Mercedes Schneider has developed a keen ability to ferret out the background of Reformer organizations.
The plutocrats spit them out so fast that it is hard to keep track of them.
Read here to see how Schneider identified two new ones.
Archives for category: Education Reform
Contact:
Wendy Katten
773-704-0336
MEDIA ADVISORY: FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 9:45 AM – CITY HALL, 10TH FLOOR
Community Organizations call on CPS, Other Agencies to Reject Two Massive New TIFs
Deliver Open Letter to Taxing Bodies at Friday’s TIF Joint Review Board meeting
What: Parents and community leaders will rally and deliver letters to the leaders of local government agencies, urging them to hold off on approving two massive new TIF Districts that would divert $2.4 billion in future revenue from the Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Park District, the City Colleges of Chicago and other agencies that depend on local property taxes.
Where: City Hall, 10th floor
When: Friday, January 11, 2019, at 9:45 AM
Why: In an open letter to the Joint Review Board, 15 prominent community organizations are calling for city agencies to keep their signatures off a $2.4B dollar plan that would create tax increment financing (TIF) districts in some of the wealthiest and most congested areas of the city — and, in the process, divert funds from the operating budgets of key local agencies. The organizations say these TIFs can only be legitimately vetted by the new Mayor and City Council taking office in May. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration has fast-tracked both TIFs for approval by April, before Emanuel steps down.
Representatives of several of the organizations will gather Friday at 9:45 AM Friday on the 10th floor of City Hall for a brief press conference and to deliver the letter to the Joint Review Board, which meets at 10 AM in Room 1003A.
“I’ve been attending school with my son since September 2017 to ensure his medical needs are met — because CPS has not been able to provide a nurse since then,” parent Guiller Bosqued of Wildwood Elementary said. “Why is CPS foregoing millions in tax dollars when they can’t fund the schools?”
The proposed Roosevelt/Clark TIF would fund $700 in infrastructure envisioned by developers of The 78 along the south branch of the Chicago River. Meanwhile, the Cortland/Chicago River TIF would encompass the proposed Lincoln Yards development along the river’s north branch.
On Tuesday, Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) announced several major changes in the plans for Lincoln Yards, but Hopkins did call for any pause in the creation of the TIF that developer Sterling Bay wants. Ultimately, community leaders noted, families across Chicago will have to pay higher property taxes to offset the funds held in these TIF accounts over the next 23 years.
“My neighborhood public school has experienced significant budget cuts over the past few years,” said parent Estela Diaz of Davis Elementary. “I can’t believe that CPS leadership and the Mayor can give away hundreds of millions of dollars to help develop luxury housing for the wealthy. We need more counselors, case managers and sped teachers in my school. We need afterschool programs to keep our kids learning and safe. Those should be the priorities for our property tax dollars.”
“Massive corruption is being unearthed in the City Council Finance Committee,” noted Cassie Creswell of Raise Your Hand Action. “What other shoe is waiting to drop from eight months of wiretaps? This is the very worst time to fast-track these deals.”
The full letter can be read here. It has been emailed to all the taxing bodies, and will be delivered in person on Friday.
To Local Taxing Bodies, Members of the Joint Review Board
This Friday at the Joint Review Board meeting, the Chicago Board of Education will be asked to sign off on two TIF districts at the cost of $2.4 billion to the taxpayers of Chicago. That’s based on figures included in the Redevelopment Area Project and Plan for each TIF, which were made public on December 12th, 2018.
Chicago is at a critical juncture. The long-standing chair of the finance committee has just been charged with extortion, and there’s a municipal election in less than 50 days. The citizens of Chicago deserve the opportunity for transparent and accountable government. This is not the time to fast-track massive projects that would include major subsidies for private corporations with huge implications for our schools, housing and transit equity, local business, etc. The creation of a TIF district impacts the revenue stream of our city and county and school district for twenty-three years; this is not something to be rushed through.
As a leader of one of the taxing bodies which are also impacted by the implementation of any new TIF districts, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your constituents to put this on hold until a newly elected city council and mayor can take the time needed to vet — via public scrutiny, deliberation and debate — both of these proposed districts and ensure that they represent balanced and equitable development.
Thank you for your consideration,
Jackee Pruitt, Action Now
Caroline Gaete, Blocks Together
Patrick Brosnan, Brighton Park Neighborhood Council
Patricia Fron, Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance
Robert Gomez and Katie Tuten, Chicago Independent Venue League
Angela Hurlock, Claretian Associates
Rocio Garcia, Enlace Chicago
Amisha Patel, Grassroots Collaborative
Juan Carlos Linares, Latin United Community Housing Association (LUCHA)
Nancy Aardema, Logan Square Neighborhood Association
Juanita Irizarry, Friends of the Parks
Rev. Liala Beukema, LakeView Lutheran Church
Marc Kaplan, Northside Action for Justice
James Rudyk, Northwest Side Housing Center
Jennifer Ritter, Organizing Neighbors for Equality Northside (ONE Northside)
Joy Clendenning, Raise Your Hand for IL Public Education
Cassie Creswell and Wendy Katten, Raise Your Hand Action
Blogger Red Queen in LA lays out the facts. Los Angeles Unified School District is not in a fiscal crisis. It can afford to meet UTLA desmans.
There was plenty of spare change when John Deasy wanted to spend $1 Billion for iPads.
She writes:
“This essay was first published April 3, 2017. It concerns persistent LAUSD budgeting chicanery, and the narrative extended to surround it.
“Nothing has changed; not the past numbers or their variance from future projections, not the unfolding reality which reveals how conservative planning shortchanges immediate needs. Suffused with fear and doubt, stakeholders are distracted from the means to realize the democratic entitlement of a truly public education. It is the responsibility of educators and their managers, to spend funds designed to educate children on educating children.”
The United Teachers of Los Angeles is getting ready to strike. As the second largest school district in the United States, this will be a national event.
This ad was placed in the Los Angeles Times.
UTLA is striking not only for fair compensation, but for smaller classes and a moratorium on charter schools, which currently drain $600 million a year from the district’s public schools.
If it happens, the strike is a perfect time for those who want to run for the Democratic nomination for President to show “Which Side Are You On?” Republican candidates (if there are any willing to challenge Trump) can join the picket line, if they are on the side of teachers and public schools.
Will Elizabeth Warren join the picket line? Will Bernie Sanders? Will Joe Biden? Will Kemala Harris? Will Corey Booker? Will Amy Klobuchar? Will Julian Castro? Will Beto O’Rourke? Will any aspiring candidates join the picket line and show their support for teachers and public schools? This is a chance for them to show who they are and also to meet teachers and learn about the needs of schools.
UTLA Publishes Mega LA Times Ad: ‘We Will Strike For Our Students’
UTLA publishes trifold ad that outlines what LA Teachers are fighting for and how parents and the community can support educators and students as we gear up for a potential strike. It features original art by Ernesto Yerena that can be used as a poster. Feel free to share the Facebook post here.
From the LA Times ad today:
A strike is not something we take lightly. If we are forced to strike, it will be as a last resort after almost two years of fruitless contract negotiations and allegations of unlawful behavior from our employer, the Los Angeles Unified School District.
We will engage in whatever talks are possible to avoid a strike, but the district must be willing to spend from its record-breaking $1.9 billion in reserves to support our students, and must engage our full package of proposals rather than dismiss them.
We know there are tough decisions ahead for the more than 600,000 students and their families impacted by a strike. While every family will make their own decision on whether to send their child to school in the event of a strike, having many parents and allies on picket lines will be powerful and transformative.
For many years, the district has been starving our schools of necessary resources and prioritizing the unregulated growth of the charter industry over our neighborhood public schools. Superintendent Austin Beutner is doing this right now as he has contracted with firms that have advanced privatization in other cities. Meanwhile more than 80% of LAUSD schools don’t have a full-time school nurse. There is only one counselor for every 945 students. LAUSD has among the highest class sizes in California.
Overtesting of our students is crowding out instruction in arts, music, ethnic studies, and science. California ranks 43 out of 50 in per-pupil funding, yet the district refuses to use its more than healthy reserves to immediately fund our classrooms.
Making progress on these issues is the only way we can provide all students, not just some, with the schools they deserve.
If LAUSD fails to engage meaningfully in our proposals and we are forced to strike, we will strike for our students.
Sincerely,
United Teachers Los Angeles
For more info, go to
Bill Gates never gives up, and he sure isn’t abandoning his Common Core baby.
But he is not investing much. Only $10 million to train teachers to use Common Core curricula.
For this multiBillionaire, that’s not an investment, it’s more like throwing a few coins out there. Maybe it’s just a signal to his grantees that he is not yet ready yo throw in the towel.
Edweek reports:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to invest in professional development providers who will train teachers on “high quality” curricula, the philanthropy announced this afternoon.
The announcement fleshes out the curricular prong of the education improvement strategy the influential foundation laid out in late 2017, a major pivot away from its prior focus on teacher performance.
The investment, at around $10 million, is a tiny portion of the approximately $1.7 billion the philanthropy expects to put into K-12 education by 2022. Nevertheless, it’s likely to attract attention for inching closer to the perennially touchy issue of what students learn every day at school.
Gates officials emphasized that the new grants won’t support the development of curricula from scratch. Instead, grantees will work to improve how teachers are taught to use and modify existing series that are well aligned to state learning standards…
The grants build on the foundation’s earlier support for shared standards, notably the Common Core State Standards. All grantees, for instance, would have to orient their teacher training around a curriculum with a high rating from EdReports.org, a nonprofit that issues Consumer Reports-style reviews, or on similar tools developed by nonprofit groups like Student Achievement Partners and Achieve.
Those tools were directly crafted in the wake of the common standards movement with heavy support from the Gates Foundation.
EdReports has received more than $15 million from the foundation since 2015, while Student Achievement Partners has received about $10 million since 2012. Achieve has received various Gates grants since 1999, most recently $1 million in September to support its reviews of science lessons…
Gates’ investment comes in the middle of two diverging national trends in curriculum that have been unleashed, respectively, by the common-standards movement, and by an explosion of online, downloadable, and often teacher-made lessons.
Gates is still hoping to standardize Instruction and curriculum.
“Who Else Has Gates Funded on Curriculum?
Apart from its newly announced grant competition, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has long supported some curriculum providers and quality-control groups. Here’s a look at what it funded in that category in 2018.
RAND Corp.
$349,000
To support curriculum
Open Up Resources
$667,000
To support capacity-building
Pivot Learning Partners
$1.23 million
To support instructional materials
Illustrative Mathematics
$2.85 million
To support student learning and teacher development
EdReports.org, Inc.
$7 million
To provide general support
PowerMyLearning, Inc.
$500,000
To explore connections between tier one and supplemental instructional resources
Achieve, Inc.
$999,548
To increase availability of high-quality science materials
State Educational Technology Directors Association
$299,752
To support state education leaders in their selection of evidence-based professional development and quality instructional materials
Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grants database
This is a great story. For eight years, Maine had a hot-headed Tea Party zealot as Governor. Paul LePage appointed a homeschooling parent as Commissioner of Education. He made racist remarks. He followed Jeb Bush as his idol.
In November, Democrat Janet Mills was elected. Competence, intelligence, sanity. Wow!
The educator she chose as Commissioner of education was stunned. She is amazing!
BRUNSWICK — The Saturday morning after Janet Mills won the gubernatorial election in November, Pender Makin sat in bed with her computer, sipping some coffee and preparing to compose a letter to whoever would be the next commissioner of the state Department of Education.
“I was on the one hand so filled with hope for a much better future for Maine, and also filled with exasperation due to some significant issues that I was concerned about at the department,” she recalled Dec. 28.
“‘Dear new commissioner,’” the Scarborough resident’s letter began.
Then, she said, “I basically laid out what I thought should be the most immediate strategic goals for that post.”
Makin, Brunswick’s assistant superintendent of schools since 2015, had no idea she was writing a letter to herself.
Even though she never planned to send the letter, deeming it just a way to organize her thoughts and feelings, Makin had started to establish a platform of issues and priorities that would serve her well in the weeks ahead.
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The state Senate and Education and Cultural Affairs Committee are due this month to confirm Mills’ nomination of Makin as Education Department commissioner. She would replace Robert Hasson of South Portland, who former Gov. Paul LePage tapped for the role in March 2017…
Makin said she was asked out of the blue in early December to attend an interview in Augusta with a cabinet screening committee.
“I said, ‘of course I will,’” she recalled. “How would I ever not? … I wake up with a sense of urgency; I consider it a complete mission, public education across the board.”
Makin saw the interview as a chance to share her beliefs about education with “a bunch of smart, powerful people,” but didn’t imagine herself much of a contender for the post…
Taking the reins of the department at the dawn of a new administration, “I see Maine as being in a prime position to be influencing national education policy, rather than reactively responding to every little whim that’s happening (at the federal level),” Makin said.
“We have the most unique demographics, we have innovative people in our classrooms all across the state,” she added, plus “a lot of passion and determination, hard work, and all the things that make Maine a real leader educationally. I feel that we maybe have squandered every opportunity to highlight that at the national level.”
Makin also said she sees Maine striving to achieve a world-class education for its students and pushing back against federal policies with which it doesn’t agree, instead of “absorbing blindly whatever gets handed down to us.”
She recalled implementation of the “No Child Left Behind” initiative in 2001, which launched a period of externally driven policies that created a culture of fear-driven accountability. Non-educators were telling educators how to teach, she said, and using sometimes punitive methods to try to bring about success.
But educators “don’t respond to carrots or sticks,” Makin noted, pointing out that the new teachers she meets each year come with a passion and idealistic desire to do the best for their students.
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“They arrive pre-motivated,” she said. “… They don’t need to have their professionalism stripped away and replaced with something to implement.”
“Government’s role should pull back, and focus on bills and initiatives that provide infrastructure,” Makin said. “Let’s look at innovative ways to provide … universal (pre-kindergarten). How can we raise up teacher bottom pay so that they’re recognized for the amount of education and work that they do to become teachers? How do we create equity across the state?”
“These are great, big things,” she continued. “I think government should stay out of the classroom; I think government should stay out of the transcripts,” and retreat from “micromanaging the actual operations of our schools.”
“When you take leaders, and you strip from them their leadership and you replace it with stuff to manage, you’re not fostering leadership,” Makin said. “So I think we need to just have a different lens.”
Most charters schools are non-union. Nationally, about 90% of charters are non-union. That’s what the Waltons, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other supporters of privatization want. They oppose unions. That’s why they support charter schools and vouchers.
Media Contact:
Ed Gutierrez, UTLA
213-595-7949 (m)
egutierrez@utla.net
Charter school teachers at The Accelerated Schools to announce possible strike
Teachers represented by UTLA at three Los Angeles charter schools operated by The Accelerated Schools (TAS) will announce on Wednesday a date for a potential upcoming strike. Educators have voted 99% to authorize a strike at the three schools.
The announcement comes on the heels of the release this week of a report by a state-appointed arbitrator and fact finding panel, which provides recommendations for resolving nearly all the outstanding contract issues at TAS. Teachers are demanding TAS decision-makers get back to the bargaining table and work to resolve these issues or face a strike.
Educators began negotiations with the urgent goal of fixing the problem of high teacher turnover and have been in contract negotiations with The Accelerated Schools for more than twenty months. The union and TAS are at impasse with disagreement on a small number of key issues. These include improvements in provisions that will ensure teachers are better able to exercise rights under their contract and provide for the same basic job protections currently enjoyed by nearly 90% of public school educators in Los Angeles. Teachers are also asking for TAS to offer more competitive health benefits and to take up an increased share of the cost for healthcare benefits.
TAS is not claiming an inability to pay for health benefit improvements. Teachers are fighting for a contract that will address skyrocketing teacher turnover at TAS and help bring increased stability for students and improvements in learning conditions.
“Last year, the teacher turnover rate was 40%,” said Wallace Annenberg High School teacher Kurt Belbin. “We know that this negatively impacts students and their educational experience. We were, and remain, resolved to fight for the schools that our students deserve.”
TAS teachers’ announcement comes at the same time that more than 30,000 UTLA members are poised to walk off the job at more than 900 school sites across LAUSD. A strike at TAS would be only the second charter school strike in the country following the walkout of 500 charter educators in Chicago last month.
JANUARY 9 – TAS TEACHER POTENTIAL STRIKE ANNOUCEMENT
Media site
Accelerated Charter Elementary School
3914 S. Main St., Los Angeles CA, 90011
What: Press Conference with TAS Teachers
Time: 3:45pm
Spanish-speaking parents and educators available
UTLA, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union local, represents more than 35,000 teachers and health & human services professionals who work in the Los Angeles Unified School District and in charter schools.
http://www.utla.net
This just came in from the Florida Education Association. Ten percent of Florida’s 3 million students attend charter schools. Three percent attend voucher schools, most of which are religious. Another eight percent attendprivate schools without vouchers. Seventy-nine percent attend public schools. Governor DeSantis and the Legislature should not ignore the seventy-nine percent while catering to the wants, needs, and desires of the twenty-one percent.
FEA statement on Gov. DeSantis and education
TALLAHASSEE — Florida Education Association (FEA) President Fedrick Ingram released this statement today following the inauguration of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Gov. DeSantis has said he is focused on giving every child the opportunity for a world-class education. So are the members of the Florida Education Association, and we hope to work with him toward that goal. We want a great education available to every child, and we want every student to be successful.
“Our state can do the most good for the greatest number of students by investing in the neighborhood public schools that educate the large majority of Florida’s kids. ‘Choice,’ on the other hand, is a code word for draining tax dollars from our neighborhood public schools to fund charter and voucher programs that serve only a small percentage of children.
“Florida’s neighborhood public schools need this administration’s support. Our state ranks 44th nationally in education spending. We are 45th in the nation in teacher pay and 47th in pay for our education staff professionals, and we are facing an unprecedented and growing teacher shortage. An investment in our neighborhood public schools and our educators is an investment in Florida’s future.”
PS: I updated the statistics to include those students enrolled in private schools that do not accept vouchers.
Thanks to Sue Legg of the League of Women Voters.
This is the third in a series about education politics in Oklahoma by John Thompson, historian and retired teacher.
The Oklahoman no longer dominates Oklahoma politics as it did for generations, but it is still the biggest bear in our woods. Now that legislators and governor-elect are more inexperienced than ever, the corporate school reform-loving newspaper is aggressively pushing its privatization agenda. Since our state government is almost completely lacking in knowledge of how and why the state implemented the entire accountability-driven, charter-driven experiment at the beginning of the decade, who knows who will win the hearts and minds of newly-elected officials?
One of the most worrisome of the Oklahoman’s recent editorials praised Reason magazine’s prescription for school improvement. Reason’s diagnosis was virtually indistinguishable from that of Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd, which said that underfunded high-poverty urban schools don’t need more money as much as they need to learn from high-performing schools in the rich exurbs.
The Oklahoman then editorialized:
In 2011 and 2012, Oklahoma implemented reforms that have proven effective in Florida, including a third-grade reading law that required retention of students who were two years below grade level, and an A-F school grading system. Lawmakers have since watered down some of those reforms. Instead of backing off, Reason’s education rankings indicate Oklahoma lawmakers should double down.
https://newsok.com/article/5616294/education-report-merits-review-in-spending-debate
The Oklahoman is still angry that moderate Republican State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister led a bipartisan effort that allowed schools to use more discretion when deciding whether to retain 3rd graders who don’t pass their reading test. For years, it has led the chorus for adopting an under-funded replica of the full Florida agenda. Fortunately, the Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer has researched the facts about our Reading Sufficiency Act (RSA) law.
Oklahoma Nearly Tops Nation in Holding Back Early-Grade Students
Palmer reports that 3rd grade is:
the only year educators are required by law to retain students who aren’t reading-proficient — it’s not the most common year for students to be retained. A review of federal data from 2011-12 to 2015-16, the latest available, found that repeating a grade is actually more common in kindergarten and first grade.
Palmer reveals “nearly 10,000 students in kindergarten through second grade were retained in the 2015-16 school year, compared to just over 2,500 in third grade.” That represents 6 percent of those three grades, and “only Mississippi retained a higher proportion of students in those early grades.”
Moreover, she finds that “the high-stakes third-grade test appears to drive many of the early retentions.”
Even sadder for poor children of color, the retention rates are worse in urban schools than in their suburbs. Palmer writes, “Oklahoma City Public Schools and Tulsa Public Schools reported similar numbers for kindergarten through second grade: 833 and 823, respectively. Moore Public Schools, on the other hand, which is about half the size of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, reported just 59 students retained.”
The Oklahoma Watch also chronicled the financial and human costs of the high stakes testing. It explains that, “In some cases, retaining a student is warranted and even beneficial, especially if their struggles are related to age or maturity, educators say. But Oklahoma’s extraordinarily high rate suggests something is out of whack.”
And “one extra year of schooling at Oklahoma’s average of $8,091 per student costs the state $80 million. Advocates say that money would be better spent on extra support for the student within their normal grade progression.”
Palmer then cites Texas A&M University research that followed nearly 800 children for 14 years. Elementary students who were held back “were almost three times more likely to drop out of high school than their peers. In that study, the most common year repeated was first grade.”
She cited another study on Florida students who were retained in third grade, and that being old for their grade didn’t reduce the likelihood the student would receive a diploma. But in contrast to the ExcelinEd lobbyists ubiquitous spin, she added “critics note the researcher in that study and others on retention works for a Harvard research center chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who came up with the retention policy and has been pushing it nationwide.”
Moreover, Florida held back 50 percent fewer students below third grade. And Florida invests more than $130 million per year for supports to improve student literacy, while Oklahoma only provided $6 million for 78,000 at-risk students in the last fiscal year.
It must be stressed that the original 3rd grade high stakes reading test, is one of two policies that were clearly repudiated by almost all Oklahoma stakeholders. I had believed it had mostly been mended, despite not being ended, and there is evidence that retentions have slowed during the Hofmeister administration. I’ve talked with many former students angered that their kids were taught by a string of temporary teachers and subs as their kids tried to avoid being retained. But that was attributable to the combination of extreme budget cuts and the overall reform package that drove teachers out of the system.
The second threat, the expansion of charter schools, has garnered pushback. Even many or most of the choice true believers have realized that it would be impossible to find more charters willing to retain more poor children of color. About the only markets left, small towns and gentrifying neighborhoods, are clearly the new targets. I don’t expect reformers to willingly back off of high stakes reading tests, but clearly their main priority will be blaming the system for failed reforms and, creating portfolios of charters in gentrifying areas, leaving district schools and pushing online charters like Epic CMO as alternative schools to the charter systems.
We’ve been winning, but we can’t back off from the battle to reclaim public education.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote a three part series on education “Reform” and politics in his state.
This is part 2.
The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli seemed to be whistling through the graveyard in “The End of Education Policy.” The corporate reformer argued that “Our own Cold War pitted reformers against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw, and reached something approaching homeostasis. Resistance to education reform has not collapsed like the Soviet Union did. Far from it. But there have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily undone, at least for the next decade.”
https://edexcellence.net/articles/the-end-of-education-policy
In fact, the failed school “reform” experiment is losing politically as the public rejects test-driven, competition-driven reform. The Billionaires Boys Club and federal and state governments have wasted billions of dollars on their theories. Now their political campaign is stumbling.
Not surprisingly, the attempt to use the stresses of high stakes testing and nonstop competition between schools to remedy the stresses of poverty and trauma, created a fiasco. They used increased segregation by charter schools to counter the stress of racial segregation. They even used untested and unreliable value-added models, that are biased against teachers in high-challenge schools, in order to recruit more talent to those schools!?!?!
The Obama administration and edu-philanthropists tried to entice charters into serving more high-poverty students with hundreds of millions of dollars of grants. As the reliable Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay explains, only 18 percent on the era’s innovations produced “any positive impact on student achievement,” and “some of these positive impacts were very tiny.” And even in many charters that initially claimed to produce big test scores gains, the result was “‘quiet churn’ of students from year to year, which slows achievement for both students who change schools and those who stay.”
High student mobility in Milwaukee stalls achievement, despite well-planned school reforms
The Hechinger Report’s Caroline Preston describes a state-authorized charter school in Seminole, Ok. as a test case as to “whether these privately operated, publicly funded schools can open in small communities without eroding public education.” The article’s title, “A rural Charter School Splits an Oklahoma Town.” The subtitle is: A businessman makes an end run around community opponents. Now, he wants to expand others like it,” should serve as a warning.
Even though it seems inexplicable, especially in a state that has too many rural school systems, Oklahoma allows charters in small towns like Seminole that only has around 1,600 students. If the charter school could meet its goal of serving as many as 700 students, the public school system would be wrecked.
Even more illogical is a law that allows the state Board of Education to override local decisions on granting charters. And due to one of the “reforms” in the full corporate reform agenda which was adopted at the beginning of the decade, the board is dominated in true believers by choice and the edu-politics of destruction for blowing up the “status quo.” It’s unlikely that the board will ever meet a charter application that it doesn’t love. Even if the charter isn’t capable of helping kids, it hurts the privatizers’ opponents.
Preston explains that the charter founder, Paul Campbell, runs a company, Enviro Systems, that wants graduates who could staff his business. She notes that Campbell lacked knowledge about schools, but his “can-do, pro-business attitude fits in with the ethos of this working class, Trump-supporting town.”
However, many patrons believed:
It could inappropriately blur the lines between schools and the workplace. Opponents also felt that Campbell, who had no background in education, had put together a proposal pockmarked with problems, one that didn’t offer students any opportunities they couldn’t already get from existing programs. Church services grew tense. Friendships soured.
At first glance, it might seem like Seminole is lucky that the charter’s goal was 60 students in the first year, and it only served 29. But the overall threat remains. As a former school board member said, “she worried the charter school would be a private school ‘in sheep’s clothing,’ benefiting only students of families with the means to sort out the school’s application process and ferry their kids to and from school.” And sure enough, about 45 percent the charter’s inaugural class qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, in contrast to 73 percent in the Seminole district.
And once again, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli stakes out a position about schools, a community, and a state he doesn’t know. Petrilli says of Campbell, “More power to him.” He endorses Campbell’s “vision of helping lift local school performance with market-style inducements. ‘Here is a person who is trying to bring up the quality of education in the community. He’s an employer; this is where a lot of the energy for education reform has come from, the employers who find they are just not getting the workers they need or they don’t have the schools to recruit people into the community.’”
The point should be clear. Charters have failed in terms of school improvement. Regardless of whether charter expansion is spun as a “portfolio” or an “innovation” school, it is a tool for economic gain as opposed to an education investment.
In urban districts, privatization is a means to spur gentrification, as well as to break unions. My approach has been to schmooze with Oklahoma City leaders, hoping to ground policy decisions in at least some education facts. As one of the most powerful and candid business leaders told me in response, “You may be right. I don’t know that much about education.” But low-performing schools make economic development more difficult, and “I believe economic growth will lift all boats.”
As will be explained in the next post, political and business leaders are still hearing nonstop spin from Fordham, edu-philanthropists, and portfolio advocates, and their pitch often sounds pretty good to business people who don’t know much about education.
