Shawgi Tell: Public Opposition to Charter Schools Steadily Growing | Dissident Voice

Public Opposition to Charter Schools Steadily Growing | Dissident Voice

Public Opposition to Charter Schools Steadily Growing

Over the years, as more problems with charter schools have been exposed, analyzed, and critiqued, more people have come to see the need for opposing them and for defending public education and the public interest. Criticism and rejection of these privately-operated schools has become more mainstream in recent years and it is safe to say that opposition to charter schools will keep growing so long as neoliberals and privatizers impose more charter schools on society.

Public school boards and many different education advocacy groups, along with more legislators, former charter school teachers, many public school teachers, countless teacher educators and teacher education students, teacher unions, and myriad rights and justice groups are just some of the forces that are increasingly speaking out and taking action against charter schools. Many others have also heard of charter schools, and even with little or no investigation, they tend to approach charter schools with some skepticism. The days when charter schools were blindly embraced and investigation was deemed unnecessary are gradually fading. More people are doing their homework and learning about the numerous problems these segregated contract schools create.

Recent Actions

In April 2021, the Buffalo Public School Board voted to close two Buffalo charter schools that have been failing for years. There is also a legal push to pass a moratorium on charter schools for the next three years in the city. And in the past year even the New York State legislature has also become a little CONTINUE READING: Public Opposition to Charter Schools Steadily Growing | Dissident Voice

Texas: Public Schools Are Better Than Charter Schools: Stop Funding Failure! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Texas: Public Schools Are Better Than Charter Schools: Stop Funding Failure! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Texas: Public Schools Are Better Than Charter Schools: Stop Funding Failure!

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to the North Texas School Boards Association by Zoom. Right now, Texas is ground zero for the charter industry. This is astonishing because the public schools in Texas far outperform the charter schools. The charter school lobby markets themselves as “saviors” of children, but they are far more likely to fail than public schools. This is a summary of what I told my friends in Texas:

I am a graduate of the Houston public schools. My father, who grew up in Savannah, never finished high school; my mother, who was born in Bessarabia, was very proud of her high school diploma from the Houston public schools.

I believe that all of us, whether or not we have children, whether or not we have children in public school, have a civic obligation to support public schools, just as we must support other public services, like police, firefighting, public roads, public parks, and public libraries. Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society, and no investment is more precious than investing in the education of our CONTINUE READING: Texas: Public Schools Are Better Than Charter Schools: Stop Funding Failure! | Diane Ravitch's blog

JEFF BRYANT: A Flood of New Charter Schools Shows How the Industry May Try to Thrive — Despite the Pandemic | Ed Politics

A Flood of New Charter Schools Shows How the Industry May Try to Thrive — Despite the Pandemic | Ed Politics

A FLOOD OF NEW CHARTER SCHOOLS SHOWS HOW THE INDUSTRY MAY TRY TO THRIVE — DESPITE THE PANDEMIC

As the COVID-19 pandemic began closing school buildings and forcing schools to quickly ramp up online learning programs in April, an op-ed by Alex Medler, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers, made an appeal to Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education to change the guidelines of her department’s grants for new charter school startups to allow the money to go to existing charter schools. Medler justified the request to address “immediate needs during the pandemic.”

But when Chalkbeat broke the story that DeVos would agree with Medler and approve Florida’s request to repurpose about $10 million in grant money for new charter schools to be redirected to existing charters, Medler made the curious admission to Chalkbeat reporter Matt Barnum that another reason for the need to change grant requirements was because “there aren’t enough new [charter] schools being created across the country to spend all the… money on the one purpose of funding the start-up of new charters.”

Is the charter school industry, even before the current crisis, really on the skids?

The annual rate of charter school growth nationwide from 2014 to 2016 was half of what it was between 2008 and 2014, according to CONTINUE READING: A Flood of New Charter Schools Shows How the Industry May Try to Thrive — Despite the Pandemic | Ed Politics

Texas: Public Schools Have Better Outcomes Than Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Texas: Public Schools Have Better Outcomes Than Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Texas: Public Schools Have Better Outcomes Than Charter Schools

William J. Gumbert has studied the performance of charter schools in Texas and has consistently documented that they are inferior to public schools. Their promoters have sold the Legislature a Bill of goods, meaning that their results are nowhere as impressive as their promises. In this post, he shows that charter graduates are poorly prepared for higher education.

Privately Managed, College Preparatory Charter Schools:
A Common Approach and a Common Result – Graduates Underperform in College

By: William J. Gumbert

Without any notices or disclosures, the Texas Legislature has been experimenting with students in public education for 25 years. The experiment allows a separate system of taxpayer funded, privately managed charter schools (“State Charters”) to recruit students from locally governed school districts. In this regard, the State provides approximately $10,000 for each student that a State Charter recruits from local school districts. In total, the State has diverted over $25 billion of taxpayer funding from local school districts to fund its separate system of privately managed State Charters.

With State Charters receiving taxpayer funding for CONTINUE READING: Texas: Public Schools Have Better Outcomes Than Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog