Six weeks ago, I wrote a post about a resolution from the NAACP calling for a moratorium on new charter schools. It’s important to note, the resolution calls for a moratorium on opening new schools, not a shuttering of current schools, though one of its purposes is to take a closer look at those already operating in black communities, some of which, the resolution says, are the educational equivalent of subprime mortgages. The resolution is pending. It should be voted on sometime this year.
Now there’s a response, a letter with 160 signers, which begins, “Dear Esteemed NAACP Board Members,” and sings the praises of charter schools, especially those in black neighborhoods. The letter asks that members of the NAACP board meet with representatives of the signers to discuss the resolution and, they hope, decide to vote it down.
The effort is spearheaded by two organizations, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the Black Alliance for Educational Options. Both groups are heavily funded by some of the deepest pockets in the privatization/”education reform” movement. In 2014 alone, the Walton Foundation, created by the Walmart fortune, gave NAPCS $1 million and BAEO $3.5 million. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave NAPCS $3 million in 2014. Its last contribution to BAEO was $250,000 in 2012. NAPCS also gets funding from at least ten other funds, including the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation and The Broad Education Foundation. I couldn’t find any information on other BAEO funders.
Clearly, these aren’t small, community-based grassroots organizations. They’re significant, well funded players in the vast charter/voucher ground game.
What I find interesting about the list of 160 signers of the letter is, the vast majority are connected to charter schools or charter advocacy organizations. Just by looking at where the signers say they work, I found 130 with direct affiliation to charter schools and charter organizations. In some cases, multiple signers come from the same overall organization. Eleven, for example, are from Fortune Schools and seven are from KIPP charter schools.
I can draw two possible conclusions from the fact that such a small proportion of the signers have no connection to the charter school movement. The first possibility is, the letter was thrown together quickly, and a blast was sent out to the two organizations’ supporters asking for signers. The second is, charter schools aren’t widely supported by black community leaders and politicians. A lack of deep support for charters is, I think, a distinct possibility. Other than a few standout charter schools and chains, charters in black communities aren’t wildly successful. Many are on a par with the local district schools, and some are so poorly run, either because of incompetence or because the owners are more concerned with making money than educating children, the children would have been far better off sticking with the school district. And those few “standout” schools often succeed by attrition, getting rid of students who don’t do well in the schools’ regimented environments, leaving a select group of students who fit comfortably into the school mold and do well on standardized tests.
It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this letter. The NAACP is far from a radical organization, and its leadership is more likely to want to build bridges than create friction with other black leaders. On the other hand, the letter is more of a lobbying effort than genuine community outreach, so the NAACP may not take it very seriously.
A GATES/WALTON-EDUCATION-PRIVATIZATION-SUPPORT EXTRA: In 2014, the Walton Foundation spent $202,461,214 (yes, over $200 million) in grants to K-12 education, most of them supporting groups that work to promote charter schools and vouchers. Arizona Charter Schools Association received $650,000. The Arizona School Choice Administration Corporation received $100,000. The Gates Foundation giving is so vast, I couldn’t find a number for its total spending on K-12, but a search in its database for the term “charters schools” yielded 20 organizations which received a total of about $46 million in 2014.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2016.
How much longer are we as a nation going to allow, and even support, this idea that turning over public institutions to private business interests is good for the country. We have privatized schools, privatized hospitals, privatized prisons, privatized probation services with no end in sight and the only thing we have learned is they do not save money, they turn vulnerable people into revenue streams and they further the growing idea that nothing works in America anymore, which in turn has fueled the idea that somehow a businessman is going to save America.
Not all charters are for-profit. Some non-profit charter schools are doing a good job and have grass roots supports from parents and the communities surrounding them.
Stop the smear job, David. Your approach is, as always, too broad-brush to be meaningful or properly informative; it is ideologically driven partisan hackery.
How’s TUSD doing serving the African American community?
What did we just hear about the last round of AZ Merit scores?
http://tucson.com/thisistucson/schools/two-thirds-of-tucson-students-fail-azmerit-for-second-year/article_a6dd106a-7c38-11e6-8aea-c796abf7c27d.html
Why do people want “choice”?
It’s because districts like the one where your sadly underperforming friends control the governing board are not delivering high quality services to their students, David.
The charter school movement is a Trojan Horse, the goal of which is to weaken the political power of teachers’ unions. That is the main reason why it has attracted right-wing support. Conservatives only care about “school choice” when it involves their own children.
Best education possible for our young people. Seems like a pretty simple goal that usually gets lost in the self serving education discussions. Economics 101 tells us that monopolies are not the best organization to deliver goods or services. They tend to serve the service provider and not the service recipient. Public schools are structured monopolies. If you don’t want to use them you still have to pay for them, as well as the school system you select. Charter schools help keep the monopolies honest and offer an alternative to families who can’t afford two tuitions. Assume the NAACP is carrying water for the school monopoly service providers/unions. Good to see someone going to bat for the Charter schools.
“The public is only dimly aware of the reform movement’s privatization agenda. The deceptive rhetoric of the privatization movement masks its underlying goal to replace public education with a system in which public funds are withdrawn from public oversight to subsidize privately managed charter schools, voucher schools, online academies, for- profit schools, and other private vendors.”-Bill Moyers
http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/28/public-ed…
How about if we just get rid of for-profit charters and ensure that charters are subject to the same financial transparency laws public districts are subject to? Then the discussion about what standards should be and how oversight takes place might actually turn into a meaningful dialogue, rather than ideologically driven, inaccurate propaganda backing the right of political machines and teachers’ unions to keep their “market share” on the one side and the right of venture capitalists to chisel out a larger “market share” on the other side.
TUSD and districts like it are not functioning, for the majority of people using them, like educational institutions. They benefit networks of cronies, not students. If you don’t understand this, you haven’t been on the sites in these districts or watching their board meetings and the media coverage of their board meetings.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/tusd-school-board-campaign-contributions-raise-red-flags/article_a89773ad-ff91-569f-84bd-b9543e92f343.html
http://tucson.com/news/opinion/tusd-superintendent-s-failure-to-disclose-link-erodes-confidence/article_35d75549-718c-5bea-a54e-6fee9181367b.html
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/new-details-emerge-in-grijalva-kin-hiring/article_674695dc-d25c-5912-936a-c6bd531d1bbb.html
http://tucson.com/news/opinion/tucson-unified-superintendent-s-percent-raise/article_2f0dd6fc-85ff-5ead-93e1-1b6f5e69b64d.html
If “choice” has been created, in part, to benefit venture capitalists, it has also been created, in part, to solve the problem of poor students being locked into districts like this where public funds will benefit the for-profit company managing the outsourced substitute teachers who teach in its classrooms instead of professionally qualified teachers, or the for-profit consulting company in which someone who gave the Superintendent a job recommendation is one of the principals, or the President of the Board’s mother in law, or a Superintendent taking home close to $500K in total compensation this year in a district where teachers are paid — literally — poverty level wages. The current leadership of TUSD, including Safier’s friends the Democratic Party insiders who currently control the governing board, run a public institution in a flagrantly malfeasant way and get away with it because their cronies in the Democratic Party and in the media do white wash jobs for them that manage to deceive enough constituents:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/03/30/sen-steve-farley-this-is-not-your-fathers-tusd
People like Safier who try to give the impression that the entire charter sector is for-profit (which it is not) but remain silent about the fact that in quid-pro-quo infested districts like TUSD there’s a whole lot of public money going, through improper bidding and hiring processes, to places (including for-profit companies) where it doesn’t belong are dishonest partisan hacks.
Charters exist and flourish because of public schools like TUSD. Try a little self exam. Trump will quadruple charter school numbers nationwide. get used to it.
This NAACP?
NAACP Leader Speaking Against Cops In Charlotte Financed By George Soros
Find out what George Soros is trying to do to America.
People should never judge other school districts against TUSD. TUSD is an anomoly, and quite a negative example to be sure. After all the blah, blah, blah, where are all these fabulous charters that have erased the achievement gap, supposedly the reason for their existence? Any student with parental support can get a great education in any public school.
“Any student with parental support can get a great education in any public school.”
Wow. You really believe that? In ANY public school?
You are misinformed.
Try this:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with?act=1
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with?act=2
And this:
https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Whos-Charge-Americas-Schools/dp/0544810902/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1474677851&sr=8-2&keywords=the+prize
Any student with parental support can get a great education in the Normandy district in Missouri? In Newark? Then why are so many concerned, deeply invested parents moving their children out of these districts, and out of the school sites on the west side of TUSD, where the classrooms are staffed with a rotating cast of outsourced subs, not permanent teachers?
I’m tired of hearing that TUSD is an anomaly. It is NOT an anomaly. What happens in TUSD is typical of what happens in any number of poor urban districts. The Democratic party wants to look the other way because some of their machine politicians are still benefiting from awarding contracts in some of these settings. It’s an ugly, sad fact about certain groups within a party that is supposed to be a champion of the poor and working class, but in some settings ends up exploiting and underserving the very populations they purport to want to help.
Public district supporters in Arizona love to talk about the inequity of the charter system. What about the inequity of TUSD vs. Catalina Foothills or Tanque Verde? Or the inequity of UHS vs. some of TUSD’s other high schools? Wake up and smell the coffee. This is what happens in the real world: THE PUBLIC DISTRICT SYSTEM DOES NOT CREATE EQUITY any better than the charter system does. And IT IS NOT TRUE THAT THE ONLY PROBLEMS WITH DISPARATE ACHIEVEMENT HAVE TO DO WITH THE SES OF THE PARENTS. A good part of the reason that test scores are higher in Districts 16 and 13 than in District 1 is that those schools have constituencies that are entitled enough to be vigilant and hold the people running these districts to a high standard. Administrators in those districts would be fired, governing board member would be recalled if they tried to pull any of the BS you see constantly in TUSD. So who defends the rights of poor families in districts like TUSD that can’t hold administrators’ feet to the fire, when necessary? The Democratic party? What a laugh. Look at all the Democratic party grandees lining up behind Foster and Juarez, who were just caught accepting $5K campaign contributions from an executive at the company that manages the substitute teachers whose labor they voted to outsource.
But keep running down charter schools and inhabiting a fantasy land in which “any student with parental support can get a great (!) education in ANY public school. ANYone who is not drinking the Koolaid you imbibe knows it’s not true.
David, are you being paid by the Teacher’s Unions? Are you a consultant to TUSD? Just curious.
Try for Accuracy Once, You are vastly misinformed …. go in as many of the schools as you want in TUSD. I work in one and have worked in many. There are 45k children whose parents choose to keep them there. THere are many many hard working teachers who get results. The amount of students leaving is down to a trickle and some return. THe classrooms by and large are not staffed by subs. Some yes but that is true in all school systems (charters too) in Arizona because of the teacher shortage. I think you need to get some ‘accuracy once’. And you bet I am lining up behind Juarez and Foster. I go to them for the truth and they give me data to back up what they say. They are honest and fight for the kids.
?