Our reader Chiara has often observed that when the charter industry decided to expand in a state or district, the subject of charters dominates public discourse. Even though only 5% of a state’s children are enrolled in charters, the legislature and the media become obsessed with charters. The 95% of children enrolled in public schools disappear. It is as though public schools no longer exist.
In the corporate reform echo chamber, she notes, public schools do not exist, except as places for testing,’z
She wrote recently:
“In “today in the ed reform echo chamber” news, here’s The 74:
“Charters, charter politics, teacher union politics and testing.
“The only time actual, existing public schools are even included is when they’re promoting testing public school students.
“The consistent omission of anything positive or even substantive regarding public schools except for 1. denigration of unions or 2. promotion of testing is really pretty remarkable when you think about it, and it’s like that on all the ed reform sites.
“If you arrived from another country and read only ed reform sites you would believe all US schools are charter schools and the number one priority of US lawmakers is testing.
“It would be okay if this were just a bunch of lobbyists or some fringe political group, but ed reformers dominate DC and most state governments. This echo chamber IS the status quo.”
“I’m not in favor of privately run charter schools. If we are going to have a strong democracy and be competitive globally, we need the best educated people in the world. I believe in public education; I went to public schools my whole life, so I think rather than give tax breaks to billionaires, I think we invest in teachers and we invest in public education. I really do.” – Bernie Sanders (Quote begins at 1:48:32)
That is: go to one hour and forty-eight minutes on the video to hear his quote.
Will Hillary Clinton pledge to oppose the privatization and destruction of our nation’s public schools?
A major new report from the progressive One Wisconsin Institute finds that the right-wing Bradley Foundation spent more than $108 million, working with 130 partner groups, to privatize public schools in Wisconsin between 2005 and 2014. During the same period, the state’s public schools experienced dramatic budget cuts.
Key findings of the updated “P Is For Payoff” report include:
Bradley Foundation head Michael Grebe, a political insider who chaired Gov. Walker’s presidential and gubernatorial campaigns, continues to orchestrate a massive propaganda campaign to advance the privatization of public education;
An analysis of IRS Form 990 records and Bradley Foundation reports reveals over 130 organizations supportive of their education privatization agenda and working to advance their cause have received over $108 million from 2005 through 2014;
Bradley’s tactics have continued to evolve, now featuring litigation to advance their privatization agenda and intimidate opponents. Leading the effort is the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty which since its inception in 2011 has been larded with over $2 million from Bradley;
According to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the voucher program will cost Wisconsin taxpayers over $1.1 billion from 2011 through the end of the 2015–17 budget cycle. Meanwhile, a new report found that Wisconsin schools have suffered the 4th biggest cuts in in the nation through 2014.
The Bradley Foundation is one of the nation’s most active reform organizations. It hopes to reform public education out of existence. Watch how skillfully the Bradley Foundation followed the usual reformer script:
Original research by One Wisconsin Institute in 2013 first exposed the Bradley Foundation as a leading player in the campaign to gut public education and promote the unaccountable, radical privatization of K-12 education. The Milwaukee-based group spent millions to support organizations, think tanks, journalists and right-wing academics. They engaged in a campaign that manufactured a crisis, singled out their enemies, generated a cure, justified their scheme with pseudo-science, broadcast their message through the media, helped elect politicians to advance their agenda and kept them in line with high-powered lobbyists and well-funded pressure campaigns. [Emphasis added by me.]
Ross concluded, “Wisconsin families and public schools are left paying the price as billions of dollars that could have been used for public education are siphoned off for the Bradley Foundation’s ideologically driven experiment. Until a majority of policy makers are willing to stand up to the Bradley Foundation’s millions, Wisconsin’s tradition of great public schools will remain under assault.”
EduShyster has a fascinating and important interview with Preston Green, the John and Carla Klein Professor of Urban Education at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, who explains why charter schools are the new subprime mortgages. Green says he used to be a strong charter supporter, but he has become wary because of the excesses of deregulation. He predicts that just as the subprime mortgage bubble burst, the same is likely to happen to the charter school bubble. Just like subprime mortgages, charters are expanding rapidly without oversight. Promoters of charters, often with the best of intentions, seek multiple authorizers so that oversight is slack. Parents in urban communities line up on the hope that they will get better education, but they often (usually?) don’t.
Green says:
Promoters of charter school expansion are calling for an increase in independent authorizers, such as nonprofits and universities. Supporters of charter school expansion believe that multiple authorizers will issue more charters, in part, because they are less hostile to charter schools than school districts. However, our research suggests another reason that multiple authorizers result in more charter schools: multiple authorizers are like mortgage originators with no skin in the game. In other words, these authorizers don’t assume the risk of charter school failure. That means that if something happens with the charter school, the authorizers don’t have to clean up the mess. Multiple authorizers may also weaken screening by giving charter schools the chance to find authorizers who *won’t ask questions.* In fact, CREDO has found that states with multiple authorizers experienced significantly lower academic growth. CREDO suggested that this finding might be due to the possibility that multiple authorizers gave charter schools the chance to shop around to find authorizers who wouldn’t provide rigorous oversight….
Where I see this playing out is that if you have too many charters or options that aren’t public having a negative impact on the education system as a whole, you may start seeing challenges in these communities saying that the state is failing to provide children with a system of public education, or that the options provided aren’t of sufficient quality to satisfy the state’s obligation to provide a public education. The assumption is that if kids fail to get an education in a charter school they can return to the traditional system. But what happens if you don’t have that option? You may soon see that develop in all of these urban settings. The really scary scenario that I could see happening is that you end up with all of these options that aren’t traditional public schools with insufficient oversight by the authorizers and no real pressure to get these schools to perform well….
If we’re going to have multiple authorizers, we have to impose standards to ensure that they do a good job, because without those standards there is really no incentive for them to ensure that these schools are operating in an acceptable manner. I should also mention putting sanctions in place to prevent the really squirrely practice of *authorizer hopping,* where schools are closed by one authorizer and then find another authorizer, which has happened quite a bit in places where oversight has been really weak, like Ohio. Further, authorizers should guard against predatory chartering practices, including fining students for discipline violations.
Despite declining enrollments, despite the closing of 50 public schools, the Chicago Public Schools board (hand-picked by Mayor Rahm Emanuel) is seeking to expand the number of charter schools. The great advantage of charters, from the Mayor’s point of view, is that they are mostly non-union. So think of it as payback to the Chicago Teachers Union for its insistence on adequate resources for the public schools.
Despite declining student enrollment and dozens of dramatically under-enrolled schools, Chicago is seeking potential new charter schools for the city.
In a Request for Proposals issued Wednesday, CPS says it’s looking for dual language schools, “Next Generation” schools that would blend technology and traditional teaching, and—in a first—it wants a “trauma-informed school,” where staff would get training to support students with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or exposure to trauma.
The district is prepared to give charters that already run schools approval for up to four additional campuses. And it’s poised to grant approvals now for campuses that wouldn’t open for several years, to allow more time for planning a school’s opening, the district says in a press release.
In recent years, the district had named Neighborhood Advisory Councils where community members could give input into charter proposals. Those are now scrapped, saving roughly $170,000, CPS says. Instead, charter schools themselves will “directly engage residents in obtaining the support of their desired school community,” according to the release.
“It looks like they’re making it even less democratic,” said Wendy Katten, director of the parent group Raise Your Hand, which has had members serve on the advisory councils.
Katten says many considered the NACs “flawed” because CPS seemed frequently to ignore the advice of the councils, but “at least it was an opportunity to look at the proposal, to really scrutinize it as a community. To take (that) away—and to have the charter operators do the community engagement—that’s even more of a sham than what currently has existed. The real question is, our city needs a massive debate about opening any kind of new schools in a city that has just hemorrhaged students,” said Katten.
The study, which is linked in the article, says that students in charters begin with higher test scores and improve faster than their peers in district public schools.
The implications, I believe, are that those who enroll in charters start off ahead academically, and their academic gains are increased by peer effects. If a student is enrolled in a school with other higher-performing students–and if the students with behavioral problems and the unmotivated students are not present–the students learn faster.
What are the lessons for public schools? Remove the students with behavioral problems; remove the students who are unmotivated; remove the students with severe disabilities; remove the students with low test scores; limit the number of English language learners to those who are nearly fluent. That’s a formula for success. In a school where everyone is motivated, well-behaved, and ready to learn, students get higher test scores.
But what should we do with all those kids who were removed and excluded? If Eli Broad has his way, half the children in Los Angeles will be in charter schools with strong peer cultures, and the rest will be left behind in squalid public schools. Are they his problem too? Why not just give the entire enrollment of Los Angeles Unified School District to Eli, and let him take responsibility for all the children, not just the likeliest to succeed?
Take the challenge, Eli. Think big. Can you do it? Take responsibility for all the children, not just the ones you want. If you aren’t willing to do that, stick to funding art and medical research. You don’t tell artists how to paint or doctors how to perform surgery, do you? Stick to what you know.
I know I am supposed to be taking a break, but I assumed the holidays would be a quiet time. I was wrong.
The Los Angeles Times published an editorial today about charter schools that pretends to be balanced, but it is not. It begins by saying that it is somehow wrong to be for or against charters; one needs a more “nuanced” view. It reports on new research that shows students in charter high schools enter with higher scores than those who do not enroll in charter high schools; that charter middle schools get impressive results; and that charter high schools get unimpressive results. These findings might be reasons to oppose Eli Broad’s proposal to put half the students in Los Angeles into privately-managed charter schools, but that’s not what the editorial says. A photo caption alongside the editorial says “A charter school expansion could be great for L.A.” What happened to that “nuanced” view”?
If you care about the future of public education in the United States, if you don’t like the idea that billionaires should be allowed to privatize public institutions, why shouldn’t you oppose Eli Broad’s plan? Why should you be on the fence?
If you read the editorial to the end, you will see that education coverage in the Los Angeles Times–apparently including the editorials–is underwritten by a group of billionaires, including Eli Broad. But of course the piper doesn’t call the tune. Except when he does.
The best part about the editorial is the comments that follow, each of them expressing a thoughtful response about why it would not be a good idea to let Eli Broad take control of half the children in LAUSD just because he wants to.
The Charlotte News & Observer wrote an editorial calling attention to the excellent series of articles published by NC Policy Watch about the state government’s assault on public services.
There are many states where the governor and the legislature seem intent on closing down the public sector, but none has done as thorough a job as the state of North Carolina. It was once the most progressive state in the South, and it is now–in less than five years, since the Tea Party takeover of the legislature–the most regressive state in the South.
Every state should have an investigative journalistic project like NC Policy Watch, which reports without fear or favor with great fidelity to the facts.
The News & Observer editorial says:
The new majority stormed in with an agenda developed during long years in the minority, and the opportunity to make that agenda law was enhanced by the 2012 election of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. Assessing how the consolidation of Republican power has shaped North Carolina depends on how one sees the role of government.
McCrory talks about a “Carolina Comeback” as the state economy has recovered from a deep and scarring recession. He and GOP legislative leaders say the recovery has been spurred by limiting state spending, cutting taxes and reducing regulation. But those who think government should solve problems, protect the vulnerable, assist the needy and expand opportunity for all see the years of conservative rule as a “Carolina Setback.”
Chris Fitzsimon, executive director of N.C. Policy Watch, said the five-year mark was a fitting time for an overview. The report offers articles on public spending, unfair tax cuts, reduced support for education, the politicization of the state courts, a rollback in environmental regulations, reductions in safety net programs and new limits on voting access.
Fitzsimon said putting the years of change between two covers creates a powerful picture. “When you take this as a whole, it’s stunning what has happened,” he said.
One of the report’s charts shows that during the last 45 years, state spending has averaged 6.1 percent of the state economy. That share fell when the recession hit, and has declined every year since. By fiscal year 2017, it’s projected to fall to 5 percent despite a growing state’s need for more services.
Another chart shows that tax cuts and changes since 2013 have saved those in the top 1 percent of income an average of $14,977, those in the middle 20 percent saved an average of $6 and those in the lowest 20 percent paid, on average, $30 more.
The governor and legislative leaders say they are spending more on schools, but the report shows that spending per student has fallen 14.5 percent since fiscal year 2008.
Parents in an elementary school in Chicago brought cleaning supplies to their children’s school, because of the filthy conditions in the bathrooms. The leadership of Chicago Public Schools, controlled directly by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, privatized custodial services last year, and at that time the principals complained that the schools were getting dirtier by the day because of the loss of their custodians.
Would Mayor Emanuel tolerate these conditions in his own children’s school? Would any member of the Chicago Board of Education? What do you think?
On Saturday, a handful of pre-kindergarten parents packed yellow rubber gloves and spray bottles of vinegar and baking soda solution and headed to Suder Montessori Elementary Magnet School, 2022 W. Washington Blvd., on the Near West Side, where they spent the morning cleaning their children’s washrooms.
The parents felt they didn’t have a choice: Upon entering the bathrooms, they found pools of day-old urine on the floor, feces smeared on the walls and clogged, stinking toilet bowls. In the past few weeks, the school had an E. coli outbreak and more than half of the kindergarten students missed school because of various diseases, including a stomach bug, diarrhea or vomiting, said Michelle Burgess, head of the school’s parent-teacher association.
“These are preschoolers. They go to the bathroom and miss. The boys play in the urinals. And sometimes can’t get to the toilet fast enough. It’s understandable,” said Angela Morales, the parent of two children who attend the school. “But they need to clean. We can’t have our kids be in this filth.”
Parents claim the unsanitary bathroom conditions, overflowing garbage cans and soiled napping cots are the result of inadequate custodial care following the Chicago Board of Education’s decision last spring to award multi-million dollar custodial management contracts to two firms, Aramark and SodexoMAGIC.
The decision to privatize much of the custodial work was made in light of “daunting financial challenges” faced by the district, CPS officials have said. Surveys conducted by principals and parent organizations at the beginning of the school year aired numerous complaints of filthy conditions inside some school buildings after the custodial changes.
Aramark and Chicago Public School officials could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.
Questions about school cleanliness grew further in early September when district officials announced close to 480 subcontracted custodians who work in CPS buildings would be laid off by Aramark.
CPS officials in March signed a minimum three-year contract worth up to $260 million with Aramark. SodexoMAGIC also received a minimum three-year, up to $80 million contract for facility upkeep earlier this year.
The reduced contracts, Suder parents say, have led to the school operating with two full-time custodians and one part-time custodian as opposed to operating with four full-time custodians as it had in previous years. Parents claim that since the reductions, janitors have done a poor job maintaining regular cleaning duties and, for the past three months, have mopped the floor with water—and nothing else.
The school board of Anaheim, California, asked for relief from charters. California has one of the most permissive charter laws in the nation. It also has one of the most powerful lobbies in the nation, the California Charter Schools Association.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
________________________
December 18, 2014
Contact: Pat Karlak
Public Information Officer
Phone: (714) 999-5662
Email: Karlak_p@auhsd.us
Anaheim Union High School District Calls for a Temporary Moratorium on Approval of Charter Schools
ANAHEIM—Board members of the Anaheim Union High School District and Superintendent Michael Matsuda on December 18 called for the state of California to implement a temporary moratorium on the approval of charter schools until legislators fix the overly permissive law that enables charters to operate on a business model whose main goal is to make money.
“Although there is nothing wrong with making money, when it comes to public education, our children should be our first priority,” Superintendent Matsuda said. “While charter school proponents may say they care about kids, many charters operate in the shadows with no transparency, no accountability, and no public review.”
The superintendent cited the example of Magnolia Science Academy, one of two charter applications recently submitted to AUHSD. Magnolia Science Academy is one of the largest charter operators in America, with 155 campuses and ambitious expansion plans. According to an expose on 60 Minutes, Magnolia Science Academy is overseen by Fethullah Gulen, a wealthy Turkish national who controls an international chain of Gulen schools.
The 60 Minutes piece exposed the fact that American taxpayer money—hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide—is being funneled into the pockets of Turkish foreign nationals in the form of contracts for building schools and hiring teachers. At the same time, Gulen’s financial health and practices have been called into question and investigated by local and state agencies. Fethullah Gulen, himself a Turkish national, is wanted by the government of Turkey and is in hiding in the United States.
“Because of lax charter laws that favor privatization, we are the only nation where taxpayer money is used to fund schools operated by foreign nationals,” Superintendent Matsuda said. “Although the Gulen officials insist there is no ill intent, enough questions have been raised about Magnolia’s charter school operations that it is a prime example of why we need an immediate temporary moratorium on charter schools until the laws are fixed and accountability is restored.”
Added Trustee Al Jabbar, “We respectfully ask the public to consider that if kids really come first, why are charter schools continuing to hide their funding, ownership, and financial relationships? Why don’t they allow open access to financials, including budgets and salaries, even though they spend taxpayer money, just like public schools do? Why not agree to the same accountability policies as public schools, policies that would build public trust?”
The entire AUHSD Board signed off on an opinion piece calling for the immediate moratorium, which was published December 18 in the Voice of OC. The day before, at a special school board meeting, AUHSD trustees unanimously rejected a petition by Vista Charter Middle School as educationally and financially unsound.
“It’s open season on neighborhood schools in Orange County, because the Orange County Board of Education, which, mind you, was elected to represent the public school children of the region, is now a 3-2 vote in favor of overturning virtually every local school board’s decision against a charter,” Mr. Jabbar noted. “The Orange County Board wants us to assume all the liability for failure. They want us to assume financial authority over charters when we just heard on Thursday night from a charter operator (Vista) who won’t have enough resources to make it through the first year. They want us to take back the special education and English learner students that they routinely ‘disenroll,’ or drop, to game the system and boost their academic reputation. Let the Orange County Board of Education assume that fiscal and moral risk. Don’t put it back on us as our responsibility. We don’t want it.”
The fact that the Orange County school board has the authority to grant charters without the consent of local school boards undermines the concept of local control and makes a mockery of the Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), said AUHSD Board President Annemarie Randle-Trejo.
“The 27 school districts in Orange County have to ask themselves if they are OK with the Orange County Board of Education deciding the composition of each of our school systems,” Ms. Randle-Trejo said. “I’m not OK with that and you shouldn’t be, either.”
“If you look at donations to politicians, you will see a lot of money being funneled to them from charter school operators and special interests. These charter people are very smart,” Ms. Randle-Trejo added. “They have wined and dined politicians from the federal level down, providing junkets and campaign contributions. They stage openings of their schools and invite the local politicians. They certainly know how to play the political game.”
The submission of the petitions by Magnolia Science Academy and Vista are part of a coordinated strategy in Los Angeles and Orange counties by charter proponents to establish a stronghold in Southern California.
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