Report More Charter Schools Could Threaten Public Education / Public News Service

Report More Charter Schools Could Threaten Public Education / Public News Service:

Report: More Charter Schools Could Threaten Public Education

A new report says 40 percent of the nation's charter schools are part of corporate chains or franchises. (in.gov)

INDIANAPOLIS – What began as an experiment to create innovation through charter schools has become a movement to privatize public education, according to a new report.

Stan Salett, the study's co-author, and the president of the Foundation for the Future of Youth spent more than four decades in public education and helped launch the nation's Head Start and Upward Bound programs. He said in the past two decades, a small group of billionaires, including News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch, who once called public schools an "untapped $500 billion sector," have worked to assert private control over public education to make money.

"And that's what's at play now," he said. "You've got a lot of money on one side going in to create a privatized school system that becomes part of the new marketplace for hedge funds and Wall Street investors."

The Independent Media Institute study found 40 percent of the nation's 6,700 charter schools are part of corporate chains or franchises. Salett said many charters do good work, and are operated by and accountable to their communities. But the report recommends a national moratorium on their rapid growth until the industry's governing structures and business models can be assessed and improved.

The study outlines how public tax dollars follow students who enroll in charters, taking money away from already struggling public systems. Salett said most major U.S. cities are now divided into private and public tracks, and argues the future of one of the nation's few institutions where people from diverse backgrounds come together is at risk.

"Different language backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, racial backgrounds," he added. "The aim of public schools has always been to create a place where the so-called 'melting pot' can occur."

Salett said companies frequently mix nonprofit and for-profit wings to win taxpayer subsidies, further boosting profits. He said some charters also have successfully lobbied to eliminate democratically elected boards, public oversight and accountability.Report More Charter Schools Could Threaten Public Education / Public News Service:

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Three Billionaires Are Trying to Buy the School Board in Oakland, California | Diane Ravitch's blog

Three Billionaires Are Trying to Buy the School Board in Oakland, California | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Three Billionaires Are Trying to Buy the School Board in Oakland, California

We keep reading this story in district after district, state after state, but we should not stop being outraged. There ought to be a law that prevents fabulously wealthy people from buying state and local school board elections. We know that their goal is not to improve the schools but to privatizatize them.

In Oakland, California, the privatizing organization is called Great Oakland public schools, and it has the chutzpah to call itself a “grassroots campaign.” It has raised half a million or so for pro-charter candidates. $300,000 came from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City. Most of the rest came from two other billionaires, who have no interest in Oakland other than to support privatization and subvert democratic control of the schools.

Here is the story:

“If it were just a matter of raising money from parents, teachers, and community members, then school-board candidates James Harris, Huber Trenado, and Jumoke Hinton Hodge’s financial advantage over their opponents would be minimal. For example, the incumbent board chairman Harris has raised $11,836 from individual contributors for his re-election this year. That’s not much more than Chris Jackson, his challenger, who has scraped together $9,622.

“But Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge benefit from two independent-expenditure committees funded by super-wealthy charter-school advocates, which have raised millions since 2014.

“These committees are on track to spend about half-a-million dollars to help Harris and Hinton Hodge keep their seats on the board, and to help Trenado unseat Roseann Torres.

“Critics worry, however, that this “outside money” distorts Oakland’s school-board races.

“It’s shocking to me how much they’re spending to get these specific candidates elected,” said Kim Davis, a parent whose kids attend Oakland public schools. “This is not a level playing field. More money means more mailers, more people knocking on doors, and more people making phone calls.”

“Gonzales, who was elected to the school board in 2014 to represent District Six, noted that a “typical school board race in years past was one where a candidate wouldn’t have to raise more than twenty-thousand, max.”

“But in 2012, Gonzales says the nonprofit organization Great Oakland Public Schools began raising and spending tens of thousands of dollars to support candidates who will advance its goals of growing the number of charters and providing them with greater access to publicly-funded resources. As a result, GO Public Schools changed the calculus of school-board elections and unleashed an avalanche of money, which other groups haven’t matched, and that dwarfs the sums that candidates can raise by themselves.

“They have relationships with corporate titans all over the country,” Gonzales said of GO Public Schools. “That’s why the school board has become a much more high-dollar affair.”

“According to campaign-finance records, the two committees supporting Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge received most of their funding from a few billionaires, who have played key roles backing the charter-school industry.

“So far, the two committees — Families and Educators for Public Education, which was set up by GO Public Schools, and the Parent Teacher Alliance, run by the California Charter Schools Association — have spent $421,906 to support Harris, Trenado, and Hinton Hodge.

“The result is that, for every dollar spent to support Jackson, $17 have been spent to support Harris.”

Will the people of Oakland allow the billionaires to buy their school board? Or will they fight to keep their public schools public?

A loss for Bloomberg won’t hurt him. A donation of $300,000 from him is equivalent to one of us dropping a dollar in a Salvation Army bucket. But if he loses again and again, whether in Oakland or in Massachusetts, he might lose interest.

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Three Billionaires Are Trying to Buy the School Board in Oakland, California | Diane Ravitch's blog:

State Board gets to hit refresh button with more control over federal funding | EdSource

State Board gets to hit refresh button with more control over federal funding | EdSource:

State Board gets to hit refresh button with more control over federal funding

For the first time in more than a decade, the California State Board of Education has the power to reshape how school districts spend about $2.5 billion in federal aid, including about $200 million it can use at its discretion.

The state board will launch a statewide discussion on how to spend the money during its bimonthly meeting on Wednesday.

California has to submit its plan by July.

The state sees an opportunity to spend some of the money on state priorities to improve schools and to fortify instruction of the state’s new academic standards in English, math, science and for English learners, according to memos written by Glen Price, chief deputy state superintendent of public instruction, and staff at the state Department of Education.

Ideas floated in the memos (here and here) include re-establishing principal and administrator training programs that were curtailed amid funding cuts during the past recession, and creating teams and networks to work together on school and district performance.

In a six-page memo to an advisory panel, California Practitioners Advisory Group, the state Department of Education suggested three possible funding ideas, which it called “starting points” for discussion:

Create a California Support Network whose primary purpose would be to strengthen teams in county offices of education to work with districts and schools identified as needing comprehensive help;

Establish a California Leadership Initiative, a revival of leadership academies the State Board gets to hit refresh button with more control over federal funding | EdSource:

Verboden!: Autonomy and Critical Thinking in Education | the becoming radical

Verboden!: Autonomy and Critical Thinking in Education | the becoming radical:

Verboden!: Autonomy and Critical Thinking in Education

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone

“Another Brick in the Wall – Part 2,” Pink Floyd (Roger Waters)

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audre Lorde

During my 18 years as a public high school English teacher, I taught as an outsider—but for many of those years, I found solace in a colleague, Ed Welchel, who taught history.

Among students, parents, faculty, and administration, Ed and I were considered good, even very good teachers, but we also were viewed with skepticism, particularly the farther up the authority chain you went (parents and administrators, especially).

The high school where we taught, although a rural public school, felt in many ways like a strict private school—very harsh discipline and dress codes, palpable conservative values.

Ed and I were as unlike that environment as two people could be.

After a particularly brutal faculty meeting that stressed the need to control our students, Ed and I began a chant we would share quietly as we passed in the hall: “Beat ’em down, beat ’em down.”

After I completed my doctorate in 1998, Ed soon finished the same program, and then left for another high school before moving on to higher education before I did.

That was fifteen-plus years ago, but it stands as relevant today since many are beginning to fret in earnest about why so many K-12 teachers leave the field.

It’s pretty damn obvious, I hate to say, but many teachers leave the profession because formal schooling is incredibly dehumanizing for students and teachers; in short, in schools, autonomy and critical thinking are verboden.

Dark Sarcasms in the Classroom

Former career music educator and blogger at Education Week/Teacher, Nancy Flanagan asks: “Who is truly afraid of genuine leadership emerging from practitioners?”

Flanagan also confronts a key distinction about what “leadership” means by examining if teacher leaders Verboden!: Autonomy and Critical Thinking in Education | the becoming radical: