Gary Rubinstein doesn’t believe Teach for America’s claim that 85% of its alumni are either working in education or serving low-income communities.
He has pulled a random sample of 100 names of TFA’s earliest recruits from its directory.
Do you know any of them?
Peter Greene points out in this post that legislatures have a nasty habit of overlooking the central question about charter schools: their funding.
They pretend that they can run two publicly funded school systems without any additional cost.
They pretend that the funding for charters is not subtracted from the funding for public schools.
Public schools are getting hammered by the loss of public tax dollars that have been diverted from public school finances into charter and choice school accounts. Charters, having forgotten the era when they bragged that they could do more with less, complain that they are underfunded compared to public schools.
The problem here, as with several other choice-related issues, is in a false premise of modern school choice movement. That false premise is the assertion that we can fund multiple school districts for the same money we used to use to fund one single public system.
This is transparent baloney. When was the last time any school district said, “We are really strapped for funds. We had better open some new schools right away!” Never. Because everyone understands that operating multiple facilities with multiple staffs and multiple administrations and multiple overhead expenses– all that costs more than putting your operation under one roof.
But the choice pitch has always been some version of, “Your community can have twelve different schools with twelve different flavors of education in twelve different buildings with twelve different staffs– and it won’t cost you a nickel more than what you’re paying now!” This is carnival barker talk, the same kind of huckster pitch as “Why buy that used Kia? I’ll sell you a brand new Mercedes for the same price!”
Adding charters and choice increases educational costs in a community. Sometimes we’ve hid that by bringing in money from outside sources, like PTA bake sales to buy a public school office equipment, or pricey benefit dinners for charters, or increasing state and federal subsidies to help charters stay afloat.
But mostly school choice is the daylight savings time of education– if we just shuffle this money around in new and different ways, somehow there will be more of it.
This trick never works. And we talk all too rarely about why it never will.
I am reposting this post because the main link was dead and I fixed it. Also, it was originally titled “The D.C. ‘Miracle’ turns to Ashes,” and a reader said a miracle can’t turn to ashes. So it has a new title.
A year ago, reformers were touting D.C. as their triumphant example. Those graduation rates!
Unfortunately, like every other reformer tale, it was a hoax. The graduation rate was phony. Students were walking across the stage without the necessary attendance or credits. Metrics!
“Critics view the problems, particularly the attendance issue, as an indictment of the entire data-driven evaluation system instituted a more than a decade ago when then-Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the school system and appointed Michelle Rhee as the first chancellor. Rhee’s ambitious plan to clear out dead wood and focus on accountability for teachers and administrators landed her on the cover of Time magazine holding a broom. But now analysts question whether Rhee’s emphasis on performance metrics has created a monster.”
Ya think?
And the teacher-turnover rate is 25% a year!
The national average? Only 16%. In fact, D.C.’s teacher turnover rate (across both traditional public and public charter schools) is higher than other comparable jurisdictions, including New York, Chicago and Milwaukee.
For both public and charter schools, the highest turnover is taking place at schools with the most at-risk students, with the rate pushing past 30% in Wards 5 and 8.
This is the fruit of Michelle Rhee’s work. A district that continues to have the largest achievement gaps of any urban district tested by NAEP, a phony graduation rate, and a startlingly high teacher turnover rate. Another “reform” hoax.
DeBlasio recently boasted at the NEA candidates’ panel about his courageous resistance to the charter industry. It is true that he started his first term in office in 2014 determined to stop the charter zillionaires’ efforts to grab money and the students they wanted from the public schools.
When he did not grant Eva Moskowitz all the new charters she wanted, her backers launched a PR blitz against DeBlasio, spending $6 million on emotional appeals on TV.
Eva bused parents and students to Albany, where Governor Cuomo pledged his loyalty to the charter cause. The legislature passed a bill requiring NYC to let the charters expand at will, to give charters any public space they wanted at no cost, and to pay their rent if they couldn’t find suitable public space.
At that point, DeBlasio stopped fighting the charter industry.
Currently, the New York City Department of Education gives the charter industry its lists of students’ names and addresses for recruitment purposes.
Parents have protested this misuse of their children’s private information. This practice of releasing personally identifiable student information is illegal under state law.
Recently Chancellor Carranza pledged to end the practice. But as Leonie Haimson reported, DeBlasio reversed the decision and promised to reach his own decision. He has not made any decision and the charter industry continues to bombard public school parents with recruitment letters.
So much for those mythical long waiting lists!
Speaking of mythical waiting lists, Leonie Haimson also reported on an exciting new development at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain:
More recently, Moskowitz created what is described as a “full service, brand strategy, marketing, and creative division within Success Academy” called the “The Success Academy Creative Agency” according to the LinkedIn profile of its Managing Director, Meredith Levin.
In an earlier version of her profile, Levin described this internal marketing division of Success as a “group of over 30 creative directors, designers, copywriters, strategists, e-learning architects & project managers to develop, execute and optimize campaigns to recruit 1,000+ teachers, enroll families, donors, influencers, and cultivate community engagement.
Angie Sullivan teaches in a Title 1 elementary school in Las Vegas. It is underfunded. The state is willing to fund failing charter schools but not pay for the public schools that most children attend. Angie wants to know why.
She recently learned that Soner Tarim wants to open a charter in Nevada. This is the same man who wants to open a charter in rural Washington County in Alabama and set off a firestorm of controversy. This is the same man whose proposal for a new charter chain was just rejected by the Texas State Board of Educatuon.
Angie writes:
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes here about the efforts by most Democratic candidates to avoid confronting the dangers of privatization:
When Democratic candidates are questioned about charter schools, many typically reply, “I am against for-profit charter schools.” Everyone cheers. Politicians have created a convenient (and false) dichotomy that says nonprofit charter schools are good, and for-profit charter schools are bad.
Don’t be fooled. There are now only 2 states that allow for-profit charter schools—Arizona and Wisconsin. California changed its laws.
However, 35 states allow for-profit Charter Management Organizations (CMOS) to run their nonprofit charter schools.
40% of the charter schools in Florida are run by for-profit charter management companies. While the individual charter is a nonprofit, it can turn over everything from hiring, to curriculum, to financial management to a for-profit corporation. In Michigan, 80% of the so-called nonprofit charter schools are run by for-profit companies.
To understand how this arrangement works, read this blog I wrote for the Answer Sheet on Florida’s charter schools. You will read about the Zulueta brothers who were on the board of an Academica charter school even while their for-profit real estate companies, including one in Panama, were leasing property to the schools.
Let me shock you a bit more. The National Alliance for (so-called) Public Charter Schools recently gave the controversial profiteer, Fernando Zulueta, an award at its national conference!
You probably know the names and reputations of the other big for-profit CMOs—BASIS, National Heritage, Academica, K12 and more.
The question candidates need to answer then are:
“Do you support for-profit Charter Management Organizations, and if you do not, what are you going to do about them?”
The most important questions to ask, however (and don’t let them off the hook), are whether they support the NAACP moratorium on new charter schools and “Will you stop the the federal funding of new charter schools?”
There is a reason the charter lobby never complains when a candidate says that he/she is against for-profit charter schools. It means nothing will change.
Thomas Pedroni of Wayne State University writes that Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants to impose corporate reform organizations on Benton Harbor to “save” the underfunded district. A cruel hoax. She is carrying forward the foul legacy of Republican Governor Rick Snyder.
Peter Greene read and loved Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
So did I, which is why it is on my short list of books I recommend for summer reading.
Peter writes:
Every so often you come across a book that unpacks and reframes a part of the universe in a way that you can never unsee. Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas has been a book like that for me.
Giridharadas is writing about “the elite charade of changing the world,” and while he is taking a broad look at the way the Betters are trying to influence our country and our world, the connections to education reform are unmistakable. I’m about to go ahead and give my grossly oversimplified take on his work and its intersection with public education; as a general guide, assume everything smart came from his book and everything wrong is my fault. There’s a lot to pack into a blog post, and I will cut corners like crazy; there are so many pull quotes from this book that I have put up an entire supplemental blog post just of quotes from the work. My best recommendation if you find any of this striking is to buy the book…
The elite assumption is that the system that put them on top, the game that they are the winners of, is fair and just and unrigged and not in need of being changed in any major ways. They are not part of the problem, and they are hurt that you would even suggest that was true; they are simply the just winners in a meritocratic system.
So the solutions they will propose meet a couple of standards:
1) It will include no challenge to the fundamentals of the current system.
2) The elites will be in charge (because their eliteness is proof of their fitness to run the show).
3) It will harness entrepreneurial energy (i.e. someone’s going to make money from it).
4) It will hand most of the blame responsibility to the people on the bottom who are being “rescued….”
The fingerprints of this mindset are all over education reform.
* The very notion, popular and bipartisan among the Betters, that education is the fix for everything. All the socio-economic inequity in the country can be solved, not by looking at the system that created that inequity– in fact, we’re not even going to admit that the system had any hand in creating inequity. No the system is swell, and the winners are people who are at the top got there by hard work and wisdom and meritocratic excellence. So, no, we don’t need to look at that system– we just need these people on the bottom to get themselves better educations (including things like grit) so that they can win at the game, too.
* Think Bill Gates, deciding that he needs to rewrite and standardize public education, and will have to circumvent, subvert and co-op the actual government to do it. Nobody elected him Grand Poobah of US Education, but he is perfectly comfortable appointing himself to the job.
* Think the deification of business standards in ed reform, and the notion that the free market will fix the system, that we will know which ideas are working best because they will succeed in the market. Think Eli Broad’s assertion that schools don’t have an education problem, but a business management problem.
* Think the repeated notion that democracy is a problem in education. We need to get rid of elected school boards and we need to give school leaders the kind of freedom that an all-powerful CEO has to create his vision. In ed reform, local control and the democratic process are to be avoided.
* Think the constant rejection of expertise. Reformsters don’t need to talk to teachers. What do teachers know? (If they are really such great shakes, why aren’t they rich?) I’ve succeeded at the game, and the same wisdom that made me a winner at that game will apply to fixing education. No other sorts of wisdom are necessary.
The huge irony of this book, which excoriates the elites and the billionaires who pretend to “save” the world by privatizing it, is that one of the blurbs was written by Bill Gates. He (or more likely, someone in his office) wrote:
In Anand’s thought-provoking book his fresh perspective on solving complex societal problems is admirable. I appreciate his commitment and dedication to spreading social justice.
This is a book that lambastes the likes of Gates. Why did he endorse it?
We have recently heard from political candidates who claim they oppose “for-profit charter schools” but support “non-profit charter schools.”
What they don’t know is that this is a distinction without a difference. Many “non-profit charter schools” are managed by for-profit EMOs (Education Management Organizations). Some are theoretically “non-profit” but pocket big money on their lease agreements (paying exorbitant sums to lease their space from a real estate company who is owned by the charter owner).
Peter Greene explains here how non-profits make a profit. It is legal graft, in which entrepreneurs figure out how to profit from taxpayers’ money intended for students and teachers.
His article originally appeared in Forbes.
He writes:
There is such a thing as a business that specializes in charter schools and real estate. In some states, the government will help finance a real estate development if it’s a charter school, and in general developers have noted an abundance of cash. Though, as one charter real estate loan bond financier told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s a ton of capital coming into the industry. The question is: Does it know what it’s doing?” Many states have found a problem with charters that lease their buildings from their own owners as well.
Why such interest in charter real estate? One reason: the Clinton-eraCommunity Tax Relief Act of 2000 made it possible for funds that invested in charter schools to double their money in seven years. And the finance side can become so convoluted that, as Bruce Baker lays out here, the taxpayers can end up paying for a building twice– and the building still ends up belonging to the charter company.
Management Companies
Once you’ve set up your nonprofit charter school, hire yourself as a for-profit charter management organization. Over the last decade, there have been numerous examples of this arrangement, sometimes called a “sweeps contract,” where the charter school hands as much as 95% of its revenue off to a for-profit management organization. As with real estate, there have been instances where the school’s assets (books, furniture, computers, etc) have been ruled to be the property of the management company— so even if the school tanks, the organizers walk away with assets they can cash in.
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