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“Charter schools embrace innovative educational practices that encourage competition and hold teachers and administrators accountable for the academic achievement of their students.”
Fast forward to last Friday, and let’s see how those “innovative educational practices” are doing in practice.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
As they move to close down a network of St. Louis charter schools over the next several weeks, state education officials face a task as monumental and complicated as dismantling an entire school district.
As many as 3,800 children — or about 11 percent of those attending public schools in the city — must find new schools. Their records must be properly preserved and transferred. The school buildings they attended have to be scoured for equipment and materials paid for with federal funds. The 288 teachers and staff who work at the schools must have a better idea of their remaining pay and benefits. And that’s not counting the thousands of questions by parents who demand answers.
[snip]
The Imagine schools [schools run by VA-based Imagine Schools, Inc.] had been on shaky ground all year.
Their scores on the state’s standardized tests were well below those of St. Louis Public Schools. The schools were deficit spending. Rent and administrative costs took dollars from the classroom to the for-profit management company that runs them.
A for-profit company, taking money for their profits? No one could have anticipated . . .
How bad were those scores? Bad. Very, very bad.
State test results from 2011 showed that nearly all students at the city’s Imagine schools were performing below grade level in reading and math, prompting St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and Nicastro to call for the closure of the schools.
But I can see why Romney loves charter schools. They apparently are doing for education what Bain did for employment and the “innovative” market practices like mortgage securitization did for the financial services industry. Consequences and product quality be damned — the corporate profits come first.
According to the Center for Educational Reform (a pro-charter schools group), 15% of all charter schools created since 1992 have closed, 42% for financial reasons and 24% for mismanagement reasons (pp. 8-9). But as they note, that’s what “a few bad apples” can do.
“Bad apples” are the problem? No one could have anticipated . . .
Yep. It’s those pesky bad apples. Just like in the financial services industry. How did Carl Levin describe one of those deals put together by an innovator at Goldman Sachs? Oh, yes, I remember.
Gotta love those market-based solutions. Unless, of course, you’re among the thousands of parents in greater St. Louis who don’t know where they are going to send their kids to school next year.
But at least the folks in Virginia at Imagine Schools Inc. got paid. And when it comes to market-based solutions, that’s what matters most.
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photo h/t to ilovememphis
33 Comments
Thank you for this, Peterr.
As a former teacher and current volunteer tutor in my local elementary school, it sickens me to see the non-stop attacks on teachers, the slashing of their resources, and the blaming them for not curing problems of poverty and family dynamics that their students bring to class.
The icing on this very rotten cake is the greed of the “reformers.” Michelle Rhee, we’re looking at you. And you, Arnie Duncan.
Boy, I hope this makes it to the FDL mothership front page.
Me too!
Thanks Peterr.
good article.
Frank Rich’s current column highlights the “vulture capitalist” business model and how most of the top GOP billionaire donors made their bucks practising vulture capitalism, along with the mittster. Rich covers some of the business practices of the vulture capitalist class, it is quite revealing.
I’ve had enough of the whole teacher bashing movement. I can’t think of anyone more important to developing our children, especially when so many of those kids’ parents are idiots.
But I understand that rethugs advocate ignorance over critical thinking, aka future fox news viewers. Really stupid people casting votes for rethugs on election day makes their whole sick system work, so yes, the worse they can make the schools, the more people will vote for them, or not vote at all.
Charter schools have been skeevy since Day One, yet they are snugly protected from the very free market their backers keep touting. Here’s Josh Marshall from June of 2002 on the infamous Edison school in Philadelphia:
Thank you for a great post. Recommended.
Has there been any new information on the charter schools on the east coast that bring in the best students to start the school year, take the State & Fed dollars, then farm the students back into the public school system by selectively un-accepting them. Keeping all the money for the school year, it does not go back to the public schools.
The free market is a delusional/predatory fabrication. Are you trying to catch them on their hypocrisy?
Who cares?
Stop using their framing. Vultures eat carrion; is that what these vampire capitalists are eating?
Don’t be stupid.
Who could have anticipated, indeed.
Good article, Peterr.
Gracias.
Recommended.
Touche.
Eeegad! My kingdom for a tilde.
Ok then, how about
?
Heh! Here you go: ~
S’ok, but you might have to elaborate – Homocidal endocannabal Capitalists – yeah, that sounds seriously threatening.
Yep and NO One Goes to Jail that’s the best part just steal the money and walk away. Please don’t forget 0 wants to do the same thing with schools.
bill & melinda gates gave big bucks to the alec group for “education reform.” The woman heading up the education arm of alec is prepared to use deceptive practices to hide the real “reform” of education for which alec is aiming. There is no doubt that the destruction of real public education is the object. They want to move to online classes for everyone to reduce costs and raise profits. This is beyond belief. At the same place that the gates article is posted, there is an opportunity to sign a petition to support the group students first. In case you are not familiar with it, students first is headed by michelle rhee, who was the hero in the movie waiting for superman, a propaganda piece for gates type “reform.” You can read about gates’s “reform” here.
Perhaps we can grow up now and accept that private for-profit corporations are not the solution to society’s every need.
This is an excellent point: what form of accountability exists for the executive management who created a disaster like the one we see described? Also, do they have to pay back any of the money?
Let me see if I understand. It’s OK for teachers to make money working at schools, and principals, and other administrators. It’s OK for the janitor to draw a paycheck, and for the contractor who built the school to make a living, and for the grocery store to get paid for the food it delivers to the cafeteria. But if a management company is paid a fee, the problem isn’t that it didn’t provide good management services or that its fee was badly negotiated — the problem is that the free market has no place in education?
At least when charter schools fail, they get shut down and replaced. When ordinary public schools fail, the kids just get trapped in them forever.
Sorry, Peterr. I got so mad that I forgot to thank you for bring to light another chapter in the downward spiral of education in the US. Actually there is another poor chapter that affects me. The governor and legislature in Florida is going to ruin the University of Florida, the premier state university. Money for academics keeps being cut while the football budget goes up. Now they are closing the Computer Science department, ostensibly to move it to a new polytechnic university. Of course, that department is totally intertwined with the rest of the engineering school,so computer classes will suffer or disappear. How could the populace of Florida have elected a guy that was a known crook, not just an implied crook? That story is here.
I have to defend Charter Schools here. It really depends how they are done. For-profit schools seem to fail mostly, as do schools set up wiith little accountability to the local public system.
Florida has a really horrid charter system – with money going to religious schools and no standards from what I’ve heard.
Maryland set them up where the teachers are union, the school is responsible for state curriculum and standardized tests and NCLB(ugh). My kids went to one that was formed by parents who felt the alternative was leaving the city or private schools. And Dr. Alonso has used the charters as models of public school reform.
Please don’t kill the baby with the bathwater.
The nonsense of your argument is too much to answer in one comment. I, however, don’t think that you are looking for a reasonable discussion. There is too much evidence to show that you are not addressing the real problems with your statement. I refuse to be dragged into a pointless circular discussion except to say that you should become more informed about education and its objectives and you wouldn’t say this unless it is your job to disrupt if possible. Sort of a deceptive practice as alec plans to do.
xcept to say that you should become more informed about education and its objectives
Agree with you there. But what are its objectives? I suggest you google John Taylor Gatto, and then take a time machine to find out on whose system our education was founded on? Then fast forward and you will find corporate titans through their foundations – Rockerfella ford and so on – were deeply involved in creating the foundational blueprint, and you can keep digging.
As you do it will explain why most adults are asleep, seem to not have any sense of unified outrage to what is going on, and why most adults have little to no basic critical thinking skills.
Welcome to the public fool system. Not saying charter is the answer, it is not. But what are our goals for education need to be seriously addressed. After all children spend the most important and “life forming” period of their lives subject to this educational system
no, “vulture capitalists” would be the correct term, it offers a direct dichotomy to the term “venture capitalist” which is how they prefer to portray themselves. my terminology directly counters their misrepresentation, thus it is the correct terminology.
it’s good that you are an expert on what different birds do, but that’s outside the scope of effective political framing, which I am doing. Your comments are more applicable to a zoology discussion.
don’t be so stupid.
Certainly there has been the influence of big business in education, but that was not the be all and end all of it. If that were true, there would have been very little expansion for kids in the pre-college years, especially in the farming areas. As the country grew, the educational system grew and produced people with interests very removed from readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmaic. There were certainly people whose main objective was just to get a job. For those people there is technical training. The objective of education is to produce people that can think through problems or write literate works or do science or engineering. These are usually people that eventually need to earn a living, but education is more than simply preparing to earn a living.
Charter schools can certainly provide a good education, but, it seems that the main function of for-profit charter schools is to provide a profit for those that run them. A not for-profit charter school can still siphon off money to pay big salaries. It is a function of who runs the school. Generally, as has been pointed out, they really don’t do any better than public schools. No, we don’t need private business sucking up tax dollars and reducing the money that could go to schools. There are too many problems of charter schools, especially for-profits to examine here, so a defense of good charter schools is not a defense of all charter schools.
this is not about charter vs public school education. It is about what is it “education” objectives. check out the leads I gave you, and follow where they might take you.
Good luck
Actually, mswinkle, it IS about charter vs. public school education. Public school education is a function of our government. Don’t we need our government to function?
Is it good that our government wants to privatize everything? Is that the change we voted for? No, it is not. Did we want to drown government in a bathtub? No, we did not. Only the oligarchs wanted that, and Obama is their tool.
The public school system could benefit from the kind of analysis you suggest. But it should remain a governmental entity, not a corporate one. Private schools can and will be alternatives if the system isn’t fixed – fine – and parents can and will form cooperative groups to home school their children if local public schools are as terrible as the ones near me. That’s what my kids have done because they want my grandchildren to be educated to think for themselves and the public schools aren’t doing that. But, I agree with you, they should!
In my day, where I lived, they did. It’s not brain surgery. And it doesn’t take a lot of money either. You can even do it – impossible though this may seem – WITHOUT COMPUTERS! (Sorry for yelling.)
One begins to think the neglect is deliberate…
Why call out Romney on this issue? The charter school/privatization scheme’s biggest bully/operative is Obama.
http://rodgermmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/the-myth-of-private-enterprise-superiority-reduced-government-and-ronald-reagan/
is an interesting blog where he says “I personally am glad the government runs Social Security and Medicare. I’d hate to see those programs left to private sector insurance companies (i.e., eliminate the programs). And, while Medicare supplements and Medicare Part D involve private insurers, they follow strict rules set up by the government.
This demonstrates the perfect public/private program. The government creates the plan and the ground rules, and the private sector executes it. Both parties are necessary for its success.”
Actually Obama loves charter schools too and heralds them for their supposed “innovation” (yeah right, fleecing taxpayers and transferring them to the 1% – where have we seen this before?) . Though he won’t send his kids to one. It is yet another bipartisan “Washington consensus”.
Or any need that matters.
And like “Proud Mary”, the money keeps rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ in . . .
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/michelle-rhee-and-george-w-bush-speaking-po
Sorry comrade, you’re not a propaganda laureate.
I always figure I’ve made a strong argument when the only answer I get is “I can’t answer you because you’re simply too wrong in ways I can’t be bothered to identify, and besides you’re probably not arguing in good faith.” Maybe more than one of us ought to go back and examine some of his premises.