Remember the stories about the long waiting lists to get into charters?
Baloney.
In Los Angeles, more than 80% of all charter schools have vacancies.
Yet the billionaires are still spending to try to open more charters, in the absence of need or demand.
Please read this article in California-based Capital & Main, which contains a fascinating statistical analysis of charter school saturation.
The evidence suggests, writes Larry Buhl, that charter schools are now stealing students not only from public schools but from other charter schools.
Total student enrollment across the Los Angeles Unified School District has been declining for years, due partly to the high cost of living, which is pushing out families from the city. The latest LAUSD Superintendent Budget showed an overall enrollment decline of approximately 100,000 K-12 students districtwide — at the same time enrollment in charter schools increased dramatically over the past 14 years.
According to the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), 118,820 students are being served at 249 charter schools throughout LAUSD. The CCSA also reports that there are more than 16,000 students on a wait list for charters authorized by LAUSD, and nearly 20,000 on wait lists for all charters in greater Los Angeles. The waitlist estimates are based on reported counts given by charter leaders; CCSA says that its estimates take into account duplicate students applying to multiple schools.
Unless there are a few standout charters that every student is applying to, those wait list figures are hard to square with district data that show widespread under-enrollment across LAUSD charters.
A November 2018 LAUSD interoffice memorandum on charter school enrollment showed that more than 80 percent of the 224 district-authorized independent charter schools were under-enrolled:
- The aggregate enrollment projections from the schools anticipated that 128,374 total students would be enrolled. The official Norm Enrollment figures show that the actual number of students for 2017-2018 was 112,492 students (or 15,882 fewer students than the schools projected).
- Approximately 34 of the 224 schools either met or exceeded their enrollment targets, while the remaining 190 did not. This trend appears consistent with both small and large charter operators.
* * *
With more charters chasing fewer students, marketing and outreach have become increasingly crucial to enrollment.
More money for marketing means less money for instruction. This is insane. It is very expensive and wasteful to maintain a dual school system.
Want to know which charter schools failed to meet their enrollment target. Look here.
During last spring’s historic teacher walkout in West Virginia, which closed every school in the state, Governor Jim Justice promised to block charter legislation.
He lied.
The legislature is set to pass both charters and vouchers.
Trachers in charters won’t need certification. Vouchers will include home schooling. Both bills mean less funding for the state’s underfunded public schools.
Gov. Justice could veto the bill but would it have gotten this far without his support?
He lied.
I’m on an Amtrak train on my way to Washington, D.C., to see the new Democratic members of Congress sworn in. A friend, Donna Shalala of Miami, is one of that group. It’s a bright new day in America. The Constitution and its balance of powers is coming to life to rein in an unhinged, ignorant, vengeful President who arrived knowing nothing about government or policy and has learned nothing.
Ann Gearan of the Washington Post reported on Trumps bizarre Cabinet meeting, the first of the New Year, in which he found plenty of time to boast about himself. Bear in mind that Trump has never worked in an environment in which anyone had the power to say no to him. In his family business, he was King. For his first two years in office, no one dared challenge him, and in the rare instance where they tried, they were ousted (think Mark Sanford) or quit (think Flake and Corker).
Now the Emperor must face hostile majority in the Houseof Representatives. Democracy lives. The King is mad.
Here is a summary of yesterday’s Cabinet meeting:
President Trump, 12 days into a government shutdown and facing new scrutiny from emboldened Democrats, inaugurated the new year Wednesday with a Cabinet meeting. It quickly became a 95-minute stream-of-consciousness defense of his presidency and worldview, filled with falsehoods, revisionist history and self-aggrandizement.
Trump trashed his former secretary of defense, retired four-star Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, as a failure after once holding him out as a star of his administration.
“What’s he done for me?” Trump said.
He claimed to have “essentially” fired Mattis, who had surprised the White House by resigning in protest last month after the president’s abrupt decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria.
And Trump, who did not serve in the military and received draft deferments during the Vietnam War, suggested he would have made a good military leader himself.
“I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?” Trump said.
Trump on Mattis: ‘President Obama fired him and … so did I’
President Trump spoke about his former defense secretary at a Cabinet meeting Jan. 2, saying he was not “too happy” with how Jim Mattis handled Afghanistan. (The Washington Post)
He took credit for falling oil prices, arguing they were the result of phone calls he made to the leaders of oil-producing nations.
“I called up certain people, and I said let that damn oil and gasoline — you let it flow, the oil,” he said.
And Trump defended his push to fund his promised border wall, parrying complaints from Democrats who have called the wall immoral by remarking, “Then we have to do something about the Vatican, because the Vatican has the biggest wall of them all.”
Trump is entering his third year in the White House with his presidency at its most challenging point.
Democrats bent on investigating his administration and stymieing his agenda will take control of the House on Thursday. The thriving economy he once touted as evidence of his success is showing signs of strain, with financial markets tumbling in recent weeks due in part to worries over his policies and stewardship of the government. And his new year began with former GOP presidential nominee and incoming Utah Sen. Mitt Romney penning a harsh critique, cheered by the president’s Republican detractors, that argued Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office.”
Trump seemed mindful of all this Wednesday as he attempted to seize the spotlight by staging an unusual Cabinet meeting that was geared more toward garnering public attention than serving as a venue for the internal deliberations of his administration.
After saying last month that he would proudly take responsibility for the government shutdown over wall funding, he sought to blame Democrats for not sticking around over the holidays to negotiate. He said he stayed in Washington because the border security debate was “too important a subject to walk away from.”
“I was here on Christmas evening. I was all by myself in the White House — it’s a big, big house — except for the guys on the lawn with machine guns,” he said.
But Trump added confusion to the debate by undercutting Vice President Pence, seated nearby, in dismissing the offer he and other administration officials made to Democrats late last month of accepting $2.5 billion for the wall.
He described the recent stock sell-off as a “glitch” and said markets would soar again on the strength of trade deals he plans this year. But House Democrats may stand in the way of the first of those, a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and markets have been rattled most by the tariffs Trump has imposed on China.
Trump dismissed Romney’s scathing criticism of how he’s conducted his presidency, saying Romney should be more of a “team player,” and played down the idea he could face a primary challenge in 2020.
“They say I am the most popular president in the history of the Republican Party,” Trump said.
Amid concerns within his own party about whether he will pull troops out of Afghanistan, Trump offered a discursive and somewhat inscrutable account of the fall of the Soviet Union, blaming it on the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,” Trump said.
His point was that the United States should pull out of hopeless and expensive wars, but he skipped over the many reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as he held up the loss of empire as an example.
“The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there,” he said, breaking with the stance taken by past U.S. administrations that the invasion was an illegitimate power play against a neighboring nation. “The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”
The semblance of a traditional Cabinet meeting broke out from time to time, including when Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, joining by video connection, briefed the group on the administration’s border security efforts and set the tone by claiming, “Mr. President, now more than ever we need the wall.”
Trump’s Cabinet is pocked by vacancies, as the roster of deputies and placeholders around the table illustrated.
Mattis’s formerly prominent place at the Cabinet table was occupied Wednesday by a little-known deputy, Patrick Shanahan, who mostly looked down at his notes as Trump called Syria, where more than 2,000 U.S. troops are deployed, a lost cause of “sand and death.”
Several officials in attendance interjected praise for the president at different points.
“I want to thank you for the strong stand you have taken on border security,” Pence told him.
Trump, a large poster of himself evoking “Game of Thrones” on the table before him, complained about allies and partners from Afghanistan and Pakistan to India and Germany. They don’t pay their way or expect too much from the United States, Trump said, claiming anew that he is insisting on a reboot of the old expectations about U.S. aid and military obligations.
He claimed that if he wanted to, he could have any government job in Europe and be popular there. He cast his unpopularity among European publics as a sign he is doing his job well.
He defended his controversial negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by stating that if he had not reached out, there would have been a “big fat war in Asia.”
A second summit with Kim will happen soon, Trump predicted. He did not mention Kim’s veiled threat, in a New Year’s message, that the United States must not try his patience.
Trump’s critics and skeptics on North Korea say he lost leverage by agreeing to the first summit last year and would only lose more with another face-to-face meeting now.
The president, who frequently faces criticism for his light public schedule, also bemoaned the lack of credit he has received for what he views as the many accomplishments of his first two years.
“I have to tell you, it would be a lot easier if I didn’t do anything, if I just sat and enjoyed the presidency, like a lot of other people have done,” Trump said.
The Waltons are an especially cynical bunch of billionaires. The family collectively is said to be worth something between $150-200 Billion. Alice Walton, at $46 Billion, is the richest woman in the world.
They have a family foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, which proclaims its love for children by funding privately managed charter schools. They boast that they have funded one of every four charter schools in the nation.
If they really cared about children, they would pay their one million employees at least $15 an hour. That would do more to help children than all their charter schools. But, as is well known, they pay low wages and are vehemently anti-union. When Walmart comes into a town, they drive every mom-and-pop store out of business, then give mom and pop a part-time job as “greeters” at the new big box store. If the Walmart is not profitable, they close it and move on, leaving all the small towns within 25-50 miles with empty main streets, their stores closed.
Now the Waltons, we learn from this excellent article by Sally Ho of the AP, have decided to target Black communities, to woo them away from public schools and to promise them the world in their privately managed charter schools. They woo them to enroll in a school where parents have no voice and children have no rights. If they don’t like it, they can leave. And by luring them away from their public school, the Waltons guarantee that the public schools will lose funding, fire teachers, have larger class sizes, and not be able to offer electives, while possibly eliminating recess and the arts.
This is not philanthropy. This is villainthropy. Nobody does villainthropy better than the Waltons. They have already forgotten that Sam Walton, the creator of their family wealth, graduated from a public high school, the David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. He would be ashamed of what his progeny are doing: Destroying the public institution that served the public good and made it possible for him to rise in the world. The entire Walton clan and everyone riding their gravy train should be ashamed of themselves. Probably they are not capable of shame.
Amid fierce debate over whether charter schools are good for black students, the heirs to the Walmart company fortune have been working to make inroads with advocates and influential leaders in the black community.
Walton family, as one of the leading supporters of America’s charter school movement, is spreading its financial support to prominent and like-minded black leaders, from grassroots groups focused on education to mainstream national organizations such as the United Negro College Fund and Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, according to an Associated Press analysis of tax filings and non-profit grants data…
While some black leaders see charters as a safer, better alternative in their communities, a deep rift of opinion was exposed by a 2016 call for a moratorium on charters by the NAACP, a longtime skeptic that expressed concerns about school privatization, transparency and accountability issues. The Black Lives Matter movement is also among those that have demanded charter school growth be curbed.
When NAACP leaders gathered to discuss charters in 2016, a group of demonstrators led the Cincinnati hotel to complain to police that they were trespassing. The three buses that brought the 150 black parents from Tennessee on the 14-hour road trip were provided by The Memphis Lift, an advocacy group that has received $1.5 million from the Walton foundation since 2015.
Please open the link to see the graphic that shows how the Waltons are funding leading black organizations, to buy their support for the privatization of public education, where parents have voice and children have rights.
Can you imagine learning civics in a Walton-funded school? Do they teach poor children and black children not to vote? Do they learn to sing the praises of unbridled capitalism? Do they learn to despise the common good? Do they teach deference to your betters? Do they teach children that protest is wrong and that rich people should never be taxed?
I’m reminded of a visit I paid to New Orleans in 2010. I was speaking at the historically black Dillard University. The audience contained many fired teachers. I spoke and we had a dialogue about what had happened to New Orleans. One woman got up and said plaintively, “First they stole our democracy, then they stole our schools.”
Black families should be wary of anything that the billionaires are promoting. If they won’t pay their workers a living wage, they can’t be trusted with the children of the workers.
Let’s hope that the Waltons are visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future.
I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas, and I wish the Waltons the gift of a soul and a conscience and a new birth of concern for their fellow men and women.
Gary Rubinstein began his career in Teach for America but became a career math teacher in New York City. He also writes a blog, where he has achieved fame and notoriety as the nation’s ultimate fact-checker of “miracle schools” whose claims are too good to be true.
As he explains in this post, he first entered the arena of miracle-School mythbusting when he heard Arne Duncan boast about a charter school in Chicago that had once been a low performing public school. That charter, Urban Prep, Duncan said, now had a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate. Rubinstein checked the data and found that the school had high attrition and low pass rates on state tests, lower than Chicago public schools.
“Urban Prep Charter School in Chicago is the original ‘miracle school.’ Seven years ago at the Teach For America 20th anniversary alumni summit, I heard Arne Duncan talk about how they had 100% of their senior class graduate and how 100% of them went on to college after they shut down the public school in that building and replaced it with a charter school.”
He was roundly criticized by charter trolls on Twitter but he was unfazed.
Now he finds this charter, with its miraculous outcomes, has expanded to a chain of three, all boasting the same 100% college acceptance rates. But the city may close one of them for low performance.
Rubinstein checked the data. See what he found.
It is astonishing. All three campuses perform worse than the Chicago public schools. The real miracle is that they still have a 100% college acceptance rate.
Where is the New York Times?
John Thompson here writes about his reaction to the annual conference of the Network for Public Education, where the implicit theme was that David is beating Goliath, but Goliath just keeps stumbling forward, crushing public schools and advancing privatization, with no evidence of success. I argued, in the opening address of the conference, that the Reformers are akin to Goliath, and that Goliath has failed and failed again but is so powerful that he continues to wreak destruction on communities. He is among the Walking Dead. He is, in fact, a zombie.
Thompson was a teacher in Oklahoma; he recently retired. He lives in the belly of the beast, a state where Goliathians control the legislature and the governorship. At least they don’t pretend to be “progressives.” They are DeVos-Trump extremists, with links to ALEC and the Koch brothers.
Thompson admits that he was slow in realizing that the Reformers are intent on undermining public schools and that they were acting in concert. But he is convinced now, not only that they are doing so, but that their promises have not been kept and that, in fact, they have failed wherever they set their sights.
He ends with this:
Knowing that Indianapolis is at the heart of the dying, but still dangerous corporate reform movement, I expected that Chalkbeat would choose its words carefully and make sure that its reporting didn’t threaten its donations from Goliath. Chalkbeat Indianapolis didn’t cover the NPE conference but Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat New York has been covering Indiana’s Mind Trust and its successor, the City Fund. (Chalkbeat Indiana has since linked to WFYI Indianapolis’s report on one of the city’s 20 “innovation schools” which is receiving $1.3 million in management fees.)
This leads to the biggest question that I brought to the NPE. We Oklahomans have failed to communicate with our state’s edu-philanthropists on how their science-based, holistic early education and trauma-informed instruction programs and the Indianapolis Goliath are inherently incompatible. We know that the City Fund seems to have its eye on Deborah Gist’s Tulsa Public schools. We could use some help from NPE conference participants in explaining to Tulsa philanthropists why their “portfolio model” is likely to undermine their contributions to high quality pre-k, just like it did in New Orleans.
As a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood and a board member for the ACLU/OK, I developed great respect for the Kaiser and Schusterman foundations and other Tulsa philanthropists. I still struggle to understand how those leaders could not see how their humane, evidence-based programs are threatened by Goliath’s data-driven, reward and punish corporate reforms. But one of the first people I saw in Indianapolis was Tom Ultican, and he gave me information on the $200,000 Schusterman donated to California privatizers such as Antonio Villaraigosa and Marshall Tuck. If nothing else, I would like to explain to the philanthropists why educators can’t lower our guard and stop defending ourselves against their scorched earth tactics. I’d appreciate any help the NPE can provide in explaining why we will fight Goliath to the end.
Imagine that. Chalkbeat has an outpost in Indianapolis, but did not think it was worth its time to send a reporter to cover a conference of 500 educators from across the country that took place in Indianapolis! Is that media bias? Would their funders (Walton, Gates, etc.) have objected if they sent a reporter to write about a major event in their city?
EdChoice (formerly the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation) conducted a telephone poll of 600 people in Kentucky and found support for “scholarships,” also known as “vouchers.”
Proponents of vouchers avoid using the V word, because the public understands that it means sending public money to religious and private schools. The public is okay with scholarships but opposes vouchers.
When proposals for vouchers (or scholarships that allow public money to be spent for religious or private schools) is on the ballot, the voters say no. They said NO last week in Arizona by a vote of 65-35%.
EdChoice and the Goldwater Institute are based in Arizona. The Koch brothers and DeVos’ American Federation for Children supported the voucher referendum (called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts), and despite the money and the euphemism, it was defeated overwhelmingly.
Watch out, Kentucky. The voucher zombies are coming for you.
José Espinosa is the Superintendent of the Socorro Independent School District In Texas. This article appeared in the El Paso Times.
Superintendent Espinosa thinks the public should know the truth about charter schoools that claim to have a 100% college acceptance rate. They are lying. Rightwingers in Texas and charter promoters are planning on a big expansion of charters in the state, peddling their wares with unverified claims about their “success.”
He writes:
When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Dating back to 1954, the Better Business Bureau used this catchphrase to alert the public of shady business practices.
In the new era of school choice, this catchphrase can be used to alert the public of misleading business practices by charter schools in order to protect our most prized possessions — our children.
Every year, certain charters tout a 100 percent college acceptance rate as their major marketing pitch to lure parents away from traditional public schools.
The reality is the public isn’t told acceptance to a four-year university is actually a graduation requirement at some charter schools.
It specifically states in certain charters’ student/family handbooks that a student may graduate and receive a diploma ONLY if the student is accepted into a four-year university and has completed 125 hours of community service.
Reading lengthy student/family handbooks carefully before considering charters is just as important as reading the fine print before signing contracts.
We must also ask, “Why is Corporate America bashing our traditional public schools, yet it doesn’t demand transparency or accountability from charter schools?”
While 100 percent of charter seniors get accepted to college as required, the public has a right to know the percentage of charter students who didn’t make it to their senior year.
Ed Fuller, Pennsylvania State University professor, found in one of his studies of a particular charter network that when considering the number of students starting in the ninth grade as a cohort, the percentage of charter cohort students who graduated and went on to college was at best 65 percent.
In other words, 35 percent of ninth-graders at a charter network didn’t make it to their graduation….
Just like the BBB, it is our duty to alert the public.
If charters insist on boasting about 100 percent college acceptance rates, then traditional public schools must insist that our communities be fully informed.
Charters’ news release could read: “Since we require students to get accepted to a four-year university in order to graduate, our seniors have a 100 percent college acceptance rate. However, more than 30 percent of our cohort students in the ninth grade didn’t graduate from our charters. Therefore, we had less than 70 percent of our cohort students graduate and get accepted to college…”
Lauding charters who lack transparency and discount students while bashing El Paso’s public schools disparages the hard work, relentless dedication and success of Team SISD.
Max Boot, who recently renounced his ties to the Republican Party, urges you to vote for Democrats. He begins by quoting Joe Biden. He is sickened by the Trump dominance of his former party.
“ I am sick and tired of this administration.
“I’m sick and tired of what’s going on.
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.” — Joe Biden
[Boot writes ]
I’m sick and tired, too.
I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)
Donald Trump has irreversibly changed the Republican Party. The upheaval might seem unusual, but as Opinion writer Robert Gebelhoff explains, political transformations crop up throughout U.S. history.
I’m sick and tired of a president who misuses his office to demagogue on immigration — by unnecessarily sending 5,200 troops [editor’s note: now upped to 15,000] to the border and by threatening to rescind by executive order the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
I’m sick and tired of a president who is so self-absorbed that he thinks he is the real victim of mail-bomb attacks on his political opponents — and who, after visiting Pittsburgh despite being asked by local leaders to stay away, tweeted about how he was treated, not about the victims of the synagogue massacre.
I’m sick and tired of a president who cheers a congressman for his physical assault of a reporter, calls the press the “enemy of the people ” and won’t stop or apologize even after bombs were sent to CNN in the mail.
I’m sick and tired of a president who employs the language of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financier George Soros and “globalists,” and won’t apologize or retract even after what is believed to be the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history.
I’m sick and tired of a president who won’t stop engaging in crazed partisanship, denouncing Democrats as “evil,” “un-American” and “treasonous” subversives who are in league with criminals.
I’m sick and tired of a president who cares so little about right-wing terrorism that, on the very day of the synagogue shooting, he proceeded with a campaign rally, telling his supporters, “Let’s have a good time.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who presides over one of the most unethical administrations in U.S. history — with three Cabinet members resigning for reported ethical infractions and the secretary of the interior the subject of at least 18 federal investigations.
I’m sick and tired of a president who flouts norms of accountability by refusing to release his tax returns or place his business holdings in a blind trust.
I’m sick and tired of a president who lies outrageously and incessantly — an average of eight times a day — claiming recently that there are riots in California and that a bill that passed the Senate 98 to 1 had “very little Democrat support.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who can’t be bothered to work hard and instead prefers to spend his time watching Fox News and acting like a Twitter troll.
And I’m sick and tired of Republicans who go along with Trump — defending, abetting and imitating his egregious excesses. I’m sick and tired of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) acting like a caddie for the man he once denounced as a “kook” — just this week, Graham endorsed Trump’s call for rescinding “birthright citizenship,” a kooky idea if ever there was one.
I’m sick and tired of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who got his start in politics as a protege of the “bleeding-heart conservative” Jack Kemp, refusing to call out Trump’s race-baiting.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once complained about the federal debt adding $113 billion to the debt just in fiscal year 2018.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once championed free trade refusing to stop Trump as he launches trade wars with all of our major trade partners.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who not only refuse to investigate Trump’s alleged ethical violations but who also help him to obstruct justice by maligning the FBI, the special counsel and the Justice Department.
Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same — with Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya.
If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do.
Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection.
If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one.
Diane Ravitch's blog 