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Curtis Cardine on the Fiscal Crisis in Arizona’s Charter School Industry

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2019 //
6

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.

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

North Carolina: Leandro Report Sets a New Direction for the State’s Schools; Will the Politicians Listen?

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2019 //
2

A report on a 25-year-old court case in North Carolina was released yesterday. The long-anticipated report rebukes the past decade of education policy in the state, led and directed by the Republican majority in the state’s General Assembly. The powers that be don’t like to spend money on education.

The report lays out

…an important new roadmap for ensuring that our public schools provide every child with the education they deserve.

The report – a collaborative effort from some of the nation’s leading education experts – is a comprehensive examination of North Carolina’s public school system. The report’s recommendations have the potential to fundamentally change the direction of our state by unleashing the potential of all children to become flourishing adults, ready to contribute to a healthier, happier, and more prosperous North Carolina.

What is Leandro?

Leandro is a 25-year long court case. Throughout the case, the courts have consistently found that North Carolina has been failing to meet its most fundamental obligation under our State Constitution: providing every child a meaningful opportunity to receive a sound basic education, backed by adequate funding and resources in every public school. Additional background on the case can be found here.

Where did this report come from?

In 2017, parties to the case (the state defendants and the Leandro plaintiffs) agreed that North Carolina had been failing its children for far too long, and that the state needed a clear, comprehensive roadmap to providing a sound basic education that benefits all children. The court-appointed consultants (WestEd, in collaboration with the Learning Policy Institute and NC State’s Friday Institute) initially submitted the report to the court in June of 2019. The report was confidential until its release today.

What does the report say?

The report confirms what North Carolinians have been saying for years: The state has consistently failed to give every child in this state access to the education they deserve. Specifically:

  • A new approach is needed: While North Carolina was once making progress towards meeting its constitutional responsibilities, the past decade’s actions have left our state “further away from meeting its constitutional obligation to provide every child with the opportunity for a sound basic education than it was when the Supreme Court of North Carolina issued the Leandro decision more than 20 years ago.”
  • Providing children with what they are owed requires significant new investment: Current levels of school funding (North Carolina ranks 48th in terms of school funding effort) are inadequate to ensure all students are achieving at grade level.
  • We must direct resources where they’re needed most: Our funding formulas need to do a better job of prioritizing higher-need students and under-resourced communities.
  • More needs to be done to put qualified, well-prepared and diverse teachers and principals in every school: Educators need competitive pay, early-career support programs, professional development, and opportunities to collaborate and lead.
  • Scarcity of early-learning opportunities is leaving too many students unprepared to start school: Both Smart Start and NC Pre-K are effective programs, but funding must be restored and expanded to ensure all students enter kindergarten ready to learn.
  • High-poverty schools lack the resources to help students overcome out-of-school conditions that create barriers to learning: High-poverty schools should be provided the resources necessary to expand learning opportunities and implement community school models providing health and social services, youth and community development, and community engagement. Struggling schools need state-level support similar to the District and School Support teams eliminated by the General Assembly in recent years.
  • Our testing and accountability system needlessly stigmatizes high-poverty schools, rather than providing useful information about educational effectiveness: Our accountability system should instead measure schools’ progress in providing each child a sound basic education by rewarding growth in student performance and highlighting school climate and equality of resources and learning opportunities.

The report contains significantly more detail. While the report’s recommendations may appear ambitious, it’s important to remember that these steps represent the bare minimum of what it takes to for the state to provide students with the education they deserve.

What happens next?

The judge overseeing the case might order the legislature to act.

The legislature might fail to act.

 

Categories Accountability, Equity, Funding, North Carolina

Pennsylvania: Republican Legislators Target State’s Neediest Districts for Failed Takeover Strategy

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2019 //
4

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. 

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Pennsylvania

Network for Public Education Releases Explosive New Report on Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2019 //
14

Last spring, the Network for Public Education published a report on waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program. The report, called Asleep At the Wheel, documented the Department of Education’s failure to monitor the veracity or feasibility of applications for the program or to follow up on what happened to the money spent to launch new charter schools. It found that nearly $1 billion of federal dollars had been wasted on charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening.

Today, NPE released a new report that delves into what happened with federal money from the Charter Schools Program in the states. The findings were even more concerning than last spring’s report.
The new report is called Still Asleep At the Wheel.

An excerpt:

This report, Still Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in a Pileup of Fraud and Waste, takes up where our first report left off. In it, we provide detailed information, state by state, on how federal dollars were doled out to schools that no longer exist or never existed at all.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) published a list of charter schools that received grants between the years of 2006 and 2014. Using that database of 4,829 schools, we meticulously determined which charters that received grants were still open, which had closed and which had never opened, resulting in state by state records of enormous waste. We examine the detailed spending records of some of Michigan’s ghost charter schools that received grants exceeding $100,000. We explain how money moves into the hands of for-profit management organizations and tell the stories of subgrantees that engaged in fraud—sometimes amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars—all beginning with funding from the federal Charter Schools Program.

Major findings of our research include the following:

Documented charter school closures and the waste of federal funds exceeds our first report’s estimations.
We believed that about 1,000 recipient charters were defunct. However, using the 2015 database (active grantees from 2006-2014), we identified 1,779 grantee schools that either never opened or had shut down. The number of non-operational recipients, across 25 years of the program is inevitably in the thousands.
In the first report, we estimated the fail- ure rate for recipient schools to be 30 percent. For schools listed in the database, however, our latest review found a failure rate of 37 percent.

It is impossible to document total waste for the entire 25 year program because the Department never required the states to report the names of funded schools until 2006. However, we have now documented $504,517,391 (28 percent of the total database amount) that was awarded to schools between 2006-2014 that never opened or that have closed. Applying that percentage to the total expenditures ($4.1 billion) of the CSP programs designed to create new schools, approximately $1.17 billion in federal funding has likely been spent on charters that either never opened, or that opened and have since shut down.

The disbursement of over one billion dollars during the program’s first decade was never monitored for its impact or results. There is no record of which schools received the funds.

From 1995 to 2005, enormous funds were pushed out to the states to distribute to schools via subgrants. Yet the Department has no complete record of which schools re- ceived funding during the program’s early years, because it never required the states to report the names of subgrantee schools or their status. The Department’s over- sight ended when the funds left Washington.

During the first decade of the program when states did not have to report where the money went, Florida, a state where nearly half of all charter schools are run by for-profit organizations, received four grants totaling $158,353,525. Michigan, where about 80 percent of all charters are run by for-profit management companies, received four grants totaling $64,608,912. California also received four grants, totaling $190,857,243.
Although the overall rate of failed charter projects was 37 percent, in some states the rate of failure was much higher.

Iowa and Kansas have the largest propor- tions of failed subgrantee charter schools. Eleven charter schools in Iowa received grants. Ten failed, wasting over $3.66 million. As of 2014, the database indicates that Kansas doled out $8.51 million to 29 schools. Twenty-two (76 percent) of those schools either never opened or are closed today–$6,389,964 of the $8.9 million was wasted.

States with a subgrantee failure rate exceeding 50 percent include: Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia and Washington (state). Mississippi had only one grantee and that school failed. Georgia had 75 failures, resulting in over 23 million federal dollars wasted.

The percentage of defunct charter school grantees in Florida was 37 percent ($34.2 million); the Michigan failure rate was over 44 percent ($21 million) and Lou- Asian’s failure rate was 46 percent ($25.5 million).
The most astounding loss, however, was California’s: nearly $103 million was awarded to charters that never opened or have shut down—37% failed.

Five hundred thirty-seven (537) schools list- ed in the database never opened at all. Many received over $100,000 in federal funds.

Since 2001, charter school entrepreneurs have been eligible to receive CSP grants before they have even identified an authorizer or submitted a detailed application to open a school. In total, we identified 28 states that had at least one charter school (537 schools in total) that never enrolled even one student for one day and yet had received federal funds. According to the CSP database, those schools received, or were due to receive when the database collection ended, a total of $45,546,552 million.

Topping the list was the state of Michigan where 72 never-opened schools received grants, most exceeding $100,000. Over $7.7 million was wasted. In California, we identified 61—with waste of $8.36 million.
Other states with large numbers of never- opened schools receiving CSP funds in- clude Arkansas (18), Florida (46) Illinois (20), Maryland (38), Massachusetts (17), New Jersey (23), Ohio (20), Oregon (40), Pennsylvania (41), South Carolina (34), Tennessee (43) and Wisconsin (15).

This report provides details on how several of these never-opened charters in Mi- chigan spent those federal funds.

Although Congress forbids for-profit opera- tors from directly receiving CSP grants, they still benefit by having their schools apply.

Although we could not identify every charter in the CSP database that was run by a for-profit management company, we were able to identify those run by the large for-profit chains including Academica, K12, National Heritage Academies, White Hat and Charter Schools USA. In total, we found 357 schools in the database run by major for-profit chains. These schools had received a total of $124,929,017 in federal CSP start-up funds. Unsurprisingly, most of this money flowed to for-profit run schools in Florida ($46,936,979) and Michigan ($26,452,927). Eighty-three (83) schools run by the Flor- ida-based, for-profit chain Academica received CSP grants, totaling $23,426,383.


Still Asleep at the Wheel also describes why so many charter schools fail, along with the stories of grantee schools that abruptly closed, sometimes with little or no notice to their students and families. Far too often those schools shut down due to corruption and fraud. Our report provides disturbing accounts of grifters and profiteers who took CSP and other taxpayer funds only to enrich themselves at the expense of the students they had promised to serve.

The staggering amount spent on schools that have closed or never opened, as well as those that have engaged in fraud, is nothing short of a national scandal. As public dollars are diverted from public schools, the students who attend their neighborhood schools have fewer resources. It is time to put on the brakes and chart a new course.

We were heartened that after the publication of our first report in March of 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives reduced funding for the CSP program for 2020. However, a small reduction is not sufficient to address the program’s structural flaws.

We therefore strongly recommend that Congress end appropriations for new charter school grants in the upcoming budget and continue funding only for obligated amounts to legitimate projects. Once those grants have been closed, we recommend that the CSP be ended and that charter schools continue to receive federal support only through other federal funding streams such as Title I and IDEA. Students, not charter school en- trepreneurs, should benefit from federal funds.

We also recommend thorough audits by Congress of previous grant awards, the establishment of regulations to ensure grant awards still under term are being responsibly carried out and that misspent money is returned to the federal coffers.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Michigan, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education

Jan Resseger: Kudos to Massachusett for Its Bold Funding Plan for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2019 //
5

Over the past decade or more, policymakers have spent zillions of hours discussing governance (charters, vouchers, state takeovers, etc.), while ignoring the basic issue facing public schools: adequate and equitable funding.

Jan Resseger writes here about the dramatic and much-needed response in Massachusetts to address the need to fund its schools appropriately: The legislature passed and the Governor signed, a bill to increase funding by $1.5 billion a year.

Resseger reviews the near collapse of funding in other states after the 2008 recession, a decade in which funding in the Bay State held steady but did not grow.

And she cites the determination of state leaders to meet the needs of today’s students.

She writes:

For NPR’s Morning Edition, Max Larkin reports: “The law is projected to add about $1.5 billion in annual state aid to schools by 2026, when it is fully phased in. The increase will reach most of the state, but it will be particularly targeted at urban districts with high concentrations of low-income students and English learners, and where many district funds now flow to charter schools.”

Larkin describes the reaction of Boston’s school superintendent to the new funding bill: “Brenda Cassellius, the new superintendent of Boston Public Schools… said… that she wants ‘to spend every single dollar’ of new aid that BPS receives on the district’s ‘neediest’ students.”

Schoenberg quotes Governor Baker’s remarks at the signing ceremony: “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 63 years, it’s that talent is evenly distributed… What’s not evenly distributed is opportunity. There’s a reason why this is the Student Opportunity Act, because this legislation is about making sure that every kid in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, regardless of where they live, where they go to school, where they’re from, has the opportunity to get the education they need to be great.”

School funding ought not to be the kind of contentious partisan issue we see today across so many states. Kudos to Massachusetts’ legislators and Governor Charlie Baker for grappling actively with the cost of our public responsibility to provide equal opportunity in the public schools. The new Massachusetts Student Opportunity Act should be held up as a challenge to legislators in the 24 states recently identified by the Center on Budget Priorities where combined state and local school funding still lags below the 2008 level when adjusted for inflation.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Massachusetts

Ohio Expands Its Failed Voucher Program, and Most School Districts Will Lose Funding

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2019 //
28

Three years ago, the pro-charter, pro-voucher Thomas B. Fordham Institute published a study of Ohio’s voucher program. The study, conducted by David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik of Northwestern University is called “Evaluation of Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program: Selection, Competition, and Performance Effects.”

The study concluded that the voucher program was failing to improve student achievement.

It said in its conclusions:

There appears to be positive selection, as measured by prior academic performance and family advantage, among voucher-eligible students into private schools as part of the EdChoice program. Although a substantial majority of the students participating in the program, as well as their peers remaining in public schools, tend to be from low-income backgrounds, those students leaving for private schools under the program tend to be more advantaged and higher performing than their peers who were eligible to participate in the program but who remained in public schools…the evidence regarding the effects of EdChoice program suggests that while higher-performing students tend to leave public schools to attend private schools under the EdChoice program, the students who remain in the public schools—at least, those public schools that were comparatively high achieving—generally perform better on statewide tests as a consequence of EdChoice vouchers being available to students in a school. On the other hand, those students who leave these comparatively high-achieving public schools to go to private schools appear to perform worse than they would have had they remained in the public schools (which we estimate to have improved as a consequence of the introduction of EdChoice). Together, it appears that EdChoice has benefitted the majority of students, but the students who actually left the public schools—at least those on the margin of eligibility—perform worse on statewide tests. Although test performance is only one measure of educational success, these findings suggest that a detailed exploration of the possible causes of the negative test-score results (for instance, which private schools participate in the program, policies on school-grade retention, test-curriculum alignment, and the like) may be warranted.

Thus, the students eligible to leave with a voucher do better if they stay in public school; the students who use the voucher, who come from more advantaged backgrounds, do worse in school.

This is the only statewide evaluation of the Ohio EdChoice Program, and not what one would call a ringing endorsement since those who use the voucher do worse in school than those who stay in public school and don’t use the voucher.

Such research did not impress the Ohio legislature. Under the  prodding of State Senator Matt Huffman (R.-Lima), the state has expanded the voucher program, so that students in two-thirds of the districts across the state are now eligible to get state funding to attend a religious school.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer wrote that the voucher expansion will hit the budgets of school districts hard, districts that in the past were not part of the voucher program.

A year ago, no students in the Parma school district used Ohio’s main tuition voucher program to attend private schools.

This year, thanks to changes in state law, 359 students are using vouchers.

For families paying tuition to send their kids to Parma-area private Catholic schools like Padua or Holy Name, a $6,000 tax-funded voucher toward tuition is a huge help.

For the district, it’s a $2.1 million hit to the budget that impacts teachers, books and supplies for its schools.

Parma isn’t alone in facing new or increased costs to help students attend private schools. Changes to state law, have more than tripled the number of districts declared part of the voucher program, from 40 in 2018-19 to 139 this school year.

Next year, the program meant to help students escape being stuck in failing schools will grow further, to more than 400 districts, which represents more than two-thirds of the districts in the state.

Even Solon, always at the top of state test score rankings, has a school considered failing and whose students are now eligible for vouchers. Next year, add a school in each of the high-scoring Brecksville-Broadview Heights and Mayfield districts.

The change has school officials protesting and gathering to find ways to seek relief…

The use of vouchers within school districts is also increasing. The Cleveland Heights-University Heights schools saw 500 more students use vouchers this year than last year, mostly to attend Jewish schools. The district’s voucher bill increased by $3 million.

That change, said district Treasurer Scott Gainer, has the school board seeking a higher tax increase than planned this spring.

Shaker Heights Superintendent David Glasner, whose district is seeing a small bill this year, but faces a larger one next year, complained to the state school board last week about the hit that school district budgets are taking.

“There are school districts that are now expecting to lose millions of dollars in the course of one year as a result of the EdChoice [voucher] expansion,” Glasner said. “These are losses for which districts were unable to forecast or prepare.”

State Sen. Matt Huffman, one of the strongest supporters of vouchers in Ohio, said some of the rules are subtle and have changed a few times. But districts should have known, he said, and should be blaming themselves for not improving their schools…

Ohio has four “scholarship” or voucher programs that provide tax dollars to pay tuition at private schools, almost all of which are Christian schools. There is one program just for Cleveland, which was started in 1996, so Cleveland is not affected by the current changes.

The biggest is called EdChoice. Created in 2005 for students attending “underperforming” schools or who would be assigned to them, EdChoice has a student’s home district pay $4,650 toward tuition for kindergarten through eighth grade and $6,000 for private high schools.

Stephen Dyer, a former legislator in Ohio who writes a blog about education, called “BS” on Huffman’s claim that school districts should have known and should have been prepared.

Dyer says that the state rigged the grades and school report cards to produce failure and make more schools voucher-eligible.

This is where I call BS.

How can I do that? Simple: Over the last decade, the state report card grades upon which these new voucher building designations are being based have been deliberately and artificially deflated for the state’s school districts. And I’m increasingly convinced it was for this sole purpose: to ensure more districts and buildings are deemed “failing” by the state so more public money can be poured into private, mostly religious schools.

Don’t believe me?

Look at school districts’ overall grade performance since the 2012-2013 school year — the first for the A-F state report card system.

Notice anything? Like a massive jump in D and F grades between 2013-2014 and 2014-2015?

Let me ask you a question: Does anyone — and I mean ANYONE — actually believe that between the 2013-2014 school year and the 2014-2015 school year school districts became more than twice as likely to “fail” kids?

Of course not.

This is a classic case of grade manipulation by state lawmakers. You’ll also notice a steady decline in the rate of Fs since the high point of 2015-2016. Why were these grades so much worse? Because the state kept changing standardized tests. So teachers and students had no idea what the testing expectations were. Since they’ve remained the same, you can see a steady and precipitous decline in the rate of F grades, though the percentages of D and F grades remain far higher than the 2012-2013 school year.

To add insult to injury, a study examing the test performance of students who take vouchers found they did worse on state tests after taking the voiucher than before … according to the pro-voucher Fordham Institute. But that doesn’t matter to Huffman, whose hero is apparently the Titanic captain who kept plowing ahead, damn the iceberg.

Anyway, here’s where Huffman struck gold for those who are taking a public subsidy to send their kids to private, mostly religious schools — only 2 out of the three years’ grades count to have your building designated “failing” from 2013-2014, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. And once the building is eligible for vouchers, every student who gets a voucher gets to keep it forever, even if the public building becomes the highest-performing in the state…

But it’s all been a plan from the beginning:

1) Deliberately deflate district report card grades

2) Get as many buildings as possible eligible for vouchers

3) Market them like crazy to families in these districts so the rest of us taxpayers can subsidize their choices with our local tax dollars and/or fewer opportunities for our kids who remain in local school districts.

That’s not a district performance problem.

It’s Huffman’s plan.

****************************************

Last Saturday I was on Meryl Johnson’s radio show, based in Cleveland, where she was a teacher in the public schools for many years. Meryl is an elected member of the Ohio State Board of Education, and she is very concerned about the explosion of vouchers. She alerted me to this disaster. I pointed out that there is one possible silver lining. Until now, the suburban districts in Ohio could ignore vouchers and assume they affected only Ohio’s urban districts. Now the cost of vouchers will hit their school budgets and their taxes will  have to go up so that a few students can go to religious schools, where they are likely to get a worse education than the one offered in their local  public schools. Their own schools will now feel the pinch caused by vouchers. Maybe this is the wake-up call that is needed to create a statewide coalition to stop defunding the public schools that enroll the vast majority of students in the Buckeye State.

Meryl sent me a screen shot of the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Will this wake up the citizens of Ohio? Will they realize that they must raise their taxes to pay for vouchers for the small number who leave their public schools? Do they know that the students who leave for religious schools will lose ground academically?

IMG_20191208_113121

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Valerie Strauss Reviews Pete Buttigieg’s Education Plan

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2019 //
38

The media received early copies of Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s plan for K-12 education. Like Warren and Sanders, he proposes a large increase in funding for the neediest children and for early education. He wants to see a reduction in college tuition. He does not propose a wealth tax on the 1%. He is against for-profit charters but, unlike Warren and Sanders, would not eliminate or freeze the federal Charter Schools Program, which currently dispenses $440 million a year, mostly to big corporate chains like KIPP and IDEA.

Mayor Pete’s plan is a centrist program, which could have been drafted by the Center for American Progress, the think tank for the Obama administration.

Valerie Strauss describes the plan here.

She writes:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is unveiling a broad new education plan on Saturday that pledges to spend $700 billion over a decade to create a high-quality child care and preschool system that he said would reach all children from birth to age 5 and create 1 million jobs.

The 37-year-old, openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., also promised to spend $425 billion to strengthen America’s K-12 public schools, targeting federal investments and policy to help historically marginalized students. He would boost funding for schools in high-poverty areas as well as for students with disabilities, and promote voluntary school integration. And he said he would ensure that all charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — undergo the same accountability measures as schools in publicly funded districts…The more than $1 trillion in his plan would be spent over 10 years and would come from “greater tax enforcement” on the wealthy and corporations, according to a Buttigieg campaign spokesperson, who asked not to be identified. He would not impose a new tax on the super-rich, the spokesperson said, who did not detail how much money the mayor believes he can realize from uncollected taxes…

Buttigieg’s new education plan details a push to help communities integrate their schools racially and economically, which research shows is beneficial to black and white students. The mayor pledged to invest $500 million into communities that want to undertake integration efforts. And he said he would reinstate Obama era guidance on the voluntary use of race in state- and district-level strategies to achieve integration, removing current restrictions on the use of federal funds to pay for busing that would be part of integration efforts.

He also pledged triple funding for Title I — the largest federally funded educational program, intended to help schools with high concentrations of students who live in poverty. But that added funding would be targeted to states and districts that “implement equitable education funding formulas to provide more state and local resources to low-income schools….”

Both Sanders and Warren have called for free college tuition for all, while the mayor’s recently released higher education and workforce development plan calls for lowering college tuition and fees on a sliding scale, with free college for those students whose families early up to $100,000. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has topped the polls more consistently than any of the other candidates, has also taken education positions less expansive than Warren and Sanders.

Buttigieg’s big initiative in this plan is around early childhood, for which he has pledged to spend $700 million to create a new system to provide child care and prekindergarten to all children, which he said is more than 20 million, and that would create 1 million new jobs in that sector.

For additional insight on Mayor Pete’s plan, read Matt Barnum and Kalyn Belsha’s account here in Chalkbeat. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Early Childhood Education, Funding, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

New Hampshire: Legislature Puts $46 Million Federal Charter School Grant on Hold

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2019 //
3

New Hampshire has divided government. The governor is a Republican, who chooses the State Commissioner. But in the last election in 2018, Democrats won control of the legislature.

The State Commissioner is a home-schooling parent who is hostile to public schools. He comes from the Betsy  DeVos mold.

Speaking of DeVos, she gave New Hampshire $46 million from the federal Charter Schools Program, which is her own $440 million slush fund to promote charters.

If spent, this money would double the number of charters in the state, a dramatic expansion.

But the Legislature used its powers to hold up the grant. They want answers to their questions about how the state’s public schools would be affected, and how the charter expansion would affect the state’s finances.

The pending charter expansion grant – the largest earmarked for any state – aims to double the number of charter schools in New Hampshire over the next five years. It is currently on hold, after Democrats on the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee cited concerns that building more charter schools would lead to unanticipated costs for the state and harm existing, non-charter public schools. 

Governor Chris Sununu criticized the hold, calling the money a “game-changing grant [that] would have cost New Hampshire taxpayers nothing.”

But an analysis by the public education non-profit Reaching Higher estimated that, because charter schools are typically funded by the state rather than local districts, the state’s plan to expand charters with this grant money could cost the state over $100 million in the next ten years.

Is this a pig in a poke?

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, New Hampshire, Privatization

Jennifer Hall Lee: Why I Volunteer at My Local Public School

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2019 //
8

Jennifer Hall Lee lives in Pasadena, California. Her child is now enrolled in the high school, but Lee continues to volunteer and raise money for the middle school, where she is needed. In a note to me, she said that 45% of the students in Pasadena are attending private schools, charter schools, or home schooled. The public schools are suffering because of this splintering of civic energy.

She explained why she cares about the middle school:

The annual fund committee raises money throughout the year to help Eliot pay for teacher salaries, supplies, programs, technology and more–all of which keeps Eliot an arts magnet school. Annual funds, once the staple of private schools, are now necessary for many public schools. Pasadena Unified doesn’t receive money from a parcel tax and California ranks very low in per-pupil spending. Let me explain that by referring to the words of Pasadena School Board Member Pat Cahalan as he explains the funding disparity well: “Wisconsin funds public education at about $2,000 more per student. If California funded PUSD at that rate, the district would have over $30 million more every year.”

Eliot is a Title 1 school, which means that our student body is over 50% socio-economically disadvantaged. Moreover, we have to deal with reality: low statewide spending on students, no parcel tax, and misperceptions about PUSD. When the annual fund committee meets to discuss fundraising ideas, we have to deal with those three realities. They are in the room with us, underscoring our ideas as we decide which events to hold and what monies we can reasonably expect to raise. It’s difficult, but also joyful.

During the first year of the Eliot annual fund, we reached the goal of $50k; believe me, it was a huge lift. It took 12 months, but we succeeded, and I have to say this: we couldn’t have done it without everyone, including community members who had no children in Eliot but who participated, reached out to us, donated, and encouraged us. We are so grateful.

In today’s political climate we need everyone’s generosity and interest in our school to help us succeed. Children need to know that everyone in their community cares about them.

 

Categories California, Education Reform, Funding, Supporting public schools

Boston: Falling Enrollment Forces Charter Chain to Retrench

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2019 //
10

The celebrated Boston charter City on a Hill is closing one of its schools and imposing budget cuts at another due to falling enrollments.

Once a shining star in the Boston charter school world, City on a Hill Charter School is facing a massive financial crisis, prompting trustees on Monday to enact a series of dramatic budget cuts: It will lay off 23 teachers, administrators, and other staffers at its Roxbury and New Bedford campuses and will close the New Bedford campus in June.

“This is a really difficult decision and we don’t take it lightly,” said Cara Stillings-Candal, chair of the trustees in an interview following their Monday morning board meeting. “We wouldn’t have made these decisions if it wasn’t in the best interest of families and students.”

Candal is the author of a book called The Fight for the Best Charter Public Schools in the Nation, published by the rightwing Pioneer Institute.  

The sweeping budget cuts represent the latest turbulent turn for the nearly 25-year-old charter school, which has been struggling with high leadership turnover, lackluster academic performance, and financial woes. Earlier this year, state officials placed the New Bedford campus on probation, and a year earlier teachers at all three sites unionized, a rarity for independent charter schools, which place a premium on operational autonomy.

The severity of this fall’s financial crisis emerged after headcounts at the three campuses revealed enrollment had dropped for a second year in a row. That, in turn, will lead to a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in per-student aid from the state and federal governments. The three campuses operate as independent schools overseen by a single board of trustees and an executive team.

Just 570 students are currently enrolled in grades 9-12 across City on a Hill’s three campuses, leaving 270 seats empty. The Boston campuses receive about $20,000 per student in state aid and the New Bedford site gets about $15,000 per student. Last year’s enrollment drop resulted in an $842,000 loss in state and federal aid.

The decline in charter enrollments mirrors a trend seen in a few states, like Michigan, where charters have lost their luster.

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization
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