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I’m Cynthia, by the way, director of marketing at ProPublica. I’m also a culture writer, a Philly native and a former political reporter. But until I started working on this project, honestly, I was a little rusty on these subjects myself. That’s why I’m writing to you, instead of our investigative reporters and data nerds. Because I believe you shouldn’t have to be an expert to participate in our democracy. I learned this stuff — you can, too.Michael Kohlhaas, blogger in Los Angeles, writes here about a charter leader who harassed a teacher who protested his staff’s lack of qualifications.
Excelencia Charter Academy is yet another creepy little charter school run by yet another shockingly unqualified creepy little galaxy-brained grifter, this one known as Ruben Alonzo, going about the place making creepy little announcements of delusionally impending disruptive excellence while lining his creepy little pockets with public money1 at the expense of the actual human children that the state legislature, for reasons they’re going to have to answer for eventually, has seen fit to place into his care.
In this regard Alonzo is much like Sakshi Jain, shockingly unqualified founder of the ill-fated GANAS Academy, whose plan to co-locate on the campus of Catskill Elementary School conjured up such a monumental hurricane of activist opposition and scorn that, it appears, she has had to put her school’s opening on hold while she slinks back to her lair to soothe her metaphorical wounds with a salve made of equal parts boorish self-pity and Walton family megabucks.
Unlike Jain, though, Alonzo did actually manage to open his school. In the Fall of 2018 as it happens and, like Jain’s fiasco, co-located, in this case on the campus of Sunrise Elementary School in Boyle Heights. And like Jain’s folly Alonzo’s weirdo little project conjured up some opposition, most publicly from Sunrise Elementary teacher Mimi Guzman-Duncanson.
Duncanson famously parked her SUV out in front of the school covered in flyers advertising the appalling lack of qualifications of Excelencia’s teachers, let alone Ruben Alonzo, the self-proclaimed founder. Duncanson’s protest was covered in the Los Angeles Timesand by Jason McGahan, writing in The Baffler.
You can see a picture of Maestra Duncanson2 with her minivan somewhere near this sentence.That picture and another like it came from a huge set of emails released to me recently by Alonzo pursuant to the California Public Records Act.3 And if it looks like hostile photography, like surveillance, well, that’s because that’s precisely what it is. It turns out that aggressively callow hellbaby Ruben Alonzo just could not deal with the fact that anyone at all dared to question his galaxy-brained 29 year old self.
Curtis Cardine, former superintendent of both public and charter schools, is the preeminent expert on charter schools in Arizona. He created the Grand Canyon Institute to study education issues, and it keeps a close eye on charter malfeasance.
Cardine has written two books that are well worth reading to learn about the failures of the charter industry in Arizona. He is an expert in school finance, and he demonstrates in detail how charter operators are ripping off the public.
The first was Carpetbagging America’s Public Schools.
I quote that book extensively in my own new book SLAYING GOLIATH.
Cardine’s second book, recently published, is Schooling Alone, in which he compares the atomization of society caused by school privatization, and likens its effects to sociologist Robert Putnam’s classic study of social disintegration, Bowling Alone.
Cardine recently prepared a review of Arizona charter school closures and their relation to the bond debt incurred by charters.
Read his letter to two Arizona state senators here.
Steven Singer discovered that the Pennsylvania Department of Education invited citizens to comment on the state’s charter law.
Now is your chance to be heard.
Steven has some definite ideas about what needs to change and he tells you where to send your own comments.
He writes:
This is a huge opportunity for residents fed up with the nonsense the school privatization industry has been getting away with in the Commonwealth for decades.
Pennsylvania has one of the worst charter school laws in the nation.
Charter schools are taxpayer-funded but privately operated.
Though there are about 180 of these privatized institutions throughout the state with more than 137,000 students, that represents only about 6 percent of the kids enrolled in public school.
Yet the state funding system pits authentic public schools against charter schools for the financing needed to stay open.
Charter schools siphon money from authentic public schools serving the neediest students creating a deficit spiral. Money gushes out of public districts which have to cut teachers and programs to patch budget gaps which in turn result in even more parents pulling their children out of the public schools and trying to enroll them in charters.
Though the legislature used to help authentic public schools by reimbursing them for 30% of the charter school costs, that funding has been eliminated.
Meanwhile, the charter school law has barely changed at all since it was enacted in 1997.
Gov. Tom Wolf has promised to correct that with sweeping reforms in 2020 – even if it means bypassing the gerrymandered and gridlocked legislature with executive orders.
But before he can begin, he needs to hear from commonwealth voters.
Bill Phillis posted this powerful letter on his blog for the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding.
The Honorable Michael DeWine
77 S. High Street, Suite 30
Columbus, OH 43215
Dear Governor DeWine,
The headline of an article in the October 27, 2019 Youngstown Vindicator reads: “DeWine Says HB70 Must Be Replaced.”
We are happy to learn that you want to maintain local control of public schools, and that you are not a supporter of House Bill 70, the state legislation allowing state takeover of public schools with failing grades, as Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland have experienced. However, we are concerned with your statement that a “remedial plan” or “outside consultants” may be needed, as stated in the Vindicator article.
We are the Northeastern Ohio AFT retiree chapter, NEO-AFT #279-R. We have over 1,000 members in our group, and are members of the state and national affiliates, the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. Our membership includes retired teachers, administrators, speech/language therapists, school psychologists, guidance counselors, librarians, and paraprofessionals from all over northeastern Ohio.
We–educators and related-service personnel–are the experts you can rely on. We represent a rich range of educational training, knowledge, and experience.
We know from research and experience that:
Parental income is the single most influential factor in a child’s academic performance.
Let us repeat:
The single most important influence on a child’s academic performance is their parents’ income.
Therefore, it is understandable that most children in high-income suburbs get higher test scores and better grades, and more children in poor districts get lower scores and lower grades. This is the case for the Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland School Districts, where 100% of the children enrolled are living at or below the State Poverty Level. However, the children’s low performance on standardized tests is not due to bad teachers, bad schools, or bad local Boards of Education.
Many children living in poor neighborhoods start school handicapped on their very first day. Poverty is a major contributing cause of frequent absenteeism, psychological trauma, health problems including mental health issues, poor nutrition, limited social skills, and much more.
What is needed to combat the effects of poverty are wrap-around school programs including tutoring, and social services including medical, dental, visual, psychological/counseling services, during and after the school day.
The Cincinnati Public Schools are an excellent model. They have successfully created Community Learning Centers (CLC) in all their schools. Since launching their program in 2002, their CLC model has drawn national attention for successfully engaging community partnerships in school buildings.
Another model is the Say Yes to Education program. The Cleveland Metropolitan School District is in its first year of Say Yes to Education Cleveland. This dual-approach program provides the incentive of last-dollar post-high school scholarships for students, along with the essential wrap- around social supports for students and their families from preschool through graduation.
Providing these services to struggling districts like Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland would require additional school funding from the state and/or other entities, but would pay off in significant academic and social gains for these communities.
Educators can and should be involved in developing any remedial plans. They are the experts, and they know what their students and families need.
We recommend:
• End HB 70 completely;
• Add additional health and social services, such as medical, dental, vision, counseling;
• Add additional academic support services;
• Add wrap-around programs, such as robust after-school programs including tutoring and physical activities.
Our public schools are one of the last democratic institutions in America, and we do not want to lose this valuable part of our nation. Most American Nobel prize winners are graduates of their local public schools. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French diplomat, political scientist, historian, and author, wrote in his famous book, Democracy in America, about the wisdom of local community decision-making as a unique characteristic of American towns.
We hope you use this information as a guide to ending HB70.
Sincerely,
Lois Romanoff, M.Eds., Ed.S. Retired School Psychologist, Cleveland Metropolitan School District and NEO-AFT 279-R Member
Teresa Green, President, and the Executive Council of the NEO-AFT 279-R
The York Dispatch, a newspaper in a district that has been targeted for state intervention, blasted the state with a scathing editorial.
I hope the editorial board will forgive me for reprinting it in full. “Financial recovery” has not helped any district; it is a disaster for the students, teachers, and schools. It accomplishes nothing but disruption.
The vultures are circling, and York City School District officials would be wise to take notice.
York City is among four Pennsylvania districts placed in state-mandated financial recovery in 2012 under a new law proponents said would finally hold to account school districts that have failed taxpayers and students alike.
York City schools clearly earned the dubious designation, one it will keep after state officials in August denied the district’s request to be removed from recovery.
Its graduation rates are among the lowest in the state — among, unsurprisingly, its peers also listed on the state’s initial list of underperformers: Harrisburg, Chester Upland and Duquesne. Its financial condition has been a dumpster fire for years.
And, all the while, York City property owners never get a whiff of tax relief.
More: Graduation rates plunged in districts under financial recovery
But one can’t help but wonder if the past few months were a harbinger of things to come for York City. And, if that’s true, the district should gird itself against an onslaught of special interests and right-wing politicians conspiring to undermine the very idea of public education itself.
The war in Harrisburg School District has been ugly for months. This past summer, the school board revolted against the state, denying state officials access to documents and information. Soon after, much of its leadership was sacked when the state took control of its operations and the state-appointed receiver hired an outside agency for most non-educational operations.
But it got worse.
This past month, state House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny County, rolled out legislation that would create a voucher program specifically in Harrisburg School District. The move would immediately bleed $5 million from the district’s budget just to pay for students already enrolled in private schools. And that number would only increase as more parents are paid to send their children elsewhere.
Turzia’s bill would, seemingly by design, cripple Harrisburg’s school district and potentially render it unsalvageable.
On Wednesday, officials from Chester Upland’s school district went to court fighting for their district’s survival. They are faced off against Chester Community Charter School, which is looking to seize control of all elementary education, a move that would no doubt hammer the struggling public district’s finances even more.
More: State places York City schools in financial recovery
It’s no secret that Republicans and private interests are working throughout the country to privatize education.
But education remains a public responsibility, one that benefits society at its very core.
Sure, elderly taxpayers grumble about ever-increasing taxes. Schools in poor, minority communities struggle financially and academically. And lawmakers lack the seriousness to address the systematic failings of a property tax-based system that creates haves and have nots.
But the “school choice” red herring only serves to line investors’ pockets and rob taxpayers of accountability. And, judging by recent history, the enemies of public education are targeting Pennsylvania’s weakest districts first.
York City School District be warned.
Rachel Cohen writes here about the charter supporters backing Pete Buttigieg.
Billionaire Reed Hastings held a fundraiser for Mayor Pete. Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has given millions to the California Charter Schools Association. He has said he looks forward to the day when there are no elected school boards. He likes schools run by corporate boards. He says they didn’t discuss charter schools, which is one of Hastings’ causes about which he is passionate.
Cohen writes:
Linda Lucy, who has served as the president of the South Bend teachers union since June 2018, told VICE she had never met with Pete Buttigieg, and had “nothing to add” about the union’s relationship with the mayor. “Politicians have hijacked the teaching profession in our public schools,” she said.
Buttigieg does appear to have made time for Heather Willey, one of Indiana’s top charter school lobbyists, who co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg in Indianapolis on October 4, according to an invitation obtained by VICE.
Willey served on the board of the Institute for Quality Education, an Indiana school choice advocacy group, for years, and co-chairs her law firm’s “Charter School and School Innovation” group. In 2019, the Institute for Quality Education, Teach for America Indianapolis, and Charter Schools USA, Inc., a for-profit charter company, all listed Willey’s firm, Barnes & Thornburg LLP, as a hired lobbyist. According to her professional biography, Willey “has been intimately involved in the charter school and school reform movements since the inception of the laws in Indiana in 2001.” She did not return repeated requests for comment.
In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, Buttigieg has also had fundraisers with several prominent charter school supporters.
Satya Patel, a venture capitalist who formerly worked as a vice president of product at Twitter, co-hosted an event for Buttigieg in the Bay Area in late August. Between 2007 and 2017, Patel served on the board of KIPP Bay Area Schools, part of the nation’s largest charter school network, which has received tens of millions of dollars in federal grants. He did not return requests for comment.
Anu Partanen and Trevor Corson we’re living in a comfortable neighborhood in Brooklyn but worried about economic pressure and the future. When Anu got an offer of a job in her native Finland, they moved there. They wrote this article to explain that Finnish society arrived at an agreement to provide excellent public services, to pay higher taxes, to protect the health and wellness-being of their citizens, and businesses thriving. The Nordic approach to social welfare is not “socialism,” they write. It’s rational thinking. Capitalists support the system because it works.
They write:
We’ve now been living in Finland for more than a year. The difference between our lives here and in the States has been tremendous, but perhaps not in the way many Americans might imagine. What we’ve experienced is an increase in personal freedom. Our lives are just much more manageable. To be sure, our days are still full of challenges — raising a child, helping elderly parents, juggling the demands of daily logistics and work.
But in Finland, we are automatically covered, no matter what, by taxpayer-funded universal health care that equals the United States’ in quality (despite the misleading claims you hear to the contrary), all without piles of confusing paperwork or haggling over huge bills. Our child attends a fabulous, highly professional and ethnically diverse public day-care center that amazes us with its enrichment activities and professionalism. The price? About $300 a month — the maximum for public day care, because in Finland day-care fees are subsidized for all families.
And if we stay here, our daughter will be able to attend one of the world’s best K-12 education systems at no cost to us, regardless of the neighborhood we live in. College would also be tuition free. If we have another child, we will automatically get paid parental leave, funded largely through taxes, for nearly a year, which can be shared between parents. Annual paid vacations here of four, five or even six weeks are also the norm…
Finnish employers had become painfully aware of the threats socialism continued to pose to capitalism. They also found themselves under increasing pressure from politicians representing the needs of workers. Wanting to avoid further conflicts, and to protect their private property and new industries, Finnish capitalists changed tactics. Instead of exploiting workers and trying to keep them down, after World War II, Finland’s capitalists cooperated with government to map out long-term strategies and discussed these plans with unions to get workers onboard.
More astonishingly, Finnish capitalists also realized that it would be in their own long-term interests to accept steep progressive tax hikes. The taxes would help pay for new government programs to keep workers healthy and productive — and this would build a more beneficial labor market. These programs became the universal taxpayer-funded services of Finland today, including public health care, public day care and education, paid parental leaves, unemployment insurance and the like…
The Nordic nations as a whole, including a majority of their business elites, have arrived at a simple formula: Capitalism works better if employees get paid decent wages and are supported by high-quality, democratically accountable public services that enable everyone to live healthy, dignified lives and to enjoy real equality of opportunity for themselves and their children. For us, that has meant an increase in our personal freedoms and our political rights — not the other way around.
Yes, this requires capitalists and corporations to pay fairer wages and more taxes than their American counterparts currently do. Nordic citizens generally pay more taxes, too. And yes, this might sound scandalous in the United States, where business leaders and economists perpetually warn that tax increases would slow growth and reduce incentives to invest…
Here’s the funny thing, though: Over the past 50 years, if you had invested in a basket of Nordic equities, you would have earned a higher annual real return than the American stock market during the same half-century, according to global equities data published by Credit Suisse.
Nordic capitalists are not dumb. They know that they will still earn very handsome financial returns even after paying their taxes. They keep enough of their profits to live in luxury, wield influence and acquire social status. There are several dozen Nordic billionaires. Nordic citizens are not dumb, either. If you’re a member of the robust middle class in Finland, you generally get a better overall deal for your combined taxes and personal expenditures, as well as higher-quality outcomes, than your American counterparts — and with far less hassle.
Why would the wealthy in Nordic countries go along with this? Some Nordic capitalists actually believe in equality of opportunity and recognize the value of a society that invests in all of its people. But there is a more prosaic reason, too: Paying taxes is a convenient way for capitalists to outsource to the government the work of keeping workers healthy and educated…
While companies in the United States struggle to administer health plans and to find workers who are sufficiently educated, Nordic societies have demanded that their governments provide high-quality public services for all citizens. This liberates businesses to focus on what they do best: business. It’s convenient for everyone else, too. All Finnish residents, including manual laborers, legal immigrants, well-paid managers and wealthy families, benefit hugely from the same Finnish single-payer health care system and world-class public schools.
There’s a big lesson here: When capitalists perceive government as a logistical ally rather than an ideological foe and when all citizens have a stake in high-quality public institutions, it’s amazing how well government can get things done.
Ultimately, when we mislabel what goes on in Nordic nations as socialism, we blind ourselves to what the Nordic region really is: a laboratory where capitalists invest in long-term stability and human flourishing while maintaining healthy profits.
Capitalists in the United States have taken a different path. They’ve slashed taxes, weakened government, crushed unions and privatized essential services in the pursuit of excess profits. All of this leaves workers painfully vulnerable to capitalism’s dynamic disruptions. Even well-positioned Americans now struggle under debilitating pressures, and a majority inhabit a treacherous Wild West where poverty, homelessness, medical bankruptcy, addiction and incarceration can be just a bit of bad luck away. Americans are told that this is freedom and that it is the most heroic way to live…
The success of Nordic capitalism is not due to businesses doing more to help communities. In a way, it’s the opposite: Nordic capitalists do less. What Nordic businesses do is focus on business — including good-faith negotiations with their unions — while letting citizens vote for politicians who use government to deliver a set of robust universal public services…
Right now might be an opportune moment for American capitalists to pause and ask themselves what kind of long-term cost-benefit calculation makes the most sense. Business leaders focused on the long game could do a lot worse than starting with a fact-finding trip to Finland.
The charter industry has lobbied for years to promote the idea that public schools and their teachers and teachers unions are uniquely responsible for denying educational opportunity to children of color. Ever since the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman,” produced by billionaire charter supporter (and rightwing evangelical zealot Philip Anschutz), the charter industry has promoted the claim that supporters of public schools are hostile to children of color while they—funded by billionaires like the Waltons, the Sacklers, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and every Republican governor—claim to be champions of civil rights.
”Malarkey!” says FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).
FAIR offers a “close reading” of media bias against public schools and demonstrates how the charter industry has deceptively labeled any opposition to charters as the work of teachers’ unions, never admitting that supporters of public schools include parents, grandparents, and graduates of public schools, as well as members of the public who understand the importance of public education in a democracy.
After thirty years of charter advocacy, only 6% of American students are enrolled in them. In the only city that is all-charter, New Orleans, the only choice that is forbidden is a public school. This decision was not the result of a vote by the citizens of New Orleans, but a decision imposed by the white Republicans who control the State Legislature. Southern white Republicans are not typically perceived as concerned about the well-being of children of color.
Valerie Strauss reviews “Still Asleep at the Wheel” here.
She begins:
“More than 35 percent of charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP) between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars, according to a new report from an advocacy group that reviewed records of nearly 5,000 schools.
“The state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“The report, titled “Still Asleep at the Wheel,” said that 537 “ghost schools” never opened but received a total of more than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding. That was more than 11 percent of all the schools that received funding from CSP, which began giving grants in 1995.
”In Michigan, where the billionaire DeVos has been instrumental over several decades in creating a charter school sector, 72 charters that received CSP money never opened, at a total cost of some $7.7 million from 2006 to 2014. California was second, with 61 schools that failed to open but collectively received $8.36 million. The Education Department did not respond to a query about the findings. DeVos has made expanding alternatives to school districts — including charters and programs that use public money for private and religious schools — her top priority as education secretary, and has said her metric for a state’s education success is how much they expand school “choice.”
”Casandra Ulbrich, president of the Michigan State Board of Education, said in an interview that she found the new report “extremely troubling.” “It raises some very legitimate questions about a federal grant program that seems to have been operating for years and years with little oversight and very little accountability,” she said.”
