PA High Court Says, “Yes, Schools CAN Sue State Over Unfair Funding, After All!”

September 28, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Civil Rights, Common Core, Compassion, Corbett, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Education, Gerrymandering, PA Core, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, Supreme Court, Teachers, Tom Wolf #FairFundingPA, Corbett, courts, fairness, litigation, PA Core, PA House, PA Senate, Pennsylvania, schools, Supreme Court, teachers, Tom Wolf

It’s back on!

Two years ago a group of plucky Pennsylvania public schools took the state legislature to court because the body wasn’t allocating funding to all districts fairly – some got too much, many got too little.

A lower court threw the challenge out saying it wasn’t the court’s job to tell the legislature how to legislate. But now the state Supreme Court has overturned that lower court decision.

In effect, justices are saying – Hell, yes, that is the court’s job! That’s why it’s called a system of checks and balances, Baby!

Or something like that.

Before going any further, there are a few pertinent facts you have to understand about the Commonwealth.

1) No other state in the country has a bigger gap between what it spends on rich vs. poor students than Pennsylvania, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

2) The Pennsylvania legislature has been paying less and less of public schools’ budgets over the last four decades. The state used to contribute 54% of all public school costs in the early 1970s. Today it pays only 35% of the costs, leaving local taxpayers to take up the slack. Since districts are not equally wealthy, that increases the disparity of resources between rich and poor districts.

3) The state has only had a funding formula specifically legislating how to allocate money to its more than 500 districts for two years. Two years! For more than 15 years previous, the legislature just handed out money willy nilly based on political backroom deals that favored already rich districts and hurt the most impoverished ones.

4) The new funding formula still is not fair. Though it does take into account the poverty of a district, it doesn’t account for the years of systematic disinvestment the district suffered through previously. That’s like giving new sneakers to a racer who hasn’t been able to get out of the starting gate while others are already halfway to the finish line.

5) The legislature STILL hasn’t healed almost $1 billion in education cuts made under previous Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. Instead, under current Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, it has reluctantly increased funding a bit at a time but failed to bring spending up to what it was four years ago. And even once the cuts are healed, spending will be behind inflationary and cost of business increases. Meanwhile the Republican controlled legislature plays games approving the state budget separately from allocating money to the programs – including schools – that it already approved!

6) Pennsylvania is one of seven states with a Constitution that specifically requires the state provide a “thorough and efficient” system of education. Some of these other states – like New Jersey – have used similar Constitutional requirements to force their legislatures to increase state funding to public schools.

So there you are.

Pennsylvania’s legislature is an absolute mess.

Hopelessly gerrymandered, controlled by the radical right, and opposed by a Democratic party nearly as beholden to big donors as their GOP counterparts and desperate for any area of bipartisanship so as to be able to claim they got anything done other than stop Republicans from burning the whole place to the ground.

That’s why today’s 5-2 Supreme Court ruling is a breath of fresh air.

It’s like someone finally called Mom and Dad to tell our bratty lawmakers to get back to work.

The case will now go back to Commonwealth Court.

Supreme Court Justice David Wecht wrote that the courts do have a responsibility to check the power of the legislature – both in regard to the requirements of the state Constitution and that poorer districts are being discriminated against.

“It remains for (the) petitioners to substantiate and elucidate the classification at issue and to establish the nature of the right to education, if any, to determine what standard of review the lower court must employ to evaluate their challenge,” Wecht wrote. “But (the) petitioners are entitled to do so.”

This may be a Herculean task for those suing the state. And it seems unlikely that Commonwealth Court will hear their arguments favorably.

Justices rarely have the courage to challenge other branches, and the history of Pennsylvania’s courts shows multiple times when the courts have simply refused to assert such power.

This is what happened back in the 1990s when the Philadelphia School District sued the state over the same issue – unfair funding.

Time and again, poor districts have asked for help from the courts when the legislature refused to do its job. And time and again the courts have refused.

But at least this ruling gets things moving again. It’s like a dose of Kaopectate for a constipated political system.

Another possible bit of good news comes from Common Core and high stakes standardized testing. Yes, that crap!

When Philadelphia sued the state, the courts refused to rule in the schools favor because it had no way of proving the state was hurting the quality of education students were receiving there through lack of funding. But that was before Pennsylvania adopted its new Common Core look-a-like standards, PA Core, and initiated aligned tests including the souped up Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSA) and Keystone Exams.

Ironically, the same “accountability” measures used to “demonstrate” poor schools are failing could be used to prove the common sense notion that unfairly funding schools leads to poor academic results.

In any case, far right demagogues like House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny, are already whining that the Supreme Court is legislating from the bench. However, as a defendant in the case, and one of the most partisan hacks in Harrisburg, that’s exactly what the Koch Brothers probably told him to say.

Unfortunately, Gov. Wolf seems to kinda agree with him. Though he has yet to make a statement about today’s ruling, he was against the suit when it was originally brought up in 2015. Though he supports increasing education funding and has consistently pushed for it with every budget proposal, he is leery of the courts butting in.

Sadly, his strategy of incremental education budget increases has been failing. Or, to be fair, it’s succeeding at such a slow rate that it would take decades for it to catch up.

The fact of the matter is that it is patently unfair for rich districts to spend $10,000 to $20,000 on each student, while poorer districts can barely pull together $5,000-$6,000.

In addition, impoverished students have greater needs than rich ones. They often don’t have books in the home or access to Pre-kindergarten. Poor students often suffer from food insecurity, malnutrition, a lack of neonatal care, worse attendance, are less well rested and have greater special needs and suffer greater traumas than wealthier students. Moreover, it is no accident that the group being privileged here is made up mostly of white students and those being underprivileged are mostly students of color.

The time is here when Pennsylvanians have to decide where they stand. Are they for a state that offers all children an equal start or do they prefer one where poor brown kids suffer so rich white ones can get ahead?

Today, the matter is in the court’s hands.

Dear Teachers, Don’t Be Good Soldiers for the EdTech Industry

September 3, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Journalism, Labor, Local Control, Media, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice Unionism, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Teachers, Technology, Unions Competency Based Education, Computers, Depersonalized Learning, edtech, education, personalized learning, Politics, schoools, teachers, technology

Dear fellow teachers,

Thank you for coming to this meeting on such short notice.

I know you have plenty more important matters to attend to this morning. I, myself, left a pile of ungraded papers on my desk so I could get here. Not to mention I urgently need to fix my seating charts now that I’ve finally met my students and know who can sit with whom. And I’ve got to track down phone numbers for my kids’ parents and go through a mountain of Individual Education Plans, and… Well, I just want you to know that I get it.

There are a lot of seemingly more pressing concerns than listening to a teacher-blogger jabber about the intersection of politics and our profession.

Is that all of us? Okay, would someone please close the door?

Good. No administrators in here, right? Just classroom teachers? Excellent.

Let’s speak openly. There’s something very important we need to talk about.

There is a force out there that’s working to destroy our profession.

Yes, ANOTHER one!

We’ve got lawmakers beholden to the corporate education reform industry on the right and media pundits spewing Wall Street propaganda on the left. The last thing we need is yet another group dedicated to tearing down our public schools.

But there is. And it is us.

You heard me right.

It’s us.

There is an entire parasitic industry making billions of dollars selling us things we don’t need – standardized tests, Common Core workbook drivel, software test prep THIS, and computer test crap THAT.

We didn’t decide to use it. We didn’t buy it. But who is it who actually introduces most of this garbage in the classroom?

That’s right. US.

We do it. Often willingly.

We need to stop.

And before someone calls me a luddite, let me explain. I’m not saying technology is bad. It’s a tool like anything else. There are plenty of ways to use it to advance student learning. But the things we’re being asked to do… You know in your heart that they aren’t in the best interests of children.

I know. Some of you have no choice. You live in a state or district where teacher autonomy is a pathetic joke. There are ways to fight that, but they’re probably not in the classroom.

It’s not you who I’m talking to. I’m addressing everyone else. I’m talking to all the teachers out there who DO have some modicum of control over their own classrooms and who are told by their administrators to do things that they honestly disagree with – but they do it anyway.

We’ve got to stop doing it.

Corporations want to replace us with software packages. They want to create a world where kids sit in front of computers or iPads or some other devices for hours at a time doing endless test prep. You know it’s true because your administrator probably is telling you to proctor such rubbish in your own classroom so many hours a week. I know MINE is.

Listen, there are several reasons why we should refuse.

First, there’s simple job security. If your principal brought in a Teach for America temp and told you this lightly trained fresh from college kid was going to take over your classes, would you really sit down and instruct her how to do your job!?

I wouldn’t.

That’s the entire point behind this tech industry garbage. You are piloting a program that means your own redundancy.

You are engaged in an effort to prove that they don’t need a fully trained, experienced, 4-year degree professional to do this job. They just need a glorified WalMart greeter to watch the kids as they push buttons and stare at a screen. They just need a minimum wage drone to take up space while the children bask in the warm glow of the program, while it maps their eye movements, catalogues how long it takes them to answer, records their commercial preferences and sells all this data to other companies so they can better market products – educational and otherwise – back to these kids, their school and their parents.

This isn’t about improving educational outcomes. It’s about bringing the cost down and pocketing the savings as profit.

It’s about replacing the end-of-the-year standardized test with daily mini stealth assessments that are just as high stakes and just as effective at providing an excuse for the state or the feds to swoop in and steal control, disband the school board and give the whole shebang to the charter school operator who gives them the most generous campaign donations.

Do NOT be a good soldier here. Do not just follow orders. Doing so is weakening our entire profession. It is putting our jobs in jeopardy. And it’s about time our national teachers unions figured this out instead of conceding the point so their leaders can keep a seat at the table. Someone needs to tell them they shouldn’t be sitting inside the building. They should be with us, outside surrounding it with signs and pitchforks.

The EdTech shell game is not about improving student learning. It’s a commercial coup, not a progressive renaissance.

Think about it.

They call this trash “personalized learning.” How can it really be personalized if kids do the same exercises just at different rates? How is it personalized if it’s standardized? How is it personalized if it omits the presence of actual people in the education process?

It’s teach-by-numbers, correspondence school guano with graphics and a high speed Internet connection.

But we give in. We don’t want to rock the boat. We’re rule followers, most of us. We do what we’re told.

Most teachers were good students, and obedience is too often a defining quality of those who succeed in our education system.

I get it. You don’t want to be a fly in the ointment. You don’t want to make yourself a target.

Me, too.

How dearly I would love to be able to just comply. But I can’t simply go along with something I know in my heart to be wrong. And this is wrong on so many levels.

I sat through a meeting much like this one earlier this year where I was told exactly which programs to force on my students. All the while good teachers whom I respect went through the motions as if nothing was wrong. They talked about how to organize our classes in the system, how to assign test prep and how often, and how to access the data.

But we never discussed why.

We never discussed if doing so was a good idea. That was all taken for granted. It was a decision reserved for someone else, someone from a higher pay grade.

Yet classroom experience is rarely commensurate with salary scale especially once you cross the line into management. Nor is the experience of a handful of administrators equal to that of a plentitude of staff!

No. I’m sorry. At very least that is a discussion WE should be having.

It is the TEACHER’S job to determine what is educationally appropriate. Not the administrators. At most, the building principal should be part of that discussion in her role as lead teacher. But the resolution to go ahead or not should be made together as a staff.

And if an individual teacher thinks based on their own experience with their own students that they should go in a different direction, they should be respected enough as a professional to have the autonomy to do so.

Teachers have to abide by best practices, but test prep in any form is NOT a best practice.

It’s time we stood up en masse and made that clear.

We are our own worst enemy in this regard.

We are too submissive. Too meek.

This world requires teachers to be revolutionaries, to be radicals.

And that doesn’t end in the classroom.

We need to educate parents and the community about what’s happening. The classroom doors are too often closed to the public. The only information they get is from anemic administrators and a mass media that invariably just reports whatever propaganda the corporation puts on the press releases.

We are responsible for our students. We must protect them from the vultures out there trying to water down their educations and reduce the quality of their learning.

We are not the only ones who can take a stand. In fact, IF we are the only ones who do it, we will certainly fail.

But, along with parents, students and concerned citizens, we MUST be part of that resistance.

We MUST take a stand for our children and our profession.

Because without us, there is no hope of success.

So we can no longer afford to be good soldiers in someone else’s army.

It’s time to have the courage of our convictions.

It’s time to rise up, walk hand-in-hand to the front of the staff meeting and tell our administrators:

NO.

Because if we don’t, no one else will.

Why I Teach

September 1, 2017 stevenmsinger Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Labor, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Schools, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teachers, Unions Corporate Education Reform, Data, educators, first day of school, Labor Day, public schools, standardized testing, Students, teacher, teachers, Why I Teach

Every year it’s the same nightmare.

I’m in front of a class of middle school students who aren’t paying any attention to me.

I point to the board, stamp my foot, even scream in vain.

But the children keep acting up – throwing pencils, swearing, hurting each other’s feelings.

It’s like I’m invisible.

And then I wake up.

Every teacher probably has a similar dream the night before their first day with students.

It’s a dream of impotence and redundancy.

Kind of like the businessmen and their political puppets claim we, teachers, are every day.

But the reality is much different.

Kids come bouncing in to my room, bristling with energy, half concealed hopes and fears.

Before they come in, I’m full of doubt: Can I still do this for another year? Will I be able to keep up with the work load? Will I be able to accommodate all the extra services for every special education student in my mainstreamed classroom? Do I have enough desks, pencils, paper? Have I planned enough for the first week? Will I be able to keep students interested, entertained, disciplined, engaged, working, inspired?

But the second the kids enter the classroom – literally the exact second – all my doubts disappear.

There’s no time.

I have more than two dozen children to see to at any given moment – and their needs outweigh any of mine.

It wasn’t until about halfway through the day that I even had an instant to myself to stop, breathe and reflect.

After my first bathroom break in more than 3 hours, then grabbing my lunch and collapsing into a seat- the first time I’m off my feet with no anxious little faces looking up to me – I think back on my day and realize – I absolutely love this!

No, really.

My feet hurt, my temples throb from making a hundred tiny decisions every 40 minutes, my body feels like it’s already been through a war… But there is no place in the world I would rather be.

Look what I’ve already accomplished today!

I took about 50 anxious human beings and made them feel like it was going to be okay.

I made 50 faces smile, sigh and relax.

I worked for hours on a new syllabus last week with manga graphics and punchy repartee, and when the kids got it today, they knew this class wasn’t going to be boring. I planned some ice breaker games to get them focused on our budding community of learners. I modeled how we can interact and still respect each other.

And in return I heard: “This is the best class!” “Mr. Singer is my favorite teacher!” “I don’t like to read or write but I’m really looking forward to doing your homework!”

How can you hear such things and not come away energized and new? How can you see such things and not feel a warm glow in your heart?

One of my first assignments is to have students write a letter about themselves. It’s now day 3 and I’m sitting at my desk reading through them.

It’s heartbreak city. Dead or absent parents, lost friends and pets, moving from place-to-place, older brothers and sisters serving as caregivers, pledges to work hard this year and make some missing adult proud. I find myself tearing up and writing supportive comments: “That’s so sad.” “I hope you like it here.” “You’ve already made me proud.”

I go through my Individual Education Plans and see a catalogue of hurt and trauma. Babies, they’re just babies, and they’ve gone through more than I have in my whole life. And I’m more than three times their age!

How can I not come to school every day and give my very best?

A public school is more than a building to me. It’s a temple to humanity. It’s where we go to offer ourselves to other people.

Every action, every thought spent on these children is holy. The tiniest gesture is magnified through infinite time and space. When I help a child gain confidence in her reading, I help not just her. I help everyone she will ever come into contact with –her co-workers, her friends, family, even her own children if she someday has some.

It’s humbling. Amazing. Staggering.

Where else can you see the accumulated hurt of the world and actually make a dent in it? Where else can you reach out not just to a cause or an idea but to a living person?

I’m lucky. I am so lucky. My circumstances allowed me to do whatever I wanted with my life.

I could have become a doctor or a lawyer. I could have gone into business and made a whole mess of money. But I never wanted any of that. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help people.

I remember the pitying looks peers would give me in my 20s. What a waste, they seemed to say. But I’ve never regretted it.

This is what I was meant to do. It’s the only thing I ever could and still respect myself.

Some folks will tell you teaching is about numbers and data. Increase these test scores. Cut costs by this much. Boost profits, escalate the graph, maximize effectiveness.

These people are fools.

Teaching has nothing to do with any of that. It’s about the children. Being there for them. Being an active part of eternity.

Thankful eyes, delighted smiles, joyous laughter. Ameliorating hurt. Igniting a tiny candle whose light will grow to encompass sights I will never see.

That’s why I teach.

I Am Not A Hero Teacher

August 1, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Common Core, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Labor, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, school violence, Schools, segregation, Shooting, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teacher Tenure, Teachers, Unions, Value Added Measures, VAM, White Privilege Accountability, education, expectations, hero, labor, Politics, Poverty, school funding, school segregation, schools, teachers, unions, white savior

I’m sorry.

I am not a hero teacher.

I am not stronger than a locomotive.

I cannot jump tall ignorance in a single bound.

I am not faster than a tax-cutting zealot.

Up in the air – it’s a bird, it’s a plane, but it’s certainly not a teacher because we can’t fly.

I am not bullet proof.

If a gunman storms the building and shoots me, I will be wounded and may die.

Giving me a gun doesn’t help, either, because I am not a marksman.

I am just a man.

I cannot stand in front of a class of thirty and give them each my undivided attention. Not all at once.

When students ask a question, I need time to answer it.

When students hand in a paper, I need time to grade it.

During the workday, I need time to plan my lessons. I need time to call parents. I need time to read all the individual education plans, fill out all the weekly monitoring forms, finish all the administrative paperwork.

At the end of a long day, I get tired and need rest.

At the end of a long week, I need time to spend with my family.

At the end of a long year, I need time to myself – to get a summer job, to take continuing education courses, to plan for next year, to heal.

I need a middle class income – not because I’m trying to get rich, but because I’m human. I need food and shelter. I have a family for whom I need to provide. If you can’t give me that, I’ll need to move on.

Sorry, but it’s true.

I’ll tell you one thing I don’t need. I don’t need the state, federal or local government telling me how to do my job. When I plan my lessons, I need the freedom to teach children in the way that seems most effective to me – the professional in the room.

I also don’t need some bureaucrat telling me how to assess my students. I don’t need some standardized test to tell me what kids have learned, if they can read or write. I’ve spent an average of 80 minutes a day with these children for five days a week. If I can’t tell, I don’t deserve to be in the classroom.

And I don’t need my principal or superintendent setting my colleagues and me against each other. We’re not competing to see who can do a better job. We should be collaborating to make sure everyone succeeds.

What do I need? My union, for one.

I need my right to collective bargaining. I need the power to gather with my colleagues and co-workers so we can create the best possible work environment for myself and my students. I need due process, tenure, so I can’t be fired at the whim of the school board or administrators without having them prove my inequities.

I need my work to be evaluated fairly. Judge me on what I do – not on what my students do with what I’ve given them.

And when it comes to the racial proficiency gap, don’t look to me to exert some kind of supernatural teacher magic. I am not a white savior who can make school segregation, racism and prejudice disappear. I try to treat every student fairly, but my actions can’t undo a system that’s set up to privilege some and disadvantage others.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re expecting a superhero, I’m bound to disappoint.

And that DOES seem to be what many of you expect us to be.

Seven years ago, Davis Guggenheim characterized the public schools as if we were Waiting for Superman.

Things are so screwed up, he alleged back then, that we need someone with superpowers to swoop in and fix it all.

But there is no superman. There’s just Clark Kent.

That’s me – a bespectacled shlub who shows up everyday in the naive hope that he can make a difference.

According to landmark research by Dan Goldhaber and James Coleman, only about 9 percent of student achievement is attributable to teachers.

That’s right – 9 percent.

If you add in everything in the entire school environment – class size, curriculum, instructional time, availability of specialists and tutors, and resources for learning (books, computers, science labs, etc.), all that only accounts for 20 percent.

There’s another 20 percent they can’t explain. But the largest variable by far is out of school factors. This means parents, home life, health, poverty, nutrition, geographic location, stress, etc. Researchers estimate those count for 60 percent of student success.

Yet we somehow expect teachers (9%) to do it all.

I’m sorry, America. I can’t.

More than half of all public school students live in poverty. No matter how hard I try, I cannot solve that all by myself.

I try to teach children how to read though many are hungry and traumatized by their home lives.

I try to teach children how to write though many haven’t slept the night before, haven’t taken their ADD medication and – to be honest – many haven’t even shown up to school yet.

I most certainly try to get them to pass culturally biased, developmentally inappropriate standardized tests without sucking away every bit of creativity from the classroom.

But much of this is beyond my control.

I can’t help that the federal, state and local government are cutting school funding. I can’t help that my impoverished district has few school supplies, the students enter the building without them because their parents are too poor to buy them. But I can – and do – spend out of my own pocket to make sure all of my students have pencil, paper, whatever they need.

I can’t help that officials at every step of the way want me to narrow my teaching to only things that will appear on the yearly standardized test, that they want me to present it as a multiple choice look-a-like item, that they want me to teach by pointing at a Common Core standard as if that held any meaning in a child’s life. But I can make the lesson as creative as possible and offer kids a chance to engage with the material in a way that connects to their real lives, desires and interests.

I can’t help that kids don’t read like they used to and instead experience the bulk of text on the Internet, Facebook or Twitter. I can’t help that most of their real world writing experience is limited to thumbing social media updates, comments on YouTube videos or communicating through a string of colorful emojis. But I can try to offer them meaningful journal topics that make them think and offer them the chance to share their thoughts in a public forum with their peers.

There’s nothing super about any of it.

But it’s the kind of things teachers do everyday without anyone noticing. It’s the kind of thing that rarely gets noted on an evaluation, rarely earns you a Thank You card or even an apple to put on your desk.

However, when the day is done, students often are reluctant to leave. They cluster about in the hall or linger in the classroom asking questions, voicing concerns, just relieved that there’s someone there they can talk to.

And that’s reason enough for me to stay.

The odds are stacked against me. Help isn’t coming from any corner of our society. But sometimes despite all of that, I’m actually able to get things done.

Everyday it seems I help students understand something they never knew before. I’ve become accustomed to that look of wonder, the aha moment. And I helped it happen!

I get to see students grow. I get to nurture that growth. I get to be there for young ones who have nobody else.

It’s a wonderful feeling.

I know I’m making a difference.

So, yes, I’m no superman.

I have no special powers, no superhuman abilities. I can’t fix all of our social problems all by myself.

But I help to make the future.

That’s why I do what I do.

Thank you for letting me do it.

Charter School Lotteries – Why Most Families Don’t Even Apply

July 3, 2017July 5, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, New Orleans, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, School Lunches, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Teachers Arizona, BASIS School Inc., busing, charter schools, education, free school lunches, KIPP, lottery, School Choice, school uniforms, Special Education

Who gets to enroll in your school?

This question is at the heart of the charter school debate.

While traditional public schools have to accept any student who meets residency requirements, charter schools can be entirely more selective.

They don’t have to take just any student. They can pick and choose based on pretty much whatever criteria they want.

Despite the fact that charters are publicly funded and privately run, transparency requirements are so low in most states that regulators aren’t even allowed to check up on their enrollment practices.

It’s a situation rife with the potential for fraud and abuse with America’s most vulnerable students often being victimized and huge corporations raking in record profits.

Critics say that charter schools routinely accept only the easiest students to educate. They take those with the best academic records, without disciplinary problems or special education needs. This allows them to spend less money to run their schools and claim all their students are doing well because of artificially inflated test scores.
But when critics level such charges against the charter school industry, the most common reply is an appeal to charter school lotteries.

When these privatized schools get more applications than they have seats, they often resort to a lottery to determine which students get to enroll.

The infamous propaganda movie “Waiting for Superman” had a much quoted scene where poor children held onto their lottery tickets as they hoped and prayed to be saved from a “failing public school.”

Advocates claim this is what makes charters fair: Students get in by pure chance.

But it’s not true.

More often than not, whenever enrollment data is available, it shows that charter administrators are, in fact, selective.

Take BASIS School Inc., a charter chain with 18 schools in Arizona, three in Texas and one in Washington D.C. The chain’s schools in Tucson and Scottsdale are highly ranked on Newsweek’s “America’s Most Challenging High Schools” list, and on the Best High Schools list of U.S. News & World Report.

However, their enrollment figures show them to be out-and-out cherry pickers.

They typically over-enroll Asian-American students and under enroll Latinos. They also enroll a much lower proportion of special education students than the state average and – shockingly – have zero English Language Learners.

Despite corporate accolades, this is not a successful model of public education. It is prejudicial, exclusionary and entirely the goal of for-profit educational institutions everywhere.

But besides outright corruption from charter administrators, there are other factors that suppress the neediest students from even applying to charter schools.

In short, they don’t want to go to these types of schools. They can’t afford losing the services and amenities they would typically receive at traditional public schools. They can’t afford the extra out-of-pocket costs charters demand.

Frankly, many charter schools are set up for middle class or wealthier students. Even if accepted, the poor would get fewer services and be forced to pay more than they could afford.

1) They Can’t Afford Uniforms

Many charter schools require students to wear uniforms. Most traditional public schools do not. Therefore, even though your local charter school is funded by tax dollars, it can be a hefty financial burden to attend.

How much more does it cost? That depends. Each charter school has different requirements.

For instance, in the New Orleans Parents’ Guide, the cost for a single uniform is estimated at more than $70. That’s at least $350 for a week’s worth of clothes. However, many estimates I’ve seen have been much higher.

Many charters require students to wear blazers – something a traditional public school student wouldn’t be caught dead wearing. These are pretty expensive items. They can cost anywhere from $80-$250 each.

Moreover, some charters, like most in the KIPP network, require everyday items like socks and shirts to contain an embroidered school logo. That’s at least an additional $10-15 per item.

For impoverished parents who routinely shop at local thrift stores or the Salvation Army, charter school uniforms can put them out of reach.

To be fair, about 19% of traditional public schools also require uniforms. However, they are typically much less expensive. In fact, they rarely amount to more than requiring clothing to be of a wide variety of colors and/or styles.

And if parents can’t afford the extra cost, traditional districts are required to either forgo the requirement or help parents meet it. They cannot deny children an education based on their parents inability to buy uniforms. Charter schools, on the other hand, can.

2) They Need Special Education Programs

Charter schools are rarely – if ever – known for their special education programs. Traditional public schools, on the other hand, are renowned for meeting the needs of diverse students with various abilities. If your child has special needs, going to a charter school simply may not be an option.

One reason for this is the basic structure of each type of institution. Traditional public schools are usually much bigger than charter schools. As a result, they can pool their resources to better meet special students needs.

At charter schools nationally, disabled students represent only about 7-8% of all students enrolled. At traditional public schools, they average a little more than 11%, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis of Department of Education data. So traditional public schools already have the staff, infrastructure and experience to help these children. Moreover, it would be cost prohibitive for charters to add them, especially when they’re designed specifically to make a profit.

Perhaps more troubling is this: charter schools rarely identify students as having special needs. Students who would get extra help and services in a traditional public school setting, do without in charter schools. In fact, parents who feel their children’s needs aren’t being met at charters, often disenroll them and place them back in their traditional public school for the extra help.

Parents with students who have learning disabilities or extra needs simply can’t afford letting their children languish in a privatized school setting that may well ignore their child’s individual needs.

3) They Need Free/Reduced Breakfast and Lunches

Though the state and federal government pay for free or reduced breakfast or lunch programs, charter schools often don’t offer them. Traditional public schools do. It’s that simple. If you’re having trouble feeding your children, sending them to a charter school can mean letting them go hungry.

Take Arizona. Statewide, more than 47% of all students receive free or reduced-priced lunch. However, charter schools in the BASIS network have none. This doesn’t mean none of their students qualify. Clearly some of them do. The BASIS chain has chosen not to participate.

Why? Perhaps it’s to keep away students who have greater needs.

If so, it’s working.

Even when charters don’t actively weed out hard to teach students, they can set things up to make them less likely to apply.

4) They Need Busing To-And-From School

Often students don’t live within walking distance of their school. Traditional public schools routinely provide busing. Charter schools often do not. If you can drive your child to-and-from school, this is not an issue. If you’re poor and don’t have your own means of transportation, this is an added burden.

And if you think this is only a feature of the most fly-by-night charters, think again. The BASIS network – again, which includes some of the highest rated charters in the country – does not provide busing.

Traditional public schools are often at the heart of the community. They spring up around community centers, parks, and social gathering places. Charter schools are more often located at new or repurposed sites that can be miles away from the people they serve.

When the traditional public school offers a free ride to-and-from school, it can be an insurmountable burden to go to a charter where you have to find another way to get there. Parents who are working multiple jobs and/or the night shift may find it impossible to take their kids to the local charter. But perhaps this is exactly why charters aren’t offering busing in the first place. They don’t want these children.

5) They Don’t Have Time and/or Money For Extra Charter Demands

Charter schools demand an awful lot from parents. Traditional public schools do not. While children often benefit from involved parents, that’s not always possible. It’s unfair to require parental involvement as a prerequisite of enrollment.

Many charter schools require parents to volunteer at the school for so many hours a week. They often require “suggested” donations for extra services and for parents to buy books, supplies, or to pay an additional fee for extra curricular activities that would be provided for free at traditional public schools.

The BASIS network, for instance, requests that families contribute at least $1,500 a year per child to the school to fund its teacher bonus program. Families are also required to pay a $300 security deposit, purchase books, and pay for activities that would be free if the student attended a public school.

This is simply out of reach for the most disadvantaged students. Their parents are out of work or working multiple jobs to support them. They can’t volunteer at the school when they have to serve a shift at WalMart. They can’t afford the additional costs.

So, yes, charters often select against the poorest and neediest students when deciding whom to enroll.

However, even when they conduct fair lotteries to determine enrollment, they often set things up to discourage the neediest families from even applying in the first place.

NOTE: Special thanks to Priscilla Sanstead on this article.

Here’s an Idea: Guarantee Every Child an Excellent Education

June 18, 2017 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Teachers, union busting, Value Added Measures, VAM charter schools, Cyber Charter Schools, education, education reform, Politics, Privatize, school board, School Choice, school vouchers, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluation, teachers, teaching, VAM

Let’s get one thing straight: there are plenty of things wrong with America’s school system. But they almost all stem from one major error.

We don’t guarantee every child an excellent education.

Instead, we strive to guarantee every child THE CHANCE at an excellent education. In other words, we’ll provide a bunch of different options that parents and children can choose from – public schools, charter schools, cyber schools, voucher schools, etc.

Some of these options will be great. Some will be terrible. It’s up to the consumer (i.e. parents and children) to decide which one to bet on.

In many places this results in children bouncing from school-to-school. One school is woefully deficient, they enroll in another one. One school closes suddenly, they start over again at another.

It’s terribly inefficient and does very little good for most children.

But that’s because it’s not designed with them in mind. It does not put the child first. It puts the education provider first.

It is a distinctly privatized system. As such, the most important element in this system is the corporation, business, administrator or entrepreneurial entity that provides an education.

We guarantee the businessperson a potential client. We guarantee the investor a market. We guarantee the hedge fund manager a path to increased equity. We guarantee the entrepreneur a chance to exploit the system for a profit.

What we do NOT guarantee is anything for the students. Caveat emptor – “Let the buyer beware.”

Imagine if, instead, we started from this proposition: every child in America will be provided with an excellent education.

Sound impossible? Maybe. But it’s certainly a better goal than the one we’re using.

And even if we somehow managed to do it – even if every school was excellent – that doesn’t mean every child would become a genius. You can only provide the basis for an excellent education; it is up to the individual learner – with help from parents, teachers, and other stakeholders – to take advantage of what is put before him or her.

That is not a crazy goal to have. Nor does it mean that education would necessarily become stagnated.

It doesn’t matter what kind of school students go to – it matters that each and every school that receives public funding must be excellent.

That doesn’t mean they each must be excellent in the same ways. One wouldn’t expect them to be carbon copies of each other. Students have different needs. One would expect each classroom and each teacher to be doing different things at different times.

However, there are some things that are universal. There are some principles that are just better than others. Here are four:

First, it is better for schools receiving public funding to have to spend that money openly. They shouldn’t be able to spend that money behind closed doors without any public scrutiny or accountability.

Second, it’s better that the majority of the decisions made about how the school is run are made in public by duly-elected school board members drawn from the community, itself. That is much more preferable to political appointees who are not accountable to the parents and community.

Third, it is better if a school cannot deny a student enrollment based on that student’s special needs, race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, academic record or other factors. If the school receives public funds, it should not be allowed to turn anyone away.

Finally, it is better if a school teaches material that is academically appropriate, generally accepted as mainstream core concepts of the subject and Constitutional. Schools funded with tax money should not teach religious concepts like Creationism. They should not teach history and science from a Biblical point of view. They should not teach racial, sexual and religious discrimination.

None of these four principles should really be controversial. But each of them is violated by our current education system.

Some voucher schools violate the latter proposition. The other three are often violated by charter, cyber and voucher schools.

The only type of school that does not routinely violate these propositions is traditional public schools. Yet that is also the type of school being consistently undermined by most of our current educational policies.

So if we start from the idea that every student should get an excellent education, we start with the proposition to support and renew our public schools.

In doing so, we would need a national commitment to bringing every public school up to snuff.

Many of them already are – Hint: they’re found in rich neighborhoods. The ones that struggle are almost always found in poorer neighborhoods, and that’s no accident. It’s the result of savage funding inequalities.

What we’d need to do is ensure schools serving impoverished students receive equitable funding compared with schools serving the middle class and wealthy kids. Impoverished students must by necessity receive as much funding as the privileged ones. In fact, given the deprivations and increased needs of impoverished students, they should actually receive more funding. Middle class and rich kids have academic advantages over poor kids before they even enter kindergarten. They have more books in the home, more educated parents, better nutrition, better neonatal care, and often more stable home environments. If we really committed ourselves to making sure even these kids got the best possible education, we’d need to start spending more money on them.

Next, we’d need to do something about school segregation. Our public school system is now almost as segregated – and in some places even more segregated – than it was before the landmark Brown vs. Board decision 50 years ago. The only way to guarantee everyone an excellent education is to make it increasingly difficult to hurt some students without hurting all. There is no separate but equal. When we keep students apart by race or class, we ensure inequality among them.

And perhaps most important is this: we must remove the profit principle from education. We cannot allow decisions to be made based on what is best for corporations. Academic decisions about how to teach, how to assess student learning and how to assess teaching should be made by professional classroom educators.

This means no more high stakes standardized testing. No more Common Core. No more depersonalized computer-based learning. No more value added measures used to evaluated teachers. No more union busting. No more Teach for America.

We need to start valuing teachers and teaching again. And we need to pay and treat them as one of the most valuable parts of our society.

These measures would not be easy to accomplish, but they would have an immense impact on our schools.

This would require a substantial outlay of additional funding. We could save money by discontinuing costly practices that don’t benefit children (i.e. testing, charter and voucher funding, etc.). But make no mistake, it would cost money. However, we’re one of the richest countries in the world. We spend a ridiculous amount already on the military. You’re telling me we can’t find the money to spend on our children? If we’re not willing to spend on our future, we don’t deserve to have one.

It requires only a change in focus, a reevaluation of our priorities and goals.

Education should not be market driven. It should be student driven.

We should no longer guarantee business a class of consumers.

Instead, every student in this country no matter if they are rich or poor, black or white, male or female, gay or straight, religious or not – every student should be guaranteed an excellent education.

It’s really that simple.

Trump Can’t Limit Federal Role in Public Schools AND Push School Vouchers

April 27, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Local Control, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teachers Betsy DeVos, Candice Jackson, Civil Rights, Department of Education, Donald Trump, Politics

Trump-5-2

Donald Trump is talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Again.

This time he’s signing an executive order demanding the Department of Education study how the federal government oversteps its legal authority with regard to K-12 schools.

Yet he still proposes bribing states with $20 billion in federal funds to enact school vouchers.

Well which is it, Oh Orange One?

Are you for limiting the federal role in education or for coercing states to do your bidding?

Because you can’t be for both.

Either states and local districts determine the bulk of their school policies or not. You can’t barge into our state capitals promising billions of dollars in federal tax money if and only if we enact your chosen reforms.

That’s one of the primary reasons many conservatives (and even a sizable number of progressives) oppose Common Core. The Obama administration promised billions of dollars in Race to the Top grants if and only if states adopted these new, untried academic standards.

How is Trump’s voucher scheme any different?

In both cases, the proposed education reform has not been proven to work, and it’s not being requested by the education community or voters. In fact, when it comes to vouchers, voters have repeatedly turned them down in referendum after referendum.

So if Trump wants to investigate federal overreach, he should start with his own campaign speeches on vouchers.

So why is the former Realty TV star doing this?

Well, his first hundred days are almost up, and he has next to nothing to show for it. Other than uniting the American people against him, President Con Man hasn’t achieved much. One can imagine why he might want to hurry up and toss off yet another executive order so he could put something – anything – in the achievement column.
But there’s a more insidious reason why the founder of Trump University took out his signing pen.

His administration – especially his Department of Education – is particularly inimical to civil rights.

Just look at the brain trust he has running it.

Secretary Betsy DeVos isn’t sure the department should be in the business of protecting special education students. Nor is she willing to take a stand to protect transgender kids.

Latest hire Deputy Assistant Secretary Candice Jackson has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the very existence of civil rights. The 39-year-old attorney is anti-women’s rights, anti-distributive justice and possibly even anti-compulsory education and anti-Civil Rights Act of 1964!

In college, she thought she, herself, was being persecuted because a tutoring group set up for minorities wouldn’t serve her as a white person – despite the fact that she could probably afford to pay for her own damn tutoring.

So this latest “study” into federal overreach is probably an attempt by the Trump administration to justify doing nothing to protect the civil rights of students across the country.

Under President Bad Hair Day, special education students can be denied services with impunity. It’s not the federal government’s job to step in. THAT would be overreach.

And if black and brown students don’t receive the same resources and opportunities as their white counterparts, there’s just nothing the Trump administration can do. They don’t want to step over the line.

It’s not that The Donald doesn’t sympathize with transgender students denied access to bathrooms that correspond with their gender. Ivanka even gave him a stern talking to. It’s just that his tiny little hands are tied. Thems the limits of federal authority, Son.

If you ask me, that’s truly the impetus behind this executive order.

He’s just setting up his next excuse for giving us, the American people, zero return on our tax dollars.

That way he can just shrug and offer more tax cuts to the rich.

Sadly, there is truth to the claim that the Department of Education has overstepped its authority. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama frequently usurped states and communities local control. No one was crying out for high stakes testing, more test prep material, and unregulated charter expansion. But that’s what we got!

If you’re looking to Trump to balance the scales, look somewhere else!

He has given no indication that he will be any different. He’ll still push his own agenda on us, but he’ll pretend like we asked for it.

Now that’s the Donald Trump we know best!

Trump Budgets More Money to Kill Kids in Yemen Than Educate Kids in USA

March 17, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Compassion, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Guns, Parents, Politics, Poverty, President, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, School Lunches, school vouchers, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teachers, Violence Against Children Budget, Donald Trump, education, free school lunches, military, Trump budget

Donald Trump apparently would rather kill children in other countries than educate them in ours.

When you make a budget, you betray your priorities.

As Paul Begala said, “The budget is a profoundly moral document. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be.”

So where exactly are Donald Trump’s priorities?

While boosting the military by $54 billion in his 2018 budget, he slashes spending at the U.S. Department of Education by $9.2 billion – the largest cut in the department’s history.

This sad excuse for a man actually proposes that guns and tanks are more important than school children. Perhaps his motto should be “Save the guns! Fuck the children!”

No wonder he obsesses about the size of his hands and literally brags about the size of his genitals on the campaign trial. Can you imagine the infinitesimal pecker you would have to possess to need to brandish phallic pistols instead of taking care of the children in your fucking care!?

What a disgrace!

And moreover, he doesn’t even know how to effectively use the armed forces at his disposal.

Against advice from the military, this pustule with a fake weave authorized a disastrous raid in Yemen in early February that left a US Navy SEAL and 14 civilians dead including an 8-year-old American girl, Nawar al-Awlaki.

At least we know where all this military money will be going. It’s cash for his toy chest so Trump can play army with our sons and daughters. Sure, there will be no more public schools, but if your kids survive to adulthood, they can be Trump’s toys soldiers!

Moreover, look at where this overgrown Cheeto is making the cuts. In order to pay for a $1.4 billion increase in charter and voucher schools, the majority of these cuts come at the expense of the nation’s public schools – institutions serving 90% of our students.

He proposes downsizing the entire department by 13.5% reducing or eliminating grants for teacher training, after-school programs and aid to low-income and first-generation college students.

So we’re throwing out proven programs that help kids learn for fly-by-night scams that have ignited scandals across the country. Charter and voucher schools can pick and choose their students. Public schools can’t. And we’re siding with the freakin’ choice schools!?

Traditional public schools have elected school boards. They have open meetings. You actually get a say in how your kid is educated and how your tax money is spent. But the choice schools do all this behind closed doors with appointed boards accountable only to the moneymen. And we’re siding with the option that gives us LESS choice – in the name of “Choice”!

I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise. We’re talking about the founder of Trump University – a fake business school that forced this professional liar to settle out of court for millions. Of course he sides with charter and voucher schools! They’re the kind of institutions he knows – scams!

The priority isn’t school children. It’s wealthy investors that can cash in with our tax dollars burdened by little-to-no oversight.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Trump wants to block funding to feed impoverished children! He actually wants to cut the already struggling Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, by $200 million.

The program serves more than 7.8 million people about three-quarters of which are children and infants.

So this human-sized hemorrhoid has money for guns and businessmen but pinches pennies on infant’s baby formula. Make no mistake – children will die because of this. And those who do survive will grow up malnourished. Their brains will not be as fully developed as middle class and wealthy kids. They will not do as well in school, they’ll struggle to even graduate and boost the numbers of our special education population.

And when called on it, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget office director, told the press that feeding hungry children doesn’t work!

He actually said this:

“Let’s talk about after-school programs generally: they’re supposed to help kids who don’t get fed at home get fed so they do better in school. Guess what? There’s no demonstrable evidence that they’re actually doing that. There’s no demonstrable evidence they’re actually helping results, helping kids do better in school.”

Not only is this untrue based on multiple studies, it’s morally bankrupt.

The Trump administration is actually suggesting we shouldn’t help feed hungry kids because they don’t score high enough on their standardized tests!

Do you base your humanity solely on graduation rates? Should I not help a needy person if it doesn’t somehow boost the GDP?

Fuck you, Mulvaney, and fuck you, Trump!

I’m sorry. I know I’ve dropped more F- bombs in this piece than Trump’s grabbed unsolicited pussies. But what other response is appropriate than seething, inchoate rage!?

That our country has sunk to this level of selfishness and shortsightedness! The hypocrisy and greed!

I’m a public school teacher. I don’t use these words during the school day. But I will get a front row seat to how this budget will affect children.

I’ll be there when the rubber hits the road. And I’ll do what I can to help. I’ll stay extra hours to tutor. I’ll bring in food so my kids can eat. I’ll listen to their problems and offer solutions.

I’ll keep doing all the things I’m doing now. But I’m only one person. Our public school teachers are only one group. We can’t save every child in America ourselves!

And the parents can’t do it, either. Neither can our school board members, volunteers and concerned citizens.

We need a strong, moral government to step in and help.

I know that’s not a popular sentiment. Government has become bad by definition because of a generation of politicians who don’t believe in it running for office to prove themselves right.

But we all pay taxes. (Well, the middle class and poor do.) And we deserve a return on that investment.

America deserves better than this Trump budget. Our children deserve a better future than this.

Because if Trump gets his way, there may be no future at all.

Corporate School Reform for Rich Kids: A Modest Proposal

July 20, 2016 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Education, Junk science, National Academic Standards, No Child Left Behind, Obama, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Propaganda, satire, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Teachers, Toxic Testing #LetTeachersTeach, #StandUpForPublicSchools, annual testing, charter schools, common core, corporate, Corporate Education Reform, education, education reform, modest proposal, Politics, public schools, rich kids, satire, school funding, standardized testing, teachers, Wealthy

Screen shot 2016-07-19 at 8.37.14 PM

America’s wealthy children are in a crisis.

Every year they score better than most of their foreign counterparts on international tests.

They’re better in math. They’re better in reading. They’re better in science. Heck! American students just won the International Math Olympiad for the second year in a row! They beat heavy hitters like Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, North Korea, Russia, the UK, Hong Kong, Japan and 90 other countries!

Yet our media still refuses to acknowledge their accomplishments by lumping our wealthiest students in with the middle class and poor. They say American students are failing when it’s just the poor kids. And even when you add them all together, we’re in the middle, and we’ve always been in the middle since these international tests began.

It’s just not fair that our wealthy students don’t get recognized for their accomplishments. The media takes their exceptional scores and mixes them in with those of children living in broken homes going to under-funded schools in high crime neighborhoods. Obviously those kids are struggling. It’s not fair to make the wealthy look bad by mixing their scores in with these “ghetto” kids.

But that’s not the worst part. All this negative publicity is actually starting to force lawmakers to do something about it. There is a policy movement in our country that’s been around for nearly 20 years made to combat this exact problem. It’s called corporate education reform, and the rich kids are being left out!

Just look at all the programs being aimed at improving education for poor kids. I mean, sure, more than half of public school children live in poverty these days. But why should they get all these innovations?

If things keep up this way, the rich kids will get totally left behind. In the interests of fairness, we must make some of these same reforms available for the wealthy.

For instance, why is it only the poor kids who get the benefit of being taught by Teach for America recruits? These are idealistic youngsters who have a college degree – but not a degree in teaching – who get to come into an underprivileged environment and educate the masses. What about those from privileged upbringings? Shouldn’t they get the benefit of this program, too?

Think about it! These are young adults with lots of knowledge about the world and a real desire to help kids learn! Sure they don’t have enough desire to go out there and learn how to actually teach, but that’s just liberal indoctrination. You don’t need a degree to do that. A six weeks training program is fine!

Their enthusiasm makes up for any shortcomings in pedagogy. It’s like someone who loves medical dramas volunteering to do your surgery. Or maybe someone who watched every season of Law and Order volunteering to defend you in court. The attention to detail of a Trekkie at a Star Trek convention tops the knowledge of an astrophysicist any day!

Why is it only the poor kids that get that!? Rich children are being robbed of this opportunity. It’s time we furlough all their fancy teachers with their PhDs and Masters degrees and replace them with Teach for America.

But of course that won’t be enough.

The poor kids also have a huge leg up when it comes to academic standards.

Many wealthy families send their children to private schools with the best of everything. They have a wide curriculum, extracurricular activities, arts and music – everything impoverished public schools lack. But what they don’t have are universal standards.

That’s right. In most states, only our public schools have been forced to enact Common Core State Standards. These are a set of academic standards for all school children to ensure every student will be ready for college and/or a career by graduation.

Where are these standards for our rich kids? They’re being left behind! We let their private school teachers make up their own standards! How can we trust them with that? Despite their manners and good breeding, these are just teachers we’re talking about! What do they know about education?

Common Core standards were created with hardly any input from classroom teachers or child psychologists. Instead we relied upon self-appointed experts from the standardized testing industry. They decided what should be taught so it will line up exactly with their state-mandated tests.

Just imagine! Rich kids don’t get that benefit! No one teaches them to the test! Their teachers just guess and – still they get good grades – but imagine how well they’d do if they had the same benefits of the poor kids! If impoverished children fail, these same test corporations provide the remedial material! What better way to improve?

And that’s another thing! Why are the wealthiest kids who go to exclusive private schools exempt from taking state-mandated tests? How do we know they’re getting the best education possible if they haven’t demonstrated it on a multiple choice exam? These private schools could be totally faking it! We don’t know they’re providing a world class education without the proof standardized testing affords. Rich parents need to demand their kids be tested just like the poor kids.

One way they could do that while still reaping all the benefits of private schools is by enrolling in charter schools.

Rich parents rarely take advantage of that if they can afford the prestigious preparatory academies. But why? Choice is great and even more choice is greater!

Charter schools are really just private schools paid for with taxpayer money. They’re often run by private companies or unelected boards and in many cases expected to turn a profit. This also means they don’t have to do the same things as traditional public schools though for the most part they are subject to giving state-mandated tests.

In fact, they have very loose transparency requirements. We don’t really know much of what they do. But everywhere they’re touted as a massive improvement to the public school system.

They’re so good we don’t even demand that they prove how good they are. It’s just that obvious! (Pay no attention to peer reviewed studies that show them to be no better and often much worse than traditional pubic schools. That’s just scientific method mysticism.)

So why can’t there be more charter schools just for rich kids? Administrators get to pick which kids attend these schools anyway. Why not select just the upper crust, the crème de la crème, a better class of students? In fact, in many cases they already do. They select the students who already do the best academically and boot those with sub par skills or who are in need of special education. That’s how they inflate their test scores. But they also could select for economic factors instead of just academic ones.

Now you have to be careful. There have been a couple charter schools (actually quite a lot of them) that have been found to be scamming the public. Think Trump University for K-12. These schools steal taxpayer money, cut services, increase profits, disband and sneak away in the night. But there are many… well… a few high quality ones out there. And since choice is always good, shouldn’t rich families roll the dice on these institutions just like poor families?

Yes, there’s a chance rich kids educations will be ruined at charters – a big chance – but shouldn’t the wealthy have the same opportunity to gamble on their children’s futures that the poor do?

The point is this: there are plenty of shiny corporate education reforms out there aimed almost exclusively at the poor. If these reforms are so great, shouldn’t the rich get them, too?

Otherwise, these reforms are just opportunities for private industry to get rich quick off the backs of impoverished children! That can’t be right, can it?

The fact that the rich almost never take advantage of these reforms has to be a coincidence, right? Maybe they just don’t know how great these corporate school reforms are. I just can’t understand why no one is telling them, selling it to them.

After all, many of the people who create and propose these reforms have children who go to educational institutions that don’t use them. Arne Duncan was U.S. Secretary of Education, and his kids don’t experience the very policies he imposed on impoverished youngsters. Neither do Bill Gates’ and President Barack Obama’s kids. It’s just so unfair to them.

So I’m asking, please, let the children of the rich and powerful experience these same corporate educate reforms. Every child deserves the right to be taught by an untrained instructor. Every child should have an education devised by non-experts making huge profits off the results. Every child’s success should be determined through mass marketed, standardized, A,B,C exams. Every child should get to go to a school where the administration can reduce services and maximize profit.

Only then can we finally compare test scores between rich and poor. Only then will be one America!

Only then will no rich child be left behind.

(Or we could just give the poor kids all the benefits of the rich ones and throw away this corporate education crap, but no. That’s too radical. This is only a modest proposal.)

Make Tons of Money Doing a Terrible Job – Start a Cyber Charter School

May 5, 2016 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Education, Pennsylvania, Politics, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Special Education, Teachers, Technology #StandUpForPublicSchools, charter schools, Computers, Corporate Education Reform, Cyber Charter Schools, education, education reform, online charter schools, Politics, Profit, public schools, teachers, technology

If you’re a parent, you’d literally be better off having your child skip school altogether than sending her to a cyber charter.

LITERALLY!

But if you’re an investor, online charters are like a free money machine. Just press the button and print however much cash you want!

Ca-ching!

Nowhere else is the goal of corporate education reform as starkly clear as in the cyber charter industry. Nowhere else can such terrible academic results reap such tremendous financial gain.

Cyber charter schools are elementary and/or secondary institutions of learning where all or most lessons are given online via computer. Like brick and mortar charter schools, they are funded by taxes but are free from much of the regulations and oversight of which traditional public schools are subject. By every discernible report, the education provided by these online charters is truly execrable.

A recent nationwide study found that cyber charters provide 180 days less of math instruction than traditional public schools.

180 days!

There are only 180 days in an average school year. So cyber charters provide less math instruction than not going to school at all.

Amazing!

Ever watched an episode of Sesame Street? Then you got a better math education than an entire year at an online charter!

Dora the Explorer, Barney the purple dinosaur, Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood, the Teletubbies – all are more mathematically rigorous than cyber charters!

But what about reading?

When it comes to that essential skill, online charters come out much better. They only provide 72 days less instruction than traditional public schools.

That’s 40% of the school year!

So at a traditional public school you’d get a better education in reading if you simply took off at the end of February. You’d get more instruction if you only went slightly more than every other day!

The same study found that 88 percent of cyber charter schools have weaker academic growth than similar brick and mortar schools.

They have an “overwhelming negative impact” on students, according to researchers. Not only do they have fewer learning days in math and reading, they have a higher student-teacher ratio and much more limited opportunities for live-contact with teachers than brick and mortar schools.

For instance, student-to-teacher ratios average about 30:1 in online charters, compared to 20:1 for brick and mortar charters and 17:1 for traditional public schools.

And THIS is somehow a viable alternative to traditional public schools!?

Well caveat emptor, suckers! Thank goodness for the ignorance of the public!

But at least it’s easy to set up these failure factories.

Here’s all you have to do:

Give a child a computer with Internet access.

Buy a cheap, generic programmed package of study.

Then sit back and watch the money roll in.

From an education standpoint, the model is clearly unsound.

Here’s how a cyber charter teacher describes the reading curriculum at his school:

“Most cyber schools get their curriculum from K12, a company started by William Bennett, a former federal Secretary of Education. My school gets the majority of its high school material from a mail order company called Aventa.

When Aventa creates a course it is fairly bare bones. They choose a textbook from one of the major textbook companies, and cut it up into lessons. The lesson will contain a few paragraphs introducing the topic, they will have the students read a section of a chapter, they will ask the student to do a few problems from the book, and lastly, there will be some form of graded assessment, taken from textbook review problems. That is all.”

This is like giving out nothing but worksheets and expecting high academic performance. Here. Read the book, answer the questions at the back, and call it a day.

Even though it’s an online school, you do need a few flesh and blood “teachers” occasionally. Their job is to contact students every now and then, but – get this – in most states they don’t even have to be certified. In my home state of Pennsylvania, only 75 percent of cyber charter teachers need to be certified and even those are not subject to the same educator effectiveness accountability regulations as traditional public school teachers.

So you could have your cousin Vinnie calling students and asking how they’re doin’. It really doesn’t matter. Most times the kids won’t answer the phone anyway.

That’s about all it takes. And boy does it pay!

Nationwide there are about 200 online charter schools enrolling about 200,000 children. They raked in $426 million in 2013-14!

It’s almost like stealing, but it’s totally 100% legal!

Cyber charter operators pull in the same amount or more of tax revenues as traditional public schools – and here’s the best part – what they don’t spend on students is all bank for them and their shareholders!

Everything is set up to benefit online charter investors to the detriment of students and families. Take the very way online charters are paid.

They get money for each student enrolled. That money comes from the school district where the student lives.

However, in many states like Pennsylvania, each district spends a different amount of money per student. These expenditures reflect varying costs and available funding from the local tax base.

So cyber charters get whatever that local per-pupil expenditure is. It doesn’t matter if a district spends $8,000 on each student or $20,000. Whatever the amount, that goes to the cyber charter.

However, the cost of educating kids is drastically reduced online. Their programs are bare bones compared with what you get at a traditional public school. Most online charters don’t have tutors or teacher aides. They don’t offer band, chorus or extra-curricular activities. You don’t have to pay for any building costs, grounds, upkeep, large staff, etc. But funding formulas in most states ignore this completely. Cyber charters get to keep the difference – whatever it is. In fact, they have an incentive to keep as much as possible because they can do almost whatever they want with it. That includes putting it into operators’ pockets!

They just call it profit.

Even many online charters that claim to be non-profit do this.

For instance, take Pennsylvania’s Insight PA Cyber Charter School. On paper, it’s run by a nonprofit board of directors. However, the board gave over all day-to-day operations to a for-profit company, K12 Inc. On paper it’s one thing. In practice, it’s something else entirely.

And in some states when it comes to special education funding, it gets worse. In Pennsylvania, our funding formula is so out of whack that charters schools of all stripes including cyber charters often end up with more funding for students with special needs than traditional public schools. However, because of this loophole in the Commonwealth, Pennsylvania online charters have been increasing the number of special education students they enroll and even working to add that label to as many of their students as possible. The state Department of Education has been so underfunded it does not have the resources to oversee these changes.

Issues like these permit a bait-and-switch that sends an awful lot of tax dollars earmarked to help children into the maw of private industry.

Sure there’s a lot of turnover. Few students stay enrolled in online charters more than a year or two before realizing they’ve been had. But they are easily replaced.

And – get this – when they return to their traditional public school hopelessly behind their peers, who has to pay to remediate them? Answer: you do! That’s a problem for traditional public schools and the taxpayers that support them – not cyber charters.

With all these issues, why do online charters keep getting approved? Ask the your local state Department of Education.

Unlike brick and mortar charters, which require approval at the district level, in most states cyber charters are approved by the Department of Education. Admittedly the online charter boom has slowed somewhat after news of fraud and abuse has become an almost a weekly occurrence in the national media.

For instance, PA Cyber Charter founder Nicholas Trombetta allegedly stole at least $8 million in public dollars only a few years ago. He bought an airplane, a $900,000 condo, houses for his girlfriend and mother, and nearly $1 million in groceries and personal expenses, according to the grand jury. Trombetta allegedly set up numerous for-profit and nonprofit businesses to provide goods and services to the cyber charter. Federal investigators filed 11 fraud and tax conspiracy charges against him and indicted others in the case.

While Trombetta awaits trial, the school continues to do business awaiting a potential state audit.

Another cyber charter founder, June Brown, was also indicted for theft of $6.5 million. Brown and her executives were indicted on 62 counts of wire fraud, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. She was well known for student test scores and had a reputation for claiming large salaries and filing suits against parents who questioned her, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Brown is also awaiting trial. She ran the Agora Cyber Charter School, which was part of the K12 Inc. empire of virtual charters.

With this kind of fraud and a record of academic failure, perhaps the most amazing thing about cyber charters is that taxpayers allow them to exist at all.

You hear educators say it’s all about the children. But not at online charters.

There it’s all about the Benjamins. Heck! The McKinleys! The Clevelands! The Madisons! The Chases! The Wilsons!

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