Parents, grandparents, and educators in Ohio. Contact the governor and legislators and urge them to stop HB 154. Now. State takeover has already failed in Ohio, yet the Senate Education Committee slipped it back into a bill intended to support struggling districts instead of taking away their democracy.
Bill Phillis and Jeanne Melvin of Public Education Partners send this urgent message.
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Terri Michal is an elected school board member in Birmingham. Betsy DeVos recently gave $25 million to Alabama from the federal Charter Schools Program, which she uses as her personal slush fund.
Federal Grants and Surplus Property: DeVos’s Solution to Help the Students of Birmingham, AL.
By Terri Michal
In Alabama we have a Legislature that appears to be perfectly fine creating legislation that targets our black and brown high poverty students in Birmingham.
We have education organizations and foundations that work against the very schools they are contracted to support.
We have a State Superintendent that is condoning the targeting of our students.
We have a real estate executive that in 2015 actively worked, unbeknownst to Birmingham City Schools (BCS), to get our charter school law passed while at the same time holding a contract to sell surplus properties for the school system. This information was just recently exposed. They are still under contract with BCS.
Now, thanks to an old organization, the Alabama Coalition for Public Charter Schools, renamed New Schools for Alabama, we can add Betsy DeVos to that dogpile. Like the cherry on top of a sundae, Betsy DeVos is the final piece needed to serve up Birmingham City Public Schools to the power-hungry politicians and the gluttonous corporations they work for.
So, what was it exactly that DeVos did to make their charter school dreams come true? She awarded New Schools for Alabama a $25 million-dollar grant to open 15 charter schools, a majority of which no doubt will be in Birmingham.
However, New Schools wasn’t the only one that got a gift, I did too. What was it? The Federal grant application that New Schools filed in an effort to receive that CSP Grant. It brought together, in one document, the entire cast of characters that’sworking to undermine public education in Birmingham, Alabama.
When I began reading it, I didn’t really know what I was looking for.
But the first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that they had no problem saying they were targeting Birmingham, along with 3 other districts. Now, finally, for all of those in this city who refuse to believe we are targets for privatization, it’s right there in the application in black and white. I guess we can now put that ‘conspiracy theory’ to rest.
Second, I noticed the people and organizations that wrote letters in support of New Schools for Alabama and the grant that would be undermining our public schools; Alabama Sen. Del Marsh (R), U.S. Sen. Doug Jones (D), State Superintendent Eric Mackey, the Mike and Gillian Goodrich Foundation, the Daniel Foundation, and A+ Education Partnership, just to mention a few.
Third, and possibly the most disturbing, was the fact that the Executive Director of NSFA, Tyler Barnett, used data gathered from our voucher law, the Alabama Accountability Act, to justify targeting our black and brown students for charter schools. Here’s what he said:
“Of Alabama’s 76 state-designated failing schools—meaning, the bottom 6% of schools in academic achievement—72 had at least a 90% poverty rate. And of the 38,420 students in those failing schools, 96% are Black or Hispanic.”
Ninety Six percent are Black or Hispanic!! How in the world can Mr. Barnett, or anyone else for that matter, take this data andthen twist it to blame the schools and/or the students for ‘failing’? Especially knowing the same Sen. Del Marsh that wrote the recommendation letter for this grant was also responsible for bringing us the Accountability Act. Just as they are targeting our students for charter schools, the Accountability Act targets our black and brown students and labels their schools as failing.
This data is garbage, the only purpose it serves is to strengthen the systemic racism that exists in public education in Alabama. If you are thinking to yourself, ‘it’s the poverty’, it’s not. Approx. half of our public-school students that live in poverty in Alabama are white.
Finally, the most surprising thing I found was this, in reference to what our charter school law says about acquiring real estate:
“Already, this law has been exercised by a charter applicant in Birmingham City Schools, which sold a historic but underutilized school building in the fall of 2018 so that an emerging charter network could restore the building for school use.”
Wait, what? I am a board member for BCS, I would like to think that I’d know if we sold a building for charter school use.We did attempt to sell one property last fall, but the sale fell through in February, a month after the NSFA Federal Grant Application was submitted.
If we were to believe that the information in this federal application were true, and why wouldn’t we, the reason I didn’t know the surplus property was going to be a charter school is, more than likely, because of three little words that come after the buyer’s name on our real estate sale agreement, ‘and/or assigns’.What these three words do is allow the person buying the property to assign the sale to a third party. So, if it says John Smith and/or assigns, then maybe John Smith is buying it, and maybe he’s just making a quick buck for his services and passing the sale on to a third party. As a BCS school board member, I don’t really KNOW who’s buying our property.
One bit of information I left out; New Schools for Alabama is still legally the Alabama Coalition for Public Charter Schools(ACPS). This coalition’s sole purpose was to get the charter school law passed in Alabama. Once it did that, the organization went dormant.
Now they have rebranded themselves with a new name, a new board and a new purpose. Part of their new purpose is to help prospective charter schools buy and/or lease property. (Surprise!!)
In light of this very generous offering from our public-school hating Secretary of Education, I decided it was time to revisit the old board of ACPCS, just to refresh my memory.
Right away I came across the name of J. Michael Carpenter. I can tell you, I was more than a little surprised to find out that it was the same J. Michael Carpenter that founded Bloc Global,the real estate company that Birmingham City Schools has had under contract to sell surplus properties since 2011. Could this be how NSFA knew that we sold property to be utilized as a charter school?
So, let me explain this again in very simple terms. As a Birmingham City Schools Board member I discovered that the real estate company that we have under contract to sell our surplus property was, in part, founded by and currently still under the direction of, the very same person that sat on the board of the coalition that is responsible for helping write our charter school law and lobbying for its passage. Legally that coalition (ACPCS) is the same entity doing business as New Schools for Alabama. NSFA wrote the CSP Grant Application that stated the BCS board sold property in the fall of 2018 to someone for charter school use.
Is your head spinning? Well so is mine. I knew none of this information until recently. I’m very concerned and upset that as an elected member of the BCS board I had to spend days doing research to uncover all of this myself.
Yet, I know this is how things work in Betsy’s world. The world of charter schools is one big land grab full of backroom deals and shell games. Now, with this new information and the $25 million dollar grant it appears the final piece of the charter school puzzle is in place in Birmingham.
Land??? Check.
Nancy Bailey calls out Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos for talking about “education freedom” at the same time that she is doing everything within her power to snuff it out.
All it took to make American education “great again” was two-and-a-half years of Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos.
So saith Betsy DeVos to the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in Michigan.
DeVos vigorously defended charter schools, especially in Detroit, even though most Detroit charters underperform Detroit public schools and are run as profit-making businesses.
DeVos opened Saturday’s program at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference by celebrating her mission to spread education freedom across the country. The Michigan native slammed teacher unions and Democratic primary candidates for offering a vision for the education system that will produce worse outcomes for students and cost taxpayers trillions of dollars.
DeVos said she is solely focused on doing what’s best for students, though she has been a frequent target of Democrats running to oppose President Donald Trump in 2020. She said Democrats who criticize the proliferation of charter schools ignores their results and falsely claim they are the “enemy of the people.”
“You’ll hear repeatedly that public charter schools are bad,” DeVos told Republicans Saturday. “The truth is they are the best thing to ever happen to Detroit students.”
This article is a reason to subscribe to The New Republic.
If you have been sick of watching the takeover of American education by entrepreneurs, professional managers, management consultants, and Wall Street, you will see parallels between the managerial culture at Boeing and the management culture that has permeated large sectors of American educators. At Boeing, crucial decisions were made by managers, not engineers; in education, crucial decisions are made by managers from the business world, not educators. The results in both cases are disastrous, but especially so in aviation where people were killed by bad decisions.
In this stunning, gripping, frightening article, Maureen Tkacik explains how Boeing was ruined by financial decision makers, which ultimately led to two crashes of its new 737 MAX jets.
She begins:
Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”
Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it). Mostly he worried about shriveling market share driving sales and head count into the ground, the things that keep post-industrial American labor leaders up at night. On some level, though, he saw it all coming; he even demonstrated how the costs of a grounded plane would dwarf the short-term savings achieved from the latest outsourcing binge in one of his reports that no one read back in 2002.*
Sorscher had spent the early aughts campaigning to preserve the company’s estimable engineering legacy. He had mountains of evidence to support his position, mostly acquired via Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers. In 2000, Boeing’s engineers staged a 40-day strike over the McDonnell deal’s fallout; while they won major material concessions from management, they lost the culture war. They also inherited a notoriously dysfunctional product line from the corner-cutting market gurus at McDonnell.
And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence:
“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.”
And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse. In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.
Boeing’s defenders blamed the pilots for the crashes. They said that the pilots needed more training. But the engineers knew otherwise.
The article ends like this:
No one who knew anything about anything thought it was a good idea to slash research and development spending, lay off half the engineers, or subcontract whole chunks of a plane without designing it first. It hardly mattered. “It was two camps of managers, the Boeing Boy Scouts and the ‘hunter killer assassins,’” remembered Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who led the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) during the 787 saga. “How do you merge those two management philosophies? The hunter killer assassins will destroy the Boy Scouts. That’s what happens.”
That’s what happened on an exponentially more ruinous scale in mortgage lending and pharmaceutical sales and at General Electric, which over the past decade has spent more than $50 billion buying back its own stock even as its staggering insurance business losses threaten to bankrupt the company. (And none of this has diminished GE’s zeal for deindustrialization, which has disemboweled places like Fort Wayne and Erie and Schenectady and put tens of thousands of people out of work, both permanently and on furlough.) It’s what happens to every well-intentioned half-measure to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change.
None of these things had to be ideological wars, said Cole, a lifelong conservative who now chairs the King County Republican Party in Washington state and first joined the union—membership in SPEEA had been voluntary when she joined—because not a few months into her first engineering job she had watched a space shuttle land in a control room full of engineers who had built the shuttle. The shuttle bounced, there was a massive collective intake of air, and one of her colleagues let it slip that the landing gear wasn’t strong enough to withstand certain weather conditions, and that if she wanted to keep her job she’d keep her mouth shut about it; she was laid off a few months later. “I thought to myself, oh my gosh! This happens in the movies.”
She had no idea then how sick she would get of watching the same movie.
But a month later, back in the same room on a biblically hot day, a son of Kenyan farmers restored a bit of moral clarity to proceedings: “As an investment professional, allow me to inform Congress as to how Boeing has viewed this whole crisis.” Noting that the stock had surged from $140 four years earlier to $446 right before the crash that had killed his wife, and his son, four-year-old daughter, nine-month-old daughter, and mother-in-law, Paul Njoroge laid out the sequence of 737 MAX orders, ten-figure stock buybacks, and dividend hikes that had dealt out this horrible fate to his family.
“Could that be the reason Boeing did not feel obliged to ground the MAX even after the second crash of the Boeing 737 MAX?” he asked. “Back to my very essential question, why wasn’t the MAX 8 grounded in November after the first crash in the Java Sea? One hundred and eighty-nine lives were lost, and executives at Boeing cared more about its stock price than preventing such a tragedy from occurring again,” and so had begun “a pattern of behavior blaming innocent pilots.”
“I am empty,” he told the committee. “My life has no meaning.” He had met his wife studying finance at the University of Nairobi. The family had been spread across Bermuda, where Paul worked as an investment manager at Butterfield Bank, and Ontario, where his wife and children were settling down. Paul was expected to join them later. The distance had been hell, and he had never even had a girlfriend before her; his family was literally everything, he explained, and every single one of them was gone. “I have nightmares about how they must have clung to their mother, crying, seeing the fright in their eyes as they sat there helplessly. It is difficult for me to think of anything but the horror they must have felt.”
After his testimony, a dead-eyed Njoroge stood in the hallway for nearly three hours, granting interviews to the dozens of journalists who needed exclusive footage to anchor their packages. He told me he wasn’t surprised that Boeing’s stock hadn’t suffered more since the company had killed his family. He would never buy it himself, of course, but even now it would be hard to justify leaving it out of a client’s portfolio.
If you read one article today or this week, read this one. It is fascinating, horrifying, and an indictment of the managerial culture that treats all problems as the same–whether it is building an airplane, educating children, or developing new medicines. A management problem, where professionals don’t matter.
Steven Miller of the Texas Monitor reports on the perks for charter executives in Texas.
https://texasmonitor.org/charter-schools-fly-below-the-radar-on-spending-and-transparency-rules/
If you are a charter bigwig or spouse, you can fly first class, a privilege not available to public school employees.
Charter executives are exempt from the rules that apply to public schools. Yet they deign to call themselves “public schools” without surrendering their perks.
Miller writes:
“It’s a treat to fly at the front of the plane, where seats are bigger and fares are roughly double the cost of a coach seat. But for the state’s most prolific charter school operator, first-class air travel is allowed. In addition, the company will pay for the travel of employee spouses, family members and “companions” of executives as well.
“That’s just one of many illustrations of the different rules that apply to charter schools in Texas compared to public schools, where funding for even the most basic needs always seems in short supply.
“IDEA Public Schools, based in Weslaco, has allowed the first-class travel perk for six years. That includes footing the bill for the commute of chief financial officer Wyatt Truscheit, who moved from Mission, Texas, to the Los Angeles area in 2013 and comes to Texas every other week, according to tax records. IDEA also pays for Truscheit’s housing while he works in South Texas.
“IDEA received $319 million in state funding and $71 million in federal money in 2018 to operate its 61 campuses around the state. With its schools in Louisiana, IDEA runs 96 locations in all.
“As a 501c3 nonprofit corporation, IDEA is also allowed to make loans to employees and board members and to do business with relatives of employees.
“In 2015, IDEA bought property from board member and developer Mike Rhodes for $1.7 million. Board member David Earl also received money for serving as counsel for Rhodes in the land deal.”
The charters can engage in business with board members and their families. They do not have to hold open meetings. They are private schools that get public money but operate like private enterprises. Some gig.
Once again, we are reminded that charter schools are a Republican cause, and their champion is Betsy DeVos.
Mike Turzai, Republican Speaker of the House in Pennsylvania, was on his way to a meeting with Betsy DeVos when he encountered some public school teachers, who were picketing with signs saying they loved their public schools.
Turzai found this deeply offensive, and he proceeded to lambaste the teachers as a “special interest group” defending a “monopoly.”
In the video, Turzai praised charter schools, which receive government funding but operate independently of the public school system, saying that in charter schools. “you have to care about each child, not about the monopoly.” He then claimed that the public school advocates were part of a monopoly
“What you care about is a monopoly and special interests,” said Turzai, whose district encompasses the North Hills municipalities of McCandless, Pine, Marshall, Bradford Woods, and Franklin Park.
One of the advocates then said, “I am little offended from that,” to which Turzai responded, pointing to the posters they were holding, “Oh, I am offended by your posters.”
One poster read “I love public schools.” The other read “Public Money for Public Schools.”
We
our teachers.
Sincerely,
All of Pennsylvania
Steven Singer has written recently about the origins of charter schools. He insists that Albert Shanker, president of the AFT, was not their father.
The real fathers of this first big step towards privatization, he writes, were Ted Kolderie and Joe Nathan of Minnesota, who wrote the nation’s first charter school law and opened the door wide for entrepreneurs, grifters, and attacks on unions.
Singer is a flame-thrower in this post, because he has come to see that behind the “progressive” facade of charters lurks Betsy DeVos, the Walton Family, the Koch brothers, ALEC, and a galaxy of public school haters.
He begins:
If bad ideas can be said to have fathers, then charter schools have two.
No, I mean two flesh and blood men who did more than any others to give this terrible idea life – Minnesota ideologues Ted Kolderie, 89, and Joe Nathan, 71.
In my article “Charter Schools Were Never a Good Idea. They Were a Corporate Plot All Along,” I wrote about Kolderie’s role but neglected to mention Nathan’s.
And of the two men, Nathan has actually commented on this blog.
He flamed on your humble narrator when I dared to say that charter schools and voucher schools are virtually identical.
I guess he didn’t like me connecting “liberal” charters with “conservative” vouchers. And in the years since, with Trump’s universally hated Billionaire Education Secretary Betsy Devos assuming the face of both regressive policies, he was right to fear the public relations nightmare for his brainchild, the charter school.
It’s kind of amazing that these two white men tried to convince scores of minorities that giving up self-governance of their children’s schools is in their own best interests, that children of color don’t need the same services white kids routinely get at their neighborhood public schools and that letting appointed bureaucrats decide whether your child actually gets to enroll in their school is somehow school choice!
But now that Nathan and Kolderie’s progeny policy initiative is waning in popularity, the NAACP and Black Lives Matter are calling for moratoriums on new charters and even progressive politicians are calling for legislative oversight, it’s important that people know exactly who is responsible for this monster.
And more than anyone else, that’s Kolderie and Nathan.
Over the last three decades, Nathan has made a career of sabotaging authentic public schools while pushing for school privatization.
He is director of the Center for School Change, a Minneapolis charter school cheerleading organization, that’s received at least $1,317,813 in grants to undermine neighborhood schools and replace them with fly-by-night privatized monstrosities.
He’s written extensively in newspapers around the country and nationwide magazines and Websites like the Huffington Post.
Read it all. Joe Nathan has frequently commented on this blog, defending charters as just a different kind of public school. I disagree vigorously because it is obvious by now that charters have become vehicles for busting unions (more than 90% are non-union), charters are more segregated than public schools (especially in Minnesota, where there are charters specifically for children of different ethnic and racial groups), and they remove democratic control in communities of color. The proliferation of corporate charter chains adds to their reputation as destroyers of democracy.
Bottom line is that Walton money, Koch money, DeVos money is not meant to advance public education but to eliminate it.
There is a reason that the Democratic candidates for president are distancing themselves from the charter idea. They understand that they can’t support the DeVos agenda. Betsy did us all a favor by removing the mask.
William J. Gumbert has posted a series of analyses of charter school performance and demographics in Texas, based on public data compiled by the state. This is a summary of earlier posts. You may recall from an earlier post about Houston that the state commissioner of education is threatening to take control of the Houston Independent School District because of the persistently low rest scores of one school, Wheatley High School. Please check out its demographics in the chart below.
By: William J. Gumbert
Ever since the “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform” report was released in 1983, corporate education reformers and privately funded, “public policy” organizations have promoted the “privatization of public schools”. In 1995, the Texas Legislature gave in to the political rhetoric and authorized privately-operated charters (“charters”) to open and independently operate public schools with taxpayer funding. As a result, taxpayers are funding a “dual education system” that consists of locally governed, community-based school districts and State approved charters.
Charters promised to improve student results by transferring the control of public schools to private organizations that had more autonomy to expend taxpayer funding without community oversight. However, charters have not fulfilled their promise. Despite the State funneling over $22.5 billion of taxpayer funding to privately-operated charters over the last 24 years, charters have not to produced better student outcomes than community-based school districts. Most recently, 86.2% of community-based school districts received an “A” or “B” rating pursuant to the State’s 2019 Academic Accountability Ratings. In comparison, only 58.6% of charters received an “A” or “B” rating. In addition, almost 1 of every 5 charters received a “D” or “F” rating from the State.
Despite the Perception – Charters Serve a Different Student Population: Charter advocates have consistently promoted that charters serve a higher percentage of “economically-disadvantaged” and “minority” students from underserved communities. But charters have also routinely stated that their student populations closely correlate with the school districts they choose to operate within. In this regard, Houston ISD and Dallas ISD collectively have over 75,000 students enrolled in State approved charters and both districts serve student populations that are at least 80% “economically-disadvantaged” and “minority”. Thus, it is fair to say that both charters and school districts serve a high percentage of “economically-disadvantaged” and “minority” students. However, the similarities in the types of students served by charters and school districts stop here.
The reality is that charters “underserve” many of the student subgroups that the “No Child Left Behind Act” identified as having potential achievement, opportunity or learning gaps in comparison to their peers. The Texas Education Agency (“TEA”) tracks the performance of student subgroups in Texas public schools and while “economically-disadvantaged” and “minority” students are identified as subgroups, so are “at risk”, “special education”, “disciplinary” and “mobile” students.
With the needs of each student being unique, it is important to emphasize that a student can be included in more than one subgroup. For example, a student can be identified solely as “economically-disadvantaged” or a student can be “economically-disadvantaged”, “at risk” and “mobile”. The more subgroups that are applicable to a student, the more challenging it becomes to ensure that student is successful. I highlight that “challenging” is not referenced as an excuse for schools to have low student performance, but rather to recognize the additional time, effort, care and resources that are required to help certain students overcome adverse circumstances and obtain a quality education.
A review of the student subgroups reported by TEA shows that privately-operated charters enroll a significantly lower percentage of “at risk”, “disciplinary placement” and “special education’ students than community-based school districts. TEA data also demonstrates that charters enroll students with significantly lower “student mobility”. Why? It is hard to definitively say. But these types of students have proven to be more costly to serve, require the most effort to achieve good “test scores” and are the least likely to continue on the “road to college”. It may also be that charters do not actively recruit students in these subgroups. Either way, here are the facts.
“At Risk” Students: Students identified as “at risk” of dropping out are performing below academic standards and/or are confronting other challenges. TEA’s definition of “at risk” includes a student that:
As shown below, despite having a large presence in each of the 5 urban school districts listed below, some of the largest charters enroll 19.3% fewer “at risk” students. In other words, for every 1,000- seat school campus, the school districts serve 193 more students that have been identified as “at risk” of dropping out. While it may be surprising to some, the listed charters also serve a lower percentage of “at risk” students than the statewide average.
| Privately-Operated Charter | “At Risk”
Students |
School District | “At Risk”
Students |
| IDEA Public Schools | 45.9% | Houston ISD | 71.7% |
| Harmony School of Excellence – Houston | 43.5% | Dallas ISD | 63.2% |
| KIPP, Inc. – Houston | 46.7% | Austin ISD | 51.3% |
| Uplift Education | 54.8% | San Antonio ISD | 73.5% |
| YES Prep. | 50.2% | Fort Worth ISD | 77.8% |
| Average – 5 Charters | 48.2% | Average – 5 School Districts | 67.5% |
| 5 Charters: Avg. Per 1,000 Seat Campus | 482 Students | 5 Districts: Avg. Per 1,000 Seat Campus | 675 Students |
| State Average: | 50.8% or 508 Students |
Disciplinary Placements: TEA data shows that 73,713 students have been identified as “Disciplinary Placements” in public schools. These are students that have previously had behavioral issues or been placed in a District Alternative Education Program (“DAEP”). By law, privately-operated charters can exclude enrollment to this student subgroup and most charters do. In fact, charter proponents have previously stated that many charters are not prepared and could not afford to serve these students. As such, the responsibility to deploy the educational services and resources needed to serve “disciplinary” students resides mostly with school districts. Once again, despite having a large presence in the same 5 school districts, the same charters served only 11 “disciplinary” students and the school districts welcomed 6,532 “disciplinary” students.
| Privately-Operated Charter | Discipline
Students |
School District | Discipline
Students |
| IDEA Public Schools | 0 | Houston ISD | 1,996 |
| Harmony School of Excellence – Houston | 0 | Dallas ISD | 1,843 |
| KIPP, Inc. – Houston | 0 | Austin ISD | 1,140 |
| Uplift Education | 0 | San Antonio ISD | 879 |
| YES Prep. | 11 | Fort Worth ISD | 674 |
| Total – 5 Charters | 11 | Total – 5 School Districts | 6,532 |
Special Education: Students identified with physical or learning disabilities comprise an average of 9.1% of all students in Texas public schools. But at the same charters listed below, only 6.2% of students are identified by TEA as “students with disabilities”. The enrollment gap for “student with disabilities” among certain charters and school districts can be alarming, especially since it is permitted to occur with the State’s blessing. For example, IDEA Public Schools is rapidly expanding in Austin ISD, but Austin ISD welcomes more than double the percentage of “students with disabilities”. For every campus with 1,000 students, IDEA only serves 52 students with “special needs” and Austin ISD serves 109 students with “special needs”. If Austin ISD served the same percentage of “students with disabilities” as IDEA, it would serve an estimated 4,500 fewer students with “special needs”.
| Privately-Operated Charter | Special Education Students | School District | Special Education Students |
| IDEA Public Schools | 5.2% | Houston ISD | 7.1% |
| Harmony School of Excellence – Houston | 6.3% | Dallas ISD | 8.2% |
| KIPP, Inc. – Houston | 6.3% | Austin ISD | 10.9% |
| Uplift Education | 7.0% | San Antonio ISD | 10.3% |
| YES Prep. | 6.1% | Fort Worth ISD | 8.3% |
| Average – 5 Charters | 6.2% | Average – 5 School Districts | 9.0% |
| State Average: | 9.1% |
Student Mobility: TEA defines “student mobility” as the percentage of students that were enrolled at a campus for less than 83% of the school year. In other words, the “student mobility” rate refers to the volume of students that were not consistently enrolled in a charter/school district throughout a school year. With an inconsistent learning environment, students that regularly change schools are faced with unique social and educational challenges in comparison to other students. For example, Education Week has reported that: “various studies have found student mobility – and particularly multiple moves – associated with lower school engagement, poorer grades in reading (particularly in math), and a higher risk of dropping out of high school”.
As summarized below, the “student mobility” rate of the listed school districts is a challenging 20.3%, while the “student mobility” rate of the charters is only 6.3%. As such, for every 1,000-seat campus, the school districts must meet the unique challenges of educating 203 “mobile” students during a school year. In comparison, the charter campus has a much more stable population with only 63 “mobile” students.
| Privately-Operated Charter | Student
Mobility Rate |
School District | Student
Mobility Rate |
| IDEA Public Schools | 7.0% | Houston ISD | 19.2% |
| Harmony School of Excellence – Houston | 10.0% | Dallas ISD | 19.9% |
| KIPP, Inc. – Houston | 4.5% | Austin ISD | 17.9% |
| Uplift Education | 5.5% | San Antonio ISD | 23.6% |
| YES Prep. | 4.4% | Fort Worth ISD | 21.1% |
| Average – 5 Charters | 6.3% | Average – 5 School Districts | 20.3% |
| 5 Charters: Avg. Per 1,000 Seat Campus | 63 Students | 5 Districts: Avg. Per 1,000 Seat Campus | 203 Students |
| State Average: | 16.0% or 160 Students |
Comparison of Campuses Located Within 3 Miles of Each Other: While each student subgroup presents unique challenges, schools that are primarily comprised of students in multiple subgroups have the most challenges to consistently achieve high student performance. In this regard, it is not a coincidence that many school district campuses labeled as “low performing” by the State are comprised of students included in multiple subgroups.
The table below further illustrates the disparities of the student populations enrolled at State approved charters and school districts by comparing the student populations of 7 charter campuses that are located within 3 miles of a school district campus. In each comparison, the charter campus competing for students with a nearby school district campus served fewer “at risk”, “disciplinary”, “special education” and “mobile” students. It most cases, the differences were substantial. On average, for each 1,000-seat campus, the comparisons revealed that the charter campuses served:
| Campus | “At Risk” | Discipline
Placement |
Special Education | Student Mobility |
| Wheatley H.S. (Houston ISD) | 88.1% | 36 | 19.0% | 31.2% |
| YES Prep. – 5th Ward | 51.1% | None | 7.6% | 4.4% |
| Travis H.S. (Austin ISD) | 77.1% | 46 | 14.2% | 30.3% |
| IDEA Allan College Prep. | 53.7% | None | 10.4% | 8.6% |
| Morningside M.S. (Fort Worth ISD) | 88.0% | 2 | 14.1% | 25.9% |
| Uplift Mighty M.S. | 67.8% | None | 10.7% | 2.9% |
| Sharpstown H.S. (Houston ISD) | 90.2% | 39 | 9.7% | 30.9% |
| KIPP Sharpstown College Prep. | 52.2% | None | 5.4% | 4.4% |
| Douglass Elem. (SAISD) | 78.5% | 6 | 9.6% | 28.7% |
| IDEA Carver Academy | 17.4% | None | 5.1% | 9.5% |
| Andress H.S. (El Paso ISD) | 66.3% | 51 | 21.1% | 18.0% |
| Harmony School of Excel. – El Paso | 49.4% | 0 | 8.5% | 12.1% |
| Carter H.S. (Dallas ISD) | 70.7% | 20 | 11.8% | 24.0% |
| Uplift Hampton Prep. H.S. | 39.5% | None | 6.4% | 7.6% |
| Average – 7 School District Campuses | 79.8% | 26 | 14.2% | 27.0% |
| Average – 7 Charter Campuses | 47.3% | None | 7.7% | 7.1% |
| Average Charter Difference – Per 1,000 Seat Campus | 325 Fewer Students | — | 65 Fewer Students | 199 Fewer Students |
Conclusion: The “A Nation at Risk” report started the false narrative that our public schools were failing and the attack on school districts has continued ever since. These strategic attacks have served to fuel the “privatization of public education agenda” of corporate reformers and society-controlling billionaires that persuaded the Legislature to provide privately-operated charters with the freedom to expand in local communities with taxpayer funding.
The State has provided privately-operated charters with many educational advantages to produce better student outcomes than community-based school districts. These advantages include less taxpayer oversight; greater instructional, staffing and enrollment flexibility; and the ability to stop serving students by closing campuses. Privately-operated charters are also permitted to underserve certain student subgroups that have been identified as having potential achievement, opportunity or learning gaps, such as “at risk”, “disciplinary”, “special education” and “mobile” students.
With all the educational advantages afforded to State approved charters, common sense tells us that charters should be outperforming school districts by a wide margin. But despite these advantages and 24 years of experimentation, the State’s 2019 Academic Accountability Ratings document that privately-operated charters continue to produce lower student outcomes than locally governed school districts!
It is time for the State to apologize to school district teachers, support staffs, administrators and Boards of Trustees across the State and admit that “privatization” was a misguided experiment. It is time for the Legislature to apologize to taxpayers for increasing the costs of public education by diverting over $22.5 billion of taxpayer funding to privately-operated charters that have failed to consistently improve student outcomes in local communities. It is time to implement education policies that are based upon the facts, not political charades or charter advertisements. The future of young Texans is counting on it!
DISCLOSURES: The author is a voluntary advocate for public education and this material solely reflects the opinions of the author. The author has not been compensated in any manner for the preparation of this material. The material is based upon information provided by the Texas Education Agency, TXSchools.gov and other publicly available information. While the author believes these sources to be reliable, the author has not independently verified the information. All readers are encouraged to complete their own review and make their own independent conclusions.
The federal Charter Schools Program handed out $440 Million this year. Betsy DeVos uses this money as her personal slush fund to reward corporate charter chains like KIPP ($89 million), IDEA (over $200 million in two years), and Success Academy ($10 million). Originally, it was meant to launch start-up charters, but DeVos has turned it into a free-flowing spigot for some of the nation’s richest charter chains.
Last March, the Network for Public Education published its study of the ineptness of the Charter Schools Program, revealing that at least one-third of the charters it funded had either never opened or had closed soon after opening. About one billion dollars was wasted by this federal program.
Despite the program’s manifest incompetence and failure, Betsy DeVos asked Congressional appropriators to increase its funding to $500 million a year, so she could more efficiently undermine public schools across the nation.
House Democrats responded by cutting the Charter Schools Program to $400 Million ($400 million too much), but $100 million less than DeVos asked for.
Senate Republicans want to increase the funding for the destructive Charter Schools Program to $460 million, giving DeVos a boost of $20 million. The Senate Republicans added a special appropriation of $7.5 million for charter schools in rural districts. Is there a need for charter schools in rural districts that may have only one elementary school and one high school?
The best remedy for the federal Charter Schools Program would be to eliminate it altogether.
Charter schools are amply funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, the Koch foundation’s, hedge fund managers, and a bevy of other billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.
Diane Ravitch's blog 