The militant Chicago Teachers Union issued a statement following the election of Lori Lightfoot, who was not its first choice. The CTU celebrates the end of the nightmare rule of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Governor Bruce Rauner. And it commemorates the historic leadership of its President Emerita Karen Lewis, who inaugurated a historic awakening of teacher militancy with the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012, which laid the seedsfor the walkoutsof the past year.
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Sometimes it helps to solve a mystery when you put it out there for public review. Like posting photos of the “Ten Most Wanted Criminals” in every postoffice. Tips come in.
An hour ago, I learned the identity of the person who named the members of the Task Force that is supposed to propose reforms to the state’s notoriously weak charter law. Seven of the 11 members of the Task Force are connected to the charter industry. The choices are so brazen that the chair of the board of the charter lobbying group (California Charter School Association) was named to the Task Force, along with another CCSA employee.
A tip came in. It makes perfect sense.
Governor Newsom’s chief of staff Ann O’Leary selected the Task Force.
O’Leary served as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which is unflinchingly pro-charter school.
She was education advisor to Hillary Clinton during her campaign in 2016. Early in the campaign, Carol Burris and I met with her at the Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn. We tried to persuade her that Clinton should oppose charter schools because they are the first step towards privatization. We mustered all our evidence about the dangers to public schools, the risks of deregulation of public money, persistent corruption, suspicious real estate deals, profiteering, etc. She was unmoved. She was insistent that Hillary would not oppose charters. We came back for a second meeting, and the best we could get was that Hillary would oppose for-profit charters. Hillary would not oppose charters.
During the campaign, while in South Carolina, Hillary was asked about charters, and she spontaneously spoke critically about charter schools, saying that they don’t accept everyone. O’Leary must have gotten loud complaints from some funders, because she quickly wrote an article for “Medium” walking back Hillary’s mild critique and reassuring readers that yes, indeed, Hillary supports charter schools, just like Arne Duncan.
Don’t worry, California charter lobbyists and billionaires, corporate charter chains, and entrepreneurs! Ann O’Leary will protect your charters!
Blogger Red Queen in LA (Sara Roos) has combed through tax filings to reveal the exorbitant salaries paid to charter school execitives, demonstrating that the ban of for-profit charter corporations has not limited the raid on taxpayers’ dollarsby charter profiteers. At the same time that charters executives are pulling down hefty salaries, charter enrollments are declining.
She writes:
“Overall, enrollment in LAUSD’s 37 CMO/Gs dropped 16.5% between 2016-17 and 2017-18, from a total of 93,842 to 78,315.”
But executive salaries are staggeringly high.
Dan Katzir, formerly Eli Broad’s Foundation Leader, now brings in more than half a million dollars a year in salary, although he was never a teacher or principal.
The CEO of Green Dot rakes in a tidy $386,000 per annum.
These are private-sector salaries, yet charters have the gall to dub themselves “public schools.”
If they really want to be considered public schools, they should be paid the same as their counterparts in the public sector.
But that might lead to executive flight that exceeded the declines in pupils choosing charter schools.
Next time you hear about those fabled “wait lists” for charter schools, recall that 80% of charters in Los Angeles have vacancies, a fact released to the public by LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson.
Bill Raden of Capital & Main presents us with this puzzle: how did it happen that seven of the 11 members of Gavin Newsom’s Task Force in charter school reform are part of the charter industry?
The Fox is in charge of the henhouse.
Since the Task Force is supposed to examine the fiscal impact of charters on public schools, why is the industry judging itself?
Shouldn’t the Task Force have been composed of public finance experts and others who are not tied to the industry?
Or, if the Task Force was supposed to be representative, shouldn’t the majority represent the almost 90% of families whose children attend public schools, not the 10% in charters?
Why are two members drawn directly from the lobby for the charter industry?
This Task Force is a blatant example of “capture” by the industry. It is akin to the tobacco industry taking control of a commission charged with examining the link between smoking and cancer.
it is an insult to public school parents and teachers, who wrongly assumed that Governor Newsom was not indebted to billionaires like Reed Hastings.
Who did the dirty deed? After talking to Tony Thurmond, I’m convinced he did not give the Task Force to the charter industry.
I’m betting that Gavin Newsom did it to placate the billionaires who love charters.
Does he need them for future campaigns?
The teachers and public school parents of California should be outraged.
If Tony Thurmond manages to get consensus from this Task Force That leads to reform, he deserves credit.
As the series published this past week in the Los Angeles Times showed, the Charter law enables corruption, prevents reasonable regulation, and encourages small districts to poach resources from other districts. The charter industry has fought any genuine accountability and transparency. It heedlessly collapses the efforts of a district like Oakland to recover a sound financial footing. Under the current law, charters in California are parasites, crippling their host.
The answer is not to remove the ability of local districts to control charter growth inside their boundaries but to empower them to make decisions about whether charters should open or close. The role of the state should be to police the fidelity and integrity of districts and charters, not to overrule districts when they reject a charter.
This post is part 4 of a series published by northjersey.com and USA Today New Jersey. Written by Jean Rimbach and Abbott Koloff, it is called “Cashing in on Charter Schools.” It explores the many ways that charter operators exploit taxpayers.
This post describes how charter operators and real estate developers are cashing in.
“Interest-only mortgages with rates that grow each year. Multimillion dollar fees for paying off loans early. Property that quickly doubles in price. And buildings sold with markups as high as 70 percent.
“Deals like these inked by New Jersey charter schools — or the private groups that support them — highlight how tax dollars meant for public education can reap profits for investors.
“But they also illustrate the lack of options some charter schools face when trying to find and finance facilities — and an absence of state oversight in the process.
“State education officials say they have no authority to review financing or lease agreements struck by charter schools before they are signed. And they don’t police the private organizations, often called “Friends of” groups, that are created to support charter schools by owning or financing their real estate and, in many cases, enter into contracts on a school’s behalf.
“That includes groups like the Friends of Marion P. Thomas Charter School, which agreed to buy two former Newark public school buildings and paid a deposit but said they couldn’t get financing to complete the purchase. So the group struck a deal with a developer who bought the buildings, which documents show needed “limited” work, and sold them to the Friends at a $10 million markup.
“Other schools, such as the International Academy of Trenton, turned to a Kansas City-based real estate investment trust, or REIT, for financing. The charter school, which the state shut down in June, signed a lease that didn’t allow it to buy its building for five years. At that point, after spending near $8.4 million in rent, it would have been required to pay 120 percent of the total development cost.”
Open the link and read the whole article.
Garn Press, one of the nation’s valuable independent publishers, has compiled a collection of my most important essays. I am grateful for their hard work and dedication in bringing the book to fruition.
The book is titled “The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch.”
It contains selected essays published on this blog, the New York Review of Books, Huffington Post, and elsewhere.
I am grateful for the prodigious research that went into this effort by publisher and literary scholar Denny Taylor and her team, as well as the elegant design.
Yohuru Williams, the great scholar of African-American history and my colleague on the board of the Network for Public Education, wrote the introduction.
Should there be any royalties, I have asked that they be given to the Network for Public Education.
To learn more about the book, open any of these links:
In this post, veteran teacher Anthony Cody explains how he happened to have a seat directly behind Betsy DeVos at the Congressional budget hearings, and he fact-checks DeVos’ preposterous claim that large classes may be preferable to small ones. No one asked her why wealthy parents who send their children to elite private schools expect and demand small classes. If they listen to our Secretary of Education, they should insist on large classes.
He begins:
“A video of Betsy DeVos responding to questions from Lucille Roybal-Allard of the House Appropriations Committee hearing has gone viral, and has been watched now by many thousands of people. I appear in the background, shaking my head as DeVos asserts that larger class sizes might actually be beneficial since they allow students to collaborate with more classmates, and might allow the best teachers to be paid more. So in this post, I will take a look at the actual research on the subject, and a bit of the history of the idea.”
Rightwing Activist Jeanne Allen slammed Cody on Twitter and advised him to spend his time helping needy students.
Apparently she did not know that he spent 18 years teaching middle school science in Oakland. Cody asked her whether she had ever been a teacher, but she did not respond. She runs an advocacy group-the Center for Education Reform- that supports vouchers, charters, home schooling, and for-profit schooling. She opposes public schools and teachers unions. She works closely with DFER and other anti-public school organizations. That’s her idea of “helping needy students”: not actually teaching them but closing their public schools. Her salary: $217,000.
Read the other comments on this exchange: Mitchell Robinson says that Anthony Cody has “forgotten more about teaching than anyone in your group [the Center for Education Reform] has ever known.” I doubt that there are any teachers on the CER board.
Northjersey.com and USA Today New Jersey are publishing a five-part series of the abuse of taxpayer funds by charter operators. This is part 3 of an investigation called “Cashing In on Charter Schools,” written by Abbott Koloff and Jean Rimbach.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid was steered to New Jersey’s largest charter school management companies over the last decade, helping them to create a network of school buildings that are privately owned.
“In other parts of the country, the same aid programs provided interest-free loans to both traditional public schools and charters to construct and renovate buildings. But a much different model emerged in New Jersey as Gov. Chris Christie’s administration gave the state’s entire share of the federal aid — bonds worth more than a half-billion dollars — to charters and other non-traditional public schools.
“More than three-quarters of that money was awarded to the state’s two largest charter school operators, KIPP New Jersey and Uncommon Schools, which used it in ways that strayed far from the intent of the aid programs.
“The companies fashioned complex financial structures that allow them to exploit the bonds by tapping into the aid as a steady stream of income over decades, using methods that in some cases have drawn the scrutiny of federal investigators.
“The result is a string of school buildings that were built with taxpayer money but remain in private hands. The companies that own them were created to purchase real estate and renovate buildings for charter schools, but they are kept legally separate from the charter schools that send millions of dollars their way each year in rent.
“Charter schools rent these buildings indefinitely. Leases do not contemplate a time when rent payments would end or when the buildings would be turned over to the public charter schools, even after the debt is paid.
“The deals involve related companies that are created to lend money to one another — an arrangement that is not uncommon in the world of private finance. But in this case the arrangements steer tax dollars — federal aid that subsidizes the projects by covering the interest on the loans — to private groups that don’t have to share details with the public or the state about how they use the cash.”
This is part 3 of the Los Angeles Times’ series about charter school dysfunction in California, written by Anna Phillips.
Phillips traces many of the problems, especially lack of oversight, to state law.
She explains that the billionaires who fund the rapid expansion of charter schools have squared off against the powerful California Teachers Association, andthe two never agree.
The resultis That a badly flawed lawremains in place.
Phillips quotes several charter school advocates who want to eliminate the role of local school boardsin authorizing charter schools and transfer that power to a single state charter board.
What the advocates never mention is that the school boards have been rendered toothless by the law, which allows charters to appeal their rejection at the local level to the county board. If the county board rejects them, they can appeal to the state board, which has been extremely friendly to charters due to appointments by Governors Schwarzenegger and Brown, both very charter-friendly.
Phillips quotes one charter advocate who points to New York as a model. New York hastwo charter authorizing Boards: the State Board of Regents and the SUNY Charter Institute. Neither supervises the charters they authorize. The SUNY committee consists of appointees of Governor Cuomo, who loves charters and receives big campaign contributions from the charter billionaires and Wall Street charter lobby. When billionaire Merryl Tisch was chair of the Board of Regents, it too was an ally of charters. She is now on the SUNY board. Even now, the Regents continue to endorse charter expansion,despite local objections.
The Network for Public Education, which is not funded by teachers unions, believes that charters should be authorized ONLY by local school districts to meet their needs, not because an entrepreneur wants a school of his own or because a corporate chain sees a chance to grow.
The irony is that the charter billionaires seem already to have captured Governor Gavin Newsom, even though they supported another candidate. Newsom promised charter reform, and he signed a bill requiring accountability and transparency and forbidding conflicts of interest and nepotism. But he may have shackled the charter reform agenda by appointing charter allies to a majority of places on the new state task force to recommend changes to the charter law. Phillips ends her article by mentioning the task force but fails to mention that charter allies were given seven of 11 seats, surely by Newsom.
So this otherwise great series ends for me on a disappointing note. It is far easier for billionaires to capture a single state board or two state boards than to deal with hundreds of local school districts. There is a limit to the number of elections and seats they can buy, even with their deep pockets. One thing has become clear about “Reformers.” They don’t like democracy. They like mayoral control and state control. Local school boards get in their way.
Northjersey.com and USA Today New Jersey are posting a five-part series about how taxpayers are being taken for a ride by the charter industry.
Part 2 is about the millions of state dollars spent to bailout a low-performing charter school.
Reporters Jean Rimbach and Abbott Koloff write:
“By 2010, four years after it opened, the Central Jersey Arts Charter School in Plainfield was in trouble.
“The state had just put it on probation for a host of deficiencies, ordering it to limit spending, develop a curriculum and address problems with its board and student achievement.
“Yet little more than three weeks later, a state agency voted to issue bonds that allowed a fledgling nonprofit called the Friends of Central Jersey Arts Charter School to borrow $8.2 million to buy and renovate a building for the school to rent and, one day, potentially own.
“It was a loan whose repayment was based on the tax dollars flowing to the public charter school.
“The Friends quickly ran out of cash, and about six months later approached a different state agency seeking millions of dollars in additional financing to finish the project without explaining why they had come up short. The next year, another $1.7 million in bonds were issued, this time with the federal government picking up most of the interest.
“While the Friends were permitted to borrow nearly $10 million, the school itself was floundering. A financial report covering the 2010-11 school year stated that Central Jersey Arts was “not in good financial condition” and raised “substantial doubt” about its survival.
“The building opened with fanfare as contractors went unpaid. The next year, the school was back on probation, where it stayed until the state shut it down in 2015 for weak finances and “dismal” academic performance — but not before dumping more taxpayer cash into a now-defunct for-profit management company in the hope of turning it around.
“This is the story of a charter school that failed, and a building that used up millions in public dollars and continued to receive federal aid long after it was left vacant. It’s a story about dubious decisions by multiple state agencies, one that raises questions about the use of public money and the oversight of private groups that own real estate for public charter schools.”
The school “churned through teachers and business administrators at an alarming rate…At one point, a janitor was doing the books.”
It became difficult to know whether to attribute the school’s failure to fraud, theft, or incompetence.
Ultimately, the public money was lost and the education of hundreds of students was squandered.
In this brilliant article, the wisest comment came from a woman who had served as Board president for a time. She said, “You know, the bottom line is greed should not supersede education.”
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