Charter Schools

NAACP Calls For National Moratorium On Charter Schools

August 1, 2016 Julian Vasquez Heilig, www.cloakinginequity.com Resist! Charter Schools, NAACP

By Julian Vasquez Heilig for Cloaking Inequality - I don’t believe that this has been reported anywhere else. Last week at the NAACP National Convention in Cincinnati, the delegates voted in a new resolution on charter schools. It’s approval as policy will not be official until the National Board meeting in the Fall of 2016. However, this is a big news story that (I suspect because of the political conventions) has not yet entered the traditional media. Yesterday in the post How will history remember the @NAACP on charters? I discussed the 2010 and 2014 NAACP charter school resolutions.

Rally At Castelar Elementary Puts Charters In Crosshairs

May 6, 2016 Craig Clough, www.laschoolreport.com Resist! Charter Schools, Education, Protests

By Craig Clough for La School Report - About 200 parents, students and teachers rallied Wednesday morning outside Castelar Street Elementary School in Chinatown as part of a “walk-in” calling for lower class sizes at LA Unified, increased staffing and more accountability for Prop. 39, the law that gives charter schools the right to use empty class space at district schools through a process called “co-location.” Several TV news crews were on hand for the demonstration, which saw parents, teachers and students march around the block hoisting banners and chanting before walking into the school.

Overwhelming Bipartisan Support To Rein In Charter School Lapses

March 5, 2016 Steven Rosenfeld, www.alternet.org Educate! Charter Schools, Education, Research

By Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet - According to a new, nationwide poll, Americans overwhelmingly want public charter schools to be more accountable, have less selective admissions policies, employ better-trained teachers, and refrain from harming traditional local schools by siphoning away precious taxpayer funds. Overall, the poll shows wide support for regulating many aspects of the school privatization movement. “Americans embrace proposals to reform the way charter schools are authorized and managed,”...

Most Charter Schools Are Public In Name Only

February 14, 2016 Steven Singer, www.gadflyonthewallblog.com Educate! Charter Schools, Corporatism, Education, Worker's Rights

By Steven Singer in Gadfly on the Wall Blog. As a public school teacher, I can never recall being at a training where charter operators taught us how to do things better with these time-tested strategies. I do, however, recall watching excellent co-workers furloughed because my district had to meet the rising costs of payments to our local charters. Moreover, if the freedom to experiment is so important, why not give that privilege to all public schools, not just a subset? The reality is much different than the ideal. In the overwhelming majority of cases, charter schools are vastly inferior to their more traditional brethren. To understand why, we need to see the differences between these two kinds of learning institutions and why in every case the advantage goes to our much-maligned, long suffering traditional public schools

Teachers, Parents And Students Hold Coloring Contest To Expose Crime

January 25, 2016 Carolyn Leith, www.livingindialogue.com Resist! Art, Budgets, Charter Schools, Education, Privatization

By Carolyn Leith for Living in Dialogue - Back in September, parents were blindsided when Seattle Public Schools (SPS) proposed staff cuts at “25 or something” schools across the district. Emergency meetings were held, letters were sent to the school board, but none of these efforts seemed to make a difference. The district had made up its mind. This is when Shawna Murphy and I decided to create our own advocacy group called Teacher Retention Advocate Parents or TRAP. We staged a spoofy bake sale – dubbed the Half-Baked Bake Sale – at district headquarters.

Teachers’ Union Protests Eli Broad’s Support Of Charter Schools

September 22, 2015 Adrienne Bankert, www.abc7.com Resist! Charter Schools, Education, Los Angeles, Privatization, Teacher's Union

By Adrienne Bankert in ABC7 - A crowd of protesters with United Teachers Los Angeles held a rally outside The Broad on the museum's opening day Sunday. Hundreds of parents, teachers and students clad in red T-shirts held up signs and chanted outside the new contemporary art museum, which opened its doors to the public Sunday morning. The protesters said they are not against the museum but are against Eli Broad's reported plan to try to expand charter schools throughout the city of Los Angeles. Broad reportedly plans to put between half a billion and a billion dollars into unregulated, non-union charter schools, that could draw half of the district's students. The teachers' union fears these schools would not be accountable to the public, would cherry-pick their students, and keep parents from being able to interact with teachers.

How The Billionaire Kingpins Of School Privatization Got Stopped

September 9, 2015 Kali Holloway, www.truth-out.org Resist! Charter Schools, Privatization, Public Education

By Kali Holloway in Truthout - The debate over public schools in Arkansas has been, for decades, ongoing and often fraught. In 1957, the Arkansas school year began with white mobs viciously attacking nine black teenagers as they attempted to desegregate Little Rock's Central High following Brown vs. Board of Education, shining a national spotlight on the state and forcing President Eisenhower to send in the 101st Airborne Division. This past January, nearly 60 years after Arkansas' first desegregation efforts, the state board of education dissolved Little Rock's democratically elected local school board, the most racially inclusive and representative of its majority-black constituency in nearly a decade. In making the decision, the state overruled widespread public outcry to take control of the largest school district in the state. Two months later, Walton Family Foundation-backed lobbyists launched a brazen legislative push to allow for broader privatization - or put bluntly, "charterization" - of schools across Arkansas. It was a move many believed revealed a carefully orchestrated effort, begun months prior, to undermine the state's public school system, destroy its teachers unions and turn public funds into private profits.

Washington Supreme Court: Charter Schools Are Unconstitutional

September 6, 2015 Staff, www.AP.org Resist! Charter Schools, Education, Privatization

By Staff for Associated Press - The Washington Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state's voter-approved charter-school law is unconstitutional, throwing the new school year into chaos for about 1,200 pupils enrolled in the system. In a 6-3 ruling, the high court said charter schools do not qualify as "common" schools under Washington's Constitution and cannot receive public funding intended for those traditional public schools. "The Supreme Court has affirmed what we've said all along - charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding," Kim Mead, president of the Washington Education Association, said in a written statement. Paul Lawrence, an attorney for the coalition, said the ruling means the charter schools can't open unless they find another source of money.

Don’t Trust The Media On Corporate Education Reform

August 25, 2015 Molly Knefel, www.fair.org Educate! Charter Schools, Education, Los Angeles, Media, Privatization

By Molly Knefel in FAIR - Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times (8/18/15) announced an initiative called Education Matters, “an ongoing, wide-ranging report card on K-12 education in Los Angeles, California and the nation.” The project will cover educational issues, including “the latest debate on curriculum or testing” and “how charter schools are changing public education.” The Times, owned by Tribune Publishing, will fund Education Matters with donations and grants from philanthropic organizations like the Baxter Family Foundation and the Broad Foundation. “These institutions, like the Times,” publisher and CEO Austin Beutner writes, “are dedicated to independent journalism that engages and informs its readers.”

Study: NYC Charters Leave 1000s Of Seats Unfilled Despite Demand

June 8, 2015 Emma Brown, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Charter Schools, Education, New York City (NYC), Privatization

By Emma Brown in The Washington Post - New York City’s charter schools are leaving thousands of seats unfilled each year despite ballooning demand and long waiting lists, according to an analysis of public data to be released Friday. The decision not to fill seats that are left vacant by departing students deprives other deserving students of places in the schools, the report argues. It also means that charter schools can appear to be improving, according to proficiency rates on standardized tests, even as the absolute number of children scoring proficient declines each year, it says. The report, entitled “No Seat Left Behind” and issued by the Harlem-based parent advocacy group Democracy Builders, calls on charter schools to begin voluntarily “backfilling” their empty seats — or admitting new students to replace those who leave.

The Uphill Battle Of Unionizing A Philly Charter School

June 6, 2015 Rachel M. Cohen, www.prospect.org Organize! Charter Schools, Education, Labor Unions

By Rachel M. Cohen in Prospect - On April 30th, faculty at North Philadelphia’s Olney Charter High School voted 104-38 in favor of forming a union, an NLRB election that Olney’s charter operator, ASPIRA, has since announced they’re challenging. Olney’s union campaign is only the latest in a small but rapidly growing wave of charter union drives nationwide. But few efforts have been as contentious, or as revealing, as this one. Ever since the campaign began three years ago, ASPIRA has pumped tens of thousands of dollars into an elaborate union-busting effort, even as the beleaguered district it’s funded by struggles with massive debt. Unionizing Olney also threatens to shine light on ASPIRA’s questionable finances, at a time when authorities at the state and district level have failed to act. More broadly, the union drive in Philadelphia reveals how charter management organizations can use lax regulation to dodge financial accountability.

Father Protects Daughter From Toxic Testing

March 27, 2015 Steven Singer, www.gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com Resist! Charter Schools, Education, Law

I’ll admit it – I was scared. I’m a nationally board certified teacher with a masters degree in education. I’ve taught public school for over a dozen years. But I’ve only been a daddy for half that time. Would making this call get my little girl in trouble? I didn’t want to rock the boat. I didn’t want my daughter to suffer because her old man is making a fuss. I didn’t want her teachers and principal giving her a hard time because of something I did. But I couldn’t deny what I know. Standardized testing is destroying public education.

The Sad Story Of The Nation’s First All-Charter District

January 9, 2015 Diane Ravitch, www.dianeravitch.net Educate! Capitalism, Charter Schools, Education, Privatization

Peter Greene here recounts the sad story of the nation’s first all-charter district in Muskegon Heights, Michigan. You never hear about this important experiment on national radio and television. Want to know why? No big PR machine. No miracles. Instead, disaster. Governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager to impose change on Muskegon Heights. The students had low scores, and the district had a deficit. The emergency manager gave the entire district to Mosaica, a for-profit charter chain. It was “a historic opportunity” to show how private enterprise could raise scores, close achievement gaps, and succeed where the public schools had failed.

The Racist History Of The Charter School Movement

January 8, 2015 Christopher Bonastia, www.alternet.org Educate! Charter Schools, Education, Privatization

The driving assumption for the pro-charter side, of course, is that market competition in education will be like that for toothpaste — providing an array of appealing options. But education, like healthcare, is not a typical consumer market. Providers in these fields have a disincentive to accept or retain “clients” who require intensive interventions to maintain desired outcomes—in the case of education, high standardized test scores that will allow charters to stay in business. The result? A segmented marketplace in which providers compete for the “good risks,” while the undesirables get triage. By design, markets produce winners, losers and unintended or hidden consequences.

Judge Says NC School Vouchers Are Unconstitutional

August 26, 2014 Politics USA, www.politicususa.com Educate! Charter Schools, Education, Law, Privatization

For the past decade, Republicans have been on a tear to blatantly transfer taxpayer money directly to private enterprises without regard for the needs of the people. Whether it is privatizing Medicare, Social Security, social services, or education, Republicans have devised various schemes to appropriate taxpayer money to profit their donors; including churches Hell-bent on inculcating Christianity in private religious schools at the expense of public education. One of the most important clauses in the U.S. Constitution is the General Welfare clause in Article I – section 8 that reads, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” According to the Founding Fathers and first four Presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, taxes providing for the ‘general welfare’ were to provide housing, food, medical care, and education for the poor among other domestic programs. In fact, one of the authors of the Constitution, James Madison killed legislation giving taxpayer money to churches anxious to profit from pretending to provide for the people because the Founders believed the government should never, never ever, give money to churches for anything; including education.

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