Teachers receive emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

Teachers receive emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

White Plains teachers flooded with emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

Hours after Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public employees do not have to pay union fees if they don’t join their labor organization, teachers in the White Plains school district began receiving emails advising them how to opt out of the union.

The emails were sent by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative nonprofit that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations in recent years from the foundation started by U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her husband.

Mark Stanton, a calculus teacher at White Plains High School, grew up in Michigan and immediately recognized the Mackinac name and its connection to the DeVoses, who are also from that state.

“I was surprised by the speed at which that arrived,” Stanton said. “It’s clearly part of a very obvious, broad effort to chip away at teachers unions, public unions.”

Lindsay Killen, vice president for strategic outreach and communications at the Mackinac Center, said the purpose of the emails and other materials — as part of a $10 million campaign the organization is launching for the rest of the year on this issue — is to educate public employees on the court decision.

“The goal is that every public employee across the country will know and understand what their rights are,” Killen said. “We are reaching out to all public employees Continue reading: Teachers receive emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer : NPR

More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer : NPR

More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer

Here's a little pop quiz.

Multiple-choice tests are useful because:

A: They're cheap to score.

B: They can be scored quickly.

C: They score without human bias.

D: All of the above.

It would take a computer about a nano-second to mark "D" as the correct answer. That's easy.

But now, machines are also grading students' essays. Computers are scoring long form answers on anything from the fall of the Roman Empire, to the pros and cons of government regulations.

Developers of so-called "robo-graders" say they understand why many students and teachers would be skeptical of the idea. But they insist, with computers already doing jobs as complicated and as fraught as driving cars, detecting cancer, and carrying on conversations, they can certainly handle grading students' essays.

"I've been working on this now for about 25 years, and I feel that ... the time is right and it's really starting to be used now," says Peter Foltz, a research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He's also vice president for research for Pearson, the company whose automated scoring program graded some 34 million student essays on state and national high-stakes tests last year. "There will always be people who don't trust it ... but we're seeing a lot more breakthroughs in areas like content understanding, and AI is now able to do things which they couldn't do really well before."

Foltz says computers "learn" what's considered good writing by analyzing essays graded by humans. Then, the automated programs score essays themselves by scanning for those same features.

"We have artificial intelligence techniques which can judge anywhere from 50 to 100 features," Foltz says. That includes not only basics like spelling and grammar, but also whether a student is on topic, the coherence or the flow of an argument, and the complexity of word choice and sentence structure. "We've done a number of studies to show that the scoring can be highly accurate," he says.

To demonstrate, he takes a not-so-stellar sample essay, rife with spelling mistakes and Continue reading: More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer : NPR

The Fraud of Computer Scoring on the Common Core Exams - Network For Public Education - https://wp.me/s3bR9v-6488 via @Network4pubEd

Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think

Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think

Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think

How Private Prisons Take Tax Dollars Away from Fixing Our Criminal Justice System – In the Public Interest - https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/?p=6994

Buried under all the bad news this week was a glimmer of progress. No, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win in New York’s 14th Congressional District — that’s way more than a glimmer. I’m talking about the order from a California judge to reunite separated undocumented immigrant families within 30 days.

Who knows whether and how the Trump administration will implement the order? But one thing’s for sure: if Trump continues to criminalize immigration, the need for detention space will continue to grow.

That’s music to the ears of the private prison industry, particularly CoreCivic and GEO Group, two publicly traded corporations that currently detain over two-thirds of undocumented immigrants. It’s music to their investors too — both have seen their stocks skyrocket in recent weeks.

Because this is what they’ve been waiting for. As we document in a new report, CoreCivic and GEO Group both have been getting in the game of offering loans to governments to build jails, prisons, and detention centers. Both have turned private equity financing, also known as “public-private partnerships,” into a central growth strategy after they became Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in 2013. In other words, private prison corporations want to be landlords.

Why? Because REIT status allows them to dodge corporate-level taxation. Last year alone, GEO Group avoided almost $44 million in taxes.

So here comes the federal government desperate for more cages to lock up undocumented immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security is considering adding space for 15,000 more adults and children in family detention centers. The agency already hired GEO Group in 2017 to finance, design, build, operate, and maintain a new 1,000-bed adult detention facility in Texas, which is expected to be up and running later this year.

All of this has the corporations salivating. A couple weeks ago, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told his company’s investors, this is “the most robust kind of sales environment we’ve seen in probably 10 years, not only on the federal side with the dynamics with ICE and [U.S.] Marshals, but also with these activities on the state side.”

GEO Group and CoreCivic now stand more ready than ever to, as they describe it, “partner” with the Trump administration and “understand and Continue reading: Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think

Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust. - The Washington Post

Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust. - The Washington Post

Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust.

A major new report concludes that a $575-million project partly underwritten by the Gates Foundation that used student test scores to evaluate teachers failed to achieve its goals of improving student achievement — as in, it didn’t work.

Put this in the “they-were-warned-but-didn’t-listen” category.

The six-year project began in 2009 when the foundation gave millions of dollars to three public school districts — Hillsborough County in Florida (the first to start the work), Memphis and Pittsburgh. The districts supplied matching funds. Four charter management organizations also were involved — Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped nearly $215 million into the project while the partnering school organizations supplied their own money, for a total cost of $575 million. The aim was to create teacher evaluation systems that depended on student standardized test scores and observations by “peer evaluators.” These systems, it was conjectured, could identify the teachers who were most effective in improving student academic performance.

This, in turn, would help school leaders staff classrooms with the most effective teachers and would lead more low-income minority students to have the best teachers — or so the thinking went. Schools also agreed to boost professional development for teachers, give bonuses to educators evaluated as effective and change their recruitment process.

The 526-page report titled “Improving Teacher Effectiveness: Final Report,” conducted by the Rand Corp. actually says:

Overall, the initiative did not achieve its stated goals for students, particularly LIM [low-income minority] students. By the end of 2014—2015, student outcomes were not dramatically better than outcomes in similar sites that did not participate in the IP [Intensive Partnerships] initiative. Furthermore, in the sites where these analyses could be conducted, we did not find improvement in the effectiveness of newly hired teachers relative to experienced teachers; we found very few  Continue reading: 

Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust. - The Washington Post

Against Philanthropy - The Atlantic

Against Philanthropy - The Atlantic

Against Big Philanthropy
Philanthropy sounds nice, but it’s still a tax-sheltered way that plutocrats exercise power, says Stanford's Rob Reich.

 The world’s tech titans are amassing some of the biggest fortunes ever created. Some, like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, are giving most of it away. While there have been some dissenters, the general reaction to this kind of philanthropy has been positive. Bill Gates has the highest net favorability of any major political figure not named Colin Powell; he’s seen as warm andcompetent.

But Stanford professor Rob Reich, who directs the university’s Center for Ethics in Society, explores an argument against philanthropy  in a forthcoming book, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. It can be summarized in a sentence:

“Big Philanthropy is definitionally a plutocratic voice in our democracy,” Reich told me, “an exercise of power by the wealthy that is unaccountable, non-transparent, donor-directed, perpetual, and tax-subsidized.”

This was not previously a minority position. If you look back to the origins of these massive foundations in the Gilded Age fortunes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, their creation was massively controversial, Reich said, and for good reason.

“100 years ago, there was enormous skepticism that creating a philanthropic entity was either a way to cleanse your hands of the dirty way you’d made your money or, more interestingly, that it was welcome from the standpoint of democracy,” Reich told me at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “Because big philanthropy is an exercise of power, and in a democracy, any form of concentrated power deserves scrutiny, not gratitude.”Continue reading: Against Philanthropy - The Atlantic

Christian Non-Profit Faces Scrutiny Over Government Foster Care Contract for Separated Children

Christian Non-Profit Faces Scrutiny Over Government Foster Care Contract for Separated Children

Christian Non-Profit Faces Scrutiny Over Government Foster Care Contract for Separated Children

Bethany Christian Services, which has links to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has fostered out at least 81 children taken from their parents at the U.S. border.

The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy prompted widespread public outrage in the spring and summer of 2018, and the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the United States’ border with Mexico has given rise to a potential future crisis as lawyers and advocates express grave concerns that many separated families may never be reunited. 

Among the approaches taken by the federal government has been to engage foster care providers throughout the country to house children whose parents were forced or coerced into giving them up at the international border.

At the end of June 2018, one foster care provider in particular came under intense scrutiny, and was the subject of speculation over its operations, as well as its links to the Trump administration. On 24 June, the left-wing Facebook page “The Other 98%” posted a widely-shared meme about Bethany Christian Services: 

Bethany Christian Services, an adoption center with financial ties to [Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos, has taken 81 immigrant children who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border. Most have had no contact with their families. They’re charging $700 per child per night. This isn’t foster care, this is state-sponsored kidnapping. 

There were more detailed claims about the links between the DeVos family and Bethany, with The Other 98% writing: “Betsy DeVos donated $300,000 to the group and her husband’s cousin Brian DeVos was a Vice President.”

The links between the extended DeVos family and Bethany are undeniable. Tax filings archived by ProPublica show that between 2001 and 2015, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation (the philanthropic organization run by DeVos and her husband) gave $343,000 in grants to Bethany Christian Services. 

Between 2012 and 2015, Bethany received $750,000 in grants from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which is run by the Education Secretary’s father-in-law, the billionaire founder of Amway Richard DeVos, and his wife Helen. 

Furthermore, Brian DeVos — a cousin of Betsy DeVos’s husband Dick — was the Senior Vice President for Child and Family Services at Bethany as recently as 2015, and Maria DeVos — who is married to Dick DeVos’s brother Doug — has served on the board of Bethany. 

The DeVos family has for years been a wealthy and influential force in Christian conservatism and Republican politics in their home state of Michigan and beyond. While Betsy and Dick DeVos did oversee the donation of $343,000 in grants to Bethany between 2001 and 2015, it’s worth noting that they also donated millions of dollars to dozens of other recipients, many of them Christian-oriented educational and childcare organizations. 

Bethany Christian Services is a prominent non-profit provider of adoption and foster services, as well Continue reading: Christian Non-Profit Faces Scrutiny Over Government Foster Care Contract for Separated Children

The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education

The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education

The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education

This year’s Brown Center Report (BCR) on American Education is the 17th issue overall since its beginning in 2000. The 2018 edition focuses on the state of social studies and civics education in U.S. schools. Like previous editions, which were authored by Tom Loveless, the report comprises three studies: The first chapter examines student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress; the second examines state policy related to civics education; and the third provides a look at the nation’s social studies teachers.

PROLOGUE

American schools find themselves immersed in politics in 2018. A horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida sparked a wave of student demonstrations, culminating in hundreds of thousands of students descending on Washington, D.C., for the March for Our Lives. A controversial president and his controversial secretary of education have aroused passions on issues including the deportation of young immigrants, civil rights protections for transgender children, and schools’ handling of bullying and student discipline. Meanwhile, unrest among teachers has yielded rallies and strikes across the country.

This, in other words, is a time of heightened political awareness and activity in schools. It is also a time of heightened concern about the state of U.S. politics and democracy. The 2016 election drew attention to the increasing polarization and divisiveness of our politics, and to the susceptibility of American voters’ beliefs to false or misleading information. These concerns have raised important questions about K-12 education in America. Are schools equipping students with the tools to become engaged, informed, and compassionate citizens? Are they equipping some students, or groups of students, better than others?

Continue reading the prologue to the 2018 Brown Center Report →

The 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education

Public School System Charged with Fraud: Guilty or Not Guilty? | Cloaking Inequity

Public School System Charged with Fraud: Guilty or Not Guilty? | Cloaking Inequity

PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM CHARGED WITH FRAUD: GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY?

Viva Las Vegas! I was asked by FreedomFest to participate in Las Vegas as an expert witness for the defense in their upcoming event “Public School System on Trial.” FreedomFest is a gathering of about 2,000 Libertarian-minded folk. The event is well-known for its annual “mock trial.” The “trial” takes on an important issue and looks at it from all sides, with a judge, star witnesses, defense and prosecuting attorneys. The jury is made up of FreedomFest attendees. Here is selection of issues on trial from past years:

• Religion
• Foreign Policy
• the Fed
• Climate Change
• the Police
• Wall Street
• the Republican Party

Here is what FreedomFest says about the Education mock trial.

The concept of public schooling in the United States has been around for a long time. As early as the 1600s, communities created structures of required and free public education and schooling. It wasn’t until the 1800s that the public school system really took shape in the United States.

Since that time, public schools have had a mixed reputation. For some, the local public school is a symbol of civic pride, community, service and progress. But in other ways, the public school system has instituted segregation, inequality, even corruption.

What is the state of our public school system today? With the emergence of common core, national standards, increasing taxes, school shootings, depleting test scores, standardized tests, diminishing arts, recess and physical education, is the public school system HELPING or HURTING our efforts to educate our children and improve our society?

And even more important, is the public school system even doing what it claims is it’s purpose? Is it EDUCATING our children or actually DEFRAUDING the American public?

In our famous mock trial this year, we’ll bring together top-notch experts in the public school system to charge the system with its shortcomings and also defend it from its detractors.

Who is right? What’s the answer for the future of American public education? The school system as it is now? Or something VERY different?

You’ll be there for the historic discussion. And you’ll get to weigh in! We’ll take YOUR vote at the end to see who wins the case.

The graphic they gave me:

‪Join me at #TheFreedomFest 2018 where I'll speak in defense of Public education in the Mock Trial. Use code VOICE100 to get $100 off your registration before 6/30! www.freedomfest.com @TheFreedomFest

A post shared by Julian Vasquez Heilig (@professorjvh) on Jun 14, 2018 at 2:57pm PDT

Continue Reading: Public School System Charged with Fraud: Guilty or Not Guilty? | Cloaking Inequity

We need to protect the Department of Education

We need to protect the Department of Education

Education unfits us for slavery; we need to protect the Department of Education
The new White House proposal to merge the Departments of Education and Labor views students only as workers

While the world was focused on the horrific Trump administration policy of family separation, they were pushing other awful proposals through. While we rubbernecked at the “zero tolerance” immigration policies that have undoubtedly caused trauma to children separated from their families, last week, the White House released a 132-page proposal to restructure the federal government. It calls into question “how well the current organizational constructs of Government are aligned to meet Americans’ needs in the digital age.” Headlining this proposal is a plan to merge the Departments of Education and Labor into a single federal agency, the Department of Education and the Workforce.

The notion of a governmental reboot seems fair enough. Government bureaucracies that grow over time can be anathema to innovation and efficiency. Technology has challenged the way we engage with all institutions, and the federal government could certainly improve its use of technology to better deliver services.

However, the chief problem in this country has been our nefarious desire to link education and labor — at times with chains. We don’t need a federal agency to concretize the connection.

Some parts of the plan seem reasonable enough. For instance, splitting the responsibilities of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — Civil Works, which does water resource and flood risk management, and moving it out of the Department of Defense and into the Departments of Transportation and the Interior But education deserves more attention than this plan would allow. In addition, there are many agencies that intersect and interact with education, such as Health and Human Services, which manages the federal Head Start pre-school program, part of the DOE’s push for quality early learning, and Housing and Urban Development, which coordinates with HHS and the DOE to help homeless children get those early learning services.

The reality is that the Departments of Education and Labor are big enough and important enough to be standalone agencies. Unschooled reductions in government and reflexive conservatism Continue reading: We need to protect the Department of Education

Deluxe Charter Schools Serve Up Opportunities For Taxpayer-Funded White Flight | Alternet

Deluxe Charter Schools Serve Up Opportunities For Taxpayer-Funded White Flight | Alternet

Deluxe Charter Schools Serve Up Opportunities For Taxpayer-Funded White Flight
Why charter schools do this is no mystery: racism pays.

Charter schools are often billed as benefiting disadvantaged urban kids—but in lots of places around the country, charters are segregating school systems by offering rich white families a way to get their kids away from students of color and poor students. In reality, 115 charter schools nationwide have student populations at least 20 percentage points whiter than public schools in their districts; more than 700 charter schools nationally are whiter than their district’s public schools. 

Why charter schools do this is no mystery: racism pays. As for how they they do it, Emmanuel Felton reports on common tactics like not offering school bus service so that parents have to have the flexibility and the reliable vehicle to get their kids to and from school. Or they require uniforms from Land’s End that low-income families can’t afford. Or they create “priority attendance zones” that ensure that kids from mostly white neighborhoods will get an admissions advantage.

Felton reports in depth on Lake Oconee Academy in Georgia, which is 73 percent white while public schools in the district are just 12 percent white. It was founded essentially at the behest of a company selling luxury lakeside properties, and when the school opened, 80 percent of its spots were reserved for people living in that company’s properties. Lake Oconee Academy has a “piano lab” with 25 pianos. It has 17 Advanced Placement courses. And just 10 percent of its students are black in a district where 68 percent of public school students are black.

As one mother, who ruled out trying to send her kids to Lake Oconee Academy because there was no school bus to get them there, said, “It’s like a black and white thing, who has money and who doesn’t have money.” It’s not just Lake Oconee Academy, and it’s the kind of education policy the Trump administration, with Betsy DeVos heading the Education Department, is pushing.

Deluxe Charter Schools Serve Up Opportunities For Taxpayer-Funded White Flight | Alternet

Stories by Laura Clawson | Alternet - https://www.alternet.org/authors/laura-clawson-0

I am going to the border. Here's why. - Lily's Blackboard

I am going to the border. Here's why. - Lily's Blackboard

I am going to the border. Here’s why.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”-Bishop Desmond Tutu

On Sunday, I am going to Tornillo, Texas on the Mexican border, where Donald Trump has jailed innocent children. As an elementary teacher, as president of a union of educators dedicated to nurturing every student, as a mother, and as a Latina, I must bear witness to Donald Trump’s unimaginable cruelty and inexplicable inhumanity to children.

Any parent knows the panic of momentarily losing a child in the store, and most of us can remember being children ourselves and feeling the terror sweep over us when we can’t find Mom or Dad. That is after only a few minutes of separation. This what these tender-aged children, separated from parents who are seeking asylum, are feeling for weeks or months.  The terror these parents and their little ones are experiencing must be unbearable. 

Even if the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other respected organizations had not issued statements about how damaging such family separations are, members of the NEA understand child development. We know that this is causing irreparable emotional and physical trauma to these boys and girls.

Our outrage is even more acute because all of this—every second of terror, fright, and worry in the lives of these children and parents—results from an intentional policy. A choice Donald Trump made.

We have heard this cruel administration and its enablers refer to child prisons like the one in Tornillo as ‘summer camps’ or ‘boarding schools.’  No one is fooled. Such ridiculous comparisons and asinine justifications simply increase our outrage at their callous, hateful treatment of desperate children. Summer camp is not a jail. This is a jail for children. 

Don’t let Trump pull the wool over your eyes with his executive order to “end family separation.” To actually do that, the administration must end the zero-tolerance policy. As long as the prosecution of parents continues, family separation continues. Furthermore, the administration has created no plan to reunite the thousands of children separated from their parents.

I think the Stoneman Douglas students said it best, when speaking about their own tragedy: We appreciate thoughts and prayers, but they are not going to be enough. Our thoughts and prayers are certainly with these separated, incarcerated children. However, it will take much more for us to repair the damage and end this Trump-made disaster. 

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”-Desmond Tutu

We must act!

We must find every politician who’s running for office at any level and demand to know if they are going to protect families from Zero-Compassion policies. These children can’t vote, but we can. And we will!

This terrible tragedy is of Donald Trump’s making, but just as it takes a village to raise a child, it took a particular Trumpian village to imprison these children and then justify it. It took the complicity of people around him who were willing to do his bidding. They created the blueprint to enact his horrible policy and then blithely defended him and themselves.

History will judge and condemn those who separated families and incarcerated children. Toddlers. Babies. The names of their jailers will forever be recorded in the worst chapters of the American story—a story that belongs to each of us, a story that we write with the actions we take, as well as those we fail to take. The culprits will surely be remembered. And so, my friends, will we.

Yes, it took a twisted village to create this crisis. But we will be the village to save these children and families. We will not fail them and we will not lose. We will not abandon any of these blessed children.

If we do not act now, then when will we? The question is no longer, “Who is Donald Trump?” It is: “Who are we?”

I am going to the border. Here's why. - Lily's Blackboard

Diane Ravitch: Charter schools are making our public schools worse - The Washington Post

Charter schools are making our public schools worse - The Washington Post

Charter schools are making our public schools worse

Diane Ravitch is a historian of American education at New York University.

In 1988, teachers union leader Albert Shanker had an idea: What if teachers were allowed to create a school within a school, where they could develop innovative ways to teach dropouts and unmotivated students? The teachers would get the permission of their colleagues and the local school board to open their school, which would be an R&D lab for the regular public school. These experimental schools, he said, would be called “charter schools.”

Five years later, in 1993, Shanker publicly renounced his proposal. The idea had been adopted by businesses seeking profits, he said, and would be used, like vouchers, to privatize public schools and destroy teachers unions. He wrote that “vouchers, charter schools, for-profit management schemes are all quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”

Shanker died in 1997, too soon to see his dire prediction come true. Today, there are more than 7,000 charter schools with about 3 million students (total enrollment in public schools is 50 million). About90 percent  of charter schools are nonunion. Charters are more segregated than public schools, prompting the Civil Rights Project at UCLA in 2010 to call charter schools “a major political success” but “a civil rights failure.” They compete with public schools instead of collaborating. Charter proponents claim that the schools are progressive, but schools that are segregated and nonunion do not deserve that mantle.

The charter universe includes corporate chains that operate hundreds of schools in different states. The largest is KIPP, with 209 schools. The-second-largest has 167 schools and is affiliated with Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen. About one of every six charters operates for profit; in Michigan, 80 percent  are run by for-profit corporations. Nationally, nearly 40 percent of charter schoolsare run by for-profit businesses known as Educational Management Organizations.

The largest online charter chain, K12 Inc., was founded with the help of former junk-bond king Michael Milken and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The biggest single virtual charter was the Ohio-based Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which collected $1 billionfrom Ohio taxpayers from 2000 until its bankruptcy earlier this year. The charter’s 20 percent graduation rate was the lowest in the nation.

Charter schools pave the way for vouchers. More than half of states now have some form of public subsidy for religious and private schools. Voucher schools are not bound by civil rights laws and may exclude students based on religion, disabilities and LGBT status.

Charters are publicly funded but privately managed. They call themselves public schools, but a federal court ruling in 2010 declared they are “not state actors.” The National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2016 that charters are private corporations, not public schools. As private corporations, they are not subject to the same laws as public schools.

The anti-union Walton Family Foundation  is the biggest private financier of Continue reading: Charter schools are making our public schools worse - The Washington Post