I went to an education forum at NN yesterday. Jeff Bryant, one of the panelists, charged that “progressives have climbed aboard the bandwagon of a conservative agenda for public schools”.
He singled out the Center for American Progress, which he says is indistinguishable from the American Enterprise Institute on public school issues.
I don’t know how true that charge is, but I think we’d do well if we’d first admit that we have a lot of for-profit charter schools and they’ve been operating long enough to leave a long paper trail. We could look at those schools, and see how the “reform movement” experiments are going, ten years in.
For-profit charter schools have been in operation in Ohio for more than a decade. They are not a thought experiment. They are not an abstract hypothetical. They are not just a topic being batted around at various “reform roundtables”. They have an extensive record of failure. Why we are pretending this is all just in the discussion stage is beyond me. The jury really isn’t still out. In Ohio, the jury came straggling back in years ago, and the verdict isn’t good.
We’ve talked about White Hat Management here before. White Hat is a for-profit charter school that operates in Ohio and Florida virtually without regulation and without any documented success. Former FOX News personality John Kasich isn’t only promoting his campaign donor White Hat, however. He’s now promoting ECOT, another for-profit that is a huge GOP donor, another for-profit with an absolutely horrendous record on actually educating people.
ECOT, The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, is the 21st largest “district” in the state of Ohio. The state spent $59,978,866 on the school last year – millions of which seem to go directly into the pocket of William Lager, the schools founder.
Lager has returned a lot of that money – hundreds of thousands of dollars just last year! – directly into the campaign coffers of some of his biggest (typically Republican) supporters – including tens of thousands of dollars directly to Speaker of the House Speaker William Batchelder, Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus and Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court Maureen O’Connor.
Which might explain why this school has been gaining support among Ohio’s Republicans even though it has been sucking hundreds of millions in state funding away from Ohio’s public schools while failing Ohio’s students for nearly a decade.
During the last campaign Kasich said he would push for State takeover of Cleveland Public Schools if they didn’t improve, but ECOT continues to have a lower graduation rate and a lower attendance rate than Cleveland Public Schools. Not only is Kasich not pushing for State takeover of ECOT – he’s promoting the school and of his party’s largest political donors – by speaking at their graduation.
I have this nightmare vision of the future: we’re all 90 years old, we’re begging Congress or a state legislature for a public option in elementary and high school education, we’re counting votes, and coming up short.