Carol Burris writes about the latest news from the charter industry. This is the same company that Valerie Strauss wrote about, called “Entertainment Properties Trust.” It’s CEO, Dennis Brain, told an interviewer that charter schools were a sound investment, had long waiting lists, and were guaranteed government revenues.
But that rosy picture has dimmed. The long waiting lists are fictional. Charters are likely to close down suddenly. In some states, charter enrollment is declining. The REIT lost confidence in the future of charter schools and liquidated its charter school holdings.
Burris writes:
EPR Properties (NYSE:EPR) is a triple net lease real estate investment trust (REIT). What that means is that it buys properties and then rents them with the tenant picking up costs like insurance, improvements, and all utilities. Therefore, every dollar EPR makes off the lease is profit.
EPR had a special relationship with Imagine Charter Schools. School House Finance, Imagine’s related organization, would buy the property. It would sell it to EPR. EPR would lease it back to School House, which would then lease it to one of Imagine’s charter schools at very high rates.
EPR also had a special relationship with the for-profit charter management firm CSMI. It would buy their charter school’s buildings and then lease them to the schools.
Education Capital Solutions is the wholly owned subsidiary of Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR).
In 2016 the school’s “operating lease” was $1,711,368. The next year it jumped to $1,871,506, which represents 17 percent of all school revenues.
The school folded. But another charter came into the building for which the company could collect rent.
Now EPR is getting out of the charter school business. It realized it was just too unstable. They have sold off their buildings to Rosemawr Management, LLC.
“Management cited competitive financing alternatives, which induced increasing earnings volatility of the charter school portfolio as the primary reason to sell it. Additionally, the sell-off will improve overall rent coverage from 1.89x to 1.94x. ”
Back in 2012, Tennessee introduced its “Achievement School District” and hired YES Prep charter founder Chris Barbic to run it. The ASD was funded with $100 million from the state’s Race to the Top grant. Barbic said he would take the state’s lowest-performing public schools, hand them off to charter operators, and catapult them into the top 25% in the state within five years. Year after year, the ASD showed no improvement. After four years, Barbic had a heart attack and left (he went to work for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation). The ASD never reached its lofty goals.
Caroline Bauman wrote in Chalkbeat about the now familiar poor results as the school semester started:
At a make-or-break moment for Tennessee’s turnaround school district, its 30 schools have collectively delivered another round of low test scores.
Only 3.4% of high schoolers in the Achievement School District met the state’s proficiency standards on this year’s math and English exams, while 12.6% of elementary students reached that benchmark, according to data released by the state education department Thursday.
The news is not surprising: The Achievement School District oversees 30 of the state’s lowest-performing schools, the majority of which are in Memphis.
Still, the scores deliver another blow to the credibility of the turnaround effort once heralded as a national exemplar. This year, the district — whose low-performing schools are taken over by charter school organizations tasked with improving them — lost its third leader, had its poor performance analyzed by an academic study, and came under scrutiny from the state’s new education chief. Commissioner Penny Schwinn says she plans to announce major changes to the district soon.
Those changes will target a district where only a handful of students meet the state’s standards in reading and math.
Only 7.5% of the achievement district’s elementary and middle school students scored on grade level in English, down slightly from last year. In math, 12% of students scored at grade level or higher, which represented an increase. Both remain well below state averages.
In the district’s five high schools, scores in Algebra I, Geometry, and English rose but remained very low, while U.S. History scores slightly dipped.
About 3% of high schoolers in Algebra 1 and 4% in English 1 scored on grade level. (Two of the five high schools are alternative schools that serve students who have already fallen behind in high school).
Open the link to see the comparisons between the ASD and the state.
It is sad that other states, such as Nevada and North Carolina, created state-takeover districts modeled on Tennessee’s ASD without waiting to see the results.
He notes that a reporter for The Intercept, Ryan Grim, attended the rally and wrote that the protestors were funded by the Waltons, who have never shown any support for civil rights issues and are actively hostile to unions, which lift low-income workers out of poverty.
He also quotes Intercept journalist Rachel Cohen, who wondered why charter parents would object to higher transparency standards.
Singer points out that the billionaire Waltons have used their money to advance for their policy goals.
Carol Burris and Kevin Welner wrote in another article that Warren’s plan would mean additional funding for both public schools and charter schools without closing any charter schools. The Waltons object to her wealth tax proposal, as well as her promise to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, meant for startups but used now by Betsy DeVos to fund big corporate charter chains like KIPP, IDEA, and Success Academy..
The Century Foundation is supposed to be a liberal foundation. I had numerous contacts with it when it was previously known as The Twentieth Century Fund. My most memorable experience involved my membership on a task force in 1983 or so, which prepared a critique of American education and the need for reform. For that era, our task force report was fairly run-of-the-mill. What was remarkable was that our staff director disagreed with the task force. He wrote a ringing defense of our public schools and took issue with the conclusions of the report. His name was Paul Petersen. He is now one of the leading critics of public schools, now one of the most widely published advocates for vouchers and charters. Well, we switched sides.
Fast forward to the present.
The Twentieth Century Fund is now the Century Fund. My ex-husband served on its board for many years. It has a reputation for its careful research and sober findings.
But last year, the Century Fund released a report about how charter schools can promote “diversity by design,” identifying 125 charter schools that promote diversity.
This raised eyebrows because charters have frequently been criticized for promoting segregation, most notably by the UCLA Center on Civil Rights.
The report was remarkable because it was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the anti-union, pro-privatization foundation of the billionaires who own Walmart. The Waltons say they have funded one-fourth of all charters in the nation. Since when does a liberal think tank take funding from a rightwing foundation and deliver a product that supports their charter crusade?
Last year, a parent activist complained about the bias of the report. She wrote her commentary on Leonie Haimson’s parent blog. Haimson, introducing her comments, pointed out a big flaw in the study. She wrote: This list of 125 schools was selected from 5,692 charter schools – only a tiny number. The methodology is also questionable. The authors identify these schools by analyzing their enrollment, websites and survey responses from school leaders. Though the Century Foundation sent their survey about diversity to 971 charter schools, only 86 responded – which means that nearly 40 schools were put on the list even though the school leaders couldn’t be bothered to answer their survey.
This year, the Century Foundation recently accepted a grant of $407,053 from the Gates Foundation “to support the Century Foundation in addressing misconceptions that charter schools exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.”
Read the wording again. TCF is not being funded to inquire whether charter schools exacerbate segregation but to “address misconceptions” that they do. This is not research. It is a contract to provide support for an opinion that challenges the scholarship of people like Gary Orfield at UCLA and Helen Ladd at Duke.
California is a bellwether for the nation. This strong stance shows that teachers are reclaiming their profession from billionaires and hedge fund managers.
Edsource reports:
Taking aim at the majority of charter schools in the state, the California Democratic Party has included language in its platform declaring that these schools should be overseen by publicly elected boards, in contrast to the self-appointed boards that run most of them.
The new language, adopted at the state party’s annual convention in Long Beach over the weekend, was promoted by the 120,000-member California Federation of Teachers and strengthens an already strongly worded section of the California Democratic Party’s platform on charter schools.
It is especially significant because it comes from a state with by far the largest number of charter schools in the nation, enrolling just over 10 percent of all the state’s public school students. It also underscored the ongoing divisions within the party over charter schools, which have become about one of the most contentious issues on the nation’s education reform agenda.
“We need to keep certain services public, and education is one of them,” said California Federation of Teachers President Jeff Freitas.
The party platform includes this new language:
CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY PLATFORM
Urges “support for those charter schools that are managed by public and elected boards, not for profit, transparent in governance, have equitable admissions, adopt fair labor practices and respect labor neutrality, and supplement rather than supplant existing public education program.” — Adopted by California Democratic Party, November 2019
Mercedes Schneider reviews the Gates Foundation’s long and costly list of failed interventions into K-12 schools and points out, quoting the words of the Foundation, that it has never admitted any failure and never apologized.
Gates paid for the interventions but the real cost was borne by teachers and public schools.
He tried breaking up big schools into small schools, convinced as he was that big schools are ineffective, but when the small schools didn’t produce higher test scores, he abandoned that idea.
He prodded Arne Duncan to include the untested of evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, and he launched his own experiments in seven districts and charter chains. That too was a flop.
He poured uncounted millions into boosting the charter industry, despite the fact that charters do not get different results from public schools when they enroll the same students.
He spent millions promoting a charter law in his home state of Washington, which passed on the fourth state referendum only after he overwhelmed the opposition by spending 16 times as much as they did; the charters he fought so hard for have struggled to get enough enrollment to stay open (four of the original dozen have already folded), and a CREDO evaluation concluded that they don’t get different results than public schools in the state.
Gates provided almost all the funding necessary for the Common Core State Standards, which required districts and states to spend billions of dollars on new tests, new textbooks, new software, new teacher training, new everything.
When the backlash grew against the Common Core, Gates simply didn’t understand it, since he compares education to an electric plug with standard current into which all possible appliances can be plugged in and get power.
This year, the Gates Foundation awarded 476 grants, but only seven went to K-12, mostly to promote charter schools, a passion he shares with the rightwing Walton Foundation and Betsy DeVos and her foundations.
Read the Gates Foundation’s statement that Mercedes includes in her post. You will see that the foundation acknowledges no failures, no errors, no miscalculations. It doesn’t even own its almost total responsibility for CC, nor for its disastrous reception by teachers and the public.
The legacy of Bill Gates: Teachers and principals who were fired based on a phony measure of their “effectiveness.” Schools in black and brown communities closed because of their test scores. A demoralization of teachers, and a dramatic decline in the number of people entering the profession. A national teacher shortage. The elevation of standardized testing as both the means and the ends of all education (tests that were never used in the schools he and his own children attended).
Here are a few things that Bill Gates NEVER funded or fought for: class size reduction; higher salaries for teachers; a nurse and social worker and librarian in every school; higher taxes to support public schools.
Mercedes concludes:
It may be too much to expect Bill Gates to completely exit K12 education. After all, we have been his hobby for years.
But the fewer Gates dollars, the smaller the petri dish.
Unfortunately the lingering effects of his failed experiments continue to ruin schools, such as the value-added measurement of teachers by test scores, still written into law in many states; the Common Core persists, often under a different name to disguise it; and of course charter schools continue to drain students and resources from underfunded public schools.
New Orleans is the nation’s first all-charter district.
New Orleans is supposed to be the shining star of the charter movement, proving the value of school choice and market-based reforms, closing schools and replacing them with new schools, then closing failing schools, ad infinitum.
Della Hasselle writes in the New Orleans Advocate:
The release of the state’s closely watched school performance scores earlier this month offered an overall update on New Orleans schools that seemed benign enough: A slight increase in overall student performance meant another C grade for the district.
But a closer look reveals a startling fact. A whopping 35 of the 72 schools in the all-charter district scored a D or F, meaning nearly half of local public schools were considered failing, or close to it, in the school year ending in 2019. Since then, six of the 35 have closed.
While New Orleans has long been home to struggling schools, the data released this month are concerning. There was an increase of nearly 11% percentage points in the number of schools that received the state’s lowest grades from the 2017-18 school year to 2018-19.
Someone, please let Betsy DeVos know.
Let Cory Booker and Democrats for Education Reform know.
Let Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, and Eli Broad know.
Let the Mind Trust and City Fund know.
Tell the Walton Foundation, which has poured over $1 billion into charter school proliferation.
Defeated Republican Governor Matt Bevin was a huge fan of charter schools. The legislature passed a charter law but never funded it. Bevin appointed a new state board of education, and they appointed Wayne Lewis as state commissioner. Lewis loves charters.
A few weeks ago, Bevin was defeated by Democrat Andy Beshear, who ran on a strong pro-public education program. He chose an educator as his Lieutenant Governor. He said he would pick a new state board on day one and a new state commissioner on day two. Beshear made clear that public education was a major priority for his administration.
Beshear has said he and Lt. Gov.-elect Jacqueline Coleman, an educator, will have no higher priority than Kentucky’s public education system and its teachers. Teacher Allison Slone, founder of a popular Facebook page called Kentucky Teachers in the Know, said she and her colleagues “are ready to move on and up from the negativity, lack of trust, and partisan politics” that they experienced under Bevin.
Not so fast, said Wayne Lewis. Beshear can’t replace the board members until their terms expire in 2020 and 2022. And Lewis has no plans to leave until the board changes.
The timing is right because the Koch Network has targeted four states for unlimited charter school proliferation: Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.
Up until now, many school districts are using the guidelines and standards developed by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, which wants minimal oversight of charter schools.
But NACSA, Pinkston notes, is not a neutral arbiter, but an organization dedicated to the growth and expansion of the charter industry.
Asking NACSA for advice about how to grant charters is akin to asking the Tobacco Industry Association whether cigarettes are good or bad for your health.
Many districts, Pinkston notes, are having budget problems because of the expansion of charters.
He advises:
Strengthening public school districts’ charter application reviews is a logical first step toward disrupting the school privatization movement…
Charter application review practices vary greatly between states and local school districts — and charter operators over the years have capitalized on this confusion in the field to push into existence scores of unneeded and unwanted charters.
Many districts have fallen into the trap of letting the charter sector exert undue influence on their review process. The most egregious example: For more than a decade, an innocuously named Chicago-based nonprofit organization — the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) — has led the national charter sector’s campaign to set ground rules for how K-12 public school districts should review charter applications…
In fact, NACSA is a thinly veiled charter advocacy group largely funded by the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — the two biggest pro-charter philanthropies in the U.S. Moreover, NACSA’s board and staff is exclusively populated with charter school advocates. According to an Internal Revenue Service filing, NACSA’s mission is simple: “Promote establishment” of charter schools.
With a multi-million-dollar annual budget, NACSA carries out its mission through a range of activities, including: Hosting conferences and workshops to train public school district employees on implementing pro-charter review standards; awarding grants to sway districts’ opinions on charters; and lobbying state policymakers to advance a pro-charter agenda in legislatures and statehouses…
The carefully branded name of NACSA’s standards assumes that charter school “authorizing” will happen. But districts’ default position should be that authorizing may happen — or not.
NACSA describes its standards as “a rich base of knowledge built on deep experience, study, deliberation, and refinement that reflects collective insights on best practices among authorizers of all types and portfolio sizes across the country.” But a closer examination reveals that NACSA’s standards are just a finely manicured PR product devised by the charter sector, for the charter sector.
Pinkston urges districts to take control of the charter authorizing process and consider such factors as:
Audits (they should be conducted by independent auditors, not self-audits);
Class size (NACSA is silent on this but district authorizers should not be);
Facilities and transportation (Districts should require charter applicants to submit detailed transportation plans that mirror best practices among districts. Moreover, districts should require charter applicants to submit robust facility plans — including the address of the proposed charter location, development or redevelopment plans, letters of commitment by funders or financial institutions, and other documentation that would be expected before any district opens a new school);
Licensed teachers (NACSA is silent, but districts should not be);
Salaries and benefits (NACSA is silent, but districts should not be).
As Pinkston says, it is up to districts to decide whether to award charters and to set conditions. They should not ask the charter lobbyists how to do it.
When Jan Resseger writes, she does so with authority and clarity.
In this essay, she explains why she will not vote for Michael Bloomberg, based on his record of disrespecting educators in New York City when he was mayor. Bloomberg as mayor employed all the same principles as No Child Left Behind: testing, accountability, school closings, charter schools, school choice, all based on “the business model.”
She writes:
Michael Bloomberg does have a long education record. Bloomberg served as New York City’s mayor from January of 2002 until December of 2013. In 2002, to accommodate his education agenda, Bloomberg got the state legislature to create mayoral governance of NYC’s public schools. In this role, Michael Bloomberg and his appointed schools chancellor, Joel Klein were among the fathers of what has become a national wave of corporate, accountability-based school reform. Bloomberg is a businessman, and Joel Klein was a very successful attorney. Neither had any experience as an educator. They took aggressive steps to run the NYC school district, with 1.1 million students, like a business. Their innovations included district-wide school choice, rapid expansion of charter schools, co-location of a bunch of small charter and traditional schools into what used to be comprehensive high schools, the phase out and closure of low-scoring schools, evaluation of schools by high stakes standardized test scores, the assignment of letter grades to schools based on their test scores, and a sort of merit pay bonus plan for teachers.
In her 2018 book, After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor, the New York business journalist and journalism professor, comments on Bloomberg’s educational experiment: “The Bloomberg administration embraced the full panoply of education-reform remedies. It worshiped at the altar of standardized tests and all manner of quantitative analysis. The Bloomberg administration also had a penchant for reorganizations that seemed to create more disruption than continuous improvement among its 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools.” ( After the Education Wars, p. 75)
Gabor describes Bloomberg’s expansion of charter schools: “Harlem, in particular, has become the center of an unintentional educational experiment—one that has been replicated in neighborhoods and cities around the country. During the Bloomberg years, when close to a quarter of students in the area were enrolled in charter schools, segregation increased, as did sizable across-the-board demographic disparities among the students who attended each type of school. An analysis of Bloomberg-era education department data revealed that public open-enrollment elementary and middle schools have double—and several have triple—the proportion of special needs kids of nearby charter schools. The children in New York’s traditional public schools are much poorer than their counterparts in charter schools. And public schools have far higher numbers of English language learners… In backing charter schools Bloomberg and other advocates pointed to one clear benefit: charters, it was widely accepted, would increase standardized test scores. However, years of studies showed little difference between the test-score performance of students in charter schools and those in public schools.” After the Education Wars, p. 95)
And there is more. Open the link and read it to understand why the “business model” did not work.
