Corporate Charter Lobbyists Go After Florida School Construction Money

With hundreds of millions already in the bank, the vulture philanthropists and their hopped-up hedge funders are looking for more cash for their corporate welfare charter schools.

Will the Florida State Legislature destroy the bond ratings of state public schools to win the next election?

From Miami Herald:

By Kathleen McGrory and Scott Hiaasen
shiaasen@miamiherald.com

 

A legislative plan to give charter schools a cut of local school districts’ construction money would steer millions of additional dollars to large charter-school networks that are already sitting on tens of millions of dollars in cash, records show.

The charter-school industry is lobbying hard in the capital to gain a share of tax dollars raised by school districts to cover the construction and maintenance costs of traditional public schools — tax revenue that has dropped dramatically in recent years with plummeting real-estate values. Currently, school districts are not required to share these tax dollars with charter schools.

School districts say the proposal could cost them as much as $140 million a year statewide and cripple their ability to repair aging school buildings and pay debts for past construction. But charter school operators say the lesser funding for their students is inherently unfair, and argue that withholding construction money has stifled charter schools’ growth.

Earlier this month, Doug Rodriguez, the principal of the Doral Academy Preparatory Middle/High charter school, told a Senate committee that the lack of construction money has “placed a cap on our school. We’re not able to expand.”

But many charter schools, including Rodriguez’s, routinely collect more tax dollars than they spend, and sock away the unspent cash. The Doral Academy charter-school network, comprised of five Miami-Dade schools, had net assets of $13.6 million last year, much of it cash, records show.

The Doral Academy network is one of four large South Florida charter-school chains run by Academica, the state’s largest charter school operator. These four school networks — the Doral, Mater, Somerset and Pinecrest academies — had combined assets of more than $83 million last year, records show. This money is held by nonprofit companies that own the schools, which are managed by Academica, a for-profit company based in South Miami.

These schools could stand to gain millions more every year from the construction tax dollars, which would be distributed on a per-student basis. For example, the Doral, Mater, Somerset and Pinecrest academies — which now have 45 percent of all charter-school students in Miami-Dade County — would receive an additional $14.5 million from the Miami-Dade school district this year alone under the proposal.

Academica’s schools aren’t the only ones with growing reserves. The Keys Gate charter schools in Homestead, managed by Fort Lauderdale-based Charter Schools USA, have about $5 million in cash reserves, and the nearby Charter School at Waterstone, run by Charter School Associates, had $2.6 million in assets last year, most of it cash, records show.

Lynn Norman Teck, spokeswoman for the Florida Consortium of Public Charter Schools, said charters should not be cut out of construction funding because some schools have managed to save money.
“Their reserves are for a rainy day,” Teck said. “I don’t think it is fair to penalize a group of charter schools for being financially savvy.”

Andreina Figueroa, chairwoman of the Somerset Academy charter-school network, said her schools put money away to safeguard against funding cuts. The 31 Somerset schools in Miami-Dade and Broward have more than 10,000 students and $25 million in assets, records show.

“We can’t control what the Legislature does,” Figueroa said. “We need to know that if the state of Florida cuts us, we can continue to educate our students.”

In contrast, many smaller, independent charters don’t have cash reserves, and struggle to pay for maintenance and construction under the current financing rules, Teck said.

The proposed legislation would allow charters to spend the new tax dollars on construction and related expenses, and facility leases. Many South Florida charters lease their school buildings from companies with ties to their for-profit managers.

Sen. Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, a sponsor of the proposal, said the issue is fairness: Under today’s rules, charter schools receive less money per student than traditional public schools. While some schools have large cash reserves, “the mom-and-pops have nothing,” he said. “We’re going to make all the kids equal.”

But opponents of the measure say it will mainly benefit the large charter-school operators with high enrollment and robust balance sheets.

“These are not the mom-and-pop charter schools that are pushing for this. These are the big management companies,” said Georgia Slack, a lobbyist for the Broward County School District.

At the moment, the fate of the proposal remains uncertain. A Senate education committee approved Wise’s bill. But the sponsor in the House of Representatives was unable to tack on similar language to the House version of the bill last week. Observers believe the provision will resurface in a later draft.

Slack said the proposal would cost the Broward school system at least $20 million a year. Miami-Dade officials estimate that the funding change would cost $37 million in the next school year, and $45 million the following year.

The school districts say they can’t afford to lose the tax money, most of which goes not to construction costs but to pay the debt on bonds. Nearly one-third of Florida’s school districts use all of their construction taxes to pay down debt.

The Miami-Dade School District is expected to collect about $267 million next year through the tax, but $182 million of that would have to go toward paying off bonds — leaving only a fraction for maintenance and construction. Overall, the capital budgets of the Miami-Dade and Broward school districts have dropped more than 70 percent in the past five years, as sinking property values dragged down tax revenues.

Maintenance needs, meanwhile, continue to grow. Miami-Dade — where half the school buildings are more than four decades old — has more than $1.7 billion in outstanding capital needs, from air conditioners that need replacing to leaky pipes and electrical upgrades.

The Broward school system, which has $1.8 billion in capital needs, can’t buy new computers for classrooms, Slack said. “We have stopped all cosmetic painting,” she told lawmakers.

Last week, the Fitch bond-rating agency warned that diverting local tax money to charters would put a significant strain on school districts — a hint that school districts’ credit ratings could suffer as a result.

“We need to slow the train down and look at the very serious implications for charter schools and traditional public schools,” said Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, the bill’s most vocal opponent. Montford is also the CEO of the Florida Association of School Superintendents. . . .

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/19/v-print/2649278/bill-would-benefit-big-charter.html#storylink=cpy

Three Kinds of Charter Schools: Largely Segregated, Intensely Segregated, and Apartheid

If a charter school in the leafy suburbs of Georgia or North Carolina offers no federal breakfast or lunch program and no transportation for kids, can poor parents choose this school for their children who will, otherwise, not have breakfast, lunch, or a ride to and from school?

If a charter school in Memphis or Minneapolis offers, as the only option to a crumbling public school, a chain gang charter that mimics the total compliance KIPP behavioral and cultural neutering programs, can middle class parents ever be expected to choose to enroll their Seths and Caitlins there?

So no, the new segregation via charter school in America is not accomplish through legal mandates but by willful and transparent discriminatory and racist measures that emanate from a corporate welfare educational caste system.  All under the rotted banner of "choice" and all of it embraced by an economically-engineered Congress and Administration bought and paid for by the corporations and hedge funders who have devised this proto-fascist system of apartheid that threatens the foundations of the Republic. 

Even as Duncan's NCLB waiver fiasco offers new opportunities for Team Obama to use some of their bribe money to "incent" schools toward diversity, not a nickel is provided.  Just as there was not a nickel provided to encourage diversity under the $3 billion plus of RTTT, even as applications without removal of charter caps were thrown in the trash. 


In the excellent piece of reporting below by John Hechinger, notice Russlyn Ali's comments that capture Team Obama's Ostrich Approach to civil rights enforcement: "there is no evidence of discrimination."  Really? 

So how is Team Obama countering the new awareness of segregation by charter school?  They trot out Arne with "voluntary guidelines," but only after the completion of the largest federal incentive in history for the return to Jim Crow schools.  Yes, Arne, I am beginning to understand why you say that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. 

By John Hechinger - Dec 22, 2011 

At Dugsi Academy, a public school in St. Paul, Minnesota, girls wearing traditional Muslim headscarves and flowing ankle-length skirts study Arabic and Somali. The charter school educates “East African children in the Twin Cities,” its website says. Every student is black.

At Twin Cities German Immersion School, another St. Paul charter, children gather under a map of “Deutschland,” study with interns from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and learn to dance the waltz. Ninety percent of its students are white.

Six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, segregation is growing because of charter schools, privately run public schools that educate 1.8 million U.S. children. While charter-school leaders say programs targeting ethnic groups enrich education, they are isolating low-achievers and damaging diversity, said Myron Orfield, a lawyer and demographer.

“It feels like the Deep South in the days of Jim Crow segregation,” said Orfield, who directs the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race & Poverty. “When you see an all-white school and an all-black school in the same neighborhood in this day and age, it’s shocking.”

Charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers studied 40 states, the District of Columbia, and 39 metropolitan areas. In particular, higher percentages of charter-school students attend what the report called “racially isolated” schools, where 90 percent or more students are from disadvantaged minority groups.

Charter-School Birthplace

In Minnesota, the birthplace of the U.S. charter-school movement, the divide is more than black and white.

St. Paul’s Hmong College Prep Academy, 99 percent Asian- American in the past school year, immerses students “in the rich heritage that defines Hmong culture.” Its Academia Cesar Chavez School -- 93 percent Hispanic -- promises bilingual education “by advocating Latino cultural values in an environment of familia and community.”

Minneapolis’s Four Directions Charter School, 94 percent Native American, black and Hispanic, promotes “lifelong learning for American Indian students.”

Charter schools, which select children through lotteries, are open to all who apply, said Abdulkadir Osman, Dugsi’s executive director.

“Some people call it segregation,” Osman said. “This is the parent’s choice. They can go anywhere they want. We are offering families something unique.”

Nobody ‘Forced’

That’s a “significant difference” between Minnesota charters and segregated schools in the 1950s South, said Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at Macalester College in St. Paul.

“Nobody is being forced to go to these schools,” said Nathan, who helped write Minnesota’s 1991 charter-school law.

Ever since Horace Mann crusaded for free universal education in the 19th century, public schools have been hailed as the U.S. institutions that bring together people of disparate backgrounds.

The atomization of charter schools coincides with growing U.S. diversity. Americans of other races will outnumber whites by 2042, the Census Bureau projects.

Even after a divided Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that schools couldn’t consider race in making pupil assignments to integrate schools, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy urged districts to find other ways to fight “de facto resegregation” and “racial isolation.”

“The nation’s schools strive to teach that our strength comes from people of different races, creeds, and cultures uniting in commitment to the freedom of all,” Kennedy wrote.

Diverse Workplaces

Citing Kennedy’s words, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder this month called for schools -- including charters -- to combat growing segregation.

Along with breeding “educational inequity,” racially- divided schools deny children the experiences they need to succeed in an increasingly diverse workplace, Duncan said in announcing voluntary guidelines for schools.

Charter schools may specialize in serving a single culture as long as they have open admissions, and there’s no evidence of discrimination, said Russlynn Ali, assistant education secretary for civil rights.

The education department is encouraging charter schools to promote diversity. Charters could expand recruiting and consider lotteries that give extra weight to disadvantaged groups, such as families living in low-income neighborhoods or children who speak English as a second language, Ali said in a phone interview.

Immigrant Magnet

Minnesota, 85 percent white, is a case study of the nation’s growing diversity. Since the 1970s, Minneapolis and St. Paul have become a magnet for Hmong refugees, who fought alongside Americans in the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, Somalis sought refuge from civil war.

St. Paul, where the nation’s first charter school opened in 1992, is 16 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic and 15 percent Asian-American, according to the U.S Census Bureau.

Charter schools should be similarly diverse, recommended a 1988 report that provided the groundwork for Minnesota’s charter-school law.

“We envision the creation of schools which, by design, would invite a dynamic mix of students by race and ability levels,” the Citizens League, a St. Paul-based nonprofit public-policy group, wrote in the report.

‘Great Failure’

Instead, in the 2009-2010 school year, three quarters of the Minneapolis and St. Paul region’s 127 charter schools were “highly segregated,” according to the University of Minnesota Law School’s race institute. Forty-four percent of schools were 80 percent or more non-white, and 32 percent, mostly white.

“It’s been a great failure that the most segregated schools in Minnesota are charter schools,” said Mindy Greiling, a state representative who lobbied for the charter-school law when she was a member of a suburban school board in the 1980s. “It breaks my heart.”

Segregation is typical nationwide. Seventy percent of black charter-school students across the country attended “racially isolated” schools, twice as many as the share in traditional public schools, according to the report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

Half of all Latino charter-school students went to these intensely segregated schools, the study found. In the West and the South, the two most racially diverse regions of the country, “charters serve as havens for white flight from public schools,” the report said.

Hmong Roots

They also serve as havens for minority students who need extra help, said leaders of Minnesota charter schools.
Christianna Hang, founder of Hmong College Prep Academy, said she designed the school so children, mostly first- generation Americans, didn’t feel adrift in public schools as she did when she arrived in the U.S. in 1980.

In the Hmong academy’s central hallway, a tapestry depicts families living in Laos, fleeing the Vietnam War and arriving in America. The school’s roughly 700 students, in grades kindergarten through 12th grade, learn Hmong.

“I came here for my parents as much as for me,” said Mai Chee Xiong, a 17-year-old senior. “I was very Americanized. I wanted to be able to speak with them in our language, and I wanted to understand my roots.”

In the 2009-2010 school year, 26 percent of Hmong Academy students met or exceeded standards on state math exams, while 30 percent did so in reading. About half passed those tests in the St. Paul Public School District.

Harvard Banners

To raise expectations, classrooms adopt colleges, hanging banners from Harvard University, Yale University and Dartmouth College over their doors.

“If we don’t do something to help these kids, they will get lost,” Hang said. “If they drop out of school, they will never become productive citizens, and there’s no way they will achieve the American dream.”

Dugsi Academy, the school for East Africans, and Twin Cities German Immersion School make for some of St. Paul’s sharpest contrasts.

Until this school year, the two schools were neighbors, across a busy commercial thoroughfare in a racially diverse neighborhood. At different times of the day, the kids used a city playground in front of the German school for recess. Dugsi has since moved three miles away, across a highway from the Hmong academy.

The German Immersion School is a bright, airy former factory with exposed brick and high ceilings.

Fluent German

“Eva, was ist das?” kindergarten teacher Elena Heindl asked one morning earlier this month as she pointed a red flashlight to letters, eliciting the name of each one in German.

To succeed at the school, students must be fluent in German to enroll, unless they enter before second or third grade, Julie Elias, a parent, told prospective families on a tour this month.

“You can’t just move into the neighborhood if you want to go to our school,” Elias said. The school is legally required to take anyone picked in its lottery, though it counsels parents against enrolling in older grades without German knowledge, said Annika Fjelstad, its director.

The school, which includes many families with one parent who speaks German or that have German relatives, holds special events at the Germanic-American Institute in a $1.3 million St. Paul house with a ballroom. Children like to call the institute “our school’s mansion,” said Chris Weimholt, another parent giving the tour.

No Buses

In the 2009-2010 school year, 87 percent of children at the German school passed state math tests and 84 percent did so in reading, according to the Minnesota Department of Education. Fifteen percent qualify for the federal free or reduced lunch program, compared with 71 percent in St. Paul. The school doesn’t offer bus transportation, so most parents drive, often carpooling, Elias said.

The language requirement and lack of transportation prevents poor families from attending, said Greiling, the state legislator, who has toured the school.

“A regular public school could never have that kind of bar,” she said. “It seems an odd thing that this would be legal.”

The German program doesn’t have buses because they would cost $100,000 a year, too heavy a burden for an expanding school of 274 that wants to maintain classes of 20 students, Fjelstad said. An immersion school can’t take kids who aren’t fluent after early grades, she said.

In February, the school formed an “inclusivity” task force to find ways to make the school more reflective of the community, Fjelstad said. The school will try to improve recruiting through its relationship with community organizations, such as a neighboring YMCA, she said.

International View

The school offers a different kind of diversity, said Weimholt, a nurse whose grandfather emigrated from Germany after World War I. “It doesn’t look diverse by skin color. But families straddle two different continents. The school truly has an international perspective.”

So does Dugsi Academy. Children learn Arabic and Somali along with English and traditional academic subjects. A caller last month heard no English on a school voice mail.

One morning in late November, a sixth-grade social-studies class discussed immigration with 28-year-old Khaleefah Abdallah, who himself fled Somalia 12 years ago. The boys wore jeans and sweatshirts. The girls sported hijabs, or traditional Muslim head coverings with skirts or long pants.

‘Melting Pot’

Abdallah asked his class about the idea of the American “melting pot:” immigrants assimilating into U.S. culture. He suggested another metaphor, a “salad bowl,” where people from different backgrounds mix while retaining their own identity.

“I agree with the salad bowl,” Fadumo Ahmed, 12, dressed in a black hijab and sneakers with pink laces, told the class. “We all come from different places, but we still want to keep our culture.”

Students shared stories of the challenge of co-existing in mainstream America.

Ahmed Hassan, 12, complained about a boy on a city playground who made fun of the long traditional robe he wore one Friday.

“He told me it looked like a skirt,” Hassan said. Abdallah told the class that, under the U.S. constitution, Americans have the freedom to express themselves through their clothing.

Test Scores

Dugsi, a low-slung red-brick building in an office park, has about 300 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Almost all qualify for federal free or reduced lunches, according to the state. Only 19 percent passed state math exams in the 2009-2010 school year, while 40 percent did so in reading.

The school’s test scores reflect families’ backgrounds. said Osman, the Dugsi director and a former employee of the U.S. Embassy in Somalia, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1993. Parents work as cab drivers, nurses and grocers, Osman said. Many had no formal schooling.

It would be better if one day Somali students could go to school with children from other backgrounds, Osman said.
“That’s the beauty of America -- Latinos, Caucasians, African-Americans and Native Americans, all together in the same building, eating lunch and in the same classrooms,” Osman said. “It would be something wonderful. That’s what I’m thinking of for my own kids and grandchildren.”

To contact the reporter on this story: John Hechinger in Boston at jhechinger@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net

Charter Schools: Duncan's Laboratories of Resegregation

Not every charter is all African-American or Hispanic with non-stop test prep, penal pedagogy, and hours that run from 7:30 to 5PM. Some, especially in the South and the West, are all white, offer karate and foreign languages, embrace hands-on learning, and run from 8AM to 2:45, except on Monday when they close at 12:45.

Just like York Preparatory Academy just outside Rock Hill, SC, which serves the white families of the new high end Gates subdivision, where lot prices start near $74,000. With an all-white Board, it's just like schools in the South used to be, back when celebrating Confederate History Month was not such a big deal.

From The Herald:

Local black leaders are concerned that York Preparatory Academy, the first charter school in York County open to any student, will be nearly all white.

The academy's organizers are still compiling information about the student body's demographics. But the several hundred people who attended the school's recent enrollment lottery were mostly white, as was the crowd of several hundred who attended a recent board meeting.

The school's governing board of seven members is all white.

Melvin Poole, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Rock Hill chapter, sees the makings of a segregated school.

"I don't think they made a real effort to get blacks in," Poole said. "I think this is just a cover-up way to get back to segregated schools ... creating a school of elites on the taxpayer's dime."

That's not true, said York Prep founder Craig Craze. He said organizers targeted black neighborhoods and churches with public information sessions about the school. Craze, who declined to speculate about the school's demographics until that data is available, said 1,588 people applied to send students to the school.

"Nowhere did we ask about gender or race before the lottery," he said.

The debate reflects a growing concern nationally over charter schools, which, with President Barack Obama's blessing, are opening in larger numbers every year.

"The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure," reads the foreword to a recent study by researchers from the Civil Rights Project based at UCLA.

Charter schools continue to "stratify students by race, class and possibly language," according to the 130-page report, titled "Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards."

The researchers found that across the country, many charter schools have largely black student populations. But the study reported that in the West and some areas of the South, charter schools are mostly white.

"These trends suggest that charter schools are contributing to white flight in the country's two most racially diverse regions," the authors concluded.

While success varies at the thousands of charter schools across the country, proponents tout them as needed competition for traditional public schools. Obama has made them a cornerstone of his push to reform American public education.

At their best, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, charter schools are "laboratories of innovation that we can all learn from."

The schools are public and paid for with tax money but generally operate outside the authority of local school districts. Charter schools don't have to follow mandates that traditional public schools must follow.

At York Prep, for example, the school day for all grades would run from 8 a.m. to 2:45 p.m., except on Mondays, when classes would let out at 12:45 p.m. Parents would have the option to leave children at school to take part in extracurricular and academic programs, including karate and foreign language lessons. . . .

Angry New Orleans Parents Not Nearly So Thankful for Katrina as Duncan

Paul Vallas, the man who taught Arne Duncan everything he doesn't know about schools, now runs the discriminatory corporate chain gang charters that have replaced public school.s in New Orleans. Parents have seen their children neglected, abused, and pushed out long enough to know that they want their schools back. From the Times-Picayune:

A crowd openly hostile to Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas used a state board of education meeting to raise concerns about whether charter schools are leaving the most vulnerable children behind.

When Vallas stated at Monday's meeting that charters are doing "a heck of a job" educating public school students, the mostly African-American audience responded with jeers. Many speakers called for the return of neighborhood schools and expressed fears that many charters accept only students with high test scores.

Ellis Lucia, The Times-Picayune archiveRecovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas
"Charters don't want anything to do with our children. They're sending them away," said Brenda Valteau, who identified herself as a 1961 graduate of George Washington Carver High School. "We're losing our young people to the streets. It sounds like a conspiracy to me."

Most New Orleans public schools were deemed low-performing and in 2005 turned over to the state-run Recovery School District and converted to charters. The Orleans Parish School Board, which once controlled more than 100 schools, retains only 16: 12 of them independently run charters and four traditional public schools.

The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education's Recovery School District committee usually meets in Baton Rouge, but it held its meeting at McDonogh 35 High School in New Orleans on Monday. More than two dozen parents, teachers and community activists spoke during the public comment section of the meeting, which sometimes took on a raucous air as speakers made provocative statements and the crowd made its approval or disapproval known.

Darryl Kilbert, superintendent of the Orleans Parish School Board, drew cheers when he called for all of the city's public schools to return to local control. Kilbert's reception contrasted with the audience's skepticism toward BESE members from other parts of the state.

"I urge you to hear the voice of the community. I'm saying to you, it's time to bring our schools back home," Orleans Parish School Board member Ira Thomas said, echoing Kilbert's comments.

Vallas said after the meeting that although the RSD still needs to improve its services for special education students, its charter schools have open enrollment policies and do not exclude anyone. The district is improving test scores and building new schools, soliciting plenty of community input in doing so, he said.

"It's basically the same old, same old. It's a group that wants the schools returned to OPSB," Vallas said of Monday night's crowd. "That's it, that's the thrust, that's the theme."

Some speakers at the meeting pleaded to preserve schools with long traditions of educating the city's African-American students. Others called for a new elementary school and high school in the Katrina-devastated Lower 9th Ward.

Jonas Nash led a group of Joseph S. Clark High School graduates concerned about the school's possible conversion to a charter.

"How can there continue to be a Joseph S. Clark High School, when it looks like it's being phased out?" Nash asked.

Vallas acknowledged that the school might become a charter because it is not meeting academic performance standards. But he tried to reassure the alumni group that Clark will exist under the same name.

"There is going to be a Clark High School. The question is what kind of high school is it going to be?" Vallas said. "As there will always be a Clark, there will always be a John McDonogh, there will always be a Carver. There will be a new high school in the Lower 9th Ward. There is going to be a high school in the Lower 9th, because we secured federal funding."

Cindy Chang can be reached at cchang@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3386.

Duncan ED Budget: Segregation Wins 2-1

One of the top priorities of the oligarchs in charge at ED is the viral spread of apartheid corporate charter schools like KIPP and the KIPP knock-offs. The RTTT bribe machine has had a significant impact toward this end, as noted here by the drooling corporationists at the NAPCS:

. . . .Whatever his wins and losses in other areas, there’s no question that Obama and his Ed Sec Arne Duncan have shifted the terms of debate on ed policy – and moved charters into the center ring of reform. We’ve seen a lot of press about charter cap-lifts but that’s only part of the story. Duncan’s personal commitment to charter growth and accountability – and sometimes his direct intervention -- have combined with the dollar clout of RTTT to produce a number of gains (and avoidance of losses). Here’s a partial list:

Connecticut: Successfully defeated budget cuts to charters proposed by the governor (2009).
Delaware: An existing moratorium was allowed to lapse (2009).
Illinois: An additional 60 charters are now allowed. (Duncan said months ago that he wouldn’t give his home state a grant unless they took action on the existing cap.) (2009)
Indiana: An attempt to place caps and a moratorium on charters was defeated. (2009)
Louisiana: The state’s cap of 70 charters was removed. (2009)
Minnesota: An attempt to implement caps and a moratorium was defeated. (2009)
Ohio: Ensured governor’s proposed budget cuts were restored by legislature. (2009)
Rhode Island: Ensured state funds for new charters. (2009)
Tennessee: A bill to allow an additional 40 charters and to expand the types of students eligible to attend charters was enacted. (2009)
Michigan: Enacted a comprehensive public education reform bill in late December that lifts long-standing caps by allowing replication of high-performing charters. (2009)
Iowa: The state’s cap of 20 conversion charters was removed, as was the pilot nature of the charter law. (2010)
Massachusetts: Made a significant lift in the most important cap (there are several), that will permit an estimated 35,000 new charter seats in low-performing districts. (2010)

I say this is a “partial” list because this doesn’t take into account things like the new CA parent “trigger,” passed as part of an RTTT package, that can result in more low-performing schools becoming charters. . . . .

And that was just Round 1 of the bribes. Imagine the possibilities!

Now entirely unmentioned and unrewarded in RTTT are any incentives or bribes to encourage states or cities to counter the resegregation of public schools, which continues at a accelerating pace proportionate to the spread of the segregative corporate charters that the Duncan agenda puts front and center. And if RTTT does not have enough segregative "incents" for you, there's plenty more in the ED budget, itself (click to expand page at left). As a sop to the old school civil rights advocates, and as an expression of the policy schizophrenia that results when conscience has become corporate, there is $100 million thrown in for school systems that continue to operate under desegregation orders from the 70s? Remember desegregation orders? Remember desegregation?

Corporate Charters Pillage Public Property: Can the Media Be Bothered to Report It?

From Danny Weil's new offering at Dissident Voice:

The Los Angeles Board of Education, little more than a managerial club belonging to LA Mayor Villaraigosa and his privatized charter crew, including Green Dot Schools, other educational maintenance organizations (EMO’s) and deep pocket entrepreneurs approved a resolution in August of 2009 to turn over 12 long-struggling campuses and 18 new ones to bidders from inside or outside the district, including some charter operators.¹ The effort is all part and parcel of the capitalist “reform of education” that is sweeping the nation below the radar screen of any national news. It includes using the government, which the neo-liberals say they abhor, to asset strip the public realm; in this case to orchestrate the legal seizure of actual public buildings that house public schools paid for over the decades by public taxpayers.

The insurgency is brutish and the mugging unconscionable as the hostile takeover of public schools is happening precisely at the same time that many schools are being closed and shuttered under the insidious No Child Left Behind provisions that allow for such pernicious disinvestment. Of course the efforts of the neo-liberals are hastily moving along with the disastrous loss of public funds for public schools and the horrific budgetary crisis slamming the state like a virtual Tsunami. Feasting on disaster is the model for these corporate market fundamentalists who see huge profits in the for-profit or non-profit ownership and management of public schools by educational maintenance organizations who want the actual building titles for the public schools and thus the imminently the facilities themselves. This is asset stripping done in broad daylight, a public pillaging that goes unreported by national media on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right.’

Coupled with this is public pillage is the huge amount of authority and autocratic decision-making that the Race to the Top, the neo-liberal brainchild of Arne Duncan and his corporate advisors, will have for the privatization of education. In order for states to qualify for any federal monies under Race to the Top, itself an insidious yet logical rhetorical label for the super-competitive ethos underlying capitalism and its ideological culture, they must meet four assurances that will open up a huge private market in teacher and student surveillance, ala longitudinal test score tracking, supplemental educational materials, merit pay for teachers tied to NCLB accountability and a chokehold on learning and assessment. Reconfigurating education in accordance with Race for the Top will also, of course, be a godsend to the makers of canned curriculum (“best practices”) that will need to be produced in alignment with the new state and federal standards to assure students pass the regimented tests which scores will be then used to rate the teachers and the new primary providers, the charter school EMO’s. Then there is the test prep industry that will dine like vultures off the new assessment obligations imposed on the states by Race to the Top.

UTLA files suit

The good news is that the union representing Los Angeles Unified Teachers (UTLA) filed a lawsuit December 21, 2009 to block the potential hand-over of new campuses to charter school EMO’s and their minions.. . . .

Read the rest here.

Gloucester Parents Stage Protest Against Crooked Charter School Approval

(Photo from Boston Globe's Jonathan Wiggs). Parents were out in force Saturday as State officials reluctantly met in Gloucester to once more air the corrupt process that rammed through the approval of an unwanted and unneeded charter school in Gloucester. From the Gloucester Daily Times:

. . . .Prior to the more than two-hour hearing, dozens of Gloucester parents and others decrying the granting of the charter marched in front of City Hall. The protest, organized in large part by parent and charter school foe Jane Cunningham, drew the attention of state Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester, who spoke briefly to the crowd from the City Hall steps, then chatted with and answered questions from some of the demonstrators individually.

Demonstrators chanted "CSO said no go," — a reference to the fact that the state's Charter School Office had recommended against approval of the Gloucester charter — and "We won't take your bitter pill." That was a reference to the now-infamous e-mail from Paul Reville, Gov. Deval Patrick's education secretary, to Chester that acknowledged approving the Gloucester charter school would be a "bitter pill," but that one of the three charter applications had to be approved to advance the governor's education "agenda," and avoid alienating traditional supporters such as The Boston Globe and The Boston Foundation.. . . .

Not only did the State approve the unwanted charter to curry political favor with corporate ed reformers, but the approval process did not follow the requirements of State Law, in that a State Board member was not present for the approval. The State subsequently eliminated that requirement, as if the illegal action could be erased in retrospect. From the Globe:

Yesterday’s meeting was held to address other issues swirling around the decision to approve the charter as well, including an allegation that the state education board did not have a member present at a public hearing held last year in Gloucester on the charter proposal, as required by state law. The board later waived the requirement.

Meanwhile, the Gloucester Public Schools are starving, just like the rest of the public schools across America. How long will the voices of the citizenry and their elected school boards be ignored in order to satisfy corrupt ideologies and corporate welfare schemes?:

Some Gloucester residents have criticized the charter school as duplicating services already offered in Gloucester schools. “What they’re proposing is imitation, not innovation,’’ said Sarah Grow, a parent of school-age children, after the hearing. “This board should do the right thing, look at the evidence, and revoke this charter.’’

City officials also fear a loss of state education funding if the school opens. On average, about $10,000 is deducted for every student who attends the charter school rather than a local public school district.

“In a way, this is a fight about money,’’ said Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk, who sits on the school committee, at the meeting. “We can’t ignore that reality.’’ . . .

The state board is next expected to take up the Gloucester charter proposal at its Nov. 17 meeting but it’s unclear what, if any, action will be taken.

The Real Effects of Corporate Charter Schools on Public Schools

Grover Norquist, whose Center for Tax Reform is prominent among the organizational supporters of Michelle Rhee's Reign of Terror in DC, is also famous for saying, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

In Los Angeles, corporate reformers are doing just that, beginning with the public schools. And they are getting it done with the viral spread of intensely segregated charter boot camps whose per-pupil public expenditure now goes to the corporate charter schools.

As this strategy gains steam, the old canards that were used to justify more charter schools are, each day, becoming more transparently false in their claims. Almost quaint, you could say:

• Charter schools will be free to experiment with innovative curricula whose successes will spread into the public schools, thus improving instruction for all. The most prominent innovation that is spreading among and beyond the urban charters is the bare-knuckled "no excuses" total compliance model of schooling that has raised test scores at the KIPP sects and the KIPP knock-offs, where 40-50 percent of 5th graders never make it to 8th grade. The constant weeding out of the weak and recalcitrant is a closely managed not-so-secret fact that the media ignore, and the inflated test scores among the KIPP survivors becomes the only part of the story worth telling. If this "choice" chain gang model, however, were used in public schools which cannot weed the weak as KIPP does, the dropout rate could soar to 60 or 70 percent, easily, by high school. And never mind for now the massive teacher turnover (18 to 49 percent per year) at the KIPPs, thus requiring a constant infusion by white Teach for America missionaries.

• Charter schools will force public schools to become better in order to attract more "market share." Sound good, but this is another market myth that is even more mythical in the context of schools. When public schools in LA or anywhere else lose students, they lose the thousands of dollars that go with each of those children to educate them. The result is a drop of public school enrollment that will mean increased financial pressures on the LAUSD, which will mean fewer teachers, larger classes, scarcer resources, reduced support services, and the further weakening of public support as the system is less able to respond to the needs of students.

The results, of course, follow the corporate ed reformer road map laid out by Andy Smarick:

First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider . . . . As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district's per-pupil costs will skyrocket.

At some point along the district's path from monopoly provider to financially unsustainable marginal player, the city's investors and stakeholders--taxpayers, foundations, business leaders, elected officials, and editorial boards--are likely to demand fundamental change. That is, eventually the financial crisis will become a political crisis. If the district has progressive leadership, one of two best-case scenarios may result. The district could voluntarily begin the shift to an authorizer, developing a new relationship with its schools and reworking its administrative structure to meet the new conditions. Or, believing the organization is unable to make this change, the district could gradually transfer its schools to an established authorizer.

As if to emphasize the fact that this emerging reality is something the media does not care to think too much about, the LA Times had this short short the other day on what is truly happening to LA schools and other urban systems that have been targeted by the Oligarchs and their henchmen who run the U. S. Department of Education:

November 4, 2009 | 6:00 am
Enrollment in traditional Los Angeles-area public schools has declined this fall, even as the number of students enrolled in charter schools has exploded, according to just-released data.

The drop at traditional schools is slightly more than 3%, with enrollment falling to 617,798 students. The number of students at independent charters is up nearly 19%, to 60,643 students. More students attend charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District than in any other district in the country.

Charter schools operate like their own school districts, with control over most of the funding generated by their students. With the opening of new charters in the Los Angeles area, the enrollment shift was not entirely unexpected, but it nonetheless has broad implications for the nation's second-largest school system. When the district sheds students, it also loses the funds that accompany them, which puts pressure on a district budget with built-in costs for services and facilities.

Fewer students ultimately result in staff reductions --- over and above those already caused by the state budget crisis.

Even if the charter students are added in, district enrollment is down 1.4% from last year, continuing a recent trend. The latest numbers are culled from an annual survey called “norm day,” which is important for setting staffing levels at schools as well as determining future funding.

-- Howard Blume