and testing. A third is the union-bashing founder of a charter school chain that has received millions of dollars from right-wing foundations and individuals but whose dubious classroom practices have been exposed not just as morally unacceptable but, in terms of standards, educationally ineffective. A fourth, yet again a charter chain leader, has published a proselytising set text for the chain’s teachers tagged ‘the Bible of pedagogy for no-excuses charter schools’ that, according to critics, makes teaching uniform, shallow, simplistic and test-obsessed. Finally, the most prominent member of the group has been feted by American and British politicians alike for ostensibly turning round one of America’s biggest urban school systems by closing schools in the teeth of parental protest, imposing a narrow curriculum and high stakes tests, and making teacher tenure dependent on student scores; yet after eight years, fewer than a quarter of the system’s students have reached the ‘expected standard’ in literacy and numeracy.

“As head of Ofsted, every one of these would be a disaster. As for the US charter school movement for which such heroic individuals serve as models and cheerleaders, we would do well to pay less attention to ministerial hype and more to the evidence. In England we are familiar with occasional tales of financial irregularity and faltering accountability, and of DfE using Ofsted inspections to bludgeon academy-light communities into submission. But this is as nothing compared with the widely-documented American experience of lies, fraud, corruption, rigged student enrolment, random teacher hiring and firing and student misery in some US school districts and charters, all of which is generating growing parental and community opposition. Witness the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and this week’s nationwide ‘walk-in’ in defence of public education. Yet the culture that American parents, teachers, children and communities are combining to resist is the one the UK government wishes, through Ofsted, to impose. Ministers believe in homework: have they done their own?”

Categories Charter Schools, International

The Death of a Community Public School in North Carolina–Killed by a Charter and Budget Cuts

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2016 //
29

When I read this story, my eyes filled with tears. The community public school in Waynesville, North Carolina, is closing. Not because it is a failing school, but because of budget cuts by the state legislature, and because of a charter school launched by a very rich man in Oregon. You read that right: in Oregon! The public school lost nearly a million dollars to the new charter, and it couldn’t survive.

 

This is the price of privatization. The death of public schools. It is not an accident. This is what ALEC and StudentsFirst and DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) and the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation and the John and Laura Arnold Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Dell Foundation and the Koch brothers and Michael Bloomberg want.

 

 

At one elementary school in the North Carolina mountains two-thirds of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

 

That would make you think that the school would not fare well on the state’s A-F grading system where poverty seems a reliable predictor of the arbitrary grade—97 percent of schools receiving a D or F have more than 50 percent of their students who are from low-income families.

 

But thanks to the efforts of teachers and parents and the community, the rural school managed a C grade in the latest state report card rankings and did even better as far as the N.C. Arts Council is concerned, earning an A+ for art-based education reform.

 

Clearly something is working at this low-income school, Central Elementary in Waynesville, but not for long.

 

The Haywood County School Board voted Monday night to close the school thanks to state budget cuts and the opening of a local charter school that has siphoned students and almost a million dollars in state funding from the local system.

 

Parents and other supporters of the school will appeal to legislators in Raleigh, but no one thinks they have much of a chance.

 

Most likely Central Elementary will close and the parents of the 250 students who are learning there this year will be reassigned and the community will lose a vital resource, a place where one parent said “…students from the whole socio-economic spectrum learn from the dedicated teachers and from and with one another.”

 

The proponents of the school privatization always claim that it’s all about parental choice and that competition is good.

 

But this is not a failing school that is closing, it’s one where students are doing ok despite the hurdles they face. And it is a school that parents and the community work hard to support.

 

Here is a local article explaining the financial situation of the schools, the budget cuts, and the effect of losing students to a charter, online schooling, and homeschooling. Read the comments. You will be reminded why some people home school; anyone can do it. No education needed. It is a way to preserve your child from the influence of “those children” and to preserve the parents’ religious views.

 

Once the privatizers and profiteers took control of the North Carolina legislature and governorship, schools like Central Elementary became just so much collateral damage. Its fate was decided by the privatization zealots in Raleigh and by a rich man in Oregon.

 

If the people of Haywood County don’t like what is happening, they should elect someone else to represent them.

 

 

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

Leo Casey: Tracking Attrition Patterns at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charters

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2016 //
35

Leo Casey, director of the Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C., has pulled together New York state data on the Success Academy charter chain in New York City.

 

When the New York Times revealed the existence of a “Got to Go” list of students, Moskowitz replied that this was an “anomaly.”

 

When the New York Times published a video of a teacher chastising and humbling a first-grader for not answering a question correctly, Moskowitz said this was an “anomaly.”

 

Critics have often said that Moskowitz gets good test results by pushing out students who might pull down scores and by not replacing them with new students (“backfilling”). Casey reviews the data. Tables are in the link.

 

Casey writes:

 

The general pattern is unmistakable. In the early grades, student enrollment in Success Academy Charter Schools increases: Whatever losses the schools may suffer through student attrition are more than compensated for by the enrollment of new students. After Grade 2, however, the enrollment numbers begin to decline and do so continuously through the later grades. There are only small variations in this essential pattern among the different Success Academy Charter Schools.

 

In New York State, high stakes standardized exams begin at the end of Grade 3.

 

Success Academy Charter Schools has made a conscious decision to not fill seats opened up by student attrition in the upper grades of its schools. And this is a deliberate, network-wide practice, as evidenced by Success Academy’s own website. When one compares the grades in each Success Academy Charter School, as listed on its website, with the grades in each school, as listed on the website of the New York City Charter School Center, one finds that the Charter School Center lists all the grades currently being provided under the school’s charter, while Success Academy lists many fewer grades – only those in which it is willing to enroll students.

 

In effect, the Success Academy website has the equivalent of a “do not apply” sign posted for each unlisted grade.

 

Moskowitz has forcefully defended the policy of not accepting new students beyond grade 3, saying it would disrupt the culture SA created.

 

Moskowitz also insists that her schools should not have to accept students from district schools who have received what she considers to be an inadequate education. Even if one accepted her questionable characterization of education in district schools, it is worth noting that she is insisting on a “one way” street: district schools should have to enroll the students who leave Success Academy Charter Schools, but Success Academy schools should not have to enroll students who leave district schools.

 

Casey notes that while few other charter operators are willing to criticize SA, the leader of Democracy Prep has called her out for refusing to fill empty seats in the upper grades as students are winnowed out.

 

Recent developments may well put Moskowitz’s defense of Success Academy’s discipline and enrollment policies to the test. The authorizer of the Success Academy charter schools, the SUNY Charter School Institute, has announced that it is launching an investigation into the disciplinary practices at Success Academy. And the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, responding to a complaint by the New York City Public Advocate, the Legal Aid Society, and a group of former and current Success Academy parents, will investigate claims that Success Academy schools illegally discriminate against students with special needs. The reaction to last week’s video publication by the New York Times can only increase the scrutiny of Success Academy Charter Schools.

 

Most national studies find that charters do not outperform public schools, yet their foundational claim is based on the assertion that they get higher scores. If the veil is ripped away from practices that produce higher scores–by selective winnowing of students–this would be a major blow to the charters’ drive to expand. Casey predicts that a major political battle over the future of public schools and charter schools is in the making.

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Testing

Sue Legg: Florida Republican Proposes to Fix Charter Mess

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2016 //
13

Well, this is a hopeful sign. A Republican the state senate in Florida has proposed to change the charter law so that it focuses on the neediest children, the ones for whom charters were first created. With the house leadership firmly controlled by Rep. Eric Fresen, whose brother-in-law owns one  of the largest and most profitable charter chains in the state, the two houses of the legislature may be on a collision course. Rep. Fresen always takes care of the charter industry.

 

Sue Legg, who has studied Florida charter schools on behalf of the state League of Women Voters, wrote with the following information:

 

 

A recent Senate President, Don Gaetz, proposed a bill this week to curb ‘private enrichment’ facilities schemes by charter school management firms and their real estate arms. He acknowledged that the legislature has gotten away from the original intent for charters schools. His bill would prioritize charters serving impoverished students and/or those with disabilities.

 

Florida has over 650 charter schools, over a third are run by for-profit firms. The legislature, the Governor, the Department of Education and the State Board of Education are all strong charter supporters.

 

This is the first time that a staunch Republican legislator has publically acknowledged the rampant charter exploitation and abuse and taken meaningful steps to curb it. It even addresses public ownership of facilities. The bill is not perfect; it may not pass. However, Senator Gaetz calls for “Charters with a Conscience”. Sometimes you just have to share the good news. 

 

Senator Gaetz is thinking about what is right. He and Rep. Fresen (HB 873) are squaring off over charter school funding for facilities. Both bills would reduce the amount of capital outlay dollars public schools can assess through local property taxes. According to the Miami Herald, Senator Gaetz’s bill would also crack down on ‘private enrichment’ schemes that charter management firms use to build and lease facilities for which they charge exorbitant rates.
Charter board members would have to swear that capital outlay funds would only be used for facilities. Funds would be awarded only to public entities, a 501(c)(3) specifying in its articles of incorporation that all property will return to specified public entities upon dissolution, or is owned by or leased to a person or entity who is not an affiliated party to the charter school.

 

The Senate proposal has some other very good features. It would reconfigure the funding formula to prioritize those charters that offer quality alternative schools for impoverished students or those with disabilities. Certain charters would receive a base capital outlay allocation from state funds, but those that serve at least 75% of children qualifying for free or reduced lunch or 25% of children with ESE, would receive an additional twenty five percent or fifty percent if both criteria are met. The Miami Herald quotes Senator Gaetz who suggested that ‘…we want to weight it for those charters that have a social conscience’.

 

The bill does not take capital outlay money away from traditional public schools for charter schools. It does, however, change the formula for how the money is allocated.

 

There are some ‘gotchas’ in the Senate bill. The legislature still needs to work with districts to create viable policy. Nevertheless, Senator Gaetz appears to recognize that unregulated school choice benefits some companies more than children.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit
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