School quality

The best education, we have found, and I like to base things on evidence and not ideology, the best educated: homeschoolers, next best, are going to be private schoolers, and then charter schoolers and then public schoolers.

Dr. Ben Carson Jack Kemp Foundation Forum

I agree that I'd put home-schooling first, seeing as smaller class size is correlated with school performance, it makes sense that if you make the classes really small, you'd get the best possible academic performance. Two conditions, though. First, you'd need to ensure that the parent who was doing the teaching had the time and the talent to properly teach the child. They'd need to be financially able to take the time for teaching during the day without impacting their basic standard of living and their financial survival. That might require a socialist type of organization for society where parents weren't required to put in so many hours a day into work. Second, I'd hate for the child to be socially isolated and would prefer to see the child enrolled in a daily sports program. There may be other and better ways to see to it that children are not socially isolated, but I would think that should be a real priority.

But to prioritize private, charter and public schools into any sort of hierarchy makes no sense. There's never been any evidence that any of these are superior to any other. Public vs. traditional private schools, there are distinctions based on admissions. Traditional private schools that serve a wealthy clientele (I used to work in one as the receptionist) are essentially skimming off the cream of the students who are most likely to profit from a really well-funded and well-organized education.

Charter schools do not benefit from capitalism and the innovation that private companies bring to technical fields because schooling is overwhelmingly a labor-intensive process. It makes very little difference to the outcome of schooling whether a schoolteacher is paid by a local government or a private corporation. Paying teachers properly and supporting them in their mission is what counts. Technology is involved to some extent, but technology is nowhere near as decisive as it is in, say, building windmills for generating wind power. Showing films via computer as opposed to the old projectors saves money and makes the teachers job a bit easier, but hardly results in any obvious bottom-line advantages as what really counts in educating children is the after-film discussion that the teacher conducts.

Why would I prioritize public schools and financially starve charter schools? Because public schools take all comers. They accept everyone regardless and put whatever resources are needed into educating all of their charges. Charter schools have a great financial incentive to toss out under-performing students and to only keep the ones that will reflect well on the school.

So it's far from clear what “evidence” Dr. Carson is basing his hierarchy on.   

Waste, fraud and abuse in charter schools

A 2014 report on charter schools identified $23 million in new cases and $44 million in old cases of “waste, fraud and abuse” that weren't included in the 2013 report. In 2015, the reported total was $203 million. 

Was there an increase in mis-spending? Actually, no. And in fact, the next report is expected to uncover even more expenditures that are simply lining the pockets of charter school owners and investors as the previous investigations simply weren't wide-ranging enough to catch all of the waste, fraud and abuse.

Campaign donations to charter schools

Okay, I found two databases with which to look up campaign donations in support of charter schools. The first one has been used to write some pieces on the subject, I used the site Follow The Money to run a query “Show me School Choice Advocates contributions to ballot measure committees that supported or opposed Vouchers/Charters ballot measures in elections in 2014 (within core federal, state, and local data)“ and it turned up nothing. But this appears to be a good database to use to check on what's going on with campaign finances.

A much more useful site, I ran a query on Campaign Finance Online for PA and found that a particular contributor, Joel Greenberg, contributed $350,000 to the Students First PAC in 2014 alone.

As to general patterns on giving to campaigns that support charter schools, I saw that in in Washington State, 91% of the campaign donations came from just 10 donors. Bill Gates, a Walton heiress and the Amazon people were among the donors. “Of all of the money raised for the charter school initiative, just one-half of 1 percent came from donations of less than $10,000.”

Over the past ten years, campaign spending in PA for and against charter schools has been $10 million for and $8.3 million against.

Among one of the lobby's biggest donors is Vahan Gureghian, the CEO of CSMI, which manages the Chester Community Charter School in Delaware County. According to Follow The Money, Gureghian pumped $336,000 into the campaign coffers of former Gov. Tom Corbett - making him his second largest individual donor over his gubernatorial career.

Gureghian has also donated close to a million to other Pennsylvania politicians and PACs.

The aforementioned Vahan H. Gureghian's Chester Community Charter School teaches 2,600 students. He's number five on a list of the ten biggest PA political contributors. Overall, he runs 150 charter schools spread over nine states.

A 2012 piece from Public Source includes detailed summaries for the 10 biggest contributors in PA.

Joel Greenberg and Arthur Dantchik are partners in Susquehanna International Group, which has used lessons from poker to build a successful broker-dealer firm. The two men spent $446,000 on groups that support vouchers for private schools such as charter schools. In 2010 their Students First political action committee contributed $4.9 million to pro-voucher gubernatorial candidate Anthony Williams, who lost in the Democratic primary election.

Former Governor Corbett was a big recipient of donations from pro-charter school interests and Republicans generally have received more, but some Democrats have received money for that purpose as well.

Money people and management competence

So, a charter school group serves 11,000 students. One of the members of the management group is a hedge fund billionaire. High employee turnover is a strong sign of poor management and this group has so much of it and other problems that the remaining employees want to form a union.

Sears is run by a hedge fund billionaire and may be entering a death spiral.

The 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney ran Bain Capital, not a hedge fund, but a private equity firm. Pretty similar though, in that the position meant he made lots and lots of money sitting at a desk. He served one term as Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, but by 2012, was so unpopular in that state that he lost MA to Obama 61% to 38%.

It's not that being a businessman who makes bucket-loads of money hand over fist necessarily means you're incompetent, it's just that making lots of money doesn't necessarily make you a good manager.

Will the charter school group teachers be successful in forming a union? We sure hope so for the sake of both the teachers and the students, but the hedge fund billionaire and others are probably going to fight a union tooth and nail. If the current managers really cared about the teachers and students, they would have recognized that their group was doing a poor job and reforms would have been instituted. No, the managers and the billionaire are in the charter school business to make money and a union would cut into their stakes in the group.

So, when Teachout, an organization of teachers and students in New York City, says that hedge fund and Wall Street billionaires are exerting pressure to force schools to accept standardized test scores as a means of evaluating teachers, I think we'd best give the teachers and students the benefit of the doubt and say that depending on standardized test scores is probably not a great idea.

Speak Up For Education and Kids

This cartoon disturbingly depicts today's reality, except that it's from a 1933 edition of Progressive Magazine. Who would you substitute for the "false economy" symbolized by the man? Learn more about a central player in the organized effort to dismantle public education, ALEC: http://educationvotes.nea.org/topics/x-canonical/alec/

How do corporate-private charter schools measure up?

Poorly. Not only do charter schools fail to “boost high school graduation rates or pass rates on most Advanced Placement exams. Another study, released this year, found that students who graduate from traditional Boston public high schools are actually more likely than charter graduates to earn a college degree or another form of postsecondary credential within six years.”

A generally-accepted figure for 9^th all the way to 12^th grade graduation rates is 85% to 90%. If you're a student, you have about a nine out of 10 chance of making it all the way to graduation. How about in a charter school? The rate there is about 60%.

Who are the people backing charter schools? Basically lawyers and hedge fund managers, people with lots of money who have run out of places to invest it all in. [16 Mar 2015]

Update: Yeah, charter schools can use...um...“stimulating” marketing to get students in their doors to begin with, but that doesn't solve the retention problem.

When state budgets are in trouble.

The economy of Kansas is a disaster because Governor Sam Brownback insists on making tax cuts that, amazingly enough, do NOT pay for themselves! They don't operate according to the theory that says they should be revenue-producers. What to do? Hey, let's just raid our education fund! Who needs educated children anyway? They're obviously less important than another tax break for rich people. [/snark]

Reporting on education

It's hard to fix a problem when you're poorly informed on exactly what the problem is and unfortunately, the media is doing a really horrible job of informing the American public about educational issues. Media Matters reported in November 2014 that only 9% of the people discussing education on TV news shows were educators. Unfortunately, this appears to be part of a pattern. In January 2015, MMFA also reported that only 16% of the people quoted in reports about climate change were scientists.

Alternet reported in March 2015 that reporters who really don't know what they're talking about on education are being lionized as “experts” when they're really nothing of the kind. A real problem a researcher quoted by Alternet was that “the 'experts' who are cited the most often are neither career educators nor scholars who've published and achieved advanced degrees; rather, they tend to be individuals from influential right-wing think tanks, with little to no scholarly work or graduate-level degree work in education.”

So if anyone is depending on the traditional media to inform them about educational problems, they're wasting their time.

Reforming education a lot harder than it looks

The average person might think: “Education isn't rocket science.” No, it's a good deal more difficult than that as it involves understanding and working with human beings. Billions of dollars and millions of hours from reformers have produced very little in the way of results because those reformers haven't actually spent much time in schools, learning about what makes learning different from other fields. “Unlike working educators, most leaders in the reform movement have never taught a five-period day, felt the joy of an unquantifiable classroom victory, lost instructional time to a standardized test, or been evaluated by a computer. And unlike the vulnerable students targeted by so much reform, most policy elites have not gone to school hungry, struggled to understand standard English, battled low expectations, or feared for their personal safety on the walk home.”

PA Governor adopts educational plan that will hurt students

An “unelected, unaccountable entity charged with school oversight” abruptly canceled a state contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers “and demand new healthcare contributions from its employees.” The Philadelphia school system had lots of problems under Governor Corbett, but very few of those problems owed anything to the schools themselves, most of the problems had to do with deliberate malfeasance from the Corbett Administration. Having been a sailor, it was my experience and as my father was also a sailor, it was his experience too, that we never had to take money out of our own pockets to fulfill our mission. There were many instances where we were obliged to do so temporarily, but we always got reimbursed. Under Corbett, teachers have “to contribute thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for the most basic supplies.” And of course, the school bureaucracy under Corbett insists that a mandatory extra contribution to health care doesn't constitute a reduction in their paychecks.

How do charter schools make money if they're non-profits?

Naturally, no one wants to be paying for a for-profit school as it would then be far too easy to identify excessive charges and then, even if parents didn't make complaints about obvious money-making moves by the school, resentment would grow. The answer is shown in Pro-Publica's piece on profits and schools. Essentially, profits are collected at one remove, with the suppliers of books, furniture, cafeteria food, computers, even teacher training. There is, of course, no competitive bidding for anything as the supply line is set up before the school itself is even built.

Is education worth spending money on?

The fellow who replaced Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Majority Leader (Second in the House after the Speaker) has an, uh, interesting view of education and spending. "My hero Socrates trained in Plato on a rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money." He has a lot of other strange views. Personally, I read I.F. Stone's “The Trial of Socrates” and was left considerably less than impressed with Socrates. I think he was far too abstract a thinker and could have been more down-to-earth and immediately practical. I had read Plato's “The Republic” in Junior High (Called Middle School these days) and recall having been pretty unimpressed by that as well. So no, I don't agree with Rep. David Brat as neither Plato nor Socrates count as “my hero.”

Charter Schools must obey civil rights laws

Good! “...the same federal civil rights laws that apply to other public schools apply equally to public charter schools.”

The piece also makes some snarky points about how long the problem has been around.

Backlash against high-stakes school testing

Seems parents and students and teachers are against putting too much reliance into testing (April 2013). Why are privatized schools (I use that term to distinguish the corporate schools from traditional private schools that are designed to draw in wealthier clients) so fond of testing? “They don’t want parents to measure a school on anything other than a number because they’re not offering anything other than a number.“ Privatized schools looking good, in theory anyway, because of the tests that students constantly take, not because students are turning out any more thoughtful or competent or skilled.

Students take exception to privatization

About 1,000 students of a half-a-dozen Newark, NJ, high schools walked out in April 2013 in response to Governor Chris Christie's plans to balance the state budget by taking money out of education.

[Apr 2013]

 

Suspicious test scores

Michelle Rhee took a corporate-reform approach to getting better test scores and graduation rates from her students. It involved the firing of many teachers and the elimination of tenure. Unfortunately, it also meant that Rhee did not have any education professionals within her leadership circle, nor was anyone experienced at running urban school systems. It appears to have worked, but in April 2013, it turned out that in her first year as Schools Chancellor in Washington, DC, she knew that there was a considerable amount of cheating, erasures of student answers on tests and substitution of correct answers. Reports of this happening went back to November 2008. The ral problem was that the erasures “suggested widespread cheating by adults.”

Unfortunately, that's a predictable response to high-stakes testing that isn't difficult to manipulate. Could she have taken a better approach once cheating was discovered? Perhaps, but “a cheating scandal might well have implicated her own 'Produce or Else' approach to reform.“ Rhee strongly denied that she was pressuring principals to produce results regardless of whether students were actually learning more, but it appears that's exactly what was happening.

Has her system actually improved teacher retention, a key measure of job satisfaction? Actually, no. “For teachers, DCPS has become a revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is said to be between three and five years.”

Sadly, “Rhee’s former deputy is in charge of public schools, and Rhee continues her efforts to persuade states and districts to adopt her approach to education reform–an approach, the evidence indicates, did little or nothing to improve the public schools in our nation’s capital.”

[April 2013]

Proposal to reform school funding

In March 2013, Pennsylvania Representative James Roebuck, Jr., proposed to reform the way in which cyber and charter school were funded and how they were called to account for their performance. He estimated the PA school budget could save up to $365 million that way. Included is a chart that shows exactly what would be affected.

Pleading poverty, Philadelphia closes 23 schools

From Channel 6 (March 2013): “Officials contended the cash-strapped system couldn't afford to keep open the 27 buildings, more than 10 percent of the district's schools. Many of them are under-enrolled and in poor condition. But opponents said the move would irreparably damage dozens of neighborhoods and further fuel a student exodus from the district.”

The closures were defended as a response to declining enrollment and a consolidation of under-attended schools. But money was also a factor. Governor Corbett tries (April 2013) to get clever with the school budget so that he can pretend that privatization is necessary. But what's really causing PA to be short of money are Corbett's tax cuts. A study by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center showed that “corporate tax breaks that will continue to shift costs to individuals and local taxpayers, while failing to restore deep cuts to public schools, keep college affordable for middle-class students, or ensure working families can obtain basic health care.” Backgrounder from Truthout as to how private charter schools are sucking money out of the system and causing public schools to be starved for funds.

Video of reaction in front of the School District Building.

Media summary from PCAPS.

 

Testimony to the Philadelphia City Council on school closing moratorium

Black Radical Congress – Recognized that demographic changes meant some school closings and consolidations were inevitable, but proposed that charter schools should be closed first.

Laura C. Dijilo, PCAPS member - The state of Pennsylvania took over the schools 10 years ago because the schools were in debt. How has the state done? The schools are still in debt and underfunded and even more buildings are in disrepair.

Philadelphia National Writers Union – The PNWU endorses the PCAPS proposals.

UFPJ-DVN Education Committee – We recognize that the charter school movement is not driven by parents or students or even by educators, but by money-seeking corporations. This is an ineffective approach to education.

The Notebook – Summary of the testimony of four public school advocates.

[February 2013]

Privatized school vouchers – unpopular but persistent

Despite the unpopularity of vouchers for corporate private schools, we see a lot of voucher programs persist anyway, programs that take money out of the popular public education system and funnel money into an system that has no real accountability. Think Progress examines the cases of several millionaires and billionaires and their “school choice” front groups.

[May 2011]