Press Advisory: Thirty Regional School Superintendents To Come Together to Defend Public Education, Joining Public District Leaders from Across the State to Urge Reform of Pennsylvania’s Charter School Law
Leaders Form Coalition and Support a Moratorium on New Charter Enrollment Until Laws Can be Reformed
Leaders from public school districts in the five-county Greater Philadelphia region are joining with others from across the state in calling for meaningful, substantive reform of Pennsylvania’s charter school laws. They also support a moratorium on new charter school applications and a freeze on additional seats for students at existing charters until reform is enacted. Public school superintendents and other top school administrators recently formed LEARN, Leaders for Educational Accountability and Reform Network, as a way to coalesce around urgent issues impacting public schools, such as charter reform. They are calling for reform to the way charters are funded, as well as an improvement in accountability and oversight. Citing an extremely inequitable funding system, LEARN says charter schools, which are often among the worst performing schools in the state, are straining public systems. Extreme increases in charter costs are sending an increasingly greater amount of public tax dollars to charters, over which locally elected school boards have little-to-no authority or oversight. LEARN wants to bring charter tuition payments in line with actual school district costs and provide more accountability.
Contact: Dr. Frank Gallagher, Superintendent in the Souderton Area School District
“School choice advocates argue that every child learns differently, and parents have a right to choose the kind of school best suited to their child’s needs. But the public education system was designed as a public benefit, with a different purpose in mind: to provide education to every person, despite their special or specific needs and limitations. Those advocates aren’t wrong in demanding better options for public education and its current failures. We all should be demanding that. Schools supported by all should work for all. Parents can make a different choice, but shouldn’t rely on the rest of us to pay for it.”
State regulators mouth complaints about the low quality of online charters yet they are renewed again and again. As Harris points out, even school choice advocates (except for Betsy DeVos) believe that the online charters should be regulated, yet they continue to operate unimpeded.
Harris writes:
SAN DIEGO — By the time authorities brought charges against the owners of A3 Education earlier this year, the online charter school company had bilked California taxpayers out of $50 million, according to indictments handed up in May.
The state would have lost another $200 million if authorities had not detected the scheme to inflate enrollment in the virtual charter school using names gleaned from youth sports league rosters, said San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan. League owners are alleged to have received kickbacks for providing names, according to the indictments.
A3 Education, a nonprofit management company that enrolled tens of thousands of California students at its peak, had sought out small school districts to authorize its online schools, knowing the districts would provide little oversight, authorities said.
The California case is the latest in a string of allegations of fraud and educational malpractice against virtual charter schools. These have included, among others, multimillion dollar scams in Ohio, Oklahoma and Indiana, and academic or financial problems that shuttered online charter schools in Georgia, Nevada and South Carolina.
California last year banned for-profit charter schools and this year adopted a two-year moratorium on new virtual charter schools. Neither law, however, would have affected A3 Education or its schools.
The Arizona Republic visited seven states to investigate the successes and challenges surrounding charter schools — the publicly funded but privately operated schools that many believed would revolutionize American public education through competition and innovation…
In Arizona, which has the most charter school students out of the states, no online charter school meets the state Charter Board’s academic standards. And Arizona’s largest virtual charter school, Primavera Online, earned the board’s lowest academic ranking and posted declining graduation rates for the last decade. That hasn’t stopped Primavera founder and CEO Damian Creamer from paying himself a combined $10.1 million in 2017 and 2018.
Primavera, which has a total enrollment of 22,000, reported a $10 million profit this year, while spending $6.9 million on teacher salaries.
“These guys are definitely in it for the profit,” said Macke Raymond, director of the nonpartisan Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, at Stanford University.
Negative headlines have, however, prompted prominent charter school leaders to call on regulators to clamp down on virtual charters, and for the industry to cut ties with the schools.
Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said poor academic performance at virtual charter schools gives ammunition to teachers unions and others who oppose school choice, hurting high-quality charter schools and the broader school-choice movement.
“They make up a small percentage of charter schools, but a huge percentage of negative publicity,” said Tom Torkelson, chief executive of Texas-based IDEA Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest charter school operators. “They add no value. I would never send my kids to one.”
Torkelson argues that it’s time for online charter schools to go out of business.
But few states have enacted reforms, experts note, because when such proposals arise, virtual charter operators — flush with cash — have flooded key lawmakers with campaign contributions.
This proves that when a big charter corporation buys legislators, they stay bought.
Despite poor academic performance, virtual charter schools likely are here to stay because parents want that choice, said Raymond, the CREDO director.
However, CREDO notes in a study, low-performing online charter schools are not keeping their end of the educational “grand bargain” struck about 25 years ago, during the early charter movement.
That deal gave charter operators the freedom to teach kids in innovative ways with minimal red tape. By being allowed to run a school like a business, operators promised they would allow regulators to shut down poor performing schools.
To fix the problems, Stanford researchers concluded that charter school authorizers “must step up their responsibilities and demand online charter providers improve outcomes for students.” And, states should examine the progress of existing online programs before approving any expansions.
Raymond said she still believes in a “cost-efficient and effective education through online” schools but the system “doesn’t seem to deliver on that.”
University of Colorado researchers agreed that states should slow or halt the growth of virtual and blended schools until their performance has improved, and student-to-teacher ratios are lowered.
But Miron, the Western Michigan professor, said changes are unlikely.
Even when prosecutors, like the San Diego County district attorney, crack down on one virtual school another will quickly pop up because the business is so lucrative, he said.
“Even if a charter board fires them, it doesn’t affect them. They are not losing a building,” Miron said. “They don’t get punished for risky behavior. It’s a very different model for brick-and-mortar schools.”
Grassroots Arkansas is calling on friends of public education to wear black on January 28 to mark the death of democratic control—of, by, and for all the children of Little Rock, which has been under state control for five years.
***Call to Action***
• Wear black wherever you are and whatever you’re doing on January 28 – and tell people you meet why you’re wearing black today: “It’s the 5th anniversary of the State’s takeover of the Little Rock School District. It’s been 1,827 days since Little Rock had a democratically elected school board.” Tie a black ribbon around a tree, car, or mailbox.
• Post pics of yourself and others wearing black with the hashtag: #oneLRSD and #AsaFreeLRSD and voice your support online and in person on the 28th for a no-strings attached, democratically elected school board in Little Rock – now!
• Email Asa Hutchinson asa.hutchinson@governor.arkansas.gov with this subject line: “Asa Free LRSD”. In the body of the email simply sign your name and indicate any and all connections you have to the LRSD, e.g.: Jane Doe, LRSD student OR John Doe, LRSD parent OR Jane Doe, Little Rock business owner and taxpayer, etc.
It’s School Board Recognition month – and Little Rock still doesn’t have one. We believe that a school board election is possible in May 2020 as opposed to November 2020 when the State “says” it intends to allow an election. We believe for any elected school board to be legitimate it must come with no-strings attached, no limitations on the school board’s governing powers by the State
Bill Phillis is a public education activist in Ohio. He retired as Deputy State Superintendent of Education in Ohio several years ago.
He writes:
December 1, Columbus Dispatch Capitol Insider: Remember ECOT?
As the article indicates, most people have forgotten the ECOT debacle. The ECOT Man, William Lager, siphoned one billion dollars from school district budgets for a business plan that was designed to collect funds for tens of thousands of students that were not being served and tens of thousands of students that were underserved. Lager’s campaign funds-driven relationship with hundreds of state and federal officials over a couple decades allowed him to steal public money in public view. When citizens began asking questions about the thievery, some public officials scrambled to give the appearance of holding Lager accountable.
School districts will never receive back the millions and millions Lager illegally took from them.
Remember ECOT?
Most Ohioans have probably forgotten that the state is still trying to pry money from leaders of the now-defunct ECOT, the online charter school that shut down almost three years ago.
Even though the state started pursuing the money in 2018, a trial might not happen until 2021 under a recent timetable developed by lawyers for the state and those associated with the former Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.
The attorney general is seeking to recover millions from ECOT founder William Lager; his companies, Altair Management and IQ Innovations; and several former ECOT officials. The lawsuit says Lager had a fiduciary duty to ECOT that was violated by the contracts signed to funnel money to his companies.
The delay is needed because Lager and his companies dumped 50,000 pages of new documents on the state in mid-October, on top of 50,000 already provided, a joint court filing from both sides said.
“The state needs time to review this latest, massive document production,” the filing in Franklin County Common Pleas Court said.
The modified schedule calls for a status conference Sept. 15, 2020, with a trial to be scheduled afterward.
Bill Phillis, longtime head of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, remarked, “Although Lager amassed a lot of wealth on the backs of schoolchildren, it is doubtful that much, if any, will be recovered.”
It has been an uphill battle, and I know that my words, though informative, are also often overwhelming and disheartening for those who care about the community school and who seek an encouraging word.
I have had fellow supporters of American public education tell me they appreciate my work but wish I had some good news to share.
It is a book about parents, teachers, students, administrators, and other public school advocates across the nation whose grass roots efforts to engage in the fight save America’s schools have created a movement, a book that allows public school advocates the opportunity to step back and see a more complete picture of their combined efforts across cities, states, situations, and years.
It is a book about us.
As I turned the pages and read of so many advocates contributing individual moments of advocacy– writing, speaking, organizing, protesting, striking, lobbying, voting, running for office– I felt wonderfully encouraged to realize on a deeper level that I am not one of few but one of many contributing to a remarkable, undeniable, and powerful effort to combat an ed-reform effort chiefly fueled by a handful of billionaires.
CORNELIUS, N.C. – When Lakeside Charter Academy opened five years ago in this boating community outside Charlotte, it faced the same challenge that confronts many new charter schools.
It had governmental approval to operate and the tax dollars that come with it to pay for teacher salaries, supplies and other expenses. But it had no money to build a school or lease classrooms.
Like most of the 45 states with charter schools — taxpayer-funded campuses operated largely by private businesses — North Carolina provides no money to new operators for start-up or capital costs.
So Lakeside struck a devil’s bargain of sorts. It entered an agreement with an Arizona company to renovate a former church building, funded, in part, bya federal program that allows private companies to raise money by essentially selling green cards to wealthy foreign nationals.
Arizona-based Education Fund of America secured the foreign financing and its business partner, American Charter Development, of Utah, would raise the rest of the cash, build the campus and then lease the space back to Lakeside.Lakeside put no money down.
Peter Mojica, a North Carolina businessman and founding school board member, said Lakeside had few options as parents worked to get the school built around 2012.
“A charter school has no credit and can’t get the money unless they have a crazy endowment from a rich benefactor,” said Mojica, who still has a son at Lakeside. “So you have Chinese investors buying visas.”
Twenty-seven other campuses in eight states, mostly small charter schools, have struck similar deals with Education Fund of America since 2013, according to its website.
Those deals have put some of the schools in financial jeopardy, according an Arizona Republic investigation.
Two Florida schools closed after one year. Four others, including three Arizona charter schools, are in imminent danger of shutting their doors, records obtained by The Arizona Republic show. More than half of the schools who entered the deals are running budget deficits. And at least 10 have turned to high-interest loans to stay afloat. The majority have average to failing academic scores.
The Republic visited seven states to investigate charter schools and what ongoing shifts in the industry might mean for Arizona, the state with the largest share of charter school students in the nation.
Almost three decades after the first U.S. charter schools opened their doors promising to innovate and compete with traditional public schools, funding remains a daunting barrier for all but the biggest operators. The result, experts say, is small, entrepreneurial operators who were the backbone of the early charter movement are increasingly squeezed out or forced to take big financial risks.
The number of mom-and-pop charter operators is declining. Between 2014 and 2018, 61% of charter schools approved to operate nationwide were affiliated with a nonprofit or for-profit chain, according to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
The officials who grant charters to would-be school operators are more inclined to favor big chains with proven track records than independent startups, said Greg Richmond, who until recently was chief executive of theNational Association of Charter School Authorizers.
“The charter school field has become a little more risk-adverse,” he said.
‘MAKING A PROFIT OFF OF OUR CHILDREN’
Lakeside Charter Academy turned to Education Fund of America only after parents struck out trying to get private investors, including hedge funds, Mojica said.
The school has paid escalating rent to American Charter Development for a campus that is far from luxurious, according to interviews and records obtained by The Republic.
Lakeside has no gymnasium or lunch room and only a small playground. At the end of last school year, a parking lot that doubles as a basketball court was rendered unusable by a large sinkhole. Its roughly 300-square-foot library is mostly filled with donated books.
As of July, the school was more than $1.7 million in debt — most of it for unpaid rent — and enrollment had plummeted to 100 students, from a high of 400. The state gave it a “C” academic rating.
“All I wanted was a good school for my sons,” said Alyson Ford, whose boys attended Lakeside until she moved them over disgust with Lakeside’s finances and governing board.
“As taxpayers, we are not happy about this situation,” she said, citing companies “making a profit off of our children.”
She questions Education Fund’s claim that the school was built for $5.1 million, using $3 million in Chinese investment through the federal Employment-Based Fifth Preference Immigrant Investor Program — or EB-5 visa program. County assessor records value the property at $3.3 million….
The nation’s 7,000 charter schools educate more than 3 million children, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The share of public school students attending charter schools nationwide has risen from 1% in 2000 to 6% today.
Despite that growth, starting a charter school remains daunting.
Just seven states and the District of Columbia offer charter school facility grants, and nine have loan programs, according to the Charter School Facilities Center.
The Charter School Facilities Center, a Washington, D.C., group tied to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, found in a June research paper that one of the biggest challenges to the expansion of charter schools is state laws that place the burden of funding facilities on school operators who struggle to find affordable facilities.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey created a charter school construction lending program in 2016 that was billed as a way to help the “best public schools” expand by providing lower-cost financing with help from the state. It mostly assisted Basis Charter Schools Inc. and Great Hearts Academies — large, successful charter chains with close ties to the governor. After only one charter school received financing through the program in 2018, three Arizona charter schools used it this fall.
The federal government since 1994 has helped fund startup costs for charter schools through competitive grants and credit programs. But only a fraction of the projected $500 million this year is set aside for smaller charter schools, with most going to the large nonprofit companies that dominate the charter school industry.
The U.S. Department of Education last year distributed 32 multi-year grants to individual charter schools. The largest was for $1.25 million, far less than what is needed to build a comprehensive campus. Meanwhile, a single chain, Texas-based IDEA Public Schools, received nearly $117 million.
Operators who succeed in opening a school have a high failure rate, suggesting additional difficulty in finding long-term financing. Since 2000, at least 2,927 U.S. charter schools, or nearly 30%, have closed, federal records show.
The failure rate in Arizona, 41%, is even higher despite the Legislature providing charters with additional per-pupil funding to help with capital costs.
The Grand Canyon Institute, a private, nonpartisan think tank, found Arizona charter schools primarily fund buildings and classrooms using high-interest “junk bonds” guaranteed by schools’ projected enrollment growth. If the growth doesn’t materialize, mortgage payments will consume a greater share of the schools’ shrinking revenue, leaving less for the classroom.
Bill Honig, a researcher and California educator who runs the Building Better Schools website, found through his research that charter school closures have disrupted the instruction of at least 288,000 school kids since 2000.
Those closures take a largely overlooked toll on students.
Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes examined school closures in 26 states over eight years, and found that fewer than 50% of students displaced by a closure ended up at a better school.
A UC Santa Barbara study, considered the definitive look at the subject, found students who changed schools between the eighth and 12th grades for any reason other than being promoted to a higher grade, were twice as likely to drop out…
Wing launched Education Fund eight years ago to help address the lack of charter school start-up funding.
“Charter schools have a massive financial disadvantage,” he said.
As a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services regional center for EB-5 visas, Wing’s Education Fund essentially sells green cards to wealthy foreign nationals in exchange for an investment in U.S. charter schools.
Among its first projects was to provide $2 million in foreign investment for the Learning Foundation and Performing Arts charter school, which opened in Gilbert in 2013.
Education Fund’s website shows smiling students, 28 “EB-5 financed charter schools,” and a breakdown of foreign capital and other investments.
There are about 880 regional centers. But Education Fund, which is approved to operate in 11 states, claims to be the first to raise foreign investment for charter schools.
Its work has gone largely unnoticed, even within the charter school industry. Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education Jim Blew, one of the country’s top charter school advocates, told The Republic he was unaware charter schools have been funded through the EB-5 program.
The foreign investments must create or maintain at least 10 U.S. jobs within two years. When Lakeside Academy signed on with Education Fund, investors could get a visa with a $500,000 investment provided it was for a project in a rural or high-unemployment area.
Wing declined to say how many visas Education Fund’s investors have obtained. Nationwide, about 10,000 such visas are issued annually, but not without controversy and allegations of fraud.
Reports to Congress by U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2015 and 2016 found a lack of federal oversight of the program resulted in fraud.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa and then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in 2017 raised questions about an EB-5 scheme that created no jobs while allowing operators to pocket $50 million from Chinese investors.
EB-5-funded projects also have been widely criticized for gerrymandering poorer neighborhoods into regional centers to fund projects in wealthier areas. For example, New York City’s $25 billion Hudson Yards mega project, which has raised luxury towers across a swath of Manhattan, drew on more than $1 billion in EB-5 investment.
USCIS acknowledged it does not keep a “database of specific EB-5 investments” and said each regional center is responsible to “provide adequate and proper oversight, monitoring and management of its projects.”
Former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee supported Grassley’s efforts to provide more oversight of the EB-5 program, said there have been numerous calls in Congress to fix it because of situations similar to the Hudson Yards project, but “we simply extend the program year after year.”
“Reforms are needed and there is pretty broad agreement on those integrity measures,” Flake said.
David North, a researcher with Washington, D.C-based Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors reducing immigration, said the “stunning” lack of federal oversight allows the EB-5 program to fester while middlemen and developers enrich themselves.
“It’s a terrific business to be in, but it’s a hell of a waste of public-school monies,” he said. “The EB-5 program is a mess. Charter schools are a mess. When you put them together, it’s a messier mess.”
One of Education Fund’s investors was Erica Zhu, who said she works in foreign-funded enterprises in China.
She learned of the program when her husband saw an article about Education Fund, and invested $500,000 in one of the company’s Florida schools, St. Cloud Preparatory Academy.
Four years passed before the U.S. government approved visas for her and three family members. They plan to relocate to North Carolina. (EB-5 investors do not have to live in the same community as their investment.)
“The EB-5 program is a great program that gives foreigners a chance to immigrate to the United States,” Zhu saidin an email to The Republic.
North disagrees, saying it unfairly rewards wealthy “aliens with a handful of green cards.”…
Education Fund’s cheap foreign money only covered a third of the charter schools’ facility costs. Wing’s business partner, American Charter Development, provided high-interest, U.S. hard money loans. The combined charter school fund totaled $234 million.
Lakeside Charter Academy’s loans with American Charter Development carry interest rates up to 9.5%. The school began missing rent payments in 2017, records show.
Wing said some Education Fund schools’ financial hardships may be unrelated to their lease arrangement — for example, board infighting or declining enrollment, both of which have occurred at Lakeside.
Wing said Morley has been generous in allowing charter operators to delay rent payments.
Still, a Republic review of Education Fund’s financing of charter schools — including a review of more than 1,000 records and dozens of interviews — found widespread financial problems at the schools:
Half of Education Fund’s schools have budget deficits, with one Arizona operator, the Learning Foundation and Performing Arts charter school in Gilbert,nearly $2.8 million in the red.
Education Fund charter operators of at least 10 schools in Arizona, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina have borrowed money from other lenders at interest rates of up to 23%.
Independent auditors for three Education Fund charter operators in metro Phoenix have raised doubts to state regulators about whether the schools will remain open. All three, Learning Foundation and Performing Arts, Champion Schools and Painted Desert Montessori Academy, have experienced high and escalating rent payments.
Two Florida schools that raised money through Education Fund closed within a year of opening.
More than half of Education Fund’s charter schools have average to failing letter grades, with just three receiving an “A….”
Frank Yanez, who has worked in the charter school industry for two decades, wanted to open a Montessori-style school in Buckeye for his grandkids and other children.
He turned to Education Fund, which raised $2.5 million from Chinese investors for the $5.6 million Painted Desert Montessori Academy. Yanez, who has worked as a consultant to Education Fund, put no money down.
Yanez sipped a latte as he greeted students and parents with hugs on the first day of classes in early August.
He wore a smile for the students, but he’s worried about the school’s finances.
The school, which is beginning its fourth school year, has paid nearly $2 million in rent to one of Morley’s companies, he said. That’s about what he receives annually from the state of Arizona to teach 370 kids in the K-8 charter school.
Yanez is $1.4 million in debt, and deferred $436,633 in rent during the 2018-19 school year. Some of the borrowed money was used last year for teacher pay raises.
Things were so dire this past year he leveraged future payments from the state as collateral to borrow operating cash. The loan had interest rates up to 23%.
This year, he said, he can’t afford to give raises even though the Arizona Legislature and Ducey approved a budget to provide all teachers with a 5% boost in pay.
“With the money on the rent, they are making money,” Yanez said of Wing and Morley. And when he buys the school, instead of paying them rent, “they will make a few million dollars, and that’s a good return on their investment,” he said.
Yanez also is on the board of Champion Charter Schools, a charter chain that financed two campuses through Education Fund in Chandler and San Tan Valley.
Carolyn Sawyer, who runs Champion, said the schools’ rent is so high she had to defer $800,000 in lease payments last year.
The nonprofit company that runs the schools, including a south Phoenix campus built without EB-5 investment, had a $1.9 million deficit last year.
She said using the EB-5 program was her only option.
Sawyer recalled a woman from Shanghai showing up several years ago when the campus on McQueen Road in Chandler was still under construction. The two put on hard hats and took a tour.
The woman returned several times to check on the school’s progress.
“She decided to invest in American school children,” Sawyer said. “These people have helped us build beautiful schools.”
Out of all the states that have struggled to provide a quality public education over the past decade, perhaps none have seen as precipitous a decline as North Carolina. Once seen as a regional model of progressive education policy, a succession of unfortunate occurrences has severely damaged our public education system. Activists now fight against difficult odds for the change students need most.
Shift of Political Power to Republicans and Impact on North Carolina Education Policy
Like many states, North Carolina was hit hard by the Great Recession and saw funding cuts that greatly impacted our schools. However, the nightmare for our public schools began in earnest in November 2010 when the Republican Party won control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives (Mildwurf & Browder, 2010) in North Carolina’s state legislature. The following year, Republicans gerrymandered electoral districts (Ballotpedia, n.d.a) to ensure they’d be able to hold onto power for the next decade and then set their veto-proof majority to work passing regressive education policies with no opposition.
The policies included significant de-professionalization of the teaching profession in North Carolina through revoking career status protection (Public Schools First NC, 2017) for teachers, terminating advanced degree compensation (Kiley, 2013), and eliminating retiree health care benefits (Bonner, 2017). The GOP majority lifted the cap (Leslie, 2011) on charter schools, worsening economic and racial segregation across the state given that charters serve an increasingly white population (Nordstrom, 2018). The legislature directed a billion dollars (Wagner, 2019) over a decade to voucher programs, despite the fact that the the schools participating in the program were not required to report on student achievement (Public Schools First NC, 2019). Additionally, the legislature cut thousands of teacher assistants (Campbell & Bonner, 2015) and created a school report card system, in which school ratings were highly correlated with levels of poverty (Henkel, 2016). Finally, state legislators passed a K–3 reading initiative (North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, n.d.), which promised to improve results through increasing assessment volume and threatening our most vulnerable students with grade retention. And when K–3 reading achievement got worse, legislators added financial pay- for-performance incentives (Clark, 2016) based on questionable value-added data.
Many of these harmful initiatives were passed in budget bills rather than being moved through deliberative committee processes, eliminating the debate and public input so essential to the creation of effective policy. In addition to promoting a neoliberal education reform agenda, North Carolina’s lawmakers passed massive tax cuts favoring corporations and wealthy individuals, which have taken $3.6 billion in potential annual revenue (Sirota, 2019) off the table, all but ensuring schools will struggle for adequate resources for the foreseeable future.
In North Carolina’s 2016 general election, Republican Mark Johnson eked out a 1% victory (Ballotpedia, n.d.b) for the state superintendency—the first time in more than 100 years the office had been won by a Republican. State legislators immediately moved to transfer power away from newly elected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and the State Board of Education and give Superintendent Johnson unprecedented control of North Carolina’s public school system (North Carolina General Assembly, 2016).
As State Superintendent, Johnson has been a disaster. Having only two years as a TFA teacher, he was over his head. His inept leadership outraged teachers and provoked mass walkouts.
Parmenter says that teacher activism is exhausting but worth it.
This year there is an election for state superintendent. The Network for Public Education has endorsed educator Jen Mangrum for the post. There is a chance to revive public education in North Carolina.
This is a very engaging video interview of Tom Ultican, an expert on corporate education reform, explaining the federal takeover of public schools via No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Ultican goes into detail about the corporate assault on public schools in the Dallas Independent School District. He names names, starting with the misguided superintendency of Mike Miles, a Broadie who managed to drive out large numbers of experienced teachers. He identifies the funders of corporate funders, both billionaires and the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
He gives a concise analysis of the money behind the “portfolio model,” charters, and privatization in Texas and Dallas.
Some refuse to enroll students whose parents are gay or hire gay staff.
Discrimination is A-OK at these schools.
This would not be a problem for Betsy DeVos, whose family has contributed to anti-gay organizations for years. It would not be a problem for the current a Supreme Court, which ruled that a baker in Colorado need not sell a cake to a gay couple if homosexuality offends his religious beliefs.
Postal and Martin wrote:
In the shadow of a nearly 200-foot cross, Central Florida Christian Academy enrolls students who live by the Bible’s commands and abstain from “sexual immorality” — meaning gay children aren’t welcome on the state-supported campus in west Orange County.
Calvary Christian High School in Clearwater denies admission to students if they, or someone in their home, are practicing a “homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity” or “promoting such practices.”
Wade Christian School in Melbourne keeps an “expulsion list,” with a “homosexual act” among the offenses, alongside bringing weapons to campus, distributing drugs and striking a staff member.
In Florida last year, 156 private Christian schools with these types of anti-gay views educated more than 20,800 students with tuition paid for by state scholarships, an Orlando Sentinel investigation found.
Florida’s scholarship programs, often referred to as school vouchers, sent more than $129 million to these religious institutions. That means at least 14 percent of Florida’s nearly 147,000 scholarship students last year attended private schools where homosexuality was condemned or, at a minimum, unwelcome.
Step by step, the Trump administration, Red states, and the Supreme Court are denying any civil rights to gay people.
MARYLAND COURT ALLOWS BALTIMORE CITY PARENTS TO RE-OPEN BRADFORD SCHOOL FUNDING CASE
By Wendy Lecker
On January 21, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Audrey Carrion paved the way for Maryland’s long-running school funding litigation, Bradford v. Maryland, to proceed. Judge Carrion denied the State of Maryland’s motion to dismiss and ordered the case be prepared for a trial on the merits.
The Bradford case was first filed in 1994 by Baltimore City public school parents, alleging that the State’s underfunding of City schools violated students’ constitutional right to an adequate education. After granting partial summary judgment in favor of the parents in 1996, the parties entered into a consent decree requiring increased funding. Despite enactment of a new school funding formula in 2002, the State consistently failed to fully fund it.
In recent reports on the school funding system, the State itself has found the Baltimore City schools remain severely underfunded. The funding shortfalls have, in turn, resulted in glaring deficits in essential resources in Baltimore schools, which serve a very high percentage of low-income, at-risk students. Schools are lacking in teachers, guidance counselors, librarians and basic curricular offerings. Many buildings are in disrepair. Student outcomes are inadequate, graduation rates are low, and dropout rates are double the state average.
Faced with consistent State failure to remedy these intolerable conditions, the Bradford parents petitioned to reopen the case in March 2019. The plaintiffs are represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU of Maryland, and the firm Baker Hostetler.
The State moved to dismiss the case, claiming the petition was untimely, the 2002 consent decree was terminated, and the case presents a purely political question not suitable for judicial review.
In denying the State’s motion, Judge Carrion ruled that the Bradford court intended to retain jurisdiction until the State fully complied with the consent decree, and the consent decree remains viable. The Court also rejected the State’s argument that the case involved a purely political question, ruling that Maryland courts retain an inherent authority to review State compliance with the constitutional guarantee of education.
Judge Carrion’s ruling paves the way for the vindication of the constitutional rights of children in the Baltimore City Schools after a nearly two-decade struggle to secure adequate resources for their public schools.
Wendy Lecker is a Senior Attorney at Education Law Center
