Peter Greene: The Promises Charter Schools Don't Make

The Promises Charter Schools Don't Make

The Promises Charter Schools Don't Make

Because the term "charter schools" often comes with the word "public" attached, parents can be surprised by some of the ways in which charters do not operate like actual public schools. Here are just a few factors that emptors should caveat when considering a charter school.

A Stable School

Just this week, word that two separate charters will be closing their doors immediately. In Delaware, the Delaware Academy of Public Safety and Security closed its doors on Tuesday. It announced that closure on Tuesday in a letter to families. Wednesday, Detroit Delta Preparatory Academy for Social Justice announced that its last day of classes would be Friday.

Sudden closure of charter schools is not unusual. The Center for Media and Democracy found that about 2,500 charter schools closed between 2000 and 2013. Some of them closed at the end of the school year, some never opened in the first place, and some closed abruptly in the middle of the year. Charters can close for a variety reasons; this week's closings appear to be due to financial problems because of low enrollment.

Charter schools are businesses, and they close for business reasons. That doesn't make them evil, but it does make them different from the public system, which is built, however imperfectly, on the Continue reading: The Promises Charter Schools Don't Make

Why Electing Tony Thurmond as Superintendent of Public Instruction Is the Most Important Race in California

Why Electing Tony Thurmond as Superintendent of Public Instruction Is the Most Important Race in California

Why Electing Tony Thurmond as Superintendent of Public Instruction Is the Most Important Race in California

Last week in my column on Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, I outlined how her superb study thoroughly exposes the fact that over the last twenty years or so, “the billionaire boys club has favored a punitive, hierarchical, undemocratic, one-size fits all approach that has hurt students more than it has helped them.” These corporate education reformers come to the table with an endless supply of money and a set of prejudices that favor:

Ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in the messy trenches of inner-city classrooms. They came with distrust of an education culture that values social justice over more practical considerations like wealth and position. They came with the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators. And most of all, they came with their suspicion—even their hatred—of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.

Tuck is THE Republican choice who is endorsed on statewide Republican mailers

Here in California, we have seen that the Bloombergs, Waltons, Broads, and other self-proclaimed rich saviors of the world have not been satisfied just to meddle in the classroom through various forms of philanthrocapitalism, they have sought to impose their will by trying to buy elections. Just last June an all-star crew of billionaires lost in their effort to turn California’s gubernatorial election into a proxy war over corporate education reform when Antonio Villaraigosa’s anti-union crusade for Governor fell flat with voters despite his donors’ considerable largesse.

Unfortunately, while their millions were vanquished in that round, the bottomless wallet crowd Continue reading: Why Electing Tony Thurmond as Superintendent of Public Instruction Is the Most Important Race in California

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New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities | Schott Foundation for Public Education

New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities | Schott Foundation for Public Education

New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities

A new report released by the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) reveals that the inexcusable underfunding of New York's public schools hits districts with Black and Latinx students the hardest.

Thanks to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's 13-year lawsuit against the State of New York, a struggle supported by the Schott Foundation from our earliest days, a "Foundation Aid" formula was mandated by the courts and finally passed into law by the state legislature in 2007. However that promise to New York's children was never fully kept: some $4.2 billion in total, by the state's own numbers, is still owed to districts.

AQE's "Educational Racism" report highlights that this underfunding hits some districts harder than others. From the executive summary:

• Two thirds of the districts in New York State are still owed Foundation Aid. By contrast, 100 percent of high needs school districts with majority Black and Latino students are owed Foundation Aid.
• There 25 school districts that are both high need and majority Black and Latino.
• The students in these 25 districts represent 80 percent of the Black and Latino (Latinx) students in the state and 69 percent of the economically disadvantaged students in the state
• These 25 school districts are owed 62 percent ($2.6 billion) of all Foundation Aid. The failure to fully fund Foundation Aid results in the failure to adequately fund schools that are majority Black and Latino.

This is, sadly, a story we see in communities all across the country: the quality of one's public education is largely on our position within the very structural problems that schools are told to solve. Our time in school, as in the workplace and Continue reading: New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities | Schott Foundation for Public Education

The Reading Wars? Who’s Talking About Reading and Class Size?

The Reading Wars? Who’s Talking About Reading and Class Size?

The Reading Wars? Who’s Talking About Reading and Class Size?

…extensive research in the reading difficulties of children show that large classes are the basic cause of failure in reading as well as in other subjects.

~Professor Arthur I. Gates, nationally known authority in the field of reading instruction. Elementary School Journal; February 1937.

When parents and teachers debate phonics and whole language, they might be ignoring a real problem facing their children in the classroom—the difficulty that steals a teacher’s ability to address the individualized reading needs a student brings to school.

That problem is huge class sizes! If you note the date of the quote above, it’s 1937!

In 2018, few still discuss class size in relationship to reading instruction along with reading disabilities and dyslexia. Many policymakers and corporate reformers like to push the class size issue under the rug.

The reading wars, on the other hand, often create opposition between teachers and parents. This rift can hurt public schools, and more importantly students. There are many who believe this conflict is designed to do just that!

Some researchers proclaim that class size doesn’t matter, that it is simply not cost efficient. So there’s no point in addressing it. But class size research disputing the Continue reading: The Reading Wars? Who’s Talking About Reading and Class Size?

Ed. Dept. Needs to Do a Better Job of Probing Charter Closures, Report Finds - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Ed. Dept. Needs to Do a Better Job of Probing Charter Closures, Report Finds - Politics K-12 - Education Week
Ed. Dept. Needs to Do a Better Job of Probing Charter Closures, Report Finds

The U.S. Department of Education hasn't done a great job of keeping tabs on states that have closed charter schools, according to a report released Monday by the agency's Office of the Inspector General.

The OIG—the department's internal investigator—looked at schools in three states: Arizona (which has highest number of closed charters authorized by the same school authorizer), California (which has the largest charter enrollment and the most charters of any state), and Louisiana (which has the highest ratio of closed charter schools to total charters). The review covered the 2011-12 school year and the 2012-13 school year.

The department did not provide enough guidance to make sure these states understood how to effectively manage charter school closures, the OIG found. And it did not look closely at states' own systems for closing charters.

What's more, the states did not always meet federal and state requirements for closing out grants to charters that received federal funding for disadvantaged students and children in special education, disposing of assets a charter bought with federal funds, or protecting student information from the closed charter schools.

This did not affect a trivial number of schools. Here's a chart explaining where the OIG spotted weaknesses:

The OIG recommends that the department come up with a risk assessment that flags states most at risk of having difficulty with charter closures, look over its guidance to make sure it does a good job of addressing issues related to closing a charter school, and work with states to come up with smart procedures for closing out charters.

The department did not explicitly agree or disagree with the OIG's conclusions, but noted that in recent years, it has taken steps to improve the process, including putting out a "Dear Colleague" letter on charter closures. And it worried that the OIG's recommendations for fixing the problem  Continue reading: Ed. Dept. Needs to Do a Better Job of Probing Charter Closures, Report Finds - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Growing Number of Undocumented Adolescents Warehoused in Tents, Denied an Education | janresseger

Growing Number of Undocumented Adolescents Warehoused in Tents, Denied an Education | janresseger

Growing Number of Undocumented Adolescents Warehoused in Tents, Denied an Education

Do you remember the thousands of migrant children detained at the border?  It is easy to get distracted these days by crisis after crisis in the federal government and forget about important issues. When I found myself wondering recently whether there are still children and adolescents being detained, I realized I didn’t know whether or how this had all ended or been dragged on.  Then I read yesterday’s NY Times.

Caitlin Dickerson reports: “In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.  Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room.  They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.  But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete.  Access to legal services is limited. These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children—the largest population ever—whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.”

The children being moved to the tent city in Texas are not toddlers or pre-schoolers: “Most of the detained children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Some crossed illegally; others are seeing asylum. Children who are deemed ‘unaccompanied minors,’ either because they were separated from their parents or crossed the border alone, are held in federal custody until they can be matched with sponsors, usually relatives or family friends, who agree to house them while their immigration cases play out in the courts.”

Dickerson adds that the rapid growth in the number of young people in custody—fivefold Continue reading; Growing Number of Undocumented Adolescents Warehoused in Tents, Denied an Education | janresseger