What Is a Democracy School? - Bridging Differences - Education Week

What Is a Democracy School? - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

What Is a Democracy School? 

Deborah Meier continues her conversation with Harry Boyte. To read their full exchange, please visit here.

Dear Harry and friends,

Indeed, we're stuck with each other on planet Earth. This is an unprecedented challenge to our human capacity to negotiate our way through the future together. As far as I know even the top .1 percent have nowhere else to go if the planet comes to a slow grinding halt. All our other disagreements will "soon" not matter. Or do "they" have a secret plan (bubble in our major cities for occupancy by only the top 5 percent? Or maybe they're preparing Mars for the oligarchy as we speak?).

Our paranoias are not all the same, and mine (above) is probably no more realistic than the idea that scientists throughout the world could have come to a virtual consensus to dupe the public about climate change.

I'm a little less enamored of Henry Wallace than you. Perhaps his naiveté around the Communist influence on his later presidential campaign sours me a bit. But we both like the rhetoric. The notion, that a substantial number of white men in America today hold, that they are the products of generations of belief that they were the hard working, indispensable core of American democracy—rural and urban. The fall-out from this century's catastrophic ability to do without them is surely part of what we are seeing in the "mood" behind a Trump. The fear that their white high school educated children may be part of the new undeserving lower class may be sinking in slowly and creating its own form of paranoia—and renewed familiar forms of racism and sexism.

So, can we rebuild the image of what it takes to have a thriving and open system of polities before we get a home-grown version of fascism? We used to call it "state capitalism"—where the state has a monopoly on coercive power and a small oligarchy working in close collaboration with the state, has a virtual monopoly on the marketplace. Meanwhile we might even be allowed to "play democracy."

We used to ask our students when they went to weekly community service jobs that they use their time to learn how decisions on various levels of importance are made at their agency: by whom, where, and even when.

That's the basic skepticism I want us to instill in all ordinary—trust, but verify. Assume good intentions, but check it out. "Where are the minutes kept?"

Which leads me back to how we might define the bottom line of what makes a school "public" with democracy in mind. What kinds of evidence would the school be able to present that would assuage my skepticism about their democratic foundations?

They should be able at least to show that all the adults whose children attend the school or who are employed directly by the school are able to "throw the rascals out" through some kind of agreed process—not to mention a process for deciding important matters like the school calendar, the curriculum, class sizes, and the forms that high-stake assessments would take—if any. Only on X matters (salaries and benefits, health, racism and sexism, due process for students and staff and transparency) would their local wisdom require a larger consensus, arrived at by the regional body which disburses the funds. Maybe a professional/lay "quality" body? One whose task is only to say whether the plan presented is "reasonable" and is being reasonably carried out.

I could add more details but do you think such a proposition would have any chance of being supported by most schools, parents, and teaches? 

DebWhat Is a Democracy School? - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

Schools Matter: Massive Charter Giveaways in ESEA Re-Write, Part 2

Schools Matter: Massive Charter Giveaways in ESEA Re-Write, Part 2:

Massive Charter Giveaways in ESEA Re-Write, Part 2

See Part 1 here.

Let’s begin Part 2 with a quiz. Based on your knowledge of how federal programs work, can you fill in the blank below?

‘‘(b) INFORMATION AND ASSURANCES.—Each application submitted under subsection (a) shall include—

 ‘‘(1) a description of—


‘‘(A) how a grant awarded under this subpart will be used to promote desegregation, including how the proposed ________ school programs will increase interaction among students of different social, economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds (p. 335)

If “charter” was your answer, you are wrong.  In fact, your answer shows how little you know about charter schools or about the requirements for charter schools by your U. S. Congress and your U. S. Department of Education. 

The answer is “magnet.”  Remember those old school relics intended to combat segregation? The ones aimed to attract diverse students to a school based on interests in varied foci of curriculum offerings? Music, science, visual arts, history, drama, writing, math, etc.

There are 10 pages in the ESSA monstrosity that deal with magnet schools, and the limitations on them are severe.  For instance, no grant shall go beyond 3 years, and no educational agency may receive more than $4 million in a single year (pp. 340-341).  For 2015, Team Obama requested $91.6 million for magnet schools. 

Contrast that with 52 pages of the ESSA that detail the special advantages that this bill offers for charter schools, whose grants are to be for 5 years, rather than 3.  Consider, too, that just one charter organization, KIPP, received $13,789,074 from a single USDOE grant in 2014. 

For 2015, Team Obama budgeted $248 million for charters, plus another $157 million in September 2015, even though the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools was pushing for $500 million.  That number will be small potatoes if Obama signs this new bill into law.

For the second question on our quiz, let’s look see what the new ESEA says about purposes of a programs.  Please fill in the blank:

The purpose of this subpart is . . .

 ‘‘(1) the elimination, reduction, or prevention of minority group isolation in elementary schools and secondary schools with substantial proportions of minority students, which shall include assisting in the efforts of the United States to achieve voluntary desegregation in public schools;

‘‘(2) the development and implementation of _______ school programs that will assist local educational agencies in achieving systemic reforms and providing all students the opportunity to meet State academic standards;

‘‘(3) the development and design of innovative educational methods and practices that promote diversity and increase choices in public elementary schools and public secondary schools and public educational programs;

‘‘(4) courses of instruction within _______ schools that will substantially strengthen the knowledge of academic subjects and the attainment of tangible and marketable career, technical, and professional skills of students attending such schools;
‘‘(5) improving the ability of local educational agencies, including through professional development, to continue operating _______ schools at a high performance level after Federal funding for the _______ schools is terminated; and


‘‘(6) ensuring that students enrolled in the _______ school programs have equitable access to a quality education that will enable the students to succeed academically and continue with postsecondary education or employment.

If you put “charter” in the blanks, you would be wrong again—although it would be terrific if the billions of governmental and corporate cash going to charter schools were going to fund these purposes, which are instead for the severely underfunded magnet schools.

When we examine the purposes for charter schools, we find no mention of desegregation, diversity, or “minority isolation.”  We know, in fact, that if minority isolation were to be Schools Matter: Massive Charter Giveaways in ESEA Re-Write, Part 2:

Was High-Stakes Testing 2015's Biggest Loser? - NEA Today

Was High-Stakes Testing 2015's Biggest Loser? - NEA Today:

Was High-Stakes Testing 2015’s Biggest Loser?

In October, President Obama announced that the Department of Education would betaking steps to limit standardized testing in schools. The proposal was a little short on specifics but the fact that the administration was conceding that rampant overtesting was a problem – for which it “bears some of the responsibility,” Obama said – was striking because it was confirmation how far the tide had turned.

Opposition to high-stakes testing had been building for some time, ever since No Child Left Behind was enacted more than a decade ago, but 2015 proved to be a watershed year. Led by educators and parents, the movement to reduce standardized testing notched up critical victories in state legislatures, school boards, and in Washington, D.C., and has been instrumental in the media’s heightened scrutiny of the effects of overtesting. There’s a lot of work to be done in the years ahead, but it is undeniable that in 2015, educators and parents made a compelling case to end the high-stakes testing madness and bring real teaching and learning back to the classroom – and lawmakers took notice.

1. Public Opinion Hardens Against Standardized Testing. Survey after survey in 2015 – both national and state – revealed a public increasingly fed up with the amount of testing and the overreliance of test scores in evaluating students, schools and teachers. The 2015 PDK Gallup poll found that 65 percent of parents believed high-stakes testing was being misused and only 14 percent said it was “ an important factor” in gauging the effectiveness of a public school. AYouGuv/Economist poll released in April revealed that majorities believed students take too many standardized tests and that they have done more harm than good. The public supports assessments but the egregious amount of time spent on testing and test prep, the crowding out of instruction time and the impact it has on their children has alienated the vast majority of the public, leaving the guardians of the status quo with little cover to defend the system.

2. Exit No Child Left Behind
The enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, the sixth reauthorization of theElementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) ushered in the high-stakes testing era, almost tripling the number of federally mandated tests for K-12 students from 6 to 17. The law was praised by members of both political parties at the time as an antidote to a perceived deficit of standards and accountability in public schools. Intentions may have been good, but the law unleashed ruinous “test and punish” policies that mandated struggling schools to meet narrow test-based criteria (so-called Adequate Yearly Progress) or face punishment  – without providing the necessary resources and supports. For an entire generation of students and educators, NCLB corrupted what it meant to teach and learn, and by 2012, attention in Washington turned to replacing it. Throughout the year, educators waged an unprecedented mobilization and advocacy campaignon behalf of the nation’s students to persuade Congress to prioritize real learning and opportunity over the failed policies of NCLB.

It took a while, but the new ESEA, the Every Student Succeeds Act , was passed by both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Obama this week.  Although it keeps annual testing in place, the new law strips the federal government of its NCLB mandates, including AYP. It also gives individual states flexibility in determining how much time should be spent on testing, streamlining and improving existing assessments and designing new accountability measures.

3. States Take the Lead
Long before ESSA passed, educators had been working with parents and other stakeholders in states to scale back the amount of testing, prioritize more time for teaching and create new authentic Was High-Stakes Testing 2015's Biggest Loser? - NEA Today:

New Report Shines A Light Into The Charter School Black Box

12/10/2015 – New Report Shines A Light Into The Charter School Black Box:

New Report Shines A Light Into The Charter School Black Box

THIS WEEK: Becoming California … High-Poverty Kids Get Substitutes … Education Doesn’t Fix Poverty … Poor Pay For Pre-K Teachers … Unions Improve Teacher Quality

TOP STORY

New Report Shines A Light Into The Charter School Black Box

By Jeff Bryant

“Charter schools are now the most rapidly growing form of schools in the nation’s education system … So little is known about how charter schools are organized and operated that they’re often referred to as a ‘black box’ … A new policy brief from the National Education Policy Center pries at the lid of the charter school black box to shine a light into these institutions and reveal how charter schools blur the line from what it means to be a ‘public school’ and, by their very design, expand opportunities to profiteer from public tax dollars and privatize public assets.”
Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

No Child Left Behind Replacement Would Give Other States The Freedom California Has Already Claimed

Los Angeles Times

“With No Child Left Behind one step closer to being a thing of the past, the governance of schools in other states is poised to look a lot more like California’s … California is already in the process of changing its school accountability system … a new system that includes factors such as attendance, how quickly students who don’t speak English are learning the language, college readiness, dropout rates and suspensions … California has a strong recent history of bucking federal dictates on education.”
Read more …

High-Poverty Schools Often Staffed By Rotating Cast Of Substitutes

The Washington Post

“In the troubled schools that serve some of the nation’s neediest children, it is not uncommon for classrooms to churn with substitutes as teachers leave in large numbers each June, or quit midyear, and principals struggle to fill the positions … The frequent use of substitutes with varying levels of skill and commitment effectively steal learning time from students who can least afford it … Just 27 states require substitutes to be certified teachers … The problem appears to be growing as teacher shortages intensify nationwide, leaving school systems struggling to fill vacancies.”
Read more …

Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty

Demos

Matt Bruenig writes, “Since 1991 … we steadily reduced the share of adults in the ‘less than high school’ and ‘high school’ … By 2014 … the share of adults with an Associate degree went up 3.9 points, the share with a Bachelor’s degree went up 8.3 points, and the share with a post-Bachelor’s degree went up 4.8 points… The poverty rate for each educational [level] went up over this time and overall poverty didn’t decline at all. In fact it went up … Handing out more high school and college diplomas doesn’t magically create more good-paying jobs … The big things that cause poverty for adults over the age of 25 in a low-welfare capitalist society … do not go away just because you have a better degree.”
Read more …

The Teachers Who Educate Our Youngest Kids Are Struggling To Make Ends Meet

The Huffington Post

“A new report … shows that a majority of voters think early childhood educators deserve more pay … Early childhood educators earn notoriously little money. A 2014 report … found that preschool teachers typically only make six dollars more an hour than fast-food workers … though early childhood educators are often required to have a bachelor’s or associate’s degree … Over 50% of early childhood educators said that finding a job with sufficient salary and benefits was a major obstacle. 84 % of preschool teachers said that low pay is a big challenge facing their profession.”
Read more …

Study Finds Unions Improve Teacher Quality, Lead To Lower Dropout Rates

Campaign For America’s Future

“A recent report … uses empirical data analysis to correct the record on the effects of unions … Teachers in districts where collective bargaining is allowed are more likely to remain in teaching than teachers in districts where bargaining is prohibited … Higher salaries that unions demand through collective bargaining encourages school districts to carefully evaluate new teachers’ performances during probationary periods and weed out ineffective teachers, in order to avoid paying the even higher wages once these teachers receive tenure … In districts where teachers are legally able to negotiate salaries and benefits … high school dropout rates decline.”
Read more …

12/10/2015 – New Report Shines A Light Into The Charter School Black Box:

FREDERICK M. HESS: The Real Obama Education Legacy > National Affairs

The Real Obama Education Legacy > Publications > National Affairs:

The Real Obama Education Legacy

President Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009 with great hope and promise. Education reform, in particular, seemed set to benefit. Candidate Obama had made a point of using education to illustrate that he was championing "investment" rather than mere government "spending" and was eager to find bipartisan solutions. The education landscape seemed ready for that kind of leadership. As Jeb Bush declared in 2009, "I'm excited...because I think for the first time in my political life, there seems to be more consensus than disagreement across the ideological spectrum about education reform."

Arne Duncan, Obama's choice for secretary of education, drew widespread praise. At Duncan's confirmation hearing, Republican senator (and former secretary of education) Lamar Alexander said, "President-elect Obama has made several distinguished Cabinet appointments. From my view of it all, I think you are the best." And influential Republicans endorsed Obama's early efforts. In a telling example, Newt Gingrich joined Duncan and Al Sharpton in 2009 on a multi-city school tour to support Obama's education agenda and lend it a bipartisan gloss.

Some of Obama's early moves suggested he would indeed be a "post-partisan" education reformer. His appointees to the Department of Education were a talented bunch, drawing heavily from the "reform" wing of the Democratic Party and reaching beyond the Beltway bubble. He did things that aren't easy for a Democrat on the national stage to do: He advocated charter schools, tussled with the teacher unions, and went after the schools of education. The administration sporadically tried to reduce the paper burden on school districts, had a secretary of education who (for a brief time) said schools needed to find ways to do more with less, and enjoyed some admirable success in increasing the role of evidence in making education funding decisions.

Obama also made powerful use of his own background to challenge America to do right by vulnerable children — and to challenge those children and their parents to do their part. He insisted that, when it comes to helping "boys and young men of color who are having a particularly tough time...government cannot play the only — or even the primary — role." He said, "We can help give every child access to quality preschool...but we can't replace the power of a parent who's reading to that child. We can reform our criminal justice system to ensure that it's not infected with bias, but nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son's life."

Despite the soaring rhetoric and heady promises, however, education reform during Obama's tenure has disappointed in practice. Oddly enough, some of the president's critics on the right have missed this and have maintained that, on education, his policy has been uniquely sound. New York Times columnist David Brooks declared that "Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency," and suggested that Obama's approach to education reform constituted a model for "health care, transportation, energy [and] environmental policy."

In fact, Obama's presidency has proven deeply divisive in nearly every area of policy, from health care to government spending to the environment. And those who have been disconcerted by the Obama administration's faults in other areas — its abuse of executive discretion, its dramatic expansion of the federal government, and its exacerbation of identity politics and the culture wars — will find that education has not been spared. Despite all the promises of a "post-partisan" presidency, Obama has pursued a polarizing, bureaucratized, and Washington-centric education agenda while exploiting and then draining a substantial reservoir of bipartisan goodwill.

While it does little good to merely gripe about bad policies and squandered opportunities for reform, setting the record straight is crucial. Our understanding of the Obama era in education will color how we regard the promises of presidential candidates and inform our expectations for future Congressional and executive policymaking. Accounting for the lessons of the last seven years is especially vital given education's substantive and symbolic import and its centrality for any national figure intent on promoting opportunity. Ultimately, the Obama years have illustrated that how presidents tackle education may matter as much as whether they do.

THE RACE TO BUREAUCRACY

When Obama took office in 2009, he was in an ideal position to champion an education bill. There were substantial Democratic majorities in Congress, and the nation's primary law for K-12 education — the No Child Left Behind Act — had fallen into disrepute. NCLB was hugely unpopular and overdue for reauthorization, and there was broad bipartisan support for education reform. Fixing the law seemed to be the natural first order of business. After nine months in office, Duncan gave a speech on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act titled "Reauthorization of ESEA: Why We Can't Wait." Ironically, Duncan took five more months just to issue a broad-strokes "blueprint" proposal for reauthorization, a proposal which then went nowhere in the Democratic Congress.

Duncan's Department of Education had been focused instead on securing the funds from Congress to pay for a new program: Race to the Top, the president's signature education initiative. Securing these funds was Obama's first, and arguably only, real legislative accomplishment on education. Race to the Top, paid for with $4.35 billion from the massive The Real Obama Education Legacy > Publications > National Affairs:

Why the New Education Law Is Good for Children Left Behind - The New York Times

Why the New Education Law Is Good for Children Left Behind - The New York Times:

Why the New Education Law Is Good for Children Left Behind

CreditAndrew DeGraff

THE No Child Left Behind law will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. With a rare display of bipartisanship, Congress has overhauled federal education policy. The law’s successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is headed for the president’s desk, and he has signaled his intention to sign it.

Good riddance to a misbegotten law. Will its replacement be any better?

No Child Left Behind, on the books since 2002, was supposed to close achievement gaps for disadvantaged students (racial and ethnic minorities, low-income students, youngsters with special needs and English learners) and to eliminate what President George W. Bush decried as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The goal was audacious — by 2014, the law decreed, 100 percent of students would perform at grade level.

Instead, things have gotten worse by almost every measure. SAT scores have declined, as have the scores of American students, compared with their counterparts in other nations, on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exam. The rate of progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, was actually higher, both over all and for specific demographic groups, during the decade before No Child Left Behind than after it was passed.

At the same time, the law’s aspiration morphed into a high-stakes target for accountability — not for the politicians, with their unachievable demands, but for school officials who were given an impossible burden of meeting annual testing goals. Under the law, schools that didn’t make “adequate yearly progress” faced ever more draconian sanctions, including wholesale reorganization and closings.

As a result, public schools have turned into pressure cookers. Teachers are pushed to improve test results. A vanishingly small amount of time is spent on art, music and sports, because they aren’t part of the testing regime. Students have become test-taking robots, sitting through as many as 20 standardized exams a year.

The Obama administration initially acted as if the miracle of 2014, with every student proficient in math and reading, would come to pass. But in 2012, when it became clear that the achievement gap wasn’t about to vanish, the Department of Education started giving waivers to states that wanted to devise their own definition of adequate yearly progress. While almost every state has gotten an official permission slip, federal bureaucrats retained the final word on whether a state’s plan would pass muster, and those waivers were conditioned on commitments to adopt administration-approved education reforms. In effect the department has been relying on waivers to rewrite No Child Left Behind.

The Every Student Succeeds Act shifts, for the first time since the Reagan years, the balance of power in education away from Washington and backWhy the New Education Law Is Good for Children Left Behind - The New York Times: 

Here's why Mark Zuckerberg is dumping billions into 'personalized learning' - Business Insider

Here's why Mark Zuckerberg is dumping billions into 'personalized learning' - Business Insider:

Here's why Mark Zuckerberg is dumping billions into 'personalized learning'

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg believes personalized learning is the answer to many of education’s current woes, and is one of the four key areas that he and his wife Prescilla Chan’s US$45 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will fund.

While some argue whether this isa philanthropic act or a shrewd business strategy, others will ask: what is personalized learning anyway? Because despite somepoliticians' enthusiastic endorsements of personalised education, there’s still no clear definition.

Many in education would argue that personalised learning is what all good teachers do as a matter of course – modifying learning materials and teaching styles to accommodate the different ways pupils learn. Others see it as an antidote to top-down, centralized school bureaucracy, with the term “personalised” used interchangeably with individual, learner-centered or customized. It’s far from clear how teachers are supposed to support such personalised learning with personalised resources on a per pupil basis, nor who should bear the costs of doing so.

Zuckerberg has a clear definition in mind, however. For him, personalised learning is about teachers “working with students to custom ise instruction to meet the student’s individual needs and interests”. Although the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Personalized Learning Platform is not part of Facebook, the underlying principles are the same: human work is replaced by technology, algorithms provide users with content based on an analysis of their past behavior and demonstrated interests. This is similar to how Facebook’s news feed works, and other commercial personalization models based on text and behavior analysis.

There has been much hype about the potential for new technology or approaches to disrupt education and, not unreasonably, there’s concern that investment in personalised learning may be a boost for Silicon Valley but a kick in the teeth for teachers.

The dangers of personalised learning

Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Zuckerberg’s idea of personalised learning has three major flaws. First, education has always been about acquiring knowledge and skills relevant to a profession, but also about acquiring general knowledge. By feeding children only the content they’re interested in, we may end up with many specialists and few generalists.

Second, while learners may cope poorly with trying to learn in a way that’s not suited to them, in the real world life will not always be so accommodating. Their lack of ability to compensate Here's why Mark Zuckerberg is dumping billions into 'personalized learning' - Business Insider:

Charter Schools Are a 'Gravy Train,' | Al Jazeera America

Charter Schools Are a 'Gravy Train,' | Al Jazeera America:

Charter schools are a ‘gravy train,’ say researchers

A new report examines the methods charter school operators can use to enrich themselves

The policy framework for U.S. charter schools encourages “privatization and profiteering,” a research institute said in a report released Thursday.

Charter schools are able to siphon off large quantities of public money for private gain — and only substantial changes to state policies regarding charter schools can stop this, according to the authors of the report from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at University of Colorado Boulder.

Many education reform advocates argue that the charter school model — under which publicly funded schools are administered by bodies other than the school board, such as private Education Management Organizations (EMOs) — promotes experimentation and newer, fresher teaching methods. But the same permissive charter regulations intended to boost innovation can also help EMOs pocket cash better spent elsewhere, the NEPC report said.

“What we found is that there are a host of real estate and tax laws that were not put in place with charter schools in mind, but that the owners of charter school enterprises are using in order to profit,” NEPC Director Kevin Welner said. “I think that understanding the nature of the charter school gravy train, as I call it, is extremely important for the public and policymakers."

For example, charter schools are sometimes able to purchase publicly owned real estate for their school facilities through a private, third-party entity. The report highlights how charter operators can make these purchases with taxpayer money, thus acquiring formerly public property at public expense. The third-party purchaser pockets overhead costs associated with arranging the sale.

“This particular type of transaction is usually legal and it can be very logical from the perspective of each of the parties involved,” said Rutgers University professor Bruce Baker, one of the report’s authors, in a statement. “But we should be troubled by the public policy that allows and even encourages this to happen.”

The report also contends that labor costs at charter schools tend to be unusually top-heavy, as EMO executives conserve funds by hiring young, relatively inexpensive staff — and then add the savings to their own salaries.

“Early studies of charter schools in Pennsylvania found charter teacher annual salaries to be on average $18,000 lower than teacher salaries in district schools,” the report said. In contrast, top EMO heads can draw comfortable six-figure salaries, the report said. Eva Moskowitz, a high-profile New York charter advocate and CEO of the city’s Success Academy network of charter schools, was found in the report to earn more than $475,000 annually.

In New York and other cities across the United States, charter schools have become a flashpoint for political fights between community activists, elected officials, teachers unions and EMOs. Over the past few years, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Charter Schools Are a 'Gravy Train,' | Al Jazeera America:

Charter schools need better transparency, accountability, study says | MLive.com

Charter schools need better transparency, accountability, study says | MLive.com:

Charter schools need better transparency, accountability, study says

The growth of for-profit management companies operating charter school has led to "scandalous" financial practices that steer money away from students and into the pockets of private business, according to a study released Thursday.

"The Business of Charter Schooling: Understanding the Policies that Charter School Operators Use for Financial Benefit" is co-authored by Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University, and Bruce Baker of Rutgers University.

Policymakers should demand more fiscal oversight and transparency from educational management companies such as National Heritage Academies, according to a study being released today. The study was co-authored by Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University.MLive file photo 

The 56-page report says public money meant to educate children "is being extracted inadvertently or intentionally for personal or business financial gain" and current disclosure requirements allow such practices to occur with a minimum of accountability or transparency.

While the report cites examples from other states, the report is applicable for Michigan taxpayers and policymakers, Miron said.

"Michigan is by far the leader in privatization of education — 90 percent of charter school students attend a school operated by a for-profit EMO," or educational management organization, Miron said.

He also said that Michigan-based EMOs such as National Heritage Academies in Grand Rapids have pioneered some of the problematic practices that have become popular nationwide, such as "sweep" contracts in which the EMO collects all the revenues coming into a charter school save for a 3 percent fund balance. 

Miron said that allows the EMOs to disguise how much is being charged as a management fee.

Among the some of the other specific practices cited in the report:

• EMOs often use public funds to buy school buildings, which become privately controlled. The EMO then charges the charter school an above-market rent to lease the building.

• Some EMO contracts state that any computers, textbooks and other supplies and equipment purchased by charter schools become the property of the EMO. That means if the charter school board ends its contract with the EMO, it has to buy back equipment and supplies purchased with public funds.

• High management fees steer money from student instruction. Miron said most Michigan charter schools spend a lower percentage of their budget on instruction than traditional public schools.

• EMOs tend to rely on hand-picked boards that fail to offer independent scrutiny of contracts. Miron said this is often the case in Michigan, where charter schools are proposed by an EMO that than hand picks the board of directors. Having a weak board that is not accountable to voters leads to boards signing off on contracts that clearly "not in the charter school's best interest," Miron said.

• Because EMOs are private companies, their contracts and expenditures are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, Miron said. "It's been harder and harder to get access to how money is being spent," he said.

An especially egregious example of charter school mismanagement in Michigan is the controversy that has engulfed Grand Traverse Academy, a K-12 charter school with about 1,200 students near Traverse City.

The school was founded in 1999 by Steven Ingersoll, a Bay City optometrist who Charter schools need better transparency, accountability, study says | MLive.com:

Barbara Madeloni: Charter schools are not the answer - The Boston Globe

Charter schools are not the answer - The Boston Globe:

Charter schools are not the answer

MASSACHUSETTS HAS long had a commitment to provide every student in the state with the opportunity to study, learn, and develop the skills and knowledge needed to contribute to our democracy. In many ways we have lived up to this promise: Our public schools are the envy of the nation. But in many ways we have not. The economic and racial injustice that plagues our communities is made manifest in urban public schools, which too often lack the resources provided in our wealthier districts.

Students in Holyoke, Boston, New Bedford, and other communities serving larger percentages of poor and minority children do not have the same access to the arts, music, libraries, athletic fields, science labs, and other resources that are available to their counterparts in wealthier districts.

We should be troubled by these inequities and equally troubled by the way that racism contributes to our inattention to this injustice.

The answer, however, is not to abandon our ideals of public education for every student. Rather, it is to recommit both resources and attention to creating the public schools every student deserves.

Commonwealth charter schools — funded with public dollars — are not the answer. They are not the answer because they siphon much-needed funds — $419 million this year alone — from our already underfunded public schools.

They are not the answer because they can be imposed by the state against the will of the community — the parents and other taxpayers who have to pay for these schools and then live with the negative impact they have on the district schools that most of their children attend.

They are not the answer because they too often use suspensions and other methods that push out English-language learners and special needs students, effectively creating what the NAACP calls “separate and unequal conditions for success.” Just take a look at the sky-high suspension rates at Roxbury Prep and so many other charter schools. Where do these students go? Usually back to the district public schools they came from. The districts welcome them, but now have fewer resources to educate a higher-need population.

Even the alleged success stories of some charter schools tell us only one thing: When you limit the range of students, impose hyper-disciplinary practices, and focus intensely on test prep, you may get better test scores, but what is lost? Too often, student experiences of autonomy and creativity are sacrificed.

Further, what happens after charter school students graduate? A study funded by the pro-charter Boston Foundation found that the graduates of the Boston Public Schools go on to complete college at a higher rate than the graduates of Boston’s charter schools.

We need real answers that make a difference for all students and communities. We need to stop the political malpractice of denying the impact of poverty on the lives of our students and instead invest in our communities by supporting living-wage legislation, secure housing, quality health care, and stable, well-compensated employment.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association is working with parents, students and community partners to make this a more equitable Commonwealth, outside and inside our public schools. The MTA is a leader in the Raise Up Massachusetts coalition, fighting for a $15 minimum wage and paid family Charter schools are not the answer - The Boston Globe:

Ohio charter schools among network accused of ‘human trafficking’ and teaching Islam - Break News - Ohio

Ohio charter schools among network accused of ‘human trafficking’ and teaching Islam - Break News - Ohio:

Ohio charter schools among network accused of ‘human trafficking’ and teaching Islam

A British law firm hired by the Turkish government is suing an international Muslim leader who, while exiled in Pennsylvania, has inspired one of the largest publicly funded charter school networks in Ohio and the nation.

Attorney Robert Amsterdam filed the lawsuit in Pennsylvania where Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen has been living in self-exile since 1999. More legal action is coming, Amsterdam said during an invitation-only press conference in Washington, D.C. Wednesday.

The international attorney, who is alleging human rights violations in Turkey, was hired in October by that country’s ruling party. Embattled President Tayyip Erdogan has considered Gulen his primary political foe in an international, religious feud with ties to American charter schools, which are privately run, publicly funded and not permitted to teach religion.

The network of public schools is vast.

The 19 charter schools in Ohio run by Chicago-based Concept schools comprise the bulk of the 30 Gulen schools in the American Midwest. Dozens more exist in Texas, California and elsewhere.

The Ohio schools receive about $50 million annually in taxpayer dollars, and there have been allegations that employees were required to donate pay to the Gulen movement.

The schools exist in Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Euclid, Toledo, Youngstown and are clustered in Cleveland. Since 2009, U.S. Department of Labor documents show the schools brought more than 325 workers from overseas, almost all from Turkey, to teach at the schools.

The Ohio schools, which perform better than most charter schools, have been the subject of multiple FBI raids probing “white collar crimes” involving federal grants. State investigators have looked into, but have not substantiated, allegations that employees doctored student tests or turned a blind eye to sexual misconduct.

The company that runs them and the foundations associated with Gulen have funded Turkish trips for Ohio lawmakers, including House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger.

Although the founders are all Turkish men inspired by Gulen, Concept Schools spokesman Mark Weaver said there is no connection to Gulen.

“They were inspired by Gulen the way I was inspired by Ronald Reagan in college. That’s the grain of truth when people say they are Gulen-affiliated,” Weaver said of his conservative ideals and the founder’s love of Gulen.

The lawsuit alleges that Gulen interests infiltrated Turkish law enforcement and other government agencies and falsely imprisoned the opposition.

Amsterdam is calling for all U.S. politicians to give back any contributions from Gulen-associated donors.

A 2014 Beacon Journal investigation found that Turkish men created the Ohio charter schools and the Chicago company, which has a “department of immigration services.” The Ohio schools, called Horizon or Noble academies, have been ordered by state auditors to repay public money used to hire Ohio charter schools among network accused of ‘human trafficking’ and teaching Islam - Break News - Ohio: