This bit of fraud at the taxpayers’ expense mostly slipped under the radar this week.
A charter school mogul was charged today in a multimillion-dollar fraud case by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. […]
Brown, 75, and four executives from her charter schools, were charged with defrauding three charter schools of more than $6.5 million in taxpayer funds.
U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger announced that a federal grand jury had returned a 62-count indictment against Brown and four of her trusted employees. […]
“The bottom line is running a charter school does not give you a license to steal,” FBI Special Agent in Charge George C. Venizelos said.
Kay’s the expert on this issue. I’m not well versed but speaking anecdotally, the first charter school I remember being aware of was started decades ago in NYC, devoted to the performing arts. I recall it worked well. In the present day, there’s a charter school for the performing arts in the tiny town of Hadley, MA, that graduated several of my friends’ kids. It also appears to be a very good school and worth the taxpayer investment.
So I’m thinking charter schools aren’t entirely a bad concept when they’re geared to one specialized area of study that serves a certain segment of the student population who excel in it. But for the most part, as far as I can see, the charter school movement as it currently exists doesn’t serve any educational purpose. It’s little more than an open invitation to steal.
Carl Nyberg
License to steal?
Fits smack dab in the middle of the whole privatizing movement.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
I’ve decided (after observing my own city’s experience with charter schools) that even when they are honestly run, they’re just another way for local, well-connected elites to funnel extra taxpayer cash into their kids’ education, at the expense of others.
Admission isn’t merit-based (ie no entry exam, which would be my preference), and there’s a long waiting list. But (surprise surprise) the Mayor’s kids, the Mayor’s friends’ kids’, and most of the kids whose parents are on the local Chamber of Commerce somehow had no trouble getting in.
Funny that.
Hunter Gathers
It was never meant to serve an educational purpose. It’s just a way to keep mommy and daddy’s perfect little white snowflakes from having to sit with those ‘other’ kids and getting the state to pick up the tab.
Zifnab
Efficiency, mother fucker!
Imagine if all those millions had gone to a teacher’s union?
geg6
Similar investigation happening here in Western PA:
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-west/pennsylvania-cyber-school-object-of-federal-investigation-644471/
Eric U.
I always saw it as a way of defunding public schools. We sent our son to a charter school, which was very good. There was lots of parent involvement, which you aren’t going to get in the for-profit charter schools. I think the ones that are run as a business are just stealing from the taxpayers.
Schlemizel
There is nothing a charter school can do that regular public schools can’t do at least as well and probably better – except funnel taxpayer money to private corporations.
Libby Spencer
It drives me crazy. And lately it seems charter school mania is largely a back door vehicle for funding religious schools. Which I don’t think should happen at all.
feebog
While I am against private charters, the public charter system we have in California seems work. I live a few blocks from the largest charter high school in U.S. They get their funding directly from the state, not through LAUSD. There is no huge administrative office taking a big slice of the pie. The school is managed by a Committee made up of community members, parents of former or future students, and teachers.
While LAUSD has been forced to cut back further and further, our Charter has kept up summer school classes (mandatory for incoming 9th graders), music programs and sports. They have one of the highest API scores in the state, far outstripping other high sxhools in the area. They are the National Academic HS champions two years in a row. They send well over 95% of their students on to some form of higher education, and have a graduation rate of almost 98%.
This school cannot pick and choose their students; they must accept any student living within their boundries, which are set by LAUSD. They have well over 4,000 students, with a waiting list of over 2500. The sucess of this high school has convinced me that control must be local, the community must be engaged, and teachers must have a voice in running the school. When that happens, sucess follows.
Mike G
It’s the Republican ethos in a nutshell, from the medical system to the military-industrial complex. Rig systems with the primary goal of generating lots of profits, preferably for ‘favored’ participants, regardless of how the taxpayer gets cheated.
The Moar You Know
We had the same thing happen here in San Diego. The district involved essentially paid off the people who defrauded them so that they’d give the school back without a court battle (the property is worth tens of millions of dollars).
Kinda like paying a bank robber to leave the bank so they won’t steal any more money.
@Hunter Gathers: Exactly what happened to my old high school. The new money moving into the area wasn’t going to stand for their kids having to share a campus with a bunch of Mexicans, so they flipped the school to a charter and made admissions contingent on test results. The campus now has no Hispanics, they all have to go to a school six miles away.
This also forced most of the Hispanics who’d been living near the school to move. That neighborhood – all with ocean views – now is getting torn down and gentrified like you wouldn’t believe.
Win-win. Unless you’re Hispanic. Then tough luck for you.
PeakVT
So I’m thinking charter schools aren’t entirely a bad concept when they’re geared to one specialized area of study that serves a certain segment of the student population who excel in it.
I see no reason to run what is a “magnet school” as a charter school. Magnet schools can be done within a normal school system (though the size of the school system is a factor on how it is structured).
I wonder if a lot of people are outright confusing the two.
gelfling545
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: That has been my experience here (WNY). Either the schools didn’t perform any better than the generic public or they were most definitely skewed to a certain clientele. At the charter my grand daughter attended there was supposedly a lottery system for selection yet amazingly all but a small minority of the students (of which she was one) lived in the same (affluent) zip code. Students like her who did manage to get in from outside that area were definitely seen as second class. For this reason she is now in the public school system albeit in the city arts academy and is much happier there. Please understand that the public school system here is a mess but the charters haven’t helped anything.
taylormattd
They are 100% entirely terrible ideas, period.
Maybe some day we can discuss this, but that should wait until every state actually funds their public schools.
Mnemosyne
@feebog:
Is it a charter school or a magnet school, though? To confuse things even more thoroughly, I know we have both kinds in Los Angeles.
I just discovered the other day that we have a performing arts magnet school in my city. It makes sense since we’re a good-sized city (200K), but I was still surprised.
JPL
OT..Libby, Thanks for the puppy cam.
I have no problem with charter schools as long as the funding is separate from public schools.
RSR
We’re livin’ the dream here in Philly.
The phrase “charter school mogul” is deeply disturbing on a few levels.
If you read the whole article, you’ll find that another charter school head engaged in fraud a few years ago offed himself rather than face the music.
And finally, one more to keep on the radar. Apparently the son of US Rep Chaka Fattah allegedly shuttered his charter school and disappeared without paying his staff’s salary which had been withheld during the school year to payout over the summer. The guys is just gone and so’s the money.
The whole charter movement has become a way to skim money out of an existing system with little oversight. It’s analogous to private military contractors and private prisons.
And the product? Usually no better than public schools, and when they are better, it’s usually because they don’t have to service the same population as the public schools. They get to work with a subset of the population, and kick out any kids that are too much work, too much trouble, or too much drag on their scores. They don’t have the special ed kids, the ESL kids, etc. All those kids go back to the local school, AND the charter keeps the money, too boot!
RSR
Also, another charter, a cyber charter here in PA, shut down, and now the students can’t even get transcripts to take to other schools. The school just disappeared with no official documents provided to anybody anywhere!
geg6
@Mike G:
It’s also a way to kill off the teachers’ unions. The Pittsburgh school district is paying huge amounts of money to PA Cyber Charter for the city students enrolled there. Meanwhile, the district furloughed 280 teachers, paraprofessionals, and staff the day before yesterday.
Mnemosyne
@PeakVT:
I think a lot of charter school operators — especially for-profit ones — are deliberately confusing the two and making people think that if they want to, say, have their kids go to a school that concentrates on math and science, their only options are private or charter.
Steeplejack
__
Not intended to be a factual statement.
MariedeGournay
Charter schools were originally proposed by the teacher’s union as a laboratory to develop new pedagogical methods that could eventually spread out to the rest of the public schools. It was a really good idea until people with dollar signs in their eyes got involved.
Punchy
OT: So Twitter crashes yesterday, and today Yahoo mail has crashed. What happs tomorry?
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
My best friend in Detroit sends his daughter to a charter school because the Detroit public schools suck ditch water through a short straw.
A few years ago he was informed TWO WEEKS BEFORE SCHOOL OPENED that the charter school his daughter was enrolled in and for which she had already bought books, supplies and uniforms WOULD NOT OPEN FOR BUSINESS that year.
Pardon my shouting but we were REALLY PISSED.
He and every otehr parent had to scramble and beg to get his daughter enrolled somewhere else at the last minute.
So that’s what can happen when education is run as a business.
Chris T.
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Yes, sure, but this is completely different from the old Soviet Union system in which all were equal, but some were more equal than others!
gene108
I’d take it one step further.
The early arguments for charter schools was they would be “laboratories” for best practices to be implemented and studied for those practices overall impact on education.
Once these practices were observed on a small scale, they could be ported to the larger school district.
There’s probably some role for charter schools to play, but it should in no way be as big as Republicans want it to be.
Also, too since right-wingers keep harping on American Exceptionalism, why haven’t they embraced our public education system that educated many of the people, who put a man on the moon, built the only man made object to leave the solar system and go into deep space, built the submersibles that found life on ocean floor, built the internet and so many other innovations?
I mean, when these doom and gloom test scores come out about how American schools stack up with the rest of the world, it’d be a good time break out a good “so what, we’re Americans, fuck yeah!” and remind people that despite whatever problems we’ve had on standardized tests we still produce a ton of brilliant, innovative people with the school system that we have.
Brad
It’s really a two-pronged approach to dismantle public education.
First and most important is obviously the license to steal. Sell off public assets to well connected capitalists so they can skim a profit off it. A prosecution for fraud here and there isn’t any different than the slaps on the wrist Wall Street gets every now and then. The whole system is really quite similar to a slow motion version of the massive fire sale of public assets after the Soviet Union fell.
Second is what the rubes actually want and how the elite sell it to them. People who are still angry about the Civil Rights Act and Brown v Board of Education really do want their segregated schools back and this is how they plan to do it. Segregated schools are pretty much the holy grail of extreme right evangelicals. Basically everything they are angry about today (abortion, taxes etc…) can be traced back to Brown v Board (and its extensions to private religious schools: Bob Jones University v. U.S.; Goldboro Christian Schools v. U.S.)
Ruckus
See the problem is most people see that one needs to provide something for the profit. A thing or service. An actual value.
No. Not at all.
The whole idea is Profit.
It’s not how well or even if you provide value. Only that money is made. Think about that last thing. Money is made. Nothing else.
It’s why we make the joke.
1. ?????
2. Profit
3. Who gives a shit.
So what if you don’t have health care, I do.
So what if your furniture, shoes, whatever only lasts half as long as it used to.
So what if your kids don’t get an education, mine did.
You have no worth, I mean why would anyone protect you from a deranged shooter. Only I have value, you have none.
You don’t look like me, you don’t pee standing up, you have no value.
You’re not willing to die for me you have no value.
I’m not sure this is the conservative mindset but it sure seems to apply.
PeakVT
@feebog: The problem of making that kind of charter school success scale up still remains. Well-funded schools with involved parents and enthused staff generally succeed regardless of how they are established.
Brad
@geg6: “It’s also a way to kill off the teachers’ unions”
This is obviously a big cog in my first point. The privatizers don’t want to be buying any union shop.
Jim Pharo
Charter schools are but a way-station on the road to all education being “online,” so that students won’t even need to leave their homes — just send $$ to the oligarchs, log-on, and get ready to sweep floors or train dressage horses.
…and then…the Matrix!
Brad
@Punchy:
Skynet takes over
feebog
@ Mnenosyne:
The school I refenced is Granada Hills Charter HS. Not a magnet, we have plenty of those in the SFV, including a great elemnetary magnet not too far away.
@ PeakVT:
You make a good point. LAUSD has more and more schools clamoring to go public charter, but they tend to be pretty sucessful schools as a whole.
rikyrah
I think, on the whole, they’re a fucking sham
SatanicPanic
@Ruckus: This is exactly what they believe-
Sarah Palin- Canada needs to dismantle its public health-care system and allow private enterprise to get involved and turn a profit
I don’t know if I’m engaged in selective editing, because that’s what I could find on this quote. Maybe she added, “By turning a profit, they have incentive to provide better care.” But since it’s Palin she’s probably giving it to us straight.
schrodinger's cat
Libby do you still live in Hadley? If so we are practically neighbors.
Libby Spencer
@PeakVT: Been a while since I’ve heard that term. They call the one Hadley a charter school, even though it’s organized within the normal school district. Assumed the terms were interchangeable.
Libby Spencer
@schrodinger’s cat: Sadly no. Lived in the Happy Valley for many long and blissful years though. Been gone for seven years. Still miss it every single day.
kindness
Where can I go to start up the Balloon Juice Critter Charter School? Louisiana? What if I tell Bobby Jindal the BJCCS teach nothing but hard core Christian stuff? Will it matter if that stuff is walking, playing and eating with no religious content? OK, I’ll give homages the the FSM before serving lunch.
roc
Charter schools that have to justify their existence and *earn* the parents’ trust and students’ tuition are generally good at what they do. Because they have to be, or they’ll go out of business.
They are fundamentally different from the charter schools created when the government pushes the entire volume of students into a ‘market’ that has enjoyed regulatory capture from day 1. Those schools have no more competition than private prisons do. Thus they are a hotbed of corner-cutting, erosion of standards, etc.
Villago Delenda Est
The intense desire to turn every human endeavor into something that can be put on spread sheet is at work with the charter school movement.
Bean counter types of all flavors want to “improve” the schools, but want an easily tossed up on a graph for pointy haired bosses’ limited intelligence to fathom way to do it.
Thus you’ve cretinous MBA flavored “testing” systems to gauge how well schools are “doing”. Because you have to dumb things down to the deserting coward/Rmoneytron way of thinking.
Of course, then you have the outright grifters like these assholes. Who thrive in an environment where manipulating the numbers is the key to easy money.
PeakVT
@Libby Spencer: If it’s drawing students from across the normal K-12 hierarchy boundaries, it’s a magnet school. If it’s operating outside the traditional rules of a school system, it’s a charter (public or private). And one school can be both.
Magnet schools aren’t a direct attack on our public education system, though they can lead to some amount of economic and ethnic sorting.
danimal
Standardized test scores for private, charter and public schools would really help separate the wheat from the chaff; the grifters from the reformers. Which is probably why Republicans consistently oppose them. I believe apples-to-apples comparisons will be a net positive for most public schools and could give useful correctives for schools that need improvement.
schrodinger's cat
@Libby Spencer: You should come visit. I have been gone from Maine for over 7 years and I miss it too. I miss the ocean. I am thinking of making a trip late summer or early fall.
schrodinger's cat
@kindness: I thought at BJ we pray to the Ceiling Cat and his prophet Tunch.
Libby Spencer
@PeakVT: I suppose the sorting is inevitable since kids who excel in certain areas of study would tend to come from similar backgrounds. But I don’t recall ever hearing complaints about those particular two schools I know about personally being exclusionary. Afraid that’s the sum total of my knowledge.
Not having young kids, I don’t follow the issues closely anymore. I’m so old I remember when public schools offered a well rounded curricula.
Jay in Oregon
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist:
People who think for-profit charter schools are a great idea should ask themselves if they want Bain Capital to have any control over their kids’ education.
PeakVT
@PeakVT: I probably should say additional sorting, since the country is sorted to a considerable degree already.
@Libby Spencer: It’s not a factor of conscious discrimination. It’s just that getting a student into a magnet usually requires additional time and money over sending them to a local school.
Libby Spencer
@schrodinger’s cat: I keep trying to make time to get back there and catch up with the few people who didn’t leave.
weaselone
Charters, even public charters often are able to engage in practices that skew results in their favor. For example, they engage in direct advertising to high performing students or market in affluent areas. This distorts their pool of candidates so that it no longer resembles the school system taken as a whole, even if they have a lottery. Better pool of candidates, better students, better results. Many charters have student attrition rates far higher than the local public school system. Cull the poor performers and test scores go up. Charters often have the advantage of more engaged parents as parents who push to get their children into charters are by definition my actively engaged in their childrens education that those who are not and a sizable portion of charters require parental invovlement.
The Moar You Know
@Jim Pharo: You’re either a teacher or know one really well. THIS is the new direction of “education”. Charters, fucked as they are, are yesterday’s news. Why just sell off the rights to education? The land those schools are sitting on, at least in SoCal, is worth a lot more.
artem1s
charter schools in Ohio = not a good thing
read up on White Hat Management. as evil as they sound in this article, you can pretty much multiply that by a gazillion. they never had any interest in education; only grabbing as much tax payer money as possible AND they took advantage of those most in need of good public schools. pure evil.
http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2011/04/essence-of-charter-school-scam.html
Mino
The first charter schools were public schools. Many were of the magnet type. Most of these performed quite well.
The current bastardization of public education and private interprise is designed to fleece the public and destroy public education.
slag
I recently got into a discussion with a pro-charter school person who thought that a charter school policy of kicking kids out if their parents failed to participate in their education was just a great idea. I totally agreed with her that “delivering the sins of the father onto the son” was indeed a great idea. I’m pretty sure she thought I was serious and yet made no argument against that statement.
People are weird.
Mino
@Jay in Oregon: How do you feel about Bain (or such as Bain) re-designing the federal government?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/09/1053013/-If-Elected-Romney-Would-Hire-McKinsey-or-Bain-to-Reorganize-The-Federal-Government
This would be a good question to ask undecided voters.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@artem1s:
I’ve read about White Hat’s for-profit Ohio schools. Those people sound like complete shameless criminals, abetted by willing or ignorant public officials. I don’t think I’ve read a case of more blatant profiteering outside of military procurement in wartime.
gene108
@PeakVT:
Went to magnet middle school and high school.
They were, when I was there, a response to the busing/integration problems from the 1970’s.
Instead of shipping poor black kids across town to the white kids school, you designate a few schools with extra special programs and entice the rich white kids to voluntarily be shipped across town to the poor black base school.
They were in no way an attack on the other public schools.
butler
@feebog: GHS is a great example, but unfortunately its one of the very few diamonds in this increasingly large rough. And unfortunately its also an example that can be held up to say “Look at what charter schools can do! Let us open charters too and we’ll build you a great school just like this one!”, completely ignoring all the actual factors which make GHS good and only focusing on the “charter” title.
Which is kind of like saying that wearing a swoosh is what makes Usain Bolt so darn fast.
Davis X. Machina
@MariedeGournay: AFT president Al Shanker was an early charter booster — but always wanted charters to deal with the hardest-to-educate students, the ones at the greatest risk. By 1993, he was editorializing against them in the Times.
Diane Ravich’s recent column on Shanker and history of charters
thm
The case of charters in Washington DC (where I live, and where I send my son to a charter school) is rather complicated. There are roughly 30k students enrolled in charters, and 40k students enrolled in regular public schools. The charter schools are about 70% low-income and the regular public schools are about 60%.
We can broadly consider the students to be either at-risk or middle-class. The charter schools, too, are pretty obviously grouped into schools that target at-risk families, and schools that target middle-class families, although admission to all is strictly on a lottery basis (with exceptions for siblings and children of school founders). Many of the middle-class-centric schools are superb. The ones that target at-risk kids I’m not so sure about. Many are desperate for outcomes better than the public schools that have predominantly at-risk students, but it’s not clear you can do this if you don’t fix poverty first. And the charters enrolling lots of at-risk students don’t seem to be doing better than the public schools.
With the student demographics as they are, it is impossible not to have (many) schools in which the population is predominantly at-risk. And there is a long tradition of middle-class folk in the poorer areas of town sending their kids to out-of-boundary schools in the wealthier areas of town. This is, in fact, one of the things that many got mad at Michelle Rhee for doing: she convinced wealthy whites (in e.g. Georgetown) to send their kids to their local public schools, instead of private school, and in doing so, dramatically reduced the number of spaces for out-of-boundary kids.
The successful (until the Tea Party shut it down?) experiment in Raleigh, North Carolina was to redraw school boundaries to give all schools some at-risk students, but have no school more than 35% at-risk. It is pretty universally accepted that it is a positive thing for at-risk students to be in schools with mostly middle-class students, and that it is good for all students to be exposed to a diverse student body. In DC, at present, there simply aren’t enough middle-class students to have all schools be at least 65% middle-class.
While having low numbers of at-risk kids in otherwise middle-class schools is a good thing, the opposite is definitely not true. Middle-class parents who’ve tried report that putting their children in schools with predominantly at-risk student populations is tolerable until about the second grade, after which the achievement gap and incessant test prep are too stifling. It’s been reported again and again that those who make it through the predominantly at-risk schools end up woefully unprepared for college-level work. Some get back on their feet, but proper preparation is preferred.
What the charters are doing is providing a feasible educational solution for middle-class families who live in school boundaries that have predominantly at-risk kids, who are determined to stay in the city, and who really don’t want to flee to the suburbs once their children are of school age. By doing so, they help establish the city as a reasonable place for middle-class families to live. The number of middle-class families will eventually reach a tipping point, at which there will be a critical mass of middle-class families to send their kids to a local regular public school. This has already happened in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and will likely happen in other neighborhoods in the coming decades as the city repopulates. So in that sense the charters are partially a transitional solution, and will likely evolve to predominantly serve the niche roles such as that that Libby mentions.
Steeplejack
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’m definitely of the church of Ceiling Cat, rather than FSM. Although I am ecumenical.
Elliecat
@danimal: They totally give away the game by refusing to hold charters, etc., to the same standards as public schools.
And there’s this:
Oh yeah. It’s all about better education for children!
schrodinger's cat
@Steeplejack: Have you read the Lolcat bible?
Steeplejack
@schrodinger’s cat:
I am familiar with the Word of Ceiling Cat.
burnspbesq
@Schlemizel:
As the parent of a graduate of a specialized charter school (Orange County High School of the Arts), I am here to tell you that that statement is absolutely false, and there are ample data to show that it’s false.
kindness
@schrodinger’s cat:
Here at Balloon Juice we are equal opportunity blasphemers.
dcdl
@weaselone:
I don’t get charter schools. I look at it as taking money out of the public school system. My kids who go to public school have to deal with the school not having the resources since they don’t have as much money for the school.
Why not put the money into public school? I believe a lot of issues stem from the parents being not involved because they have to work all the time and are not home &/or the parents were ‘taught’ that school sucks so they pass it onto their kids. In other words, you need a higher living wage and a way to educate the parents on how to help their children.
If you want to have a better school I believe you have to volunteer through the PTC, classroom, basically involve yourself in your child’s life at school and at home.
Obviously, there are issues with public schools, but instead of washing ones hands of them why not try and fix them. Public schools have been working for a long time and have produced great people.
Cassidy
@gene108: Jacksonville, Fl? That’s the exact story of how the magnet program was created here.
burnspbesq
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
Arts charters have auditions and portfolio reviews. You OK with that?
Cassidy
@burnspbesq: So do art magnets. Honestly, I’ll put the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts up against any art charter any day of the week.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@burnspbesq:
Absolutely.
Mino
@thm: That sounds like charters are being used to facilitate gentrification. Am I wrong?
barbequbob
I’m not in the education business or a student of charter schools, so I can not comment on all these other cases and issues. But we have a couple of public charter schools here on Cape Cod that are excellent schools run by highly dedicated teachers and administrators that are providing an exceptional education. The Sturgis Charter Public School was ranked by Newsweek as the #1 school in Massachusetts. My kids both went to the Lighthouse Charter School,a middle school, where admission is by a lottery system as it is at Sturgis (my youngest did not get in the first year, had to wait on a list until 7th grade). The teachers are mostly ex-hippie free spirit refugees from the more rigid classroom and curriculum of the larger schools in the district. I guess what we have here is exceptional, but you won’t find religous zealots or profiteers at our charter schools. But we are mostly a bunch of “radical liberals” here in Massachusetts anyway.
NotMax
Vocational and specialized schools (Bronx High School of Science, for an example of the latter) have been around for many decades, as a part of the public school system.
The private, for-profit aspect is what is fairly new and deeply insidious.
Some parts of the commonweal are too important to be wrenched from public authority, or too necessary to wail over not running at a profit.
The private charter school movement is functionally the equivalent of privatizing ownership. control and use of bridges on the interstates.
barbequbob
I should also add that a lot of what the Lighthouse Charter School does is also the result of parent involvement, e.g. coaching teams, driving vans on field trips, gassing up the vans over the weekend, helping teach seminars, fund raising, and the school has a board of directors composed of parents too. So, it is a collaboration between teachers and parents .
Interrobang
@dcdl: While that sounds good in theory, except if you’re anti-gentrification, what happens if the common scenario (and the expressed desire of most high-level charter proponents) comes true in the DC area, and the for-profit, anti-public-school operators effectively kill off the public school system before you hit the alleged “tipping point” you talk about? As far as I can tell, what you’d then wind up with is a de facto race- and class-segregated school system where the rich(er), white(r) students get good, private, for-profit education and the poor, mostly black students get…what, exactly?
I don’t mean to be making a slippery slope argument here, but it really sounds like there should be other ways of accomplishing the same goal through the public system, rather than feeding into a system which explicitly operates (presently) to funnel public money away from public education.
gene108
@thm:
As laudable as the Wake County plan for balancing out low income students was, I’d have hated to be a parent with kids in the system and deal with the constant changing of schools.
For example, John age 8 goes to Northridge elementary school. There’s guarantee his little brother Bobbie will also follow him to Northridge or that either of them will finish their elementary school careers at the same school, even if the parents don’t move.
The out-of-state New Jersey transplants, I believe, were voted out in the recent election and any attempt to turn the Wake County school system into the New Jersey model of a patch work of each town having its own school system seems to be over.
Some effort to rebalance the number of poor kids is being done, but the current school board doesn’t want to be as onerous to parents with constant school reassignments.
@Cassidy:
Raleigh, NC. Wake County Public Schools.
JoyfulA
I’m editing a book on the topic now. It turns out that vast piles of money from Bill Gates’s foundation and other worse ones have gone to the charter school system in New York
City. These donors looked for large school districts with no school board and a single boss, like Bloomberg’s NYC, so decisions and changes can be made quickly, without getting input from parents, teachers, taxpayers, or students. It’s all appallingly undemocratic.
peggy
What I like is that when parents complained, the head sued them for libel. Even after the indictments, the suit is still pending, but I bet it will be settled.
Another Halocene Human
@gene108: Yes, so the white kids get more educational options than the Hispanic kids, the black kids, the Vietnamese kids.
I was an inmate of the Montgomery County School System briefly. I know of which I speak.
Another Halocene Human
@thm: The history of DC charters begins with Marion Barry handing a charter contract to one of his cronies.
The school never opened.
Another Halocene Human
@Mino: White people moving back into the District is not a bad thing.
You know what sucks? Arson, block busting, red lining, and white flight. (Followed by departure of middle class Blacks, though their withdrawal was less… spectacular.)
It’s actually shocking how quickly things have changed there since about 1998.
Cassidy
@gene108: Wow. That is esactly how Duval County got it’s magnet system. Jacksonville is so big, that we’re just naturally segregated communities. You never have to leave your side of town for any reason of necessity. So, as is common, the city became segregated. The NAACP filed suit because of the disparity in school quality that varied by neighborhood and disproportionately affected black neighborhoods (I know, right!). As part of the desegregation settlement, thye started bussing students all over the city and created the magnet program to maek it more palatable to the white citizens.
Another Halocene Human
@barbequbob: Before the disgusting voucher/charter/testing regime raid and pillage of inner city schools, the big movement in the Northeast was a parent-driven demand for a return to neighborhood schools in communities where busing had been a fact of life for decades. Maybe it was a nostalgia for the old days of the kindly, god-like Black principle of the all-Black high school, misremembered by those who never experienced it. Or not. Some of the first experimental charters fed into the desire of city parents to have the same kind of educational experience for their children that suburban parents took for granted.
Of course, we don’t allow urban people self rule. Time for those who know best to step in–evangelical grifters, the RCC, desperate for new students and cash (the had the Federal government forcing DC to pay to send their kids to their schools), testing “experts”, new charter school firms, assorted grifters, shills, conmen, and clowns.
Ohio Mom
Libby, you still there? All you have to do to get up to speed on what’s happening to public education is read Diane Ravtich’s blog for a few days. http://dianeravitch.net/ I promise you’ll know as much, if not more than Kay does after that.
You’ll see how high-stakes testing (NCLB, RTTT), charters/vouchers, and union-busting are all intertwined, and all aimed at the same end, privatization. And you will be shocked by the tremendous progress the forces that want to dismantle public education have made and are making. Really, there isn’t a corner of this nation that isn’t being affected.
And if you don’t know who Ravitch is, she is THE foremost historian of American public education. She was also a high-level mucky-muck in Bush’s Dept of Ed — and then she had a come-to-Damascus moment.
P.S. To everyone on this thread who has a kid in a charter and wants to defend their school: yeah, there are a few good charters out there. Their function is to serve as decoys while the rest of the “school deform” movement systematically removes the level of local government known as the school board/district and replaces it with private concerns.
I don’t blame you, everyone’s kid is only a kid for a few years and you made the best choice for them, given the options you had.
You’re not that much different from me, I left the city and moved to the suburbs because that’s where the best schooling option for my kid is. But I don’t pretend that it’s fair that suburban schools are so much better funded and resourced than city schools — don’t you go pretending that your school proves anything at all about the school privatization movement. Because it doesn’t.
pluege
So I’m thinking charter schools aren’t entirely a bad concept
and maybe you’re an idiot.
a) there are plenty of outrageously successful public “magnet” schools – checkout Stuyvesant HS in New York for one.
b) Charter schools can NEVER be anything but a scam. They take a bucket of money – the SAME money you would have given to a public school, except now with Charter Schools you have the scam artists running the school skimming from the fixed bucket of money, meaning you have LESS money for educating children. They use the same teachers, the same services, only they pay them less because they have less after they’ve glommed their no value share.
Only morons could ever fall for the scam that Charter schools. They are yet another fang of the plutocrats stealing from taxpayers to enrich themselves while delivering NO VALUE to society like private prisons, privatized military services, and virtually ALL privatized government services.
Doug Woodard
There’s a whole lot of uninformed BS in here. Check out Success Academy in NYC. My daughter works there, and the people there are as dedicated, work as long hours, and for as little pay as happens in political campaigns. These folks are on a mission – and it’s about providing an environment for kids who would otherwise slide to the bottom to learn and grow and develop. Some of you all are weigh off, and using your limited experience to piss all over the entire charter school effort. Misguided, that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Success_Academy_Charter_Schools