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Archives for category: Privatization
The Education Law Center is suing in New Jersey Supreme Court to challenge the negative effects of charter schools on public schools in Newark.
ELC is asking the court to review the fiscal impact and segregating effects of charters on public schools. The bottom line is whether the state can afford to support two different school systems.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has granted a petition filed by Education Law Center (ELC) to review the State Commissioner of Education’s 2016 decision approving an enrollment increase of 8500 students in KIPP, Uncommon and other charter operators’ schools in the Newark Public School (NPS) district.
In accepting In Re Team Academy Charter School, the Supreme Court will now decide several consequential issues raised by the State’s push to rapidly grow charter school enrollments in NPS over the last decade. Under former Governor Chris Christie, Newark charter enrollments grew 320% from 4,559 in 2009, to 19,152 in 2020. NPS payments to charter schools increased from $63 million in 2009, or 7% of the NPS operating budget, to $265 million in 2020, or 26% of the budget.
The legal issues before the NJ Supreme Court in Team Academy implicate the Commissioner’s failure to comply with the Court’s 2000 Palisades Charter ruling imposing an affirmative obligation under the New Jersey Constitution to carefully evaluate the impact of charter school applications in two interrelated areas:
- The education resources available to NPS students from the loss of funding that will occur from increasing charter school enrollments;
- The segregation of NPS students by disability, English language proficiency and race.
The Team Academy appeal addresses the obligation of charter authorizers to protect the constitutional rights of public school students when faced with overwhelming and unrefuted evidence that expanding charters will deprive district students of essential education resources and intensify persistent patterns of student segregation in the resident district.
In 2016, ELC, on behalf of NPS students, submitted detailed evidence to the Commissioner opposing the charter school expansion. ELC’s evidence showed that, if the expansion was approved, NPS would continue to lose funding from its budget, causing further cuts to essential teachers, support staff and programs, including for English language learners (ELL) and students with disabilities. ELC also documented that the expansion would increase the concentration of more costly to educate students with disabilities and ELLs in Newark district schools and worsen the entrenched isolation of Black and Latino students in the already intensely segregated district.
After the Commissioner ignored this evidence and approved the applications, ELC appealed. The Appellate Division upheld the decision, relying on the failure of the NPS superintendent, hired by the State, to object to the expansion. At the time the charter applications were decided by the State, NPS was under State control.
Because NPS students are in the class of plaintiff school children in the landmark Abbott v. Burke school funding litigation, the Supreme Court will also decide whether the Commissioner bears a heightened burden when reviewing charter applications in those districts. Abbott district students remain the subject of continuing Abbott orders to remedy the State’s longstanding violation of their right to a constitutional thorough and efficient education.
Michael Stein of the Pashman Stein Walder Hayden law firm is serving as pro bono co-counsel on this appeal, along with ELC Executive Director David Sciarra, lead counsel for the Abbott v. Burke school children.
Argument before the NJ Supreme Court is expected in the fall.
Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24
Donald Cohen, executive director of “In the Public Interest,” explains a new direction that the organization will take. Not just to say that privatization is bad public policy, but to explain why the public sector can be more efficient and effective at the things it does best. In education, we have seen how privatization exacerbates segregation by race, religion, and social class; we have also seen how it opens the public purse to exploitation by profiteers and grifters who take advantage of public money without public accountability.
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Audrey Watters asks the question that we should all be asking: is our democracy for sale to the candidate with the most billions?
Apparently our schools sold out years ago when money was dabbled before them.
People who take money from that powerful education foundation — you know the one, the one that turns 20 years old this year — always insist to me that they’ve never been compelled to change their policies or practices. Of course, it doesn’t have to coerce its grantees to say and do things. People self-censor. They shape their initiatives to suit the foundation’s philosophy and its goals. They value the things the foundation says it values; they measure the way the foundation says it measures. Because if they rely on the foundation for funding, they know to fall in line. They needn’t be told. That’s how the power of philanthropy works. It sets the agenda. Personalized learning. The Common Core. Charter schools. Measures of Effective Teaching. It didn’t push for these ideas because that’s what people wanted. It helped convince politicians that these were the ideas that education needed. That is to say, education policy has not been shaped by democratic forces as much as it has been by philanthropic ones — by the billionaires who wield immense political power through their “charity.”
Actually, I don’t blame schools—few of whom had a say in decisions to follow the Gates money trail—so much as I blame the policy elites, who fell in love with the idea of sitting at the feet of billionaires and following their commands. The billionaires didn’t know what they were doing, but they were so confident in the virtues of testing, accountability, competition, choice. Who could resist?
Bill Raden of Capital and Main writes here about the charter school advocates’ frantic efforts to pour millions of dollars and tons of lies into the race for four school board seats in Los Angeles. They are churning out scurrilous and defamatory lies about Jackie Goldberg and Scott Schmerelson, both of whom are veteran public school educators.
Schmerelson has received a heavy dose of filthy fliers that call him greedy, unethical and unfit, very likely because he had the nerve to reveal that at least 80% of the city’s charter schools have empty seats. In Los Angeles, the charter lobby despises critics who defy them.
If you live in their districts, vote for Jackie Goldberg, Scott Schmerelson, George McKenna and Patty Castellanos.
Stop Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump, and Bill Bloomfield from buying seats on the LAUSD school board.
Veteran journalist Andrea Gabor explains that Betsy DeVos got the Trump administration to commit fully behind her voucher obsession, rolling some 29 or 30 programs into a block grant, including the toxic federal Charter Schools Program. In exchange, the Trump administration is seeking $5 billion for national voucher program. It is certain not to be approved by Congress, but meanwhile the Supreme Court is considering a case (Espinoza v. Montana) that could eliminate all state bans on public spending for religious schools. This would have a devastating fiscal impact on public schools.
But, she warns, the voucher idea is an expensive failure and politically toxic. Based on recent electoral results, she predicts that it could blow up in the faces of Republican candidates. The overwhelming majority of American children attend public schools, including the overwhelming majority of children of Republican voters.
Despite DeVos’s enthusiastic support for vouchers, it may turn out to be a losing issue:
K-12 schooling remains a hot issue especially in local elections; thus, the combination of block grants and vouchers create a political minefield for Republican state legislators this election year. During the 2018 midterms, teachers in Kentucky helped a Democrat, Andy Beshear, defeat Republican incumbent Matt Bevin in the race for governor in a state Donald Trump had carried by 30 points.
In Wisconsin, where another pro-public education Democrat, Tony Evers, defeated Republican incumbent Governor Scott Walker, voters set recordspassing ballot measures increasing property taxes and allowing districts to exceed state-imposed revenue caps. These measures brought in an estimated $1.37 billion in additional public-school revenue.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, groups critical of public education, including ones backed by DeVos and the Koch family, chose not to campaign for a 2018 ballot measure that would have expanded the state’s voucher law when they saw it would be a losing battle. The expansion measure was resoundingly defeated following a vigorous anti-voucher campaign. And just last month, Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, unveiled a budget with close to $300 million in extra funding for Arizona public schools.
Sarah Vowell is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times where this article appeared. Proponents of vouchers often claim that the state prohibitions on public funding of religious schools were birthed in anti-Catholic bigotry, based on the Blaine Amendment, which was offered as a Constitutional amendment after the Civil War but failed to be adopted. Many states wrote their own “baby Blaine” amendments to assure that no public money went to religious schools–not just Catholic schools, but religious schools of any kind. The case now before the Supreme Court, Espinoza v. Montana, asserts the claim that refusal to fund religious schools is bigotry towards those schools. Sarah Vowell explains that the Montana constitution was rewritten in 1972. It included a strict prohibition against funding religious schools because the people of Montana can barely afford to pay for the public schools they have. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Espinoza, it will impoverish the public schools of Montana. That is why the suit is supported by the far-right Institute for Justice and their funders such as the Walton and DeVos families.
Scrutinizing the avuncular sphinx Chief Justice John Roberts throughout the impeachment trial of President Trump, I kept wondering whether he will preserve or ransack the legacy of the framers we revere — framers like the Republican Betty Babcock and the Democrat Dorothy Eck. It’s the question on all Americans’ minds: Do Mr. Roberts and his eight co-workers fully appreciate the public-spirited grandeur of the winter of 1971-72, when 100 Montanans, including housewives, ministers, a veterinarian and a beekeeper, gathered at the state capital, Helena, for the constitutional convention, affectionately nicknamed the “Con Con”?
The question haunts the current Supreme Court case Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. This newspaper has called the dispute over whether state tax credits can apply to donations for scholarships to private religious schools “a proxy battle over school choice.” However, the back story is so clumsily specific to Montana’s small population and immense geography that the case doesn’t entirely translate to states where people outnumber cows.
The novelist Ivan Doig wrote that in the scruffy Montana of yore, “when you met up with someone apt to give you trouble from his knuckles, the automatic evaluation was ‘too much Butte in him.’” When, as the grateful graduate of a Montana public school, I was determining whether I had a duty to stick up for the Con Con framers regarding the Espinoza case, I spotted a sequence in the web address of an article about it in The Atlantic that read “montana-bigoted-laws.” At that moment this Bozeman girl had too much Butte in her. Dorothy Eck wrote no “bigoted” anti-Christian laws — she was a blatant Methodist!
Before it ended up at the Supreme Court, the Espinoza ruckus started with a $150 tax credit. Montanans will make an appellate-level stink about chump change because that’s the only available change. The tiny tax base is basically eight coal miners, a couple of ski lift operators, that family in Belgrade making organic goat cheese and Huey Lewis.
Kendra Espinoza counted on scholarships to help pay for her daughters’ tuition at Stillwater Christian, a private school in Kalispell. No wonder. At up to $8,620 per year, ninth grade is more than $1,000 higher than undergraduate tuition at the University of Montana. What we called a “band room” at Bozeman High, Stillwater considers a “conservatory.”
School choice partisans pounced when Ms. Espinoza and other private-school parents sued to overturn the State Supreme Court’s ruling that the tax credit for scholarship donations violated the “no-aid” clause for sectarian schools in the Montana Constitution. They argued that it was time to erase “antiquated” anti-Catholic laws against public funding for private religious education. The subtle former state senator Matthew Monforton denounced the law as “Jim Crow for Christians.”
It is worth pointing out that the eighth word of the ’72 Constitutionis “God.” In the first draft of the preamble, some wistful Jeffersonians tried to thank the “Spirit of the Creator” for “the quiet beauty of our state.” They were shot down in the Bill of Rights Committee because “not mentioning ‘God’ specifically would be unacceptable” and so they “voted unanimously to retain Him in the Preamble.” The framers included a priest from Great Falls, Mitt Romney’s cousin Miles, the self-proclaimed “first Roman Catholic ever elected to anything in Yellowstone County,” and enough Presbyterians to warrant their own photo op.
While the ’72 Constitution’s no-aid clause looks similar to its predecessor in the 1889 original, the update was motivated by fortifying public schools, not shunning people of faith. Rethinking education was, along with open government and the right to individual dignity, part of the Con Con’s crusade to take a stand that no one dared dream of at statehood: that Montana would be a state in a republic and not an exceedingly wide company town.
“We were known as the state that wore the copper collar, controlled by the Anaconda Company,” Ms. Eck once said. A swashbuckler for the League of Women Voters, she referred to the copper company lording over the “richest hill on earth” and thus the newspapers and politicians. “There were stories of how their lobbyists would sit in the balcony at the legislature and do thumbs up and thumbs down of how people should vote.”
The Con Con delegates, who arranged themselves not by party but alphabetically, were so preoccupied with the public interest that they agreed public funds could be spent only on public agencies. During deliberations on the no-aid clause, the pastor of Helena’s Plymouth Congregational led the charge of “preserving our public school system,” preaching, “that’s what this issue is all about. I don’t think we ought to dilute that in any way.” (Diluting that is the aim of Espinoza.)
Article X, Section 1, of the ’72 Constitution proclaims that it is the duty of the state to “develop the full educational potential of each person.” That is an expensive ideal in a desolate wasteland. Public schools are supposed to be a volume business, but tell that to the Great Plains. The state of Montana has about 60,000 fewer inhabitants than the number of students enrolled in New York City’s public school system. I have volunteered in that epic system, which is to say I have had to excuse myself from a struggling student to go cry in a bathroom, so I sympathize with an urban kid who might eye a parochial school as her best chance.
That school choice logic doesn’t apply to Montana, where the poorest schools often have the smallest class sizes. The Montana Free Press reported that out in Prairie County, “Terry High School’s sophomore class has just five students this school year.” Starting in first grade, my friend Genevieve would ride her horse Croppy to the Malmborg School near Bozeman Pass; one year she and her brother Pete were half the student body.
When USA Today asked Ms. Espinoza if she had any qualms about what her case could mean for public schools, she insisted, “They have plenty of money.”
How I wish that were true. Last year, the public school district in Kalispell announced $1.7 million in budget cuts, Great Falls recently lost almost a hundred teachers, and Billings just announced about $4 million in cuts that mean canceling fifth grade orchestra and band.
A Supreme Court decision on Espinoza is expected in June. If the justices rule against Montana’s voters, tax credits for private school scholarship donations could surge. Revenue that might revive the Billings fifth grade band program could underwrite the fifth grade band at a pricey Kalispell private school.
Kalispell is the seat of Flathead County, which between 2000 and 2015 added more than 15,000 jobs just as rural Choteau County was losing more than 300. Overturning the no-aid clause will shovel more money into the cities (where most of the private schools are) and kick Choteau while it’s down, thereby thwarting the framers’ plan to spare needy districts from taxing “their residents three or four times as much as rich districts to provide less than half as much money per student.”
The public schools the framers conjured ask the taxpayers to splurge on fairness, not privilege, to pull together, not away. That beekeeper, those clergymen and moms chartered a state in a republic where a first grader on horseback is supposed to be as big and important as the mountains. As the Supreme Court justices ponder whether to upend all that over what appears to be a $150 trifle, I’ll pass along this lesson of Montana winters: A collapsed roof starts with a single snowflake.
Sarah Vowell, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “The Wordy Shipmates” and “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States.”
Heather Gautney and Eric Blanc warn in the Guardian the Michael Bloomberg’s ideas about education would be a disaster for the nation. He is the only candidate whose ideas about education are in synch with those of Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, and Arne Duncan. The authors are both supporting Bernie Sanders.
Affer persuading the legislature to give him total control of the city’s 1.1 million public school students, he hired three non-educators as city Chancellor. One of them, a publisher out of her depth, lasted 95 days.
Like Trump and his inept Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, Bloomberg is a fervent backer of privatizing and dismantling public schools across the country. Education, in their view, should be run like a business.
While other establishment Democrats have begun changing their tune in response to the “Red for Ed” movement, Bloomberg’s campaign spokesman has made it clear that privatization will be a core message of his 2020 presidential run: “Mike has always supported charter schools, he opened a record number of charter schools as mayor of New York City, and he will champion the issue as president.”
Indeed, Bloomberg succeeded in massively expanding privately run but publicly funded charter schools during his term as mayor, increasing their number from 18 to 183. His controversial push to “increase school choice” closed over 100 schools in low-income communities and entrenched New York City’s education system as the most racially segregated in the country…
If anything, the main difference between Bloomberg and Trump is that the former has spent far more of his immense personal fortune to boost corporate “education reform” and local candidates driving this agenda. The New York Times reported last week that Bloomberg has spent millions to promote charters in the state of Louisiana alone. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: Bloomberg’s foundation in 2018 announced its plan to spend $375m to promote charters, merit pay, and the sacking of “failing” teachers, among other reforms.
Bloomberg is also an active promoter of high stakes testing. Despite abundant evidence that an excessive testing regime does little to improve real educational achievement, Bloomberg has vociferously sung the praises of this system in op-eds such as Demand Better Schools, Not Fewer Tests. Accordingly, as mayor he fought for a merit pay system through which teachers’ salaries would be pegged to student test scores.Like Trump and DeVos, Bloomberg has also viciously attacked teacher unions and scapegoated educators. He spent much of his mayoral tenure fighting with the powerful United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which he compared to the National Rifle Association. As he put it, “if the UFT wants it, it ain’t good”.
Actually, Bloomberg has poured money into charter school campaigns across the country, not just in Louisiana. He donated big money to school board races in Los Angeles and a charter referendum in Massachusetts, among many other state and local races.. His daughter Emma is one of three billionaire board members of TFA’s political action arm, called Leadership for Educational Equity.
Though his Republican roots are less evident on some other issues, Bloomberg’s personal and political similarity to Trump will make it very hard for him to win in a general election. Trump’s base remains solid – we need a candidate who can increase turnout by energizing the Democratic base and involving new voters in the political process.
That’s why having Bloomberg as the Democratic party’s standard bearer would make defeating Trump exceedingly difficult. At a moment when a wave of successful teachers’ strikes has captured the imagination of millions and changed the national discussion on education, a Bloomberg nomination would be a sure-fire recipe for demoralizing educators and teachers’ unions, an indispensable bastion of organized labor and the Democratic base.
They conclude:
You can’t win in November without teachers. And nobody should expect educators to be won over to a billionaire who has spent much of his career and fortune demonizing them. If you want to save public schools and defeat Trump, Bloomberg is no choice at all.
Jeff Bryant writes in the Progressive about the Trump-DeVos budget and their plan to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, which incensed the charter industry. The charter industry was certain they had a friend in Betsy DeVos, how could she have abandoned them?
Bryant quotes me as saying that the far-right foundations and think tanks embraced charters thirty years ago because they were easier to sell to the public than vouchers. I was involved in three different conservative think tanks–the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force. I met with leaders of the voucher movement and the charter movement. Charters were easier to sell because they could be “called” public schools even when they were under private management. And, of course, the charter industry passed legislation in state after state labeling themselves as “public charter schools,” when it would be more accurate to say that they are privately managed schools with a government contract.
Charters were embraced by the right because they did not run the risk of losing in court as vouchers did (at that time). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the charter industry got its start, the courts would have never approved a full-blown voucher scheme (the courts did okay vouchers for Cleveland and Milwaukee, but those seemed to be special cases, since they were supposed to “save” poor black and brown children from “failing public schools.”) Now we know that vouchers did not work in Cleveland and Milwaukee, but that has not slowed the zeal of voucher advocates one iota. From the discussions that I listened in on in rightwing circles, the invocation of “saving poor black and brown children” was a propaganda ploy intended to win the support of liberal legislators. It was a hoax and it was a knowing hoax. And many liberals fell for it.
Bryant explores Trump’s lie during the State of the Union address about the Philadelphia student who was allegedly “trapped” in a “failing government school.” As we soon learned, the student had attended a private Christian Academy, then applied for and was accepted into one of the city’s most elite charter schools.
Bryant writes:
As The Philadelphia Inquirer revealed, Janiyfah Davis was enrolled in Math, Science and Technology Community Charter School III (MaST III), which is part of a popular charter network in Philadelphia with a reputation for being “high performing.” But that designation is also deceptive.
A research study I co-authored with the Network for Public Education on the federal government’s charter school grant program—the program Trump now proposes to cut—spotlighted MaST I and MaST II schools in the network because of the multiple grants, totaling over $1.6 million, the schools received.
We also found that—though the schools’ grant applications expressed a “vision” to provide access to high-level math and science courses to low income, special education, English language learners, and minority populations—the schools actually served disproportionately higher percentages of white students than Philadelphia district schools.
Despite any indication that MaST III actually served the groups it purported to, DeVos awarded the school a grant of $1,345,000 in 2019.
In other words, the MaST network is an example of how charter schools have rigged the game to claim the mantle of “high performing” by serving mostly non-disadvantaged students.
Yet as the charter school industry continues to pour huge sums of money into its advocacy and lobbying efforts, it does little to address, and arguably worsens, the pervasive inequality that is at the root of the nation’s education problems.
Indeed, as the reformers fretted over the elimination of the federal government’s charter school grants, they were completely silent on Trump axing programs that actually do address inequality, such as those that focus on migrant and homeless students, native Hawaiian and Alaskan students, rural education, after-school programs, and full-service community schools.
So sure, Trump lied during his State of the Union address about saving the educational destiny of a young African American girl in Philadelphia, but that lie exposed a much deeper one: That the political establishment, conservative and liberal alike, has been deceiving us about the goals of school choice—vouchers and charter schools—all along. It’s always been about turning education into a private enterprise.
About 30 public schools in Broward County may close due to loss of students to charter schools.
The original purpose of charter schools was to collaborate with public schools, not to destroy them. Unfortunately, the charter industry is so well represented in the legislature that they have a distinctive edge over real public schools. The wife of the State Commissiomer of Educatuon Richard Corcoran runs a charter school.
About 30 Broward schools could close, combine with other schools or convert into a new type of facility as the school district looks for ways to deal with nearly half-empty campuses.
Many of these schools are in the southern part of the county, from Hollywood to Pembroke Pines, where thousands of students have left for charter schools. Others are in the Fort Lauderdale area and have struggled with factors such as low student performance, outdated facilities and aging neighborhoods…
Enrollment has dropped about 30,000 in the past 15 years, due mostly to charter schools and to a smaller degree private school vouchers. The demographics also have changed in Broward, where most growth is among adults without school-aged kids….
Broward considers a school to have insufficient enrollment if it has 70% percent or fewer students than it was built to serve. Many of these schools aren’t able to afford an art, music or physical education teacher or a media specialist to run the library. Several didn’t get musical instruments through the $800 million bond because they can’t afford to teach music.
Nearby charter schools are eagerly eying the buildings that might become available.
