Ed Johnson is a systems analyst in Georgia who is a strong supporter of public schools. He has consistently criticized efforts to multiply privatized charters and charter chains in Atlanta. Much to his chagrin, the Democratic nominee for State of Education is a veteran leader of charter schools and a graduate of the Broad Academy, which is hostile to public schools. Consequently, the Georgia Association of Educators has endorsed the Republican incumbent, State Superintendent Richard Woods. Johnson says: “The BIG lie is ‘charter schools are public schools.’”
Johnson wrote a post for his regular mailing list, explaining that charter schools are not public schools. He was responding to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that profiled the two candidates—the Democrat, Alisha Searcy, and the Republican, Richard Woods.
Johnson’s critique was titled, “No, AJC, charter schools are not public schools, even if Alisha Searcy pretends they are.” Searcy is a proponentand veteran leader of charter schools.
Johnson wrote:
In profiling the candidates, AJC reports that the Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) is endorsing Richard Woods and suggests why GAE is doing so:
The Georgia Association of Educators is endorsing Woods, saying [school choice] policies like those [Searcy stands for] leave less money for traditional public schools. (Charter schools are publicly funded public schools governed by independent boards with government oversight.) Her [Searcy’s] “school choice” advocacy has also rankled members of her own party.
Now, see that parenthetical statement AJC makes right after reporting that GAE is endorsing Woods?
Why would AJC do that? Why would AJC perpetuate the “Charter schools are public schools” lie?
Charter schools are not public schools, plain and simple.
Rather, charter schools are private business enterprises operating within the so-called public education industry. And that does not make them public schools.
Heck, the private business enterprises themselves have told us they are not public schools.
Take, for example, Ivy Preparatory Academy, where Alisha Searcy was, at first, Executive Director then Superintendent, so-called:
After leaving the state House, Searcy became executive director of Ivy Preparatory Academy, a network of charter schools in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. […] Searcy said her title at Ivy Prep was changed to superintendent a year or so after her hire. She wields that in her campaign against Woods, asserting she has more leadership experience than he does.
Ivy Preparatory Academy applied for and received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan of more than one-half million dollars, all the while suckling public money from DeKalb County and Gwinnett County public school districts:
IVY PREPARATORY ACADEMY (NAICS 611110) 1807 MEMORIAL DR ATLANTA GA 30317 PPP Loan Amount: $643,603.00 Date Approved: 2020/04/14 Number of Jobs Protected: 53 PPP Loan Amount per Job: $12,143.45
Ivy Prep applied for and received a PPP loan because it was eligible to do so, as the private business enterprise it is in reality:
In order to be eligible for the Paycheck Protection Program, an applicant must be a small business, sole proprietor, independent contractor, self-employed person, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, 501(c)(19) veterans organization, or a tribal business.
Public schools were ineligible for the Paycheck Protection Program.
In Atlanta, a breakdown of charter schools that applied for and received PPP loans goes like this:
$4,822,200.00 to Purpose Built Schools Atlanta, Inc.
$4,039,752.60 to Drew Charter School, Inc.
$3,855,982.00 to The Kindezi Schools Atlanta, LLC
$1,850,000.00 to Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, Inc.
$1,659,400.00 to Centennial Place Academy, Inc.
$1,085,420.00 to Wesley International Academy, Inc.
$750,400.00 to Westside Atlanta Charter School, Inc.
That comes to more than $18 million dollars ($18,063,154.60) in PPP loans that went to these charter schools.
So, here are these charter schools telling us they are private business enterprises and not public schools.
Yet, also, here is AJC saying, “Charter schools are public schools.”
One would be wise to believe the fox when it tells one it is a fox although some may choose to believe the fox is a hen.
One would be wise to not believe the “Charter schools are public schools” lie.
And one would be wise to not want to have Alisha Searcy (aka, Alisha Thomas Searcy; aka, Alisha Morgan; aka, Alisha Thomas Morgan; aka, Alisha Thomas) be Superintendent, State of Georgia.
On her campaign website, Searcy boldly and shamelessly calls attention to her charter schools track record and associations with school choice enterprises, such as EdChoice (à la Milton Friedman), Broad Superintendent Academy (à laEli Broad), and such others. See more here.
The school choice enterprises with which Searcy associates are known to be about undermining and ultimately destroying public schools, so as to then privatize and commodify them, especially when it comes to education for children labeled “Black” and other minoritized (not “minority”) children.
Thus, out of her own mouth, Alisha Searcy tells us she has not the wisdom to perceive, understand, and appreciate public schools and public education being fundamental common goods essential to the sustainment and continual advancement of democratic practice ever closer to realizing democratic ideals.
She tells us that aspects of her school choice advocacy necessarily and unavoidably begs selfishness, immediate gratification, and wanton consumerism—all attributes that, in excess, make circumstances fit for giving rise to oligarchy and such other societal dysfunctions hence the demise of democracy and civil society.
So, let’s believe Alisha Searcy when she tells us she is a far-right Republican dressed as a Democrat.
But, for Pete’s sake, do not believe, or stop believing, the “Charter schools are public schools” lie.
Moreover, let’s understand there are no such things as “traditional public schools” because that implies other types of public school exist—charter schools, specifically—and they don’t. It’s just “public schools,” so let’s just drop the qualifier “traditional,” already.
Please. Ed Johnson Advocate for Quality in Public Education Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com
A comment by Diane:
Bravo for Ed Johnson for calling out the blatant hypocrisy of privately managed charter schools applying for and receiving Payroll Protection Program money that was available to private businesse , but not to public schools.
How can a “public school” receive federal money for which public schools are ineligible? They did, but doing so was hypocritical, and the Trump administration didn’t care.
If you open the last link in Johnson’s post (“see more here”), you will learn that Searcy champions high-stakes standardized testing and co-authored a teacher evaluation bill based on test scores, although she was never a teacher.
If Georgia wants to maintain public schools with elected school boards, voters should re-elect State Superintendent Richard Woods.
For the first time, the state of Alabama audited a charter school. The audit discovered that $311,000 was missing. But no one will be held accountable because the bbookkeeping was so sloppy.
Birmingham’s Legacy Prep Charter School misspent or did not accurately track $311,517 in spending, over the course of two years, a state audit recently found. Some of that money was from public funds.
The audit, performed at special request of the Alabama State Department of Education, marked the first time the Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts was asked to conduct an audit of a charter school.
“Compliance monitoring led us to know there were issues,” State Superintendent Eric Mackey said, referring to the regular monitoring cycle of schools and districts. “It was serious enough that it got elevated,” he added, and resulted in the department asking for the special audit.
Many of the audit’s findings were related to the school’s lack of proper record-keeping; others were related to the school’s governance and compliance with the school’s charter contract, according to documents reviewed by AL.com.
The school’s CEO and founder, Jonta Morris, who resigned in 2021, was initially asked to repay $311,000, some of which was initially spent on TopGolf, airfare, gift cards and Life Touch Massage.
Chief Examiner Rachel Riddle said Morris eventually provided documentation and did not have to repay any amount. Ultimately, no one will repay any amount, she said.
“Our audit could not find one person that was culpable or should owe back the $311,000,” Riddle said, because of “the lack of organization and adequate documentation.”
Steven Singer is a teacher in Pennsylvania and a blogger. In this post, he contends with the argument that some charter schools are really very good and not at all like those charters mired in scandal, unaccountable, inequitable, greedy, and a drain on public school resources.
Singer writes:
Not MY charter school!
That’s the usual reaction from charter school fansto any criticism of the industry.
I say many of these institutions lack accountabilityabout how tax dollars are spent…
I talk about frequent scandals where unscrupulous charter school operators use copious loopholes in state law to enrich themselves without providing services to parents, students and the community…
Not MY charter school! Not MY charter school! Not MY…
Really!?
If the industry is subject to this much malfeasance and corruption, doesn’t that reflect badly on the entire educational model – even the examples that avoid the worst of it?
One model has daily scandals. The other – authentic public schools – is far from perfect but relatively tame by comparison. You can’t blame people for generalizing.
Yes, there were colonies where the invaders treated the conquered with more respect and dignity than others.
But not a single colony was a good thing. Not a single colonial enterprise avoided subjugating people who should have been free to determine their own destinies.
So without even examining exactly which special rules are stipulated in that charter, these schools are founded on the very concept of privilege.
They get to abide by their own rules tailor-made just for them.
Why does that matter? Because they get public funding.
And, yes, ALL charter schools are publicly funded – they get at least part of their money from taxpayers, usually all or the majority of their funding.
Sit down and prepare for a long but very important read. You might conclude that the elected officials of South Carolina–Governor Henry McMasters, Senator Lindsay Graham, Senator Tim Scott, and the State Legislature–don’t give a damn about the children of South Carolina. You might be right.
Seven years ago, Arnold Hillman and his wife Carol retired as educators in Pennsylvania and moved to South Carolina. Instead of taking up golf, they became deeply involved in helping high school students in impoverished schools. Having served as volunteers in the schools, Arnold Hillman quickly realized that South Carolina ignores the needs of its children. There is no real system, he says. Charter schools have been a distraction, not a solution. He concludes that the schools of South Carolina need radical change. What are the chances of a deep Red state acting on his proposals? Sadly, not great. South Carolina has a well established record of tolerating neglect of its children, especially those who are impoverished and Black.
Arnold Hillman can be reached at arnold@scorsweb.org
Arnold Hillman writes:
THE NEED FOR RADICALIZATION IN EDUCATION
It’s time for us to look seriously at completely redoing the education system in South Carolina. As Senator Greg Hembree, Chair of the Senate Education Committee of the South Carolina Assembly told Barnett Berry, “ It is time to stop nibbling around the edges of school reform and the teaching profession.”1
No truer words have been spoken about our present education system. In fact, there really is no system. In the long scheme of things, our present way of doing education is a bunch of pile-ons from the original manufacturing design of Frederick Taylor and his scientific management.
While Taylor was creating the assembly line process, Ford was dehumanizing it by considering people as cogs in a great machine. If you don’t see any relationship between these two mammoth names in our economic history, go to your local high school and watch when the bells ring and students change classes.
More specifically, South Carolina ranks low on education state rankings that use multiple variables. They are variously ranked from 40thin the nation to 49th. Education Week gives South Carolina a C- for education quality.2 While the Annie Casey Foundation grades education as 43rd in the nation.3
Each year the legislature and the administration in South Carolina claim that we have a new program that will increase test scores and general education standards. According to the numbers, that just is not so. We may introduce the newest panaceas and claim that they will create higher state, federal and NAEP scores, but that does not usually happen.
This is not a single person’s opinion. In this article in the State Newspaper of August 5, 2022, it declares that “ SC has among worst school systems in US, new ranking shows. Here’s why and what’s being done.”
The problems will continue. The same people will present small ideas that will hold forth for a while. Then these ideas and programs will fade into the distance and new people with other small ideas will approach these problems and fail once more. Take a gander at the history of education in South Carolina over the past 50 or so years.
If what you see in our history disturbs you, then you are on the correct path to starting over again and creating a new way of teaching our children.
WHERE DO WE BEGIN ?
Minnesota passed the first Charter School law in 1991. It was followed by Massachusetts in 1993. The basic tenets of the laws were that these were going to be public schools, with independent management. They were also less restricted by state law and could become examples of innovation.5
Public schools would then have a chance to look at these innovations and use them in the regular public schools. That is not what happened. Charter schools became independent entities, sometimes managed by profit making organizations. Their history of innovation is slim. Furthermore, since they were able to disregard state law in many instances, while regular public schools could not copy any of the alleged innovations.
Here was a panacea that really had no possible way of succeeding for the overwhelming majority of public school children. Once again, here was an idea that would propel education into the 21st century and improve education for our children. It did not work that way.
As almost all of these panaceas fell by the wayside. It is evident that none of them had any chances of succeeding. The ideas that created these programs never seemed to begin with the children. They were always ideas that were promulgated to somehow enter the system and make things right. Few, if any of them, began with the needs of the children.
In any radicalization of education, students need to come first. All other things are just trimmings that come after. What is evident from all of these efforts to improve public education, is that they have no basis in children’s needs. Whether you agree with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or its revision or not, children have absolute needs when they are in school.5
Proof of these needs has been highlighted recently when mass school shootings have created social and emotional disturbances among children. These children need to feel safe.
We can list children’s needs from pre-school to 12th grade. They will all be familiar to you.
Safe and Stable environment
Proper nutrition
Structure
Sense of belonging
Consistency
Health Care
Emotional Support
Education
There are many more items that could be added to the list. The author has chosen these because of consistent information about South Carolina’s children that appears in public journals and media. Here are some statistics.
One in six (or 178,710) children in South Carolina are food insecure — numbers that are growing due to the pandemic-induced unemployment.
• Over 12,000 students experienced homelessness in 2017-19, and another unidentified 34,000 were estimated to be without a home.
• Over 40 percent of South Carolinians live in childcare deserts — a term used to describe a Census tract of more than 50 children under the age of five where there are no childcare providers.
• In 2019, about 10 percent of the 15,000 children referred to the Department of Juvenile Justice were for status offenses (truancy, curfew violation, etc.) reflecting underlying personal, family, or community problems, not criminal ones.
The simple truth is that many children in our state have few of the basic needs outlined above. This is not just a problem of poor and minority communities. 6
A kindergarten assessment at the beginning of the 2020- 21 school year was modified because of the pandemic. However, the results published by the Westend Corporation, the creator of the assessment, found these numbers statewide:
33% of the 48,000 of the kindergartners tested at the beginning of the year had an Emerging Readiness. This means that they will need significant help to reach readiness.
40% of the children were classified as approaching readiness and would need some kind of intervention.
27% of the children are actually demonstrating readiness.7
During the early days of the pandemic there were contrary opinions about wearing masks and getting vaccinations. Even today cases of Covid variants are spiking in a number of counties in the state, according to the DHEC. The situation is confusing. There is an elected Superintendent of Education who had differing views from those of the administration.
This confusion made life difficult for local decision makers. Who does one listen to, the Governor, the Superintendent of Education or the Department of Health and Environmental Control? Consequently, there was little consistency across the state.
Leadership at the local level became a problem when 32 of the 78 school superintendents turned over from March of 2020 to June of 2022. That is 41%.8 This lack of consistency has propelled many school districts into micro-management by school boards. These kinds of happenings are never a positive event for the children.
If South Carolina has a system of education, it is not apparent. The funding mechanisms for school districts relies on many layers of bureaucratic meddling. As in most states in the union, school districts are governed by local school boards. At the upper levels of the state government, the Governor, or an appointed official, such as a Chief State School Officer actually operates the system.
Leadership at the local level became a problem when 32 of the 78 school superintendents turned over from March of 2020 to June of 2022. That is 41%.8 This lack of consistency has propelled many school districts into micro-management by school boards. These kinds of happenings are never a positive event for the children.If South Carolina has a system of education, it is not apparent. The funding mechanisms for school districts relies on many layers of bureaucratic meddling. As in most states in the union, school districts are governed by local school boards. At the upper levels of the state government, the Governor, or an appointed official, such as a Chief State School Officer actually operates the system.
South Carolina is one of 12 states that elects its chief state school officer. There are pros and cons to this system. In some cases, it can stimulate cooperative action, while in others it stimulates conflict.In South Carolina, there are a number of bureaucratic layers to school governance. At the local level, there are school boards, superintendents of schools, county councils, and something called a legislative committee whose power is ill defined. It is composed of both state senators and state house members. There is also the Education Oversight Committee (EOC). This is the legislators’ way of keeping on eye on education and how it is performing across the state.
SO WHAT IS THE CONCLUSION ?
Underneath the edujargon and the political palaver, most folks know that education is not doing well in South Carolina. We will not delveinto higher education. This is a concluding thought from many people.
Now, who do you blame? We blame everyone and no one. Many good hearted people of all political stripes have tried to fix things. They have not succeeded. The Covid-19 pandemic has pointed out that our system cannot deal with the realities of our current world. We have left our children to the devices of companies who are producing online products. We have left our teachers out there in the universe of online education with no tools at their disposal. They have tried mightily to do their job. It was mostly a futile attempt.
staff reports | Results from end-of-year examination scores revealed that South Carolina students are struggling in U.S. history, algebra and biology. More than a third of high school students failed algebra last year and 24% got a “D.” They scored even worse in history and biology with a mean of 65% and 66%, respectively.The culprit: Pandemic-related learning loss, education officials suspect.
State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman said more work needed to be done to help students recover: “Preparing students to meet college and career-readiness standards must not just be an aspiration in our state,” she said, according to published reports. “It’s a responsibility that all of us must play a role in as we pursue meaningful solutions.16
As we get back to in-person education, the children have been besieged with social and emotional problems. Teachers are not able to handle such things by themselves. It is a gross miscalculation that all children are getting the help that they need. In fact, when they do get help, who is it that provides it ?
We are even further behind than we were in March of 2020. Yet, some school districts still seem to shine. In larger school districts, with many schools, there still seem to be those whodo well. They are singularly in the minority. How can we compare a school district with a median household income of $101,284 with one whose income is $26,074?9
Think of the resources that wealthy parents can provide for their child, compared to a child whose parents are just getting by and have no resources for their child, except for love.
O.K. RADICALS, WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?
We begin with the children and the things that they need. We can look at the above-mentioned items as a beginning. As was said, there are many more things that children need. As they mature through the school and life experiences, their needs change. Do we know enough Piaget to list the things that the children need at particular ages. Notice, I did not say grades. As a noted educator and speaker Sam Clemens once said, “ How do you handle a kindergartner who comes into school carrying a New York Times when you also have a little one who walks in and needs to learn his alphabet?
It all begins at birth, or maybe even before. Without proper health care for expectant moms, the chances of a child having a normal entrance into this world is diminished. South Carolina’s infant mortality rate of 6.5% per 1000 live births is higher than the national average of 5.4% per 1000 live births. Pre-natal medical care is most lacking in rural areas of the state.
How does one prevent this kind of statistic? There are a number of ways, if the state is of a mind. One way is a massive public campaign aimed at areas with few physicians and few clinics. The need for medical facilities in these places should become a state priority.
A second, and more accelerated way is for consortia of school districts, local municipalities and hospitals to purchase medical vans. These vans have been in use in many rural and urban areas in the United States. The van could be under the jurisdiction of one of these entities for financial responsibility. The driver would be a staff member of one of these entities.
Medical personnel could be secured with volunteers, dentists, school psychologists, doctors, nurses, PAs and others. The vans could advertise when they would be in a certain area. Pre-natal exams could be a major function, while children from 0-4 could also be seen by some of these specialists.
A third method of securing health care for pre and post-natal care is an outreach program that is run by a local school district. The Appleton, Wisconsin School District has created a birth through five program that focuses on entire community resources to help parents in the community.
85% of the foundation for a child’s intellect, personality and skills is formed by age 5. Appleton Area School District’s Birth-Five Outreach offers an inclusive network of family care services, school information, and community support.Birth–Five Outreach builds positive relationships with families by offering connections to many school and community resources early on.11
A fourth possible method is to establish a 0-5 school building, or community building that will have all of the services needed by families with children from 0-5 and pre-natal care. In the early 1980’s such a school was created by the Titusville School District in Northwestern Pennsylvania.
All of these suggestions are now in effect in the United States of America, but not in South Carolina. These programs are not only helpful to the individual parent and child, but to the community and to the schools that these children will go to.
SO NOW THEY WALK INTO SCHOOL, OR DO THEY?
If we are going to deal with children where they are at, can we still use the old fashioned age requirement for kindergarten. Not only don’t we want to do that, but maybe we don’t even call the first year of school by that old name. There are things attached to the word, that it may be necessary to use some other word or some other description.
So many of the children that walk through those school doors are at variance with what we consider “ready to learn.” The differences between the children is immense. So what do we do? Here are some programs that could exist in a public school, a vocational school or a technical college.
A. Pre and postnatal care
B. Teenage pregnancy
C. Day Care for community members orschool staff
D. Day Care to programming 0-5
E. On site medical care
F. Training for students to learn day care skills
G. Special education programs for children with disabilities
H. Eldercare
I. Job Placement
J. Home for state reps and congress people
K. Psychological services
There are many definitions of what a school or series of schools might be. The origin of the term, “Community School” comes from Stewart Mott’s vision of the Flint community in Michigan in the mid 1930’s. As the head of General Motors, he was able to fund these programs through his Mott Foundation, which still exists today.
A simple definition of the term Community School comes from the NEA.
Community Schools are built with the understanding that students often come to the classroom with challenges that impact their ability to learn, explore, and develop to their greatest potential.
Because learning never happens in isolation, community schools focus on what students in the community truly need to succeed—whether it’s free healthy meals, health care, tutoring, mental health counseling, or other tailored services before, during, and after school. 13
In recent times, here in South Carolina, Professor Barnett Berry has coined the term “ Whole Child,” education.14His thesis is that unless we take care of the complete needs of children, they will not achieve their maximum capabilities. He also believes that “Whole Child” education begins at birth. Although teaching, “The Whole Child” was concept from the 1950’s, Berry’s description of the process of “Whole Child Education” is much wider and includes so much more than just teachers in a classroom.
One form of “Community School” has been a building that was open 24 hours a day and accommodated an entire community’s needs. The current administration in Washington has increased funding for these kinds of “community schools.” That is not to say that they do not exist already. Here is an example of a school district that has recognized the problems their children bring with them to school and has taken action.
The federal government has recently sent out a request for proposals with the intent of distributing the funding to school districts across the country to promulgate or expand community schools. The total of 468 million dollars in the federal budget proposal for 2023 expands the program. It will be distributed to schools that provide medical assistance, nutritional assistance, mental health, tutoring, enrichment and violence prevention services. The schools will have to be those who have been involved in these programs for a decade.
SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH SOUTH CAROLINA EDUCATION ?
For the most part, South Carolina’s education system does not work for most of its children. The state has tried a number of changes, but to no avail. There is a feeling among educators and those who view the system, that caring for the students is not the priority that it should be.
A good example of this kind of attitude is the recent return of one billion dollars in taxes, rather than using these funds to upgrade education. The needs are so great in many districts.
The establishment of public education in the 19th century was challenged by churches and by religious organizations across the burgeoning country. In some states, religious leaders imposed their religious beliefs upon these new schools. As one example, in a number states, there were no events in schools on Wednesdays afternoons and evenings. Those times were set aside for religious experiences.
In other states, there were established times when students could be released early to go to religious studies in their churches. Certainly, no sporting events were to be held on Sunday. Bibles were distributed to 6th grade students in many schools across the nation.
These were but a few instances of church actions in public schools. Sometime at the end of the 1960’s, groups of right wing religionists and their acolytes met to try and undo public education in its entirety. Now, some 50 years later, that they are succeeding in their efforts.
There can be no doubt that elite billionaires with a religious bent are moving to destroy public education. The issue of the separation of church and state is dissolving amidst a cacophony of yelps from these right wing relgionists, or faux religionists, that they are being discriminated against.
It is a apparent that these plans are not only to create a side by side educational system, but to allow students, who they feel are not up to par,to remain in public schools.
In the prior administration, billions of dollars were distributed to charter school privateers, religious schools, private schools and others. This Paycheck Protection Plan was to be used for businesses that had not been doing well during the Covid 19 pandemic. Interestingly enough, none of these dollars could go to public schools.15
The history of public education both here and in all parts of our land is the history of our success as a country. The forces that continue to try and dissolve public education have no idea what will come next. Here in an essay by Anya Kamenetz, reporter from NPR, explains the history and a possible future of public education.
END NOTES
1 “ A Whole Child Policy Analysis,” Barnett Berry, University of South Carolina, SC4Ed P. 4 2022
2. Annie Casey Foundation 2022 Kids Count data book
3 “Map A-F Grades Rating States of School Quality”, Education Week Research 2021
4 “Minnesota is the Birthplace of Charter Public Schools” Minnesota Association of Charter Schools
5 “ Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” Simply Psychology April 2022
6 1 “ A Whole Child Policy Analysis,” Barnett Berry, University of South Carolina, SC4Ed P. 62022
In a stunning turn of events, the charter schools affiliated with ultra-conservative Hillsdale College withdrew their applications in three counties. The counties rejected them, but the state charter commission had the power to override the local school boards. The charters stirred controversy in the rural counties, and the president of Hillsdale College made matters worse by insulting teachers.
American Classical Education — a group set up to create a network of charter schools affiliated with Hillsdale College across Tennessee — has withdrawn its applications to open schools in Madison, Montgomery and Rutherford counties.
This follows months of controversy since Gov. Bill Lee announced a “partnership” with the ultraconservative Michigan college during his State of the State Address in January.
ACE’s application had been rejected in all three counties, and they faced a contentious appeal next week before the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, which could have overruled the local school boards.
“We made this decision because of the limited time to resolve the concerns raised by the commission staff and our concerns that the meeting structure and timing on Oct. 5 will not allow commissioners to hear directly from the community members whose interests lie at the heart of the commission’s work,” board chair Dolores Gresham wrote in a letter delivered Thursday to the commission….
Lee had praised Hillsdale’s “patriotic” approach to education and asked Hillsdale president Larry Arnn to open as many as 100 of the taxpayer-funded schools across the state.
More recently, NewsChannel 5 Investigateshad uncovered video of a Hillsdale College professor, who teaches part of an online course about the civil rights movement, questioning the achievements of famous Black Americans.
Early on, Governor Lee asked Hillsdale to open 100 charters in Tennessee, and Hillsdale College scaled the number back to 50. At the moment, Hillsdale has none. Governor Lee underestimated the close ties between rural communities and their public schools. The people of Tennessee were unwilling to toss aside the teachers they know and the schools that are the hub of their communities.
Please open the link to read the rest of the story. Hillsdale might try again.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General conducted an in-depth audit of the federal Charter Schools Program, which was initiated in 1994 with a few million dollars by the Clinton administration. Thanks to astute lobbying by the charter industry, the modest program grew to $440 million a year with little or no accountability. Betsy DeVos pushed it aggressively to large charter chains, including for-profit chains.
This audit demonstrates the power and persistence of the Network for Public Education, a small but smart advocate for public schools. NPE operates with one full-time employee and a small number of part-time employees. Our work is motivated not by greed but by idealism and a passionate commitment to the common good. We believe in well-funded schools with experienced teachers for all children.
The introduction by by Strauss and the analysis by Burris has many links, but none transferred when I copied it. I copied some, but not all of them. I urge you to open the original and find the links.
Strauss begins:
The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General has released a new audit of the federal Charter School Program that found some alarming results about how charter school networks have used millions of dollars in funding. Among other things, the audit found that charter school networks and for-profit charter management organizations did not open anywhere near the number of charters they promised to open with federal funding. This piece looks at the new audit and what it tells us.
The reason this is not surprising is that investigations into the Charter School Programs by the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that opposes the growth of charter schools, found that same problem, as well as others and reported it a few years ago. You can read my stories about their “Asleep at the Wheel” here and here. (The second report noted that the state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who has pushed to expand charter schools for decades.)
Charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed. The federal charter program, which began in 1994 with the aim of expanding high-quality charters, had bipartisan support for years, but many Democrats have pulled back from the movement, citing the fiscal impact on school districts and repeated scandals in the sector. The Biden administration is making some changes to the program in an effort to stop waste and fraud and provide more transparency to the operation of charters.
This piece was written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning principal in New York. She has been chronicling the charter school movement and the standardized-test-based accountability movement on this blog for years. The Network for Public Education is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and sees charter schools as part of a movement to privatize public education.
By Carol Burris
A new report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) entitled “The Effectiveness of Charter School Programs in Increasing the Number of Charter Schools” documents how states, charter management organizations, and charter developers often make wildly exaggerated claims regarding the number of charter schools they will open or expand to secure large grants.
The OIG, an independent watchdog of the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), found that for grants issued between 2013 and 2016, only 51 percent of the schools promised by Charter School Programs (CSP) recipients opened or expanded.
The OIG audit also exposed the sloppy record keeping and weak oversight that characterize CSP operations. Since 2006, the department has paid a private corporation, WestEd, millions of dollars to compile, check and update CSP records. WestEd’s present CSP contract exceeds $12 million. In total, WestEd has active contracts with the U.S. Department of Education worth more than $27.6 million. Yet an alarming number of grant records could not be found when requested by the OIG auditors. And while the Biden administration is attempting to clean up and reform the CSP, according to the independent OIG, more work needs to be done.
What did the Office of the Inspector General audit? The audit had three goals. The first was to describe how the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education tracked and reported the number of charter schools that opened and expanded using Charter School Program funds. A second goal was to determine whether CSP grant recipients actually delivered the number of charter schools they promised when they applied for their often multimillion dollar awards. Finally, the audit sought to determine how many schools were still open two years after CSP funding ended.
As its title stated, the audit was an attempt to measure the program’s effectiveness in fulfilling its mission. To conduct the audit, the OIG examined 2013 through 2016 CSP grant records. During that period, the department awarded 103 CSP grants to states, charter management organizations, or individual charter developers. Ninety-four were closely investigated by the OIG. The likely reason these years were chosen was that most grants are for five years. The auditors also found that the department often extends them further when grantees have not spent all of their money. Therefore, more recent grants were excluded because records were likely to be incomplete.
Incomplete and inaccurate records
The auditors noted that while the department, through WestEd, tracked spending and schools while grants were open, the tracking stopped as soon as the grant was complete. Therefore, the department had no way of knowing whether schools remained open beyond the years federal funds propped them up. This speaks to the purpose of the program — to open and expand high-quality charter schools.
When auditors asked the department to define the term high-quality, the department responded that the “CSP office does not determine whether a charter school is high-quality because state rules for determining high quality vary.”
“Additionally,” it said, “the determination of whether a charter school is a high quality is often the responsibility of charter school authorizers.” The department also told auditors that tracking a school’s existence after all money was doled out was not its job.
Even if the department wanted to do a quality check of schools as they were funding and expanding, the OIG found that there was no accurate base of information that they could rely on to determine whether they should continue what was often a multimillion-dollar grant. From the audit:
Although the CSP office created processes for tracking and reporting on charter schools that opened and expanded and charter schools that remained open through the grant performance period end date, those processes did not result in CSP grant recipients reporting precise, reliable, and timely information in their FPRs [final performance reports], APRs [annual performance reports], and data collection forms. The processes also did not result in the CSP office receiving all the necessary information to assess grant recipients’ performance or evaluate the overall effectiveness of the CSP.
Specifically, the department could not produce 13 percent of the required final reports from grantees and 43 percent of the required final data collection sheets. Auditors noted that grantees would report different numbers of schools opened or expanded among required collection forms and final reports. The accuracy of the final documents prepared by WestEd for the department was beyond the scope of the audit.
During our research for our second “Asleep at the Wheel” report, we found that the data collection sheets produced by WestEd and published in 2019 by then Education Secretary Betsy De Vos were replete with errors. Schools that had closed or never opened were reported as open or future. We also noted inaccuracies in recently submitted sheets we received from a Freedom of Information Act request, especially relating to the for-profit management status of the awardee.
But the OIG discovered a far worse problem yet. More than half of the schools that grantees committed to opening or expanding did not open or expand at all.
CSP grantees failed to meet commitments Grant applicants asked for and received millions of dollars based on their promises to open and expand charter schools. However, when the auditors examined 94 grantee applications, they found that many grantees fell far short of their commitments.
The OIG determined that based on the commitments made in the 94 applications, state education agencies, CMOs, and developers promised to open or expand 1,570 charter schools using CSP funds.
As of July 2021, approximately 75 percent of the grant funding had been spent, yet grantees had only opened or expanded 51 percent of the charters they had promised.
This begs the question, where did millions of tax dollars go? I identified grantees by matching applications on the department website along with numbers in the data set with grant codes in the OIG report.
In its 2016 CSP application, the Florida Department of Education put forth what it called a “bold and ambitious plan to … develop a high-impact system to dramatically improve the opportunities of educationally disadvantaged students. The department said that it would use the grant to “support the creation of 200 new high-quality charter schools over the next five years.”
Florida received $70.7 million to achieve its “bold and ambitious” plan. According to the OIG report, it had only opened 33 percent — or 66 — of the schools it promised to open as of July 2021, although it had spent over 51 percent of the CSP funds.
Colorado’s 2015 application promised that it would open 72 charter schools with its over 24.2 million dollar grant. In the end, it opened fewer than half — just 33 — and expanded three schools. Nevertheless, it spent 87.5 percent of its funds.
Tennessee ambitiously promised to open 114 charter schools. It opened just 16, though it managed to spend 63 percent of its grant. These states are not outliers. The report shows a pattern.
And CMOs also failed to deliver. The KIPP charter network promised 65 schools for its jumbo $48,750,000 grant, one that well exceeded most states. It delivered 34 schools and expanded one.
Finally, there are grants to developers that the department directly provides. The Innovation Development Corporation received a $405,730 CSP grant to open The Delaware Met. It was open for just a few months before it was shut down. It also received and spent $72,000 to open DE Stem. That school was shut down before it even opened. Willow Public School, a Washington charter school, took and spent a $602,875 grant, opened, ran into trouble, changed its name, and then shut down.
The department and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools attribute the problem to authorizer reluctance and state caps on the number of schools that can open. Really? Every state that got a grant has a state board that can override local rejections of applications. State applicants and the department are also well aware of caps. Take the case of the 2018 $78,888,888 CSP grant to the New York State Department of Education, which was outside the scope of the OIG audit.
In the New York State application review, which you can find here, raters acknowledge that New York State had not even used up its previous grant which was open beyond its terms and that charter expansion would be limited by the state cap on the number of charters. Yet they gave the application high scores, and it was approved. Where did that 2018 money go? Over $10 million went to provide staff development in technology for charter schools.
Jumbo grants
Why do states and charter management organizations ask for jumbo grants knowing they cannot deliver? Because they want the money to fund their charter school operations.
States and charter management organizations get to keep 10 percent of the cut for grant administration and technical assistance to charter schools. The bigger the grant, the bigger the cut.
Therefore, KIPP was allowed to keep nearly $5 million for its charter management organization, even though it fell way short of its commitment. The Florida Department of Education secured over $7 million for administrative services on its grant. Second, there are no guidelines about how much an individual charter school can get. We have seen grants as low as $250,000 and grants to schools of $1.5 million. When a state realizes it cannot or will not meet its commitment, it just doles out larger amounts.
Third, until President Biden, no prior administration did anything about it over the Charter School Program’s existence. Therefore, states, CMOs, and individual schools realized pretty quickly that they could create grandiose applications, sometimes including falsehoods, and there would be no real consequences if commitments were never met.
The present department has taken a terrible beating for creating modest CSP reform regulations which are still being fought by the charter trade organizations and their proxies, including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a charter school authorizer. Challenges include both a lawsuit and a Republican-sponsored bill to overturn the new rules.
But as the OIG audit shows, reforms are desperately needed.
A controversial Afrocentric charter school for Black students was approved by the Denver school boardhttps://www.denverpost.com/2022/09/23/5280-freedom-schoool-denver-dps-charter/, after initially rejecting the proposal. The board worried that the charter would not attract enough students to be viable. Other charters in Denver have closed because of declining enrollment. If you read the comments that follow the article, the main theme of writers is shock that the Denver school board would open a racially segregated school.
The Denver Post reported:
After the state ordered Denver Public Schools to reconsider a charter school centering Black students and culture, the school board Thursday approved the school to open next fall.
But the approval comes with conditions, including that 5280 Freedom School must fill all of its open seats in its first year. The school plans to open with 52 students in kindergarten and first grade, and add grades each year up to fifth grade.
Denver schools are funded per pupil, and other new charter schools have had to delay opening because they didn’t enroll enough students. Existing charter schools have closed because their enrollment declined, and the district is considering closing some of its own schools due to low student counts.
The school board initially rejected the 5280 Freedom School for fear it would struggle to attract enough students to be financially viable….Last month, the State Board of Education ordered Denver to reconsider its decision. State Board members said it was unfair to assume that 5280 Freedom School would face the same challenges as other charters.
Stephen Dyer, a former state legislator in Ohio, writes a blog that tracks funding and privatization in Ohio. It’s called “10th Period.” He relies on state data to tell the truth about the failure of charters and vouchers. Here is the latest data on charter schools.
Dayton is the lowest performing major urban district. Yet 2 out of 3 Ohio charter schools are less prepared than Dayton students
Ohio’s new report card has revealed something extremely troubling about Ohio’s Charter Schools. On a new measure called “Students in the 4-year Graduation Cohort who Completed a Pathway and are Prepared for College or Career Success”, only 9 percent of Ohio’s potential Charter School graduates met those qualifications. More than 36 percent of Ohio’s public school district students met those qualifications.
(Data Note: These data only examine students who could graduate high school, not whetherthey graduated high school. Public School Districts graduated 91.4 percent of their potential 121,968 graduates. Charter Schools only graduated 65 percent of their 4,657 potential graduates — a lower rate than any Ohio Public School District.)
Of the 43 Ohio Charter Schools with enough students to count in this College and Career Readiness measure, 18 schools had zero — that’s right, not a single student —who qualified as college or career ready. That means that 3 out of every 25 Ohio charter school graduates attended a school where not a single potential graduate was considered college or career ready.
But it gets worse.
More than 54 percent of Youngstown City School potential graduates are college or career ready. Only one Ohio Charter School — Dayton Early College Academy — has a higher rate.
That means that 98 percent of potential Ohio Charter School graduates are less prepared for post-high school lives than Youngstown City Schools’ potential graduates. Remember that Youngstown was seen as such a “failed” school district that the state created a new law to take over the district — in large part so more Charter Schools could open there.
Yet that district’s students are more likely to be prepared for post-high school lives than 98 percent of the 4,657 students potential graduating Ohio’s Charter Schools.
But wait. It gets worse.
The lowest-performing major urban school district in Ohio — Dayton — only had 5.7 percent of its students qualify as career or college ready.
Not good.
But before all you pro-charter school/voucher people scream “School Choice, Now!”, an astonishing 2 out of every 3 potential Ohio Charter School graduates attend schools with worse post-graduate preparation measures than Dayton.
Dayton is the home of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and has been a hotbed of charter and voucher activity for 25 years. It’s not like school choice hasn’t been tried in Dayton.
And it ain’t working.
More Ohio students in all schools need to be career and college ready than they currently are. Full stop.
But what’s clear is that the best place for that to happen is in Ohio’s local public schools, not in Ohio Charter Schools.
I’d also like to use some space to bring up the Ohio Virtual Academy (OHVA) — the ECOT-sized online school. OHVA was paid to educate 14,530 students last year — more students than ECOT ever was paid to educate.
Yet they are just as bad as ECOT at preparing their students for the post-graduate world. An astonishing 87 of 1,820 potential OHVA grads were considered college or career ready. That 4.8 percent rate is lower than all but one Ohio school district — New Miami Local in Butler County, which only had 1 of 44 potential graduates considered college or career ready.
There’s more. If you want to follow the terrible results of privatization in Ohio, subscribe to Stephen Dyer’s blog.
Kathryn Joyce of Salon has written one dynamite article after another about the movement to destroy public education. In this post, she writes that Florida was ranked # 1 in “educational freedom” by the far-right Heritage Foundation, which wants to privatize all schools. This is a brilliant, must-read article!
Arizona, which has pushed hard to expand charters and vouchers, came in a close second.
That claim, along with the fact that the list’s top 20 states are mostly deep “red” and its bottom 10 are almost all dark “blue,” might come as a surprise to education watchers who are familiar with more traditional assessments of education performance. But in the Heritage Foundation’s inaugural “Education Freedom Report Card,” the think tank is grading according to a different metric entirely: not things like average student funding, teacher salary or classroom size, but how easily state legislatures enable students to leave public schools; how lightly private schools and homeschooling are regulated; how active and welcome conservative parent-advocacy groups are; and how frequently or loudly those groups claim that schools are indoctrinating students….
In the category of education choice, Heritage’s primary focus is on education savings accounts(ESAs), a form of school voucher that allows parents to opt out of public schools and use a set amount of state funding (sometimes delivered via debit card) on almost any educational expenses they see fit. ESAs can be used towards charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and low-cost (and typically low-quality) “voucher schools,” as well as online schools, homeschooling expenses, unregulated “microschools” (where a group of parents pool resources to hire a private teacher) or tutoring. The report’s methodology also notes that the percentage of children in a state who attend these alternatives to public schools figures into its rankings, implying that families who choose traditional public schools are not considered examples of educational “freedom.” The “choice” category also awards points based on how non-public schools are regulated, docking states that require accreditation or the same level of testing mandated for public schools.
States can lose points if they have credentialed teachers and gain points if they let anyone without any credentials teach. They also lose points if they have good pension plans and unions. They gain points by having strong bans on “critical race theory” and gain points for teaching patriotic history.
What’s especially noteworthy about this report — which Heritage says it will release on an annual basis — is how closely most of its ranking criteria track with the right’s broader education agenda. Over the last few months, almost all the issues addressed in this report have been highlighted as key action items for conservative education reformers, from the promotion of ESAs, as a preferred pathway to universal school vouchers, to alternative teacher credentialing to the expansion of the anti-CRT movement, which now encompasses anything related to “diversity, equity and inclusion…”
Framing the report by invoking the libertarian economist [Milton] Friedman — who, over the course of his controversial career, proposed eliminating Social Security, the Food and Drug Administration, the licensing of doctors and more — is a telling choice. In a foundational 1955 essay, as Heritage notes, Friedman famously argued that “government-administered schooling” was incompatible with a freedom-loving society, and that public funding of education should be severed from public administration of it — which would end public education as the country had known it for generations…
“Friedman may have been an accomplished number-cruncher, but when it came to social issues, he was a crackpot,” said Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. He claimed that “vouchers ‘would solve all of the critical problems’ faced by schools,” from discipline, to busing to segregation, Burris continued. “He presented no evidence, just claims based on his disdain for any government regulation….”
By 1980, Friedman was declaring that vouchers were merely a useful waypoint on the road to true education freedom, which would include revoking compulsory education laws. In 2006, shortly before his death, Friedman told an ALEC audience that it would be “ideal” to “abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”
For Heritage to use Friedman as its ideological lodestar, public education advocates observe, makes clear what the report values most in the state education systems it’s ranking….
“The fact that the Heritage Foundation ranks Arizona second in the country, when our schools are funded nearly last in the nation, only underscores the depraved lens with which they view the world,” said Beth Lewis, director of the advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, which is currently leading a citizen ballot referendumagainst the state’s new universal ESA law. “Heritage boasting about realizing Milton Friedman’s dream reveals the agenda — to abolish public schools and put every child on a voucher in segregated schools….”
“With this report,” added Burris, “the Heritage Foundation puts its values front and forward — that schooling should be a free-for-all marketplace where states spend the least possible on educating the future generation of Americans, with no regulations to preserve quality.” It’s no accident, Burris added, that Heritage’s top two states, Florida and Arizona, were ranked as the worst on the Network for Public Education’s own report card this year.
Jan Resseger is a careful researcher and thoughtful political analyst who lives in Ohio. In this post, she has compiled a list of the far-right groups who influence the Ohio legislature as it wreaks havoc on the public schools that most children attend.
She writes:
Ohio is overrun with far-right advocates pushing the privatization of public education through the expansion of both vouchers and charter schools and with people spreading alarm about public school teaching of divisive subjects. This should not be surprising in our notoriously gerrymandered Republican state legislature. Here are some of the extremist organizations whose lobbyists counsel our legislators, help them draft legislation, and make political donations.
The Buckeye Institute
Sourcewatch describes this Ohio organization: “The Buckeye Institute… is a right-wing advocacy group based in Ohio. It is a member of the $120 million-a-year State Policy Network (SPN), a web of state pressure groups that denote themselves as “think tanks” and drive a right-wing agenda in statehouses nationwide.” Sourcewatch further describes the State Policy Network: “SPN groups operate as the policy, communications, and litigation arm of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), giving the cookie-cutter ALEC agenda a sheen of academic legitimacy and state-based support.”
On Tuesday of last week, The Buckeye Institute released a new report outlining its strategy for helping students “regain lost learning” during the pandemic: “In its new policy report… The Buckeye Institute outlines how empowering parents, funding students first, and enhancing school choice can counteract the ill effects the pandemic had on learning loss for Ohio’s K-12 students.” While The Buckeye Institute claims to focus on individual students in its response to the past two years of COVID disruption, the new report doesn’t mention students at all. There is nothing about giving students extra attention in smaller classes or more enrichments and activities to make school exciting or more counselors and mental health support. Instead the report addresses the more abstract issues of school ownership and governance. In essence universal marketplace school choice via vouchers is the solution: “The report offers four commonsense policy solutions that will improve the K-12 academic experience:
“Broad-Based Education Savings Accounts: Create a broad-based ESA initiative to reform Ohio’s education system and its long-standing government-run education monopoly…
“Universal Open Enrollment: Make it easier for all families to send students to their school of choice by requiring all Ohio public schools to participate in inter-district open enrollment.
“Expanded Tax Credit Scholarships: Increase the maximum tax credit from its current $750 limit to $2,500 to make it easier for grant organizations to offer larger scholarships (vouchers) to more students in need.
“Enhanced Spending Transparency: Require all public school districts to operate more transparently by sharing their spending data with parents in Ohio Checkbook.”
The Center for Christian Virtue
The Center for Christian Virtue recently purchased an office building across the street from the Statehouse in Columbus to bring the organization right into the center of power in Ohio. One of the Center for Christian Virtue’s new initiatives is to help locate private religious schools in churches—schools that qualify for tax-funded EdChoice vouchers. For the Statehouse News Bureau, Jo Ingles reports: “A new, private school has been commissioned in Columbus, but it’s not like many others… Inside the walls of the Memorial Baptist Church on the west side of Columbus, classrooms normally used for Sunday church services are being readied for kindergarten through second grade students who have been going to local public schools. That’s according to Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, a conservative Christian organization. He said seven churches came together to create this new model school. This is a pilot project for the Center for Christian Virtue. And the group said it’s just the first of many that will use church facilities for a private Christian school.” “Children who enroll in the school this year can use state money through Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program to pay for their tuition because they will fit the income or school attendance area guidelines… Other Christian-based schools are now receiving money from the EdChoice Scholarship program.”
Ingles adds that, “Baer’s organization is leading the charge for majority Republicans state lawmakers to adopt a bill, commonly called the “backpack” bill, that would expand the Ed Choice Scholarship even more to allow any student, regardless of income or where they live, to use public money for private schools. ”
For the Ohio Capital Journal, Zurie Pope reports that the Center for Christian Virtue has gone farther than merely supporting HB 290, the Backpack Bill. Members of the Center for Christian Virtue’s staff helped write the language of the bill: “(D)ocuments obtained by the Ohio Capital Journal through a public records request reveal CCV’s involvement in HB 290 has been more extensive than previously known, and included the advice and promotion of outside groups like Heritage Action and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This past February, a legislative aide for McClain (one of the bill’s sponsors) emailed a draft of the bill to CCV legislative liaison Nilani Jawahar and CCV lobbyist and Ohio Christian Education Network Assistant Director Corine Vidales.” The Ohio Capital Journal‘s report also names so-called academic research the drafters of the Backpack Bill considered as they were drafting the bill: “Both studies were created by EdChoice, an Indiana-based think tank that advocates for school choice. Ohio’s private school voucher program is also called EdChoice.” Finally, explains Zurie Pope, of the Ohio Capital Journal, the executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network, Troy McIntosh, “sent a draft of the bill to Stephanie Kruez, a regional director for Heritage Action, the policy arm of the right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation.”
The Thomas Fordham Institute
The Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben reports that the Thomas Fordham Institute has joined a lawsuit pushing to overturn reasonable and sensible new rules recently imposed by the U.S. Department of Education to improve oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program. The Fordham Institute functions not only as an Ohio think tank, but also as an approved sponsor of its own Ohio charter schools. Tebben explains: “An Ohio group that supports charter schools has joined in a lawsuit fighting against what they say is ‘hostility’ in rule-making by the U.S. Department of Education. The D.C. and Ohio-based Thomas Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank, spoke as a ‘charter school sponsor’ for the state of Ohio, arguing that rules regulating enrollment and use of charter schools… will ‘disadvantage some or all of the charter schools sponsored by Fordham’… The part of the rule that charter school advocates have a problem with states charter schools would need to prove public schools are over-enrolled, and encourage but don’t require ‘community collaboration’ with fellow school districts.” The lawsuit Fordham joined claims: “The most successful charter schools are those that provide educational alternatives to under-enrolled schools, not those that simply house excess numbers of students.” Ohio’s Fordham Institute is supporting the idea that charter schools should operate in competition, not collaboration, with the public school districts in which they are located. Neither does Fordham worry about the areas in Ohio where too many low quality charter schools with fancy advertising are sucking essential dollars from the public schools that serve the majority of the community’s students.
The Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill recently published a detailed set of priorities the Fordham Institute will be advocating this winter when the legislature begins to debate Ohio’s FY 2024-2025 biennial state budget. Churchill explains that Fordham will lobby to expand the charter school funding formula, expand special targeted assistance for charter schools, raise the facilities alliance to cover building costs, and support a credit enhancement to make building restoration and construction more affordable for charter schools. Fordham will also lobby to make EdChoice vouchers available for all students living in families with income up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level and allow brand new private schools to receive publicly funded vouchers from students even in a private school’s first year of operation. To its credit, Fordham will push to make the academic quality of private schools accepting vouchers more transparent by requiring, for the first time, private schools to release standardized test scores. Fordham will also lobby to make interdistrict public school choice universal across all the districts in the state, removing discretion for local school boards to decide whether to participate.
Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative
In the first of an important three-part expose for SALON last spring, Kathryn Joyce outlined the fast-growing initiative of Michigan’s conservative Christian Hillsdale College to disseminate its Classical Academy curriculum—which is Christian as well as classical—nationwide by encouraging charter schools to incorporate its model curriculum: “Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular… Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board embers are clamoring to implement Hillsdale’s proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the ‘patriotic education’ premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.”
The NY Times‘ Stephanie Saul explains the Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative’s name: “Hillsdale’s charter school operation… began in 2010 with a grant from the Chicago-based Barney Family Foundation, endowed by Stephen M. Barney, a financial industry executive. Saul continues: “The Hillsdale charter schools are neither owned nor managed by Hillsdale. Instead, the schools enter agreements to use the Hillsdale curriculum and the college provides training for faculty and staff, as well as other assistance—all free of charge.”
Four of these schools, however, are charter schools—which Ohio considers public schools. As schools with an explicitly Christian curriculum, these charter schools, deemed public by Ohio law, raise obvious questions about church-state separation. After the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin, a Maine school voucher decision which affirmed the constitutionality of publicly funding schools that explicitly teach religion, perhaps these Ohio Hillsdale charter schools will ultimately be tested with further litigation.
