Charter schools are turning into the next subprime mortgages

boing
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But we’re not talking about politicians. We’re talking about parents who come together to create and support non-profit charter schools with their children’s well-being in mind.

But what about the parents who have thought long and hard about their kids’ education and who don’t think that their charter school is “crap?” Are you going to tell them that they’re mistaken, that, despite their positive experiences, despite their children being happy with their school, that you know they’re all wrong and that they really have chosen “smellier crap” for their kids?

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if the whole community is there, where is the old school exactly?

oh everyone BUT THEM is involved. Yeah… funny thing about your definition of community.

How about you just rename the old school?

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The “whole community” is never anywhere. The old school is wherever it’s ended up.

I don’t know what you mean by “them.” Why do you assume I know?

I don’t know what your point is, here.

All I know is that there are lots and lots of poor and lower middle class families who are very, very grateful for and happy with their local charter school. If you think they’re mistaken for being grateful, for being happy with their charter school, you should explain precisely why, along with how you know better than they do.

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All I know is that there are lots and lots of poor and lower middle class families who are very, very grateful for and happy with their local school. If you think they’re mistaken for being grateful, for being happy with their school, you should explain precisely why, along with how you know better than they do.

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So which charter company do you work for? Is it White Hat Management* or Electronic Classrooms of Tomorrow* perhaps?
Or are you an investor? Protecting your dividend?

(*thanks @milliefink for the names)

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Or maybe Rocketship Education?

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Another interesting piece of this puzzle that has remained yet unmentioned in this discussion is TFA (Teach For America)… I’d link to their website (instead of TheAtlantic) but it’s so full of “pseudo-profound bullshit”, hooey, gibberish, flim-flam, bunk, propaganda, and outright lies that it might actually break your bullshit detector… fuck it, you should have a peak:

https://www.teachforamerica.org/

You’ll teach for at least two years [starting with virtually no prior training and not as a TA but as a “full fledged teacher”] in a low-income community [Because poor kids deserve the highest quality teachers], where you’ll show students what’s possible when they work hard and dream big.

And as your students thrive, you’ll grow in ways you never imagined.

Our top priority is expanding educational opportunities for kids and your placement is chosen to ensure that your efforts can have the greatest impact.

Our mission is to enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation’s most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.

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A article on how awful TFA is by Daniel Katz, the Director of Secondary Education and Secondary Special Education Teacher Preparation at Seton Hall University:

TFA’s brand of education “leaders” are at the forefront of closing neighborhood schools in favor of opaque charters, using test scores to evaluate teachers, and breaking teacher unions. In this school of thought, there are no problems in education of vulnerable children that require increased resources and the dedication of experienced professionals. Rather, all that are needed are energetic but easily replaceable novices, a “no excuses” attitude, and school management that is relieved of any open and democratic accountability.
Advice for My Students: DON'T "Teach For America" | HuffPost Latest News

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Forgot Guns in there!

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Yep, Teach for America is “useful altruism,” enabled by useful idiots. Young people going into it usually have no idea about the destructive agenda they’re taking part in. Teach for America is another pernicious arm in the effort to privatize education in urban areas, and it’s hitting rural ones too, along with the charter “movement” –

The charter school movement has gained support from both Democrats and Republicans as the policymakers in general have accepted the business model of improvement and believe choice and competition will produce better education results. Urban school districts have borne the brunt of the charter movement, as seen in districts such as Chicago and New York, where the battles are ongoing, and New Orleans, which now has completely privatized its public education system. Rural schools, though not as prevalent in the discussion about the forces of privatization as urban, are under no less a threat of corporatization as distance education and virtual classrooms are now arising as options for rural youth.

Another sickening problem is how all of this is eroding the teaching profession, and thus the quality of education:

After the policy recommendations begins the attack on certified teachers and unions. The report recommends charter schools be exempt for teacher certification requirements, and allow for organizations such as Teach for America to provide staffing. It also pushes forth the notion of teachers using online classrooms, so they would not even have to go the school site. This is referred to as the creation of an “elite remote teaching corps” who would provide the actual classroom instruction for rural students, and any schools left open would serve simply as computer labs staffed by tutors.

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Charter schools definitely can be a breath of fresh air in a forgotten, abandoned, underfunded community, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. There’s also no question though, that the concept has, at a high level, been converted into a back-door privatization scheme.

The most well-meaning of the charter movement envisioned a system where not-for-profit-dirven schools were given an opportunity to experiment outside of the bureaucratic strictures of a stagnant system. The idea, and indeed the promise made by charter proponents was that the good ideas that came out of these experiments would flow back into the public school through cross-pollinating the administrations and teachers. It is difficult for large government programs to innovate, so a laboratory for change outside the system makes some kind of sense on paper.

In reality, charter schools became places that sucked a lot of passionate and creative administrators and teachers out of the public schools, and just had them work themselves to the bone (teacher’s unions -problematic in themselves, certainly - have less, if any jurisdiction in charters) in an unsustainable model. The inch of privatization offered by the charter system was taken a mile by political opponents of public education and any good results that come out of charters are used as evidence against the public school model, rather than a feed-back loop to reinforce them (a lot of the gains are due to the unsustainable models, so they wouldn’t be scalable in any case…).

The financial games we see now are just the natural result of allowing profiteering to seep into schooling. Public goods like national defense, education, medical care, housing etc…are fish in a barrel when the floodgates are opened to private money. Allowing private money in without proper regulations in the name of a program that on its surface is altruistic is just letting the wolf into the flock, and giving him a tailored sheep costume on the way in.

I work for a public/privately funded early childhood non-profit in NYC, and our model is to use private dollars (and public dollars, whenever the funders are feeling randy) to prototype, experiment with and evaluate ways of improving early childhood care and education, and the preparation of teachers and administrators. I believe deeply in the idea of laboratories outside of the larger system being given the freedom to experiment. The essential part of this equation, though is always the feedback loop back into the system to improve things for everyone.

And, of course, not turning the whole damn thing into a fucking philanthrocapitalist investopalooza and deregulation party.

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As a follow-up to my earlier thought about charters taking money away from public schools and giving it to private concerns I remembered a recent case of the Nashville, TN school board rejecting a proposal that would have put a charter school in a wealthy neighborhood where the public schools are doing quite well.

The school board rejected the charter four times, twice in violation of a state order, and the state decided to respond by withholding $3.4 million from the school district.

It’s easy for legislators to say public schools are failing when they’re the ones working to make sure public schools fail.

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and cargo cult, for that matter.

“Ethan and Fairleigh are in the new charter shcool”

:wink: I’m leaving the typo.

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Those parents will have well educated children regardless of whether they learn in a public school, a private school, at home, or in a publicly funded charter school.

Parents who don’t give a shit about their kids’ education will find that their kids have received a shit education. Regardless of where.

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But but but-
That would cost money.

Never mind that a substantial portion of the county already seems to resent that the gubmint has any part in their children’s education…

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Public schools are (at least in my neck of the woods) accredited by independent auditing organizations. The same ones, in fact, that provide accreditation to higher ed institutions.

Charters schools don’t compete for they same students as public schools- they can (effectively) cherry-pick students, which means they can have a more focussed and homogenous group than the public institution typically has to work with.
Also: The statistics regarding teacher retention in charter schools are appalling- they blow through new promising teachers at a rate that causes wide-ranging problems. If you siphon off young and energetic teachers and burn them out of teaching (entirely, mind you) inside three years, you’re doing something wrong.

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The charters are only slightly better than the worst public districts in my county. The state publishes test scores, this isn’t conjecture.

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Or, put slightly differently:

Parents with means in expensive districts with healthy schools will find their children adequately educated regardless of their level of input and enthusiasm. Their children can also do decently well skating on social and cultural capital if they’ve failed to absorb the intellectual material they’re exposed to. Their parents can afford to be complacent, though as the systems and networks around them are robust. Under these circumstances, an engaged parent will raise the level of the education to excellent, no question.

The equation for poor children with shitty social services, crumbling infrastructure and overstressed networks is entirely different. An engaged parent (a thing that it is magnitudes harder to be when struggling financially) can raise the education from utter shite to effective, and in rare cases, excellent. Regardless the kid still faces a hundred other cirumstancial currents to fight against to succeed. Any kids who don’t have parents with the capacity (mental, temporal, physical or spiritual) are more or less fucked.

Exceptional adults should be working to make sure that there is a system (schools, health care, libraries, museums, playgrounds, nutrition) that supports all kids to succeed, regardless of the luck or the draw in their parentage, rather than simply raising the chances of success for their individual offspring.

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Mr Doctoro has somehow absorbed the wall street consensus on the financial crisis:

  1. Minutea of US mortgage policy toward those people
  2. ???
  3. Housing bubbles in many countries around the world.