'Since Maryland approved charters in 2003, 47 of the publicly funded, privately operated schools have opened across the state. Baltimore City has 32 of the schools. Many jurisdictions have none'.
The statement above shows why all of Baltimore's public schools have closed these few decades PRETENDING these charters being funded are PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
If we know Jindal of Louisiana, Kasich of Ohio, Hogan of Maryland as Wall Street global neo-conservatives are installing whatever 1% Wall Street tells them to ---ie, global corporate neo-liberal education standardized globally with Common Core---then we know they are not opening public school funding to religion because they FEEL THE SPIRIT. The neo-liberal governors and mayors are doing the same for this same reason---
DEREGULATING TO PRIVATIZE TO GLOBAL EDUCATION CORPORATIONS.
I shared the article showing the Mexican leaders tied to attacks and brutal murders of educators in that nation fighting what are the same Race to the Top testing and evaluation/Common Core structures as all International Economic Zones around the world are being forced to embrace. We know Wall Street global pols--whether running as neo-cons or neo-liberals WILL install all these education policies no matter how much they PRETEND NOT TO. A JINDAL, KASICH, HOGAN will follow through with these policies even as Republican voters shout just as will EMANUEL, BROWN, DEVAL as neo-liberals.
This is why religious leaders allowing the breakdown in Church and State by pushing for and taking public funding for education are placing these very freedoms for religious schools in jeopardy----AND THOSE TAKING THESE PUBLIC FUNDS KNOW THIS.
Below you see where a citizen tied to religious schools says just that. They know by being private they have the right to emphasize religion in their schools AND they recognize the advancement of Common Core, although currently allowing religious schools exemptions, will down the road encroach on their freedoms as well.
PEOPLE PUSHING FOR PUBLIC FUNDING OF RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS ARE ACTUALLY WORKING TO UNDERMINE RELIGIOUS FREEDOMS.
Is Common Core Right for Christian Schools?
By Maureen Van Den Berg, CP Guest Contributor
October 18, 2013|5:05 pm
As parents, educators, and legislators learn more about the Common Core Standards (CCS) and doubts continue to rise, the fact that the CCS have become a national standard presents real challenges to a group that is already providing excellent education-private, faith-based schools.
These schools are successful because of their ability to maintain autonomy, and, in the case of religious schools, their faith-based mission. They are not funded by tax dollars, and their accountability is to the parents-the strongest accountability a school can have. Although these schools are not required to follow government direction regarding standards and curriculum, the CCS as a national standard will negatively affect the autonomy of these schools, chipping away at the religious freedom enjoyed by faith-based schools.
Crisis Magazine
A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity
August 8, 2013Common Core: A Threat to Catholic Education Phyllis Schlafly
Editor’s note: The following letter by Eagle Forum president, Phyllis Schlafly, was mailed this month to key members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States concerning the implementation of the Common Core education standards in public and private schools, including Catholic schools. It is reprinted here with permission of the author.
Your Excellency,
I write today to share with you our significant concerns about a troubling development in our Catholic schools and to seek your prayerful guidance about this issue.
Under the guise of reforming the nation’s failing public schools, President Obama’s Department of Education offered states $4.35 billion in stimulus funds in a grant competition called Race to the Top in 2010. In order to compete for the funds, let alone receive them, states had to agree to adhere to the only set of national academic standards then under development by a private organization funded largely by Bill Gates.
Governors of cash-strapped states were only too eager for the opportunity to supplement their budgets regardless of the quality of the standards. In fact, the standards were not even completed until after the grant applications were due. As a further inducement to apply for the funds, states were offered waivers of the Bush era No Child Left Behind law and were also warned that failure to adopt the new standards could cost poor districts their Title 1 funds. One must wonder why allegedly superior academic standards necessitated such underhanded tactics.
The new national standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts, called Common Core, were adopted by forty-five states giving an appearance of national unanimity. This facade crumbles once you know the standards were approved not by the people of these 45 states or their elected representatives but by governors and state boards of education officials. Neither the state legislatures nor the voters ever knew about this radical change in their children’s education until this spring (more than two years after they were adopted).
As the standards began to be implemented during the 2012-2013 school year parents noticed disturbing changes in homework, textbooks, and tests. Suddenly, Euclidian geometry was displaced, children were instructed to add in columns from left to right, and “conceptual” math replaced fundamentals. In language arts, “close reading” strategies forced students to read texts “in a vacuum” or without the encumbrance of what was deemed “privileged information.” Furthermore, classical literature was dramatically reduced in favor of reading “informational texts” like computer manuals. The stated goal of the new standards, in both Math and English, is to make students “college and career ready” by focusing on “21st century skills.”
Although Common Core was designed specifically to address public school failings, the standards are impacting Catholic schools as well. Many Catholic schools have decided to adopt the Common Core in a misguided attempt to remain “competitive.” This rationale makes little sense as Catholic schools have long enjoyed a superior academic record to the public schools. This is due not only to a faith-filled learning environment and the dedication of good teachers but because they have had the freedom to employ time-honored teaching methods only sporadically seen in the public schools. With a tradition that includes Cardinal Newman, St. Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas why would we ever consider adopting the latest public school fad in education?
Catholic educators who propose to “adapt” the Common Core to the Catholic model forget the purpose of Catholic education. The mission of the Catholic school is to prepare students for eternal life with God while its secondary goal is to prepare them for temporal work. They accomplish this by pursuing Truth and by seeking to acquire Knowledge for its own sake. In contrast, the goal of Common Core is the narrow training of students to become mere functionaries educated solely for earthly success. Catholic educators should be leery of any standards that create automatons rather than humane individuals.
In the United States, Christians in general and the Catholic Church in particular have been under siege over the past five years. In light of the HHS mandate, the IRS targeting of faith organizations, the active promotion of gay marriage, and other federal efforts designed to dismantle moral society we cannot remain complacent as this administration takes aim at our children. Just a few weeks ago the president condemned Catholic education in Ireland calling it “divisive.” Evil is dangerously palatable when hidden in the stew of “good intentions,” and the Church should be particularly cautious about accepting anything at face value from this federal government. Clear Church teaching on the principle of subsidiarity demands that we guard jealously the local control of our children’s education.
Thus far, only math and language arts standards have been introduced. We shudder to think of the challenges to the faith that will be posed when the standards for social studies, history, science, and health are released. Because it is impossible to totally remove personal bias and opinion from the development of any set of standards, and because we understand that standards drive curriculum, we must be especially vigilant in examining new standards before they are implemented by our schools.
In addition to a long list of academic worries with Common Core we have additional privacy concerns related to the onerous data collection requirements that are part of the system. The idea behind the federal data collection mandate is to track students from pre-school through their careers so as to determine whether the standards are succeeding in making students “career ready.” While the initial goal may be laudable, there are serious concerns about maintaining the privacy of minors. The federal government has proposed gathering over 400 personally identifiable data points on each student, and whereas that information could have previously been considered “safe,” the federal government’s changes to FERPA in January, 2012 now make it possible for school officials to share private data without parental consent. Once unscrupulous school officials realize they can sell private data to the highest bidder all privacy will be in jeopardy.
The threat posed by Common Core to the Catholic schools comes as they struggle to compete against public charter schools, home schooling, and other innovative models of education. Sadly, Catholic Schools can no longer count on welcoming the children of the parish as many parishioners no longer feel obligated to send their children to parochial schools. As our Catholic schools search for ways to attract new students, they would do well to reject the servile training model of the public schools rather than seeking to imitate it.
My humble request is that you investigate the dangers of Common Core to Catholic education. Please consider the concerns of a growing number of parents around the country. More than a dozen state legislatures have now taken some action to review, defund, or repeal Common Core now that parents and legislators have learned the details of this program. In April, Indiana became the first state to suspend Common Core led by the efforts of two Catholic school mothers. Your sheep ask for the protection of their shepherd. Your sheep are asking to be fed. The laity needs to hear from the bishops on this very important issue.
________________________________________
The photo on this article shows it all----here we have a Bush/Johns Hopkins neo-conservative Hogan pushing the Arne Duncan Clinton neo-liberal Race to the Top global corporate charter policies just as O'Malley did.....all of this charter policy has failed-----the data for several years shows the INNOVATIONS sold as the reason for doing this do nothing to instill love of learning and achievement that public schools WELL-FUNDED AND RESOURCED have already proven can do.
While the Maryland Assembly POSES PROGRESSIVE in holding this national charter privatization movement at bay------Baltimore is being used as the platform in Maryland to expand this very global corporate education policy statewide. Since these goals end with global corporations owning all K-12 schools and all citizens required to allow children be tracked to wherever these corporate test scores send a child----and since this whole structure of competition and Wall Street stock market profits center on those testing and evaluation ratings to sell global education BRANDS-----with COMMON CORE required to create that level competitive corporate platform---
WE KNOW WALL STREET GLOBAL POLS ARE GOING TO MOVE FORWARD IN ADVANCING ALL THIS AND YES, FREEDOM AND LIBERTY IS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.
Below you see a caption that is a perfect example of PRAGMATIC NILISM-----NO MORALS, NO ETHICS, NO RULE OF LAW DO ANYTHING TO ACCUMULATE EXTREME WEALTH AND POWER-----two Wall Street global pols pictured reading THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD to poor children. It is a disgrace.
'Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, center, reads “The Little Engine That Could” to students at Empowerment Academy charter school on Feb. 18 in Baltimore, alongside Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, left, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. (Patrick Semansky/AP)'
Hogan pushes bill to expand number of charter schools in Maryland
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, center, reads “The Little Engine That Could” to students at Empowerment Academy charter school on Feb. 18 in Baltimore, alongside Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, left, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
By Ovetta Wiggins February 21, 2015
Officials with the College Park Academy in Prince George’s County wanted to reserve spots for the children of University of Maryland employees who live in the city. The Frederick Classical Charter School sought to hire teachers who might lack state certification but were skilled in grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Each request was denied because of what charter school operators describe as the rigid requirements that Maryland imposes on the publicly funded, independently run schools.
But Gov. Larry Hogan (R) wants to loosen those requirements, with legislation that would give charter schools greater oversight of hiring and firing, more power to set admissions criteria, and increased access to public funding.
Hogan’s bill would more closely align the charter school effort launched under Maryland’s last Republican governor with what is typical of charter schools in other states. It has drawn quick and fierce opposition from teacher’s unions and public school officials but a more mixed reaction from Democratic legislative leaders, who say the bill might offer Annapolis a rare chance at bipartisan compromise.
“This is one that I think is not a Republican issue or Democrat issue,” Hogan said during a visit to a Baltimore charter school last week. “It’s not a liberal or conservative issue. It’s about kids and providing more opportunities for them to get a good education.”
The number of charter schools in the United States has nearly doubled in the past decade, increasing from 3,400 to more than 6,700, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The alliance says Maryland’s strict charter rules discourage some of the nation’s best charter school operators from coming to the state.
There are 47 charter schools currently operating in Maryland that were founded since the state began allowing them in 2003; another five existing schools have converted to charter operation. In neighboring Washington — where charters are embraced and educate 44 percent of the city’s public school students — there are 112 charter schools, the alliance says. The alliance estimates that there are now 1,184 charters in California and 653 in Florida, the states with the largest number of the schools.
Only 1 percent of U.S. businesses participate in global trade
“Many of the high-performing networks have stayed away because they are not given the autonomy that they want,” said Michael McShane, a research fellow in education policy at the American Education Institute.
Most elements of Hogan’s bill, which will be the subject of a House Ways and Means Committee hearing scheduled for Thursday, are standard operating procedure in many other states, McShane said.
The legislation would give charter school operators greater autonomy to hire and fire teachers — who under the current rules are employed by local school districts, not by individual charters. Teachers would be exempt from state certification. Charters would have a greater say over who attends their schools, with the option of giving preference to students based on geography or having a low family income. Charters would receive a guaranteed and higher percent of per-pupil funding at the state, local and federal level. They also would be able to compete with traditional public school districts for school construction funds.
Charters, which would still have to be approved by local school boards, would be able to ask the State Board of Education for a “comprehensive waiver” from most laws that govern traditional public schools. The bill would not allow waivers of audit requirements, assessments that gauge student achievement or rules governing the health, safety or civil rights of students or employees.
The state board also would be able to authorize charters to operate following an appeal of a local board’s decision. Currently, a final decision goes back to the local board after a state appeal.
“It enables us to experiment and help kids get more options,” said Hogan, who as a top aide to then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich (R) was called in on the final day of the 2003 legislative session to help negotiate the state’s current charter law with Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert).
The new bill is one of two proposals Hogan has made to support parents who opt out of traditional public schools. The other would provide a tax credit to corporations that contribute to private schools.
“Sometimes we’re in the traditional public school system and we’re restricted from how we can do things,” Hogan said. “We’ve just seen charter schools around the country reach kids and turn their lives around, ways that we haven’t been able to do in the [traditional] public schools.”
OH, REALLY????????????
President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan have embraced the expansion of charter schools. Hogan said Duncan — who joined him at the Empowerment Academy in Baltimore last week — called him the day after he was elected governor to offer his support for expanding charters in Maryland.
But Democrats in Annapolis, who control both chambers of the General Assembly, are worried that provisions in Hogan’s bill that would free charter schools from adhering to state labor contracts would amount to “union busting.”
Sen. Paul Pinsky (D-Prince George’s), vice chair of the Senate education committee, also questioned the provision that would allow teachers not to be certified, which he likened to pulling people “off the street” and placing them in front of a classroom.
“When you lower safeguards, the people you hurt are the kids,” Pinsky said.
The Senate is willing to pass at least some parts of the charter bill, Miller said, so long as Hogan agrees to increase funding for all public schools at the levels that were planned before he took office. The governor has proposed trimming some of that increase to help bridge a revenue shortfall.
Miller predicted a compromise on Hogan’s bill, and added that the governor “will be pleased.”
But House Speaker Michael Busch (D-Anne Arundel) — who has vowed to restore the education funding that was left out of Hogan’s budget proposal — said the charter bill will be reviewed on its own merits.
Busch, a former teacher, said lawmakers are willing to listen to suggestions for improving charters. But he added that there “hasn’t been a large outcry to change charters in Maryland in the last eight years.” And he expressed reservations about allowing charter schools to receive some of the state’s school construction money, which already is in high demand.
“If there are ways to make our charter schools better, we’re open to that suggestion,” Busch said, “but I don’t think we’re open to the idea of reinventing charter schools that already seem to work pretty well in collaboration with our public school system.”
Any effort at compromise by Democrats in the legislature risks strong pushback from the Maryland State Education Association and the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, both of which wield considerable influence in Annapolis.
Prince George’s School Board member Verjeana Jacobs, who is president of the state board association, said she agrees that parents should have options. But she disagrees with the proposal’s sweeping changes, including allowing charters to give enrollment preferences to students with special needs or who live in a certain area.
“That is cherry-picking,” she said. “Talking about preferences is a slippery slope.”
Officials with the state teachers’ union said their opposition to the bill focuses on three areas: funding equity, education quality and enrollment. They accused Hogan of seeing charter schools as a panacea for improving student achievement and argued that many traditional public schools perform as well as — or better than — charters.
Sean Johnson, the assistant executive director for MSEA, said Hogan’s bill would “lower quality, accountability and equity for students in public charter schools, and it would put at risk some of the dollars for traditional public schools.”
He pointed to cases of fraud and fiscal mismanagement of charter schools in the District and in several states and questioned why Maryland should aspire to make its rules as flexible as those jurisdictions.
But for Spear Lancaster, whose Chesapeake Lighthouse Foundation operates four charter schools in Anne Arundel and Prince George’s counties, the need for more flexibility is clear.
Without the power to fire, Lancaster said, he has had to keep ineffective teachers longer than he has wanted. In the case of one teacher who seemed overwhelmed by his students, the school added an assistant teacher instead of hiring someone new to take charge of the class.
When the local school board ruled that a classroom in one of the schools was four inches too small, Lancaster said, the foundation spent $15,000 to extend a classroom wall. That is exactly the kind of bureaucratic requirement that charter proponents say their movement was designed to avoid.
At Lancaster’s newest school, in Laurel, there are signs of innovation everywhere. The school gymnasium has a rock-climbing wall. First-graders spent one recent class building landscapes using Legos. Older students work in an ecology lab outfitted with a massive pool that is filled with fish and turtles.
Lancaster said he wants to be able to focus more on providing these types of educational opportunities, and less on “roadblocks and nitpicking.”
________________________________________
What both Congress and statehouses have done these few decades of dismantling all that is public is what we see below. Hogan writes a bill that goes TOO FAR and a far-right Clinton/Obama neo-liberal Maryland Assembly PRETENDS to bring back this movement towards privatization. Keep in mind, there is no oversight and accountability with these charter agreements towards opportunity and access, meeting school choice rules, verifying student achievement data saying a specific school is indeed raising achievement---they are all allowed to do what they want----AND OFTEN THAT IS JUKING THE STATS.
What Maryland Assembly did as media touts these pols as foiling all those pesky WALL STREET PRIVATIZATION CHARTER PLANS is pass a bill that MOVES FORWARD just that. The public policies that must be changed for national corporate charters is SEPARATE SCHOOL BOARDS ----CHARTER VS PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARDS ----and breaking down county school structures to allow charter chains to expand from Baltimore across county lines to all counties. HOGAN HAS WRITTEN BILLS TO DO BOTH. Warnock is using his national charter chain GREEN ACADEMY to break those county restrictions and Hogan will be that support.
None of this has anything to do with LOCAL, COMMUNITY CHARTERS----MARYLAND CAN is supposedly fighting for those people wanting just that----and in pushing these charter laws in a Maryland Assembly bent on global corporate neo-liberal education ----they are simply providing the DEATH BY A HUNDRED CUTS----the kinds of schools both public school and local, community charter school citizens want.
BOTH REPUBLICAN BASE PUSHING COMMUNITY CHARTERS INCLUDING RELIGIOUS CHARTERS LOSE AS THEY ALLOW PUBLIC SCHOOLS BE DEREGULATED AND DISMANTLED.
"It solves some of the challenges," said Jason Botel, executive director of Maryland CAN, an organization that supports charter schools.
Botel said that there is "a lot of confusion" among charter schools about whether their principals and employees answer to the boards that govern the school or the local school districts that employ them.
Clarifying that for schools in the pilot program, he said, "is a significant step forward."
Global corporate education wants to install GREAT SCHOOLS testing and evaluation school boards geared towards marketing globally a national K-12 brand----not a local community charter board controlled by parents-----WAKE UP ---THERE IS NO PARENTAL VOICE IN GLOBAL CHARTER CORPORATIONS.
There will be no DUAL----as Conway pretends to be fighting----they are deregulating the very centralized school board that parents want to have filled with elected community members.
Senate panel rewrites Hogan's charter school law
Erin CoxContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun
Senators revamp Gov. Larry Hogan's proposed charter school law, allowing only minor changes.A key state Senate panel spent Wednesday dismantling Gov. Larry Hogan's bill to expand charter schools, redrafting it to allow for only small changes to Maryland's program for alternative schools.
Democratic senators on the Education, Health & Environmental Affairs Committee stripped out the Republican governor's proposals to exempt charters from the teachers' union, to require local school systems to send more cash to charters, and to give their operators more leeway in hiring teachers and principals.
Hogan had said those provisions were necessary to encourage more charter schools to open in the state.
Lawmakers even retitled Hogan's "Public Charter School Expansion and Improvement Act of 2015," deleting "expansion" as they tore apart one of the signature initiatives of the governor's inaugural year.
"We're giving the modest stuff," said Sen. Joan Carter Conway, the Baltimore Democrat who chairs the committee.
She said lawmakers do not want to create a "dual" education system in which charters compete against traditional schools for students, teachers and resources.
"That's what we've been trying to do away with since 1954," she said — a reference to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case'.
Keiffer Mitchell, Hogan's special assistant for education, thanked the committee for its work.
"That is not to say that we are happy," he added.
"For charters to be successful, they need to have flexibility," Mitchell, a Democrat who served in the House until January, said in an interview. "The governor wants to see a stronger law. He does not want to go backwards."
The committee is expected to vote Friday on the charter school bill, sending it to the Senate floor for debate next week.
The House of Delegates has been mulling its own set of changes to Hogan's bill, but education subcommittee Chairwoman Anne R. Kaiser this week declined to discuss details.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller last week urged senators to pass some version of Hogan's charter school bill, saying there was a "tacit agreement" that passing it would prompt the governor to send more money to public schools.
Hogan's administration has declined to discuss whether such an agreement exists.
Mitchell said that if the Senate passes its version of the bill, he'll go to work trying to get more of the governor's proposal approved in the House.
Since Maryland approved charters in 2003, 47 of the publicly funded, privately operated schools have opened across the state. Baltimore City has 32 of the schools. Many jurisdictions have none.
National advocacy groups for charter schools, hailed for their ability to experiment in teaching, rank Maryland among the worst states in the country to launch one.
But state education officials say the state's strict rules about operating charters have ensured that those that do open here will thrive.
The rewritten bill would allow for a pilot program that would grant more flexibility in hiring, curriculum and scheduling to successful existing charters that qualify.
The program would also make clear that charter operators would not have to accept principals they dislike and would have authority over day-to-day administration.
"It solves some of the challenges," said Jason Botel, executive director of Maryland CAN, an organization that supports charter schools.
Botel said that there is "a lot of confusion" among charter schools about whether their principals and employees answer to the boards that govern the school or the local school districts that employ them.
Clarifying that for schools in the pilot program, he said, "is a significant step forward."
"If this bill is the best we can get out of the legislature this year, we'll be happy," Botel said.
Representatives for the teachers' union told lawmakers they much preferred the version drafted by the committee to Hogan's original bill.
Sean Johnson, a lobbyist with the Maryland State Education Association, said the new version manages to "strategically thread a needle."
The draft calls for a study of how much each school district spends per pupil on education, a figure that would eventually be used to determine how much money charter schools would get from local school boards.
Hogan's originally called for giving charters 98 percent of what their local districts spend per pupil. Critics said that number was too high because per pupil spending includes large centralized expenses such as school buses and administration.
The governor proposed letting charters give preference to students from low-income neighborhoods and allowing siblings of students who are already attending the charter enroll.
The committee left those provisions in the bill, but added restrictions.
In Baltimore, the legislation found opposition from a surprising corner. Charter school teachers circulated a petition opposing the bill, and sent it to legislators outlining how they feared the unintended consequences of the law.
Of most concern, they said, was that it would create inequities in funding.
"I do not want our success to come on the backs of just as needy students in non-charter schools," said Corey Gaber, a teacher at Southwest Baltimore Charter School.
The charter school-promoting Center for Education Reform in Washington sent material to the teachers arguing the law, particularly the provision that would allow a break from the union, would improve their working conditions.
In response, the Baltimore Teachers Union released literature to counter the claims.
Kris Sieloff, a teacher at City Neighbors High School, called the idea of leaving a union "disturbing."
"We like the protections, and I like feeling part of a larger system," she said.
Exempting teachers from the union was one of the measures that lawmakers refused to grant, Conway said.
"What they really want is the ability to hire and fire their own staff," she said. "That's what this is really about."
_______________
Here we have our Maryland CAN director Botel----simply working for national charter chain KIPP and as we see here tied to Warnock and his venture capitalist GREEN ACADEMY----both having the aim of being a stock market education corporation. Maryland media would never provide this info---they instead allow local community charter people think Maryland CAN speaks for them.
The article below shows the goal of national charter chain corporate schools----they will engage in the same systemic fraud and corruption as those for-profit higher education schools did to the tune of a trillion dollars last decade.
This is what allowing our public K-12 be taken to private corporate charters will do---and these advocates for charters are all tied to these Wall Street global corporate charter chains and not for individual parents in communities wanting a charter school.
All entries tagged "Jason Botel":
Baltimore's future: Jason Botel
by admin
in News on Monday, February 2, 2015 Jason Botel is a former long-time executive director of KIPP Baltimore and is the current executive director of Maryland CAN, a research and advocacy organization. He speaks with David Warnock.
An alarming new study says charter schools are America's new subprime mortgages
The charter-school industry — consisting of schools that are funded partly by tax dollars but run independently — may be heading toward a bubble similar to that of the subprime-mortgage crisis, according to a study published by four education researchers.
The study, "Are charter schools the new subprime loans?" warns of several factors that appear to be edging the charter industry toward a bubble premeditated by the same factors that encouraged banks to start offering risky mortgage loans.
With charters, school authorizers play the role of the banks, as they have the power to decide whether to issue a new charter school. There are a multiple types of authorizers, including state education agencies and independent charter school boards. Most authorizers are local education agencies.
"Supporters of charter schools are using their popularity in black, urban communities to push for states to remove their charter cap restrictions and to allow multiple authorizers," one of the study's authors, Preston C. Green III, told The Washington Post, where we first read about the study. "At the same time, private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth. The result is what we describe as a policy 'bubble,' where the combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight can end up creating an abundance of poor-performing schools in particular communities."
The study's authors point to a change in business practices as the catalyst of the bubble in the subprime industry and possible bubble in the case of charter schools.
With the mortgage crisis, loan origination changed from an originate-to-hold model to an originate-to-distribute model. The OTD model allowed banks to sell mortgages into the secondary market, where they were bundled up and sold by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Students at KIPP Bridge Charter School in San Francisco.Michael Buckner/Getty Images
In both the mortgage crisis and the charter industry, these business-model changes essentially transfer the risk to a third party whose incentives don't necessarily align with those of the originator.
The study also highlights a similarity its authors call the "Principal-Agent Problem." In the mortgage crisis, mortgage servicers emerged as a result of the OTD model. Servicers handled administrative tasks that originators used to carry out, such as collecting fees from late payments or foreclosures.
Again, the incentives of the servicers and the originators diverged, as the servicers were compensated to foreclose loans rather than to find alternatives.
Michael Bloomberg at Explore Charter School.Wikimedia Commons
Charter schools have this same misalignment when it comes to management by third-party organizations, the study says. Many charter-school boards hire private education-management organizations to run the day-to-day administrative tasks of the school.
The study says that while charter-school boards have the responsibility to follow the laws mandated of public schools, the incentive of these outside organizations is to increase revenue or cut expenses. And that misalignment creates an environment that may discriminate against students the organizations see as "too expensive," such as those with disabilities, according to the study.
The authors of the study acknowledge the necessity of alternatives to failing public schools, but they urge lawmakers to put safeguards in place to ensure a bubble doesn't develop and affect the very communities they aim to help.
______________________________________
Larry Hogan, just as O'Malley are working only to create these global education charter chains and all Maryland Assembly pols are Clinton/Obama neo-liberals and Bush/Hopkins neo-cons passing all the laws necessary bit by bit while PRETENDING to be fighting for our public K-12 schools. We see Kieffer Mitchell partnered with Hogan-----he would have partnered with O'Malley/Anthony Brown to do the same----breaking down what his grandfather as a REAL civil rights leader fought to install legally through equal opportunity and access public education......all SHOW ME THE MONEY. Baltimore's PUGH was central in doing this same thing to our public university system a few decades of Clinton neo-liberalism privatized and made corporations of our universities and PUGH was placed as leader of one of them ----Stratford University----at the same time for-profit education colleges were committing the trillion dollars in fraud against our Federal Department of Education and funds. This denied millions of middle/working class and poor student opportunity and access to REAL higher education opportunities and this university privatization is why Historically Black Colleges and our liberal arts and humanities colleges see falling attendance and are staging to be closed.
THESE SAME POLS IN MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND BALTIMORE CITY HALL PLAYING THE WALL STREET PLAYER GAME DENYING BALTIMORE CITIZENS STRONG PUBLIC SCHOOLS WHILE PRETENDING THEY HAVE NO POWER TO STOP IT.
Now these same Wall Street players are doing the same to K-12 just to get some sort of edge on SHOW ME THE MONEY. As religious schools push for these kinds of privatized 'public charters' everyone knows are not public----this is to where they are taking our public education in America......
AND SHAME ON YOU!
Tuesday, Jan 5, 2016 12:17 PM EDT
The charter-school scam deepens: The sick new “bubble” that could explode urban schools
A charter-school bubble is growing, and it's young black kids in cities who are most in danger Jennifer Berkshire
(Credit: Lightspring via Shutterstock/Salon)A new study warns that we may be headed towards a charter school “bubble.” Jennifer Berkshire of the Edushyster blog spoke with one its authors, Preston Green, who is also the John and Carla Klein Professor of Urban Education at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut.
It’s unusual to see the words “hair-raising” and “academic study” in tandem, but your new study merits that marriage. You and your co-authors make the case that, just as with subprime mortgages, the federal government is encouraging the expansion of charter schools with little oversight, and the result could be a charter school “bubble” that blows up in urban communities. Do I have it right?
The problem of subprime mortgages began in part because the government tried to increase homeownership for poor people and minorities by enabling private entities to offer more mortgages without assuming the risk. Under the old system, the mortgage originator was still at risk if the mortgage went into default. With subprime, they were able to spread that risk by selling the mortgages on the secondary market. You had all these mortgage originators that could issue more mortgages without careful screening because they no longer had skin in the game. Now how are charter schools similar to subprime? In the charter school context, charter school authorizers are like mortgage originators.
There’s a great moment in the new movie “The Big Short” when Selena Gomez turns to the camera and explains to the world what collateralized debt obligations are. Here’s your opportunity to do the same, but for the convoluted world of charter school authorizing.
Promoters of charter school expansion are calling for an increase in independent authorizers, such as nonprofits and universities. Supporters of charter school expansion believe that multiple authorizers will issue more charters, in part, because they are less hostile to charter schools than school districts. However, our research suggests another reason that multiple authorizers result in more charter schools: multiple authorizers are like mortgage originators with no skin in the game. In other words, these authorizers don’t assume the risk of charter school failure. That means that if something happens with the charter school, the authorizers don’t have to clean up the mess. Multiple authorizers may also weaken screening by giving charter schools the chance to find authorizers who won’t ask questions. In fact, CREDO has found that states with multiple authorizers experienced significantly lower academic growth. CREDO suggested that this finding might be due to the possibility that multiple authorizers gave charter schools the chance to shop around to find authorizers who wouldn’t provide rigorous oversight.
Your paper raises the spectre that a charter school “bubble” may be forming, particularly in urban areas where these schools are expanding the most rapidly, and often with the least oversight. Can you explain how a charter school bubble would form? And how can I bet against it?
There is an intense push to increase the number of charter schools in Black, urban communities, where they’re very popular because of the dissatisfaction with traditional public schools. Because of this desire for more educational options, these communities are more likely to support policies that could lead to charter school bubbles forming. In fact, I would argue that we are at Ground Zero for the formation of such bubbles. Supporters of charter schools are using their popularity in Black, urban communities to push for states to remove their charter cap restrictions and to allow multiple authorizers. At the same time, private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth. The result is what we describe as a policy “bubble,” where the combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight can end up creating an abundance of poor performing schools in particular communities.
What’s fascinating and frankly disturbing about your research is how well the subprime analogy fits, down to the edu-equivalent of predatory lending practices in particular communities. But it seems important to point out that these bubbles have their origin in worthy policy goals, like increasing home ownership, or sending more kids to college. Who would be against that?
Who would be against that? That’s the power of the choice argument. Folks in poor communities and Black, urban communities obviously want better opportunities for their kids. And I don’t blame them for really pushing for better options. But I do feel that there are people taking advantage of their desire to get better opportunities by pushing forward more options for charters without ensuring that these schools are sufficiently screened. The argument that I hear all the time that drives me crazy is that “obviously this is a good choice. Look at all the parents who are standing in line.” That’s just evidence that people want a better education. That doesn’t mean that they’re actually getting it. What I’d love to see happen is that we have programs and oversight in place to ensure that their choices have meaning. I’m afraid that we’re going down a path right now where we may not be setting up those mechanisms to provide those assurances.
You make a provocative argument that what could ultimately cause the charter bubble to burst in these communities is lawsuits, including those filed by parents against charter schools on civil rights grounds. Explain.
You’re already starting to see that happen. In New Orleans, for example, charters have been sued for failing to provide students with disabilities with an education. This is such a problem that the US Department of Education issued a guidance letter last year reminding charter schools that if they receive federal money, they also have to comply with federal statutes such as Section 504 or Title 6. You may also start seeing state constitutional challenges, like we saw in Washington state. Where I see this playing out is that if you have too many charters or options that aren’t public having a negative impact on the education system as a whole, you may start seeing challenges in these communities saying that the state is failing to provide children with a system of public education, or that the options provided aren’t of sufficient quality to satisfy the state’s obligation to provide a public education. The assumption is that if kids fail to get an education in a charter school they can return to the traditional system. But what happens if you don’t have that option? You may soon see that develop in all of these urban settings. The really scary scenario that I could see happening is that you end up with all of these options that aren’t traditional public schools with insufficient oversight by the authorizers and no real pressure to get these schools to perform well.
The paper ends with some very helpful suggestions about steps that might be taken to avert a charter school bubble. Since the subprime mortgage crisis taught us that your advice will be completely ignored, I want to give you the opportunity to share here.
If we’re going to have multiple authorizers, we have to impose standards to ensure that they do a good job, because without those standards there is really no incentive for them to ensure that these schools are operating in an acceptable manner. I should also mention putting sanctions in place to prevent the really squirrely practice of *authorizer hopping,* where schools are closed by one authorizer and then find another authorizer, which has happened quite a bit in places where oversight has been really weak, like Ohio. Further, authorizers should guard against predatory chartering practices, including fining students for discipline violations.
As someone who predicted the subprime crisis (who didn’t?), I’m going to go out on a limb and predict how this paper will be received. You, sir, will be characterized as an “anti-charter ideologue.” Is that an accurate description?
I used to be much more pro-charter than I am now. I was really, really, really pro charter. I see my research as explaining the systems aspect of charters. I look at how these schools fit into the system of public schools, and at what terms like public and private mean in terms of oversight and student rights. This particular paper lays out how instances of fraud and mistreatment of students can happen systematically--how they’re embedded in the system and not just examples of rogue charter school operators.
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All these global corporate neo-liberal education policies are of course pushed by Wall Street and their top spokesman NYC MAYOR BLOOMBERG AKA Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore. This is why Baltimore citizens are always exposed to the worst of education policy and if corporate fraud is involved---so too is Bloomberg and his SHOW ME THE MONEY POLITICIANS. Right now we have several national chains gaining market share and expanding by fleecing Federal funds in frauds and it is those few national chains that will take national market share and go global. None of this stock market competition can happen without Pearson and GREAT SCHOOLS----the two corporations tied to building the testing and evaluation structures needed to rank these corporate schools which then will market themselves on those rankings.
Here in Baltimore we had a McKesson running as Mayor of Baltimore with media selling him as a BLACK LIVES MATTERS leader when McKesson is simply a private college grad who went to work in NY for Bloomberg and his corporate charter chain movement tied to TEACH FOR AMERICA and all this testing and evaluation policy. NOTHING GRASSROOTS OR BLACK LIVES MATTER in what will become a school to prison pipeline----or school to 6th grade apprenticeship enslavement in a global corporate factory pipeline. Now, Baltimore must endure a McKesson as NYC BLOOMBERG as yet another Baltimore City School Board leader. This all happens because Wall Street Baltimore Development has its 'LABOR AND JUSTICE' organizations with leaders pretending to work on justice issues who then tie themselves to
WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE CANDIDATES----PLAYERS PUSHING PLAYERS in Baltimore.
Is the charter school bubble about to burst?
June 13, 2016
A new study by four education researchers says the movement toward private charter schools could be headed toward a disastrous outcome, much like the subprime mortgage crisis of several years ago.
“Private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth,” says one of the authors, Preston C. Green III. “The result is what we describe as a policy ‘bubble,’ where the combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight can end up creating an abundance of poor-performing schools in particular communities.”
Basically, it works like this, according to the study, as reported in the Business Insider:
With the mortgage crisis, loan origination changed from an originate-to-hold model to an originate-to-distribute model. The OTD model allowed banks to sell mortgages into the secondary market, where they were bundled up and sold by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In both the mortgage crisis and the charter industry, these business-model changes essentially transfer the risk to a third party whose incentives don’t necessarily align with those of the originator.
The EdVocate puts it this way:
The bubble that the authors are referring to is one created by what they describe as misaligned priorities from varying parties with interests in the success of charter schools.
Basically, many charter schools are run by third-party groups. The goal of those groups is to either raise revenue or slash costs. Doing so means that students will suffer as the outside entity will likely look to cut expenses at any turn, such as making students that are deemed as a drain on the school’s financial resources go to other schools.
The researchers are Preston Green from the University of Connecticut, Bruce Baker from Rutgers University, Joseph Oluwole from Montclair State University, and Julie Mead from the University of Wisconsin.
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When Maryland Young Democrats support Clinton/Obama Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals every election they are the ones causing all these problems to MOVE FORWARD. We know Clinton/Obama are dismantling all public education from university to K-12 so when a group supports those very politicians----IT BECOMES THE FORCE BEHIND THESE BAD POLICIES ESPECIALLY NOW IN PUBLIC EDUCATION.
It is not a Republican governor's fault when the O'Malley team created all the platforms to advance these bad policy goals. They are tag teams. Maryland Young Democrats would do best by educating the Republican base as to why a very Bush/Johns Hopkins neo-conservative like Hogan is bad for those voters as well. Public education is key to having citizens with rights-----in having WE THE PEOPLE in charge of legislating what is best for our communities-----and these issues effect both Republicans and Democrats.
FIGHT FOR STRONG PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR ALL BECAUSE---INJUSTICE FOR ONE DOES BECOME INJUSTICE FOR ALL.
'When Chicago’s Black youth are constantly being told that “getting an education” is the key to overcoming systemic poverty and rampant violence, but are deprived of accessible and affordable educational opportunities, who is to blame for the continuation of these cycles? All of us'.
Did We Do Enough To Save Chicago State University? Not At All.
Posted On March 1, 2016 By Elizabeth Adetiba In Black Youth Spotlight, BYP
Less than 24 hours after Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hosted a rally at Chicago State University, all 900 employees of the university received layoff notices. The layoffs appear to be the final blow in the nearly 8 month battle between Chicago State (as well as other predominantly-Black public colleges) and Illinois politicians. But while many have directed their anger over the budget impasse at Springfield, primarily towards Republican governor Bruce Rauner, one thing is certain: Chicago itself did not do enough to save CSU.
The city of Chicago’s lack of regard for many of its own primarily-Black and Latino public schools may explain its silence concerning Chicago State’s impending fate. Last summer, parents and community members in the south side of Chicago staged a 34-day hunger strike to force Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to reopen Walter H. Dyett High School on their terms. And while Mayor Emanuel has stayed relatively mum on Chicago State, his involvement in the closing of nearly 50 of the city’s public schools have convinced many to believe that the mayor could not care less about the fate of Black students.
One such person is Cosette Hampton, a third-year student at the University of Chicago and BYP100 organizer. Hampton views the lack of budgetary support for both Chicago State and CPS as “mirror situations”, especially since many CPS teachers hold degrees from the university. With in-state and out-of-state tuition hovering around just $11,000 and $20,000 per academic year, respectively, Chicago State remains one of the most affordable higher education institutions in the entire city, a selling point for Black and Latino students with financial hardships.
In her eyes, it is no coincidence that the only primarily-Black college in Chicago, known for encouraging it students to be unapologetically Black with its rich African American studies department and open adoption of the Black national anthem, is being forced to close its doors.
But for Charles Alexander Preston and Paris Griffin, two CSU students who have spearheaded many of the organized efforts to save their university, the silence from Black pastors and community leaders is one of the most enraging aspects of the possibility of seeing Chicago State closed. Griffin names two individuals, Pastor James Meeks and Rev. Corey Brooks, as just a few of the community leaders who have “let her down” the most.
The two south side pastors, who are known for speaking out against gun violence in Chicago, endorsed and campaigned for then — Mr. Rauner in the 2014 gubernatorial race, and received political appointments to statewide positions shortly after his election. It is this type of action, coupled with their deafening silence as one of the south side’s most integral institutions faces closure, that leads Griffin to feel profound disappointment in the leadership of the Black church.
“During the Civil Rights Movement they led us, but the pastors of today have left us”, Griffin says.
Preston, who echoed Griffin’s statements, states that he “doesn’t see the same type of care and concern for institutions like Chicago State” as [he does] when “we protest explicit violence, be it police brutality or intra-communal.”
Preston refers to Chicago State as a “second-chance school”, home to former drug abusers and ex-offenders who seized the affordable education offered by the university to turn their lives around for the better.
But those narratives, he claims, get lost in the statistics.
Both had hoped that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who was quick to capitalize on Chicago State’s publicity to host a large campaign rally last week, would seize the opportunity to share those narratives with the crowd and mobilize them into taking action. Instead, he gave little more than surface-level acknowledgement of the university’s dire situation. And while the event was jam-packed, not a plate was passed to support the very institution they were gathered in.
So much for intersectional Democratic Socialism.
Griffin interprets Sanders’ actions, or lack thereof, as a way of telling CSU students that “you matter, but you don’t really matter that much.”
While some legislators, specifically State Representative Ken Dunkin, have moved to use funds from the Roseland community’s Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to keep CSU open, the tactic might actually perpetuate more suffering for those who live in the surrounding neighborhood. Both Preston and Griffin warn against it, claiming that diverting funds from an already cash-strapped neighborhood creates a situation in which no one wins.
Yet the blame extends even further—to us. Every Chicagoan who has ever so much as uttered the phrase “black-on-black crime” while disregarding the very real and very life-altering situation that the entire CSU community faces, is complicit in this educational injustice. And according to Preston, so is every person who has chosen to prioritize the 2016 election over Chicago State.
“Institutions like Chicago State have lasted longer than election cycles, before Black Lives Matter and before the Civil Rights Movement. Why aren’t we doing to enough to preserve them?”, he questions.
When Chicago’s Black youth are constantly being told that “getting an education” is the key to overcoming systemic poverty and rampant violence, but are deprived of accessible and affordable educational opportunities, who is to blame for the continuation of these cycles? All of us.
The statement above shows why all of Baltimore's public schools have closed these few decades PRETENDING these charters being funded are PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
If we know Jindal of Louisiana, Kasich of Ohio, Hogan of Maryland as Wall Street global neo-conservatives are installing whatever 1% Wall Street tells them to ---ie, global corporate neo-liberal education standardized globally with Common Core---then we know they are not opening public school funding to religion because they FEEL THE SPIRIT. The neo-liberal governors and mayors are doing the same for this same reason---
DEREGULATING TO PRIVATIZE TO GLOBAL EDUCATION CORPORATIONS.
I shared the article showing the Mexican leaders tied to attacks and brutal murders of educators in that nation fighting what are the same Race to the Top testing and evaluation/Common Core structures as all International Economic Zones around the world are being forced to embrace. We know Wall Street global pols--whether running as neo-cons or neo-liberals WILL install all these education policies no matter how much they PRETEND NOT TO. A JINDAL, KASICH, HOGAN will follow through with these policies even as Republican voters shout just as will EMANUEL, BROWN, DEVAL as neo-liberals.
This is why religious leaders allowing the breakdown in Church and State by pushing for and taking public funding for education are placing these very freedoms for religious schools in jeopardy----AND THOSE TAKING THESE PUBLIC FUNDS KNOW THIS.
Below you see where a citizen tied to religious schools says just that. They know by being private they have the right to emphasize religion in their schools AND they recognize the advancement of Common Core, although currently allowing religious schools exemptions, will down the road encroach on their freedoms as well.
PEOPLE PUSHING FOR PUBLIC FUNDING OF RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS ARE ACTUALLY WORKING TO UNDERMINE RELIGIOUS FREEDOMS.
Is Common Core Right for Christian Schools?
By Maureen Van Den Berg, CP Guest Contributor
October 18, 2013|5:05 pm
As parents, educators, and legislators learn more about the Common Core Standards (CCS) and doubts continue to rise, the fact that the CCS have become a national standard presents real challenges to a group that is already providing excellent education-private, faith-based schools.
These schools are successful because of their ability to maintain autonomy, and, in the case of religious schools, their faith-based mission. They are not funded by tax dollars, and their accountability is to the parents-the strongest accountability a school can have. Although these schools are not required to follow government direction regarding standards and curriculum, the CCS as a national standard will negatively affect the autonomy of these schools, chipping away at the religious freedom enjoyed by faith-based schools.
Crisis Magazine
A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity
August 8, 2013Common Core: A Threat to Catholic Education Phyllis Schlafly
Editor’s note: The following letter by Eagle Forum president, Phyllis Schlafly, was mailed this month to key members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States concerning the implementation of the Common Core education standards in public and private schools, including Catholic schools. It is reprinted here with permission of the author.
Your Excellency,
I write today to share with you our significant concerns about a troubling development in our Catholic schools and to seek your prayerful guidance about this issue.
Under the guise of reforming the nation’s failing public schools, President Obama’s Department of Education offered states $4.35 billion in stimulus funds in a grant competition called Race to the Top in 2010. In order to compete for the funds, let alone receive them, states had to agree to adhere to the only set of national academic standards then under development by a private organization funded largely by Bill Gates.
Governors of cash-strapped states were only too eager for the opportunity to supplement their budgets regardless of the quality of the standards. In fact, the standards were not even completed until after the grant applications were due. As a further inducement to apply for the funds, states were offered waivers of the Bush era No Child Left Behind law and were also warned that failure to adopt the new standards could cost poor districts their Title 1 funds. One must wonder why allegedly superior academic standards necessitated such underhanded tactics.
The new national standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts, called Common Core, were adopted by forty-five states giving an appearance of national unanimity. This facade crumbles once you know the standards were approved not by the people of these 45 states or their elected representatives but by governors and state boards of education officials. Neither the state legislatures nor the voters ever knew about this radical change in their children’s education until this spring (more than two years after they were adopted).
As the standards began to be implemented during the 2012-2013 school year parents noticed disturbing changes in homework, textbooks, and tests. Suddenly, Euclidian geometry was displaced, children were instructed to add in columns from left to right, and “conceptual” math replaced fundamentals. In language arts, “close reading” strategies forced students to read texts “in a vacuum” or without the encumbrance of what was deemed “privileged information.” Furthermore, classical literature was dramatically reduced in favor of reading “informational texts” like computer manuals. The stated goal of the new standards, in both Math and English, is to make students “college and career ready” by focusing on “21st century skills.”
Although Common Core was designed specifically to address public school failings, the standards are impacting Catholic schools as well. Many Catholic schools have decided to adopt the Common Core in a misguided attempt to remain “competitive.” This rationale makes little sense as Catholic schools have long enjoyed a superior academic record to the public schools. This is due not only to a faith-filled learning environment and the dedication of good teachers but because they have had the freedom to employ time-honored teaching methods only sporadically seen in the public schools. With a tradition that includes Cardinal Newman, St. Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas why would we ever consider adopting the latest public school fad in education?
Catholic educators who propose to “adapt” the Common Core to the Catholic model forget the purpose of Catholic education. The mission of the Catholic school is to prepare students for eternal life with God while its secondary goal is to prepare them for temporal work. They accomplish this by pursuing Truth and by seeking to acquire Knowledge for its own sake. In contrast, the goal of Common Core is the narrow training of students to become mere functionaries educated solely for earthly success. Catholic educators should be leery of any standards that create automatons rather than humane individuals.
In the United States, Christians in general and the Catholic Church in particular have been under siege over the past five years. In light of the HHS mandate, the IRS targeting of faith organizations, the active promotion of gay marriage, and other federal efforts designed to dismantle moral society we cannot remain complacent as this administration takes aim at our children. Just a few weeks ago the president condemned Catholic education in Ireland calling it “divisive.” Evil is dangerously palatable when hidden in the stew of “good intentions,” and the Church should be particularly cautious about accepting anything at face value from this federal government. Clear Church teaching on the principle of subsidiarity demands that we guard jealously the local control of our children’s education.
Thus far, only math and language arts standards have been introduced. We shudder to think of the challenges to the faith that will be posed when the standards for social studies, history, science, and health are released. Because it is impossible to totally remove personal bias and opinion from the development of any set of standards, and because we understand that standards drive curriculum, we must be especially vigilant in examining new standards before they are implemented by our schools.
In addition to a long list of academic worries with Common Core we have additional privacy concerns related to the onerous data collection requirements that are part of the system. The idea behind the federal data collection mandate is to track students from pre-school through their careers so as to determine whether the standards are succeeding in making students “career ready.” While the initial goal may be laudable, there are serious concerns about maintaining the privacy of minors. The federal government has proposed gathering over 400 personally identifiable data points on each student, and whereas that information could have previously been considered “safe,” the federal government’s changes to FERPA in January, 2012 now make it possible for school officials to share private data without parental consent. Once unscrupulous school officials realize they can sell private data to the highest bidder all privacy will be in jeopardy.
The threat posed by Common Core to the Catholic schools comes as they struggle to compete against public charter schools, home schooling, and other innovative models of education. Sadly, Catholic Schools can no longer count on welcoming the children of the parish as many parishioners no longer feel obligated to send their children to parochial schools. As our Catholic schools search for ways to attract new students, they would do well to reject the servile training model of the public schools rather than seeking to imitate it.
My humble request is that you investigate the dangers of Common Core to Catholic education. Please consider the concerns of a growing number of parents around the country. More than a dozen state legislatures have now taken some action to review, defund, or repeal Common Core now that parents and legislators have learned the details of this program. In April, Indiana became the first state to suspend Common Core led by the efforts of two Catholic school mothers. Your sheep ask for the protection of their shepherd. Your sheep are asking to be fed. The laity needs to hear from the bishops on this very important issue.
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The photo on this article shows it all----here we have a Bush/Johns Hopkins neo-conservative Hogan pushing the Arne Duncan Clinton neo-liberal Race to the Top global corporate charter policies just as O'Malley did.....all of this charter policy has failed-----the data for several years shows the INNOVATIONS sold as the reason for doing this do nothing to instill love of learning and achievement that public schools WELL-FUNDED AND RESOURCED have already proven can do.
While the Maryland Assembly POSES PROGRESSIVE in holding this national charter privatization movement at bay------Baltimore is being used as the platform in Maryland to expand this very global corporate education policy statewide. Since these goals end with global corporations owning all K-12 schools and all citizens required to allow children be tracked to wherever these corporate test scores send a child----and since this whole structure of competition and Wall Street stock market profits center on those testing and evaluation ratings to sell global education BRANDS-----with COMMON CORE required to create that level competitive corporate platform---
WE KNOW WALL STREET GLOBAL POLS ARE GOING TO MOVE FORWARD IN ADVANCING ALL THIS AND YES, FREEDOM AND LIBERTY IS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.
Below you see a caption that is a perfect example of PRAGMATIC NILISM-----NO MORALS, NO ETHICS, NO RULE OF LAW DO ANYTHING TO ACCUMULATE EXTREME WEALTH AND POWER-----two Wall Street global pols pictured reading THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD to poor children. It is a disgrace.
'Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, center, reads “The Little Engine That Could” to students at Empowerment Academy charter school on Feb. 18 in Baltimore, alongside Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, left, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. (Patrick Semansky/AP)'
Hogan pushes bill to expand number of charter schools in Maryland
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, center, reads “The Little Engine That Could” to students at Empowerment Academy charter school on Feb. 18 in Baltimore, alongside Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, left, and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
By Ovetta Wiggins February 21, 2015
Officials with the College Park Academy in Prince George’s County wanted to reserve spots for the children of University of Maryland employees who live in the city. The Frederick Classical Charter School sought to hire teachers who might lack state certification but were skilled in grammar, logic and rhetoric.
Each request was denied because of what charter school operators describe as the rigid requirements that Maryland imposes on the publicly funded, independently run schools.
But Gov. Larry Hogan (R) wants to loosen those requirements, with legislation that would give charter schools greater oversight of hiring and firing, more power to set admissions criteria, and increased access to public funding.
Hogan’s bill would more closely align the charter school effort launched under Maryland’s last Republican governor with what is typical of charter schools in other states. It has drawn quick and fierce opposition from teacher’s unions and public school officials but a more mixed reaction from Democratic legislative leaders, who say the bill might offer Annapolis a rare chance at bipartisan compromise.
“This is one that I think is not a Republican issue or Democrat issue,” Hogan said during a visit to a Baltimore charter school last week. “It’s not a liberal or conservative issue. It’s about kids and providing more opportunities for them to get a good education.”
The number of charter schools in the United States has nearly doubled in the past decade, increasing from 3,400 to more than 6,700, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The alliance says Maryland’s strict charter rules discourage some of the nation’s best charter school operators from coming to the state.
There are 47 charter schools currently operating in Maryland that were founded since the state began allowing them in 2003; another five existing schools have converted to charter operation. In neighboring Washington — where charters are embraced and educate 44 percent of the city’s public school students — there are 112 charter schools, the alliance says. The alliance estimates that there are now 1,184 charters in California and 653 in Florida, the states with the largest number of the schools.
Only 1 percent of U.S. businesses participate in global trade
“Many of the high-performing networks have stayed away because they are not given the autonomy that they want,” said Michael McShane, a research fellow in education policy at the American Education Institute.
Most elements of Hogan’s bill, which will be the subject of a House Ways and Means Committee hearing scheduled for Thursday, are standard operating procedure in many other states, McShane said.
The legislation would give charter school operators greater autonomy to hire and fire teachers — who under the current rules are employed by local school districts, not by individual charters. Teachers would be exempt from state certification. Charters would have a greater say over who attends their schools, with the option of giving preference to students based on geography or having a low family income. Charters would receive a guaranteed and higher percent of per-pupil funding at the state, local and federal level. They also would be able to compete with traditional public school districts for school construction funds.
Charters, which would still have to be approved by local school boards, would be able to ask the State Board of Education for a “comprehensive waiver” from most laws that govern traditional public schools. The bill would not allow waivers of audit requirements, assessments that gauge student achievement or rules governing the health, safety or civil rights of students or employees.
The state board also would be able to authorize charters to operate following an appeal of a local board’s decision. Currently, a final decision goes back to the local board after a state appeal.
“It enables us to experiment and help kids get more options,” said Hogan, who as a top aide to then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich (R) was called in on the final day of the 2003 legislative session to help negotiate the state’s current charter law with Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert).
The new bill is one of two proposals Hogan has made to support parents who opt out of traditional public schools. The other would provide a tax credit to corporations that contribute to private schools.
“Sometimes we’re in the traditional public school system and we’re restricted from how we can do things,” Hogan said. “We’ve just seen charter schools around the country reach kids and turn their lives around, ways that we haven’t been able to do in the [traditional] public schools.”
OH, REALLY????????????
President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan have embraced the expansion of charter schools. Hogan said Duncan — who joined him at the Empowerment Academy in Baltimore last week — called him the day after he was elected governor to offer his support for expanding charters in Maryland.
But Democrats in Annapolis, who control both chambers of the General Assembly, are worried that provisions in Hogan’s bill that would free charter schools from adhering to state labor contracts would amount to “union busting.”
Sen. Paul Pinsky (D-Prince George’s), vice chair of the Senate education committee, also questioned the provision that would allow teachers not to be certified, which he likened to pulling people “off the street” and placing them in front of a classroom.
“When you lower safeguards, the people you hurt are the kids,” Pinsky said.
The Senate is willing to pass at least some parts of the charter bill, Miller said, so long as Hogan agrees to increase funding for all public schools at the levels that were planned before he took office. The governor has proposed trimming some of that increase to help bridge a revenue shortfall.
Miller predicted a compromise on Hogan’s bill, and added that the governor “will be pleased.”
But House Speaker Michael Busch (D-Anne Arundel) — who has vowed to restore the education funding that was left out of Hogan’s budget proposal — said the charter bill will be reviewed on its own merits.
Busch, a former teacher, said lawmakers are willing to listen to suggestions for improving charters. But he added that there “hasn’t been a large outcry to change charters in Maryland in the last eight years.” And he expressed reservations about allowing charter schools to receive some of the state’s school construction money, which already is in high demand.
“If there are ways to make our charter schools better, we’re open to that suggestion,” Busch said, “but I don’t think we’re open to the idea of reinventing charter schools that already seem to work pretty well in collaboration with our public school system.”
Any effort at compromise by Democrats in the legislature risks strong pushback from the Maryland State Education Association and the Maryland Association of Boards of Education, both of which wield considerable influence in Annapolis.
Prince George’s School Board member Verjeana Jacobs, who is president of the state board association, said she agrees that parents should have options. But she disagrees with the proposal’s sweeping changes, including allowing charters to give enrollment preferences to students with special needs or who live in a certain area.
“That is cherry-picking,” she said. “Talking about preferences is a slippery slope.”
Officials with the state teachers’ union said their opposition to the bill focuses on three areas: funding equity, education quality and enrollment. They accused Hogan of seeing charter schools as a panacea for improving student achievement and argued that many traditional public schools perform as well as — or better than — charters.
Sean Johnson, the assistant executive director for MSEA, said Hogan’s bill would “lower quality, accountability and equity for students in public charter schools, and it would put at risk some of the dollars for traditional public schools.”
He pointed to cases of fraud and fiscal mismanagement of charter schools in the District and in several states and questioned why Maryland should aspire to make its rules as flexible as those jurisdictions.
But for Spear Lancaster, whose Chesapeake Lighthouse Foundation operates four charter schools in Anne Arundel and Prince George’s counties, the need for more flexibility is clear.
Without the power to fire, Lancaster said, he has had to keep ineffective teachers longer than he has wanted. In the case of one teacher who seemed overwhelmed by his students, the school added an assistant teacher instead of hiring someone new to take charge of the class.
When the local school board ruled that a classroom in one of the schools was four inches too small, Lancaster said, the foundation spent $15,000 to extend a classroom wall. That is exactly the kind of bureaucratic requirement that charter proponents say their movement was designed to avoid.
At Lancaster’s newest school, in Laurel, there are signs of innovation everywhere. The school gymnasium has a rock-climbing wall. First-graders spent one recent class building landscapes using Legos. Older students work in an ecology lab outfitted with a massive pool that is filled with fish and turtles.
Lancaster said he wants to be able to focus more on providing these types of educational opportunities, and less on “roadblocks and nitpicking.”
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What both Congress and statehouses have done these few decades of dismantling all that is public is what we see below. Hogan writes a bill that goes TOO FAR and a far-right Clinton/Obama neo-liberal Maryland Assembly PRETENDS to bring back this movement towards privatization. Keep in mind, there is no oversight and accountability with these charter agreements towards opportunity and access, meeting school choice rules, verifying student achievement data saying a specific school is indeed raising achievement---they are all allowed to do what they want----AND OFTEN THAT IS JUKING THE STATS.
What Maryland Assembly did as media touts these pols as foiling all those pesky WALL STREET PRIVATIZATION CHARTER PLANS is pass a bill that MOVES FORWARD just that. The public policies that must be changed for national corporate charters is SEPARATE SCHOOL BOARDS ----CHARTER VS PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARDS ----and breaking down county school structures to allow charter chains to expand from Baltimore across county lines to all counties. HOGAN HAS WRITTEN BILLS TO DO BOTH. Warnock is using his national charter chain GREEN ACADEMY to break those county restrictions and Hogan will be that support.
None of this has anything to do with LOCAL, COMMUNITY CHARTERS----MARYLAND CAN is supposedly fighting for those people wanting just that----and in pushing these charter laws in a Maryland Assembly bent on global corporate neo-liberal education ----they are simply providing the DEATH BY A HUNDRED CUTS----the kinds of schools both public school and local, community charter school citizens want.
BOTH REPUBLICAN BASE PUSHING COMMUNITY CHARTERS INCLUDING RELIGIOUS CHARTERS LOSE AS THEY ALLOW PUBLIC SCHOOLS BE DEREGULATED AND DISMANTLED.
"It solves some of the challenges," said Jason Botel, executive director of Maryland CAN, an organization that supports charter schools.
Botel said that there is "a lot of confusion" among charter schools about whether their principals and employees answer to the boards that govern the school or the local school districts that employ them.
Clarifying that for schools in the pilot program, he said, "is a significant step forward."
Global corporate education wants to install GREAT SCHOOLS testing and evaluation school boards geared towards marketing globally a national K-12 brand----not a local community charter board controlled by parents-----WAKE UP ---THERE IS NO PARENTAL VOICE IN GLOBAL CHARTER CORPORATIONS.
There will be no DUAL----as Conway pretends to be fighting----they are deregulating the very centralized school board that parents want to have filled with elected community members.
Senate panel rewrites Hogan's charter school law
Erin CoxContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun
Senators revamp Gov. Larry Hogan's proposed charter school law, allowing only minor changes.A key state Senate panel spent Wednesday dismantling Gov. Larry Hogan's bill to expand charter schools, redrafting it to allow for only small changes to Maryland's program for alternative schools.
Democratic senators on the Education, Health & Environmental Affairs Committee stripped out the Republican governor's proposals to exempt charters from the teachers' union, to require local school systems to send more cash to charters, and to give their operators more leeway in hiring teachers and principals.
Hogan had said those provisions were necessary to encourage more charter schools to open in the state.
Lawmakers even retitled Hogan's "Public Charter School Expansion and Improvement Act of 2015," deleting "expansion" as they tore apart one of the signature initiatives of the governor's inaugural year.
"We're giving the modest stuff," said Sen. Joan Carter Conway, the Baltimore Democrat who chairs the committee.
She said lawmakers do not want to create a "dual" education system in which charters compete against traditional schools for students, teachers and resources.
"That's what we've been trying to do away with since 1954," she said — a reference to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case'.
Keiffer Mitchell, Hogan's special assistant for education, thanked the committee for its work.
"That is not to say that we are happy," he added.
"For charters to be successful, they need to have flexibility," Mitchell, a Democrat who served in the House until January, said in an interview. "The governor wants to see a stronger law. He does not want to go backwards."
The committee is expected to vote Friday on the charter school bill, sending it to the Senate floor for debate next week.
The House of Delegates has been mulling its own set of changes to Hogan's bill, but education subcommittee Chairwoman Anne R. Kaiser this week declined to discuss details.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller last week urged senators to pass some version of Hogan's charter school bill, saying there was a "tacit agreement" that passing it would prompt the governor to send more money to public schools.
Hogan's administration has declined to discuss whether such an agreement exists.
Mitchell said that if the Senate passes its version of the bill, he'll go to work trying to get more of the governor's proposal approved in the House.
Since Maryland approved charters in 2003, 47 of the publicly funded, privately operated schools have opened across the state. Baltimore City has 32 of the schools. Many jurisdictions have none.
National advocacy groups for charter schools, hailed for their ability to experiment in teaching, rank Maryland among the worst states in the country to launch one.
But state education officials say the state's strict rules about operating charters have ensured that those that do open here will thrive.
The rewritten bill would allow for a pilot program that would grant more flexibility in hiring, curriculum and scheduling to successful existing charters that qualify.
The program would also make clear that charter operators would not have to accept principals they dislike and would have authority over day-to-day administration.
"It solves some of the challenges," said Jason Botel, executive director of Maryland CAN, an organization that supports charter schools.
Botel said that there is "a lot of confusion" among charter schools about whether their principals and employees answer to the boards that govern the school or the local school districts that employ them.
Clarifying that for schools in the pilot program, he said, "is a significant step forward."
"If this bill is the best we can get out of the legislature this year, we'll be happy," Botel said.
Representatives for the teachers' union told lawmakers they much preferred the version drafted by the committee to Hogan's original bill.
Sean Johnson, a lobbyist with the Maryland State Education Association, said the new version manages to "strategically thread a needle."
The draft calls for a study of how much each school district spends per pupil on education, a figure that would eventually be used to determine how much money charter schools would get from local school boards.
Hogan's originally called for giving charters 98 percent of what their local districts spend per pupil. Critics said that number was too high because per pupil spending includes large centralized expenses such as school buses and administration.
The governor proposed letting charters give preference to students from low-income neighborhoods and allowing siblings of students who are already attending the charter enroll.
The committee left those provisions in the bill, but added restrictions.
In Baltimore, the legislation found opposition from a surprising corner. Charter school teachers circulated a petition opposing the bill, and sent it to legislators outlining how they feared the unintended consequences of the law.
Of most concern, they said, was that it would create inequities in funding.
"I do not want our success to come on the backs of just as needy students in non-charter schools," said Corey Gaber, a teacher at Southwest Baltimore Charter School.
The charter school-promoting Center for Education Reform in Washington sent material to the teachers arguing the law, particularly the provision that would allow a break from the union, would improve their working conditions.
In response, the Baltimore Teachers Union released literature to counter the claims.
Kris Sieloff, a teacher at City Neighbors High School, called the idea of leaving a union "disturbing."
"We like the protections, and I like feeling part of a larger system," she said.
Exempting teachers from the union was one of the measures that lawmakers refused to grant, Conway said.
"What they really want is the ability to hire and fire their own staff," she said. "That's what this is really about."
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Here we have our Maryland CAN director Botel----simply working for national charter chain KIPP and as we see here tied to Warnock and his venture capitalist GREEN ACADEMY----both having the aim of being a stock market education corporation. Maryland media would never provide this info---they instead allow local community charter people think Maryland CAN speaks for them.
The article below shows the goal of national charter chain corporate schools----they will engage in the same systemic fraud and corruption as those for-profit higher education schools did to the tune of a trillion dollars last decade.
This is what allowing our public K-12 be taken to private corporate charters will do---and these advocates for charters are all tied to these Wall Street global corporate charter chains and not for individual parents in communities wanting a charter school.
All entries tagged "Jason Botel":
Baltimore's future: Jason Botel
by admin
in News on Monday, February 2, 2015 Jason Botel is a former long-time executive director of KIPP Baltimore and is the current executive director of Maryland CAN, a research and advocacy organization. He speaks with David Warnock.
An alarming new study says charter schools are America's new subprime mortgages
- Jan. 6, 2016, 10:40 PM
The charter-school industry — consisting of schools that are funded partly by tax dollars but run independently — may be heading toward a bubble similar to that of the subprime-mortgage crisis, according to a study published by four education researchers.
The study, "Are charter schools the new subprime loans?" warns of several factors that appear to be edging the charter industry toward a bubble premeditated by the same factors that encouraged banks to start offering risky mortgage loans.
With charters, school authorizers play the role of the banks, as they have the power to decide whether to issue a new charter school. There are a multiple types of authorizers, including state education agencies and independent charter school boards. Most authorizers are local education agencies.
"Supporters of charter schools are using their popularity in black, urban communities to push for states to remove their charter cap restrictions and to allow multiple authorizers," one of the study's authors, Preston C. Green III, told The Washington Post, where we first read about the study. "At the same time, private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth. The result is what we describe as a policy 'bubble,' where the combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight can end up creating an abundance of poor-performing schools in particular communities."
The study's authors point to a change in business practices as the catalyst of the bubble in the subprime industry and possible bubble in the case of charter schools.
With the mortgage crisis, loan origination changed from an originate-to-hold model to an originate-to-distribute model. The OTD model allowed banks to sell mortgages into the secondary market, where they were bundled up and sold by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Students at KIPP Bridge Charter School in San Francisco.Michael Buckner/Getty Images
In both the mortgage crisis and the charter industry, these business-model changes essentially transfer the risk to a third party whose incentives don't necessarily align with those of the originator.
The study also highlights a similarity its authors call the "Principal-Agent Problem." In the mortgage crisis, mortgage servicers emerged as a result of the OTD model. Servicers handled administrative tasks that originators used to carry out, such as collecting fees from late payments or foreclosures.
Again, the incentives of the servicers and the originators diverged, as the servicers were compensated to foreclose loans rather than to find alternatives.
Michael Bloomberg at Explore Charter School.Wikimedia Commons
Charter schools have this same misalignment when it comes to management by third-party organizations, the study says. Many charter-school boards hire private education-management organizations to run the day-to-day administrative tasks of the school.
The study says that while charter-school boards have the responsibility to follow the laws mandated of public schools, the incentive of these outside organizations is to increase revenue or cut expenses. And that misalignment creates an environment that may discriminate against students the organizations see as "too expensive," such as those with disabilities, according to the study.
The authors of the study acknowledge the necessity of alternatives to failing public schools, but they urge lawmakers to put safeguards in place to ensure a bubble doesn't develop and affect the very communities they aim to help.
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Larry Hogan, just as O'Malley are working only to create these global education charter chains and all Maryland Assembly pols are Clinton/Obama neo-liberals and Bush/Hopkins neo-cons passing all the laws necessary bit by bit while PRETENDING to be fighting for our public K-12 schools. We see Kieffer Mitchell partnered with Hogan-----he would have partnered with O'Malley/Anthony Brown to do the same----breaking down what his grandfather as a REAL civil rights leader fought to install legally through equal opportunity and access public education......all SHOW ME THE MONEY. Baltimore's PUGH was central in doing this same thing to our public university system a few decades of Clinton neo-liberalism privatized and made corporations of our universities and PUGH was placed as leader of one of them ----Stratford University----at the same time for-profit education colleges were committing the trillion dollars in fraud against our Federal Department of Education and funds. This denied millions of middle/working class and poor student opportunity and access to REAL higher education opportunities and this university privatization is why Historically Black Colleges and our liberal arts and humanities colleges see falling attendance and are staging to be closed.
THESE SAME POLS IN MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND BALTIMORE CITY HALL PLAYING THE WALL STREET PLAYER GAME DENYING BALTIMORE CITIZENS STRONG PUBLIC SCHOOLS WHILE PRETENDING THEY HAVE NO POWER TO STOP IT.
Now these same Wall Street players are doing the same to K-12 just to get some sort of edge on SHOW ME THE MONEY. As religious schools push for these kinds of privatized 'public charters' everyone knows are not public----this is to where they are taking our public education in America......
AND SHAME ON YOU!
Tuesday, Jan 5, 2016 12:17 PM EDT
The charter-school scam deepens: The sick new “bubble” that could explode urban schools
A charter-school bubble is growing, and it's young black kids in cities who are most in danger Jennifer Berkshire
(Credit: Lightspring via Shutterstock/Salon)A new study warns that we may be headed towards a charter school “bubble.” Jennifer Berkshire of the Edushyster blog spoke with one its authors, Preston Green, who is also the John and Carla Klein Professor of Urban Education at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut.
It’s unusual to see the words “hair-raising” and “academic study” in tandem, but your new study merits that marriage. You and your co-authors make the case that, just as with subprime mortgages, the federal government is encouraging the expansion of charter schools with little oversight, and the result could be a charter school “bubble” that blows up in urban communities. Do I have it right?
The problem of subprime mortgages began in part because the government tried to increase homeownership for poor people and minorities by enabling private entities to offer more mortgages without assuming the risk. Under the old system, the mortgage originator was still at risk if the mortgage went into default. With subprime, they were able to spread that risk by selling the mortgages on the secondary market. You had all these mortgage originators that could issue more mortgages without careful screening because they no longer had skin in the game. Now how are charter schools similar to subprime? In the charter school context, charter school authorizers are like mortgage originators.
There’s a great moment in the new movie “The Big Short” when Selena Gomez turns to the camera and explains to the world what collateralized debt obligations are. Here’s your opportunity to do the same, but for the convoluted world of charter school authorizing.
Promoters of charter school expansion are calling for an increase in independent authorizers, such as nonprofits and universities. Supporters of charter school expansion believe that multiple authorizers will issue more charters, in part, because they are less hostile to charter schools than school districts. However, our research suggests another reason that multiple authorizers result in more charter schools: multiple authorizers are like mortgage originators with no skin in the game. In other words, these authorizers don’t assume the risk of charter school failure. That means that if something happens with the charter school, the authorizers don’t have to clean up the mess. Multiple authorizers may also weaken screening by giving charter schools the chance to find authorizers who won’t ask questions. In fact, CREDO has found that states with multiple authorizers experienced significantly lower academic growth. CREDO suggested that this finding might be due to the possibility that multiple authorizers gave charter schools the chance to shop around to find authorizers who wouldn’t provide rigorous oversight.
Your paper raises the spectre that a charter school “bubble” may be forming, particularly in urban areas where these schools are expanding the most rapidly, and often with the least oversight. Can you explain how a charter school bubble would form? And how can I bet against it?
There is an intense push to increase the number of charter schools in Black, urban communities, where they’re very popular because of the dissatisfaction with traditional public schools. Because of this desire for more educational options, these communities are more likely to support policies that could lead to charter school bubbles forming. In fact, I would argue that we are at Ground Zero for the formation of such bubbles. Supporters of charter schools are using their popularity in Black, urban communities to push for states to remove their charter cap restrictions and to allow multiple authorizers. At the same time, private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth. The result is what we describe as a policy “bubble,” where the combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight can end up creating an abundance of poor performing schools in particular communities.
What’s fascinating and frankly disturbing about your research is how well the subprime analogy fits, down to the edu-equivalent of predatory lending practices in particular communities. But it seems important to point out that these bubbles have their origin in worthy policy goals, like increasing home ownership, or sending more kids to college. Who would be against that?
Who would be against that? That’s the power of the choice argument. Folks in poor communities and Black, urban communities obviously want better opportunities for their kids. And I don’t blame them for really pushing for better options. But I do feel that there are people taking advantage of their desire to get better opportunities by pushing forward more options for charters without ensuring that these schools are sufficiently screened. The argument that I hear all the time that drives me crazy is that “obviously this is a good choice. Look at all the parents who are standing in line.” That’s just evidence that people want a better education. That doesn’t mean that they’re actually getting it. What I’d love to see happen is that we have programs and oversight in place to ensure that their choices have meaning. I’m afraid that we’re going down a path right now where we may not be setting up those mechanisms to provide those assurances.
You make a provocative argument that what could ultimately cause the charter bubble to burst in these communities is lawsuits, including those filed by parents against charter schools on civil rights grounds. Explain.
You’re already starting to see that happen. In New Orleans, for example, charters have been sued for failing to provide students with disabilities with an education. This is such a problem that the US Department of Education issued a guidance letter last year reminding charter schools that if they receive federal money, they also have to comply with federal statutes such as Section 504 or Title 6. You may also start seeing state constitutional challenges, like we saw in Washington state. Where I see this playing out is that if you have too many charters or options that aren’t public having a negative impact on the education system as a whole, you may start seeing challenges in these communities saying that the state is failing to provide children with a system of public education, or that the options provided aren’t of sufficient quality to satisfy the state’s obligation to provide a public education. The assumption is that if kids fail to get an education in a charter school they can return to the traditional system. But what happens if you don’t have that option? You may soon see that develop in all of these urban settings. The really scary scenario that I could see happening is that you end up with all of these options that aren’t traditional public schools with insufficient oversight by the authorizers and no real pressure to get these schools to perform well.
The paper ends with some very helpful suggestions about steps that might be taken to avert a charter school bubble. Since the subprime mortgage crisis taught us that your advice will be completely ignored, I want to give you the opportunity to share here.
If we’re going to have multiple authorizers, we have to impose standards to ensure that they do a good job, because without those standards there is really no incentive for them to ensure that these schools are operating in an acceptable manner. I should also mention putting sanctions in place to prevent the really squirrely practice of *authorizer hopping,* where schools are closed by one authorizer and then find another authorizer, which has happened quite a bit in places where oversight has been really weak, like Ohio. Further, authorizers should guard against predatory chartering practices, including fining students for discipline violations.
As someone who predicted the subprime crisis (who didn’t?), I’m going to go out on a limb and predict how this paper will be received. You, sir, will be characterized as an “anti-charter ideologue.” Is that an accurate description?
I used to be much more pro-charter than I am now. I was really, really, really pro charter. I see my research as explaining the systems aspect of charters. I look at how these schools fit into the system of public schools, and at what terms like public and private mean in terms of oversight and student rights. This particular paper lays out how instances of fraud and mistreatment of students can happen systematically--how they’re embedded in the system and not just examples of rogue charter school operators.
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All these global corporate neo-liberal education policies are of course pushed by Wall Street and their top spokesman NYC MAYOR BLOOMBERG AKA Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore. This is why Baltimore citizens are always exposed to the worst of education policy and if corporate fraud is involved---so too is Bloomberg and his SHOW ME THE MONEY POLITICIANS. Right now we have several national chains gaining market share and expanding by fleecing Federal funds in frauds and it is those few national chains that will take national market share and go global. None of this stock market competition can happen without Pearson and GREAT SCHOOLS----the two corporations tied to building the testing and evaluation structures needed to rank these corporate schools which then will market themselves on those rankings.
Here in Baltimore we had a McKesson running as Mayor of Baltimore with media selling him as a BLACK LIVES MATTERS leader when McKesson is simply a private college grad who went to work in NY for Bloomberg and his corporate charter chain movement tied to TEACH FOR AMERICA and all this testing and evaluation policy. NOTHING GRASSROOTS OR BLACK LIVES MATTER in what will become a school to prison pipeline----or school to 6th grade apprenticeship enslavement in a global corporate factory pipeline. Now, Baltimore must endure a McKesson as NYC BLOOMBERG as yet another Baltimore City School Board leader. This all happens because Wall Street Baltimore Development has its 'LABOR AND JUSTICE' organizations with leaders pretending to work on justice issues who then tie themselves to
WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE CANDIDATES----PLAYERS PUSHING PLAYERS in Baltimore.
Is the charter school bubble about to burst?
June 13, 2016
A new study by four education researchers says the movement toward private charter schools could be headed toward a disastrous outcome, much like the subprime mortgage crisis of several years ago.
“Private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth,” says one of the authors, Preston C. Green III. “The result is what we describe as a policy ‘bubble,’ where the combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight can end up creating an abundance of poor-performing schools in particular communities.”
Basically, it works like this, according to the study, as reported in the Business Insider:
With the mortgage crisis, loan origination changed from an originate-to-hold model to an originate-to-distribute model. The OTD model allowed banks to sell mortgages into the secondary market, where they were bundled up and sold by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In both the mortgage crisis and the charter industry, these business-model changes essentially transfer the risk to a third party whose incentives don’t necessarily align with those of the originator.
The EdVocate puts it this way:
The bubble that the authors are referring to is one created by what they describe as misaligned priorities from varying parties with interests in the success of charter schools.
Basically, many charter schools are run by third-party groups. The goal of those groups is to either raise revenue or slash costs. Doing so means that students will suffer as the outside entity will likely look to cut expenses at any turn, such as making students that are deemed as a drain on the school’s financial resources go to other schools.
The researchers are Preston Green from the University of Connecticut, Bruce Baker from Rutgers University, Joseph Oluwole from Montclair State University, and Julie Mead from the University of Wisconsin.
______________________________________
When Maryland Young Democrats support Clinton/Obama Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals every election they are the ones causing all these problems to MOVE FORWARD. We know Clinton/Obama are dismantling all public education from university to K-12 so when a group supports those very politicians----IT BECOMES THE FORCE BEHIND THESE BAD POLICIES ESPECIALLY NOW IN PUBLIC EDUCATION.
It is not a Republican governor's fault when the O'Malley team created all the platforms to advance these bad policy goals. They are tag teams. Maryland Young Democrats would do best by educating the Republican base as to why a very Bush/Johns Hopkins neo-conservative like Hogan is bad for those voters as well. Public education is key to having citizens with rights-----in having WE THE PEOPLE in charge of legislating what is best for our communities-----and these issues effect both Republicans and Democrats.
FIGHT FOR STRONG PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR ALL BECAUSE---INJUSTICE FOR ONE DOES BECOME INJUSTICE FOR ALL.
'When Chicago’s Black youth are constantly being told that “getting an education” is the key to overcoming systemic poverty and rampant violence, but are deprived of accessible and affordable educational opportunities, who is to blame for the continuation of these cycles? All of us'.
Did We Do Enough To Save Chicago State University? Not At All.
Posted On March 1, 2016 By Elizabeth Adetiba In Black Youth Spotlight, BYP
Less than 24 hours after Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hosted a rally at Chicago State University, all 900 employees of the university received layoff notices. The layoffs appear to be the final blow in the nearly 8 month battle between Chicago State (as well as other predominantly-Black public colleges) and Illinois politicians. But while many have directed their anger over the budget impasse at Springfield, primarily towards Republican governor Bruce Rauner, one thing is certain: Chicago itself did not do enough to save CSU.
The city of Chicago’s lack of regard for many of its own primarily-Black and Latino public schools may explain its silence concerning Chicago State’s impending fate. Last summer, parents and community members in the south side of Chicago staged a 34-day hunger strike to force Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to reopen Walter H. Dyett High School on their terms. And while Mayor Emanuel has stayed relatively mum on Chicago State, his involvement in the closing of nearly 50 of the city’s public schools have convinced many to believe that the mayor could not care less about the fate of Black students.
One such person is Cosette Hampton, a third-year student at the University of Chicago and BYP100 organizer. Hampton views the lack of budgetary support for both Chicago State and CPS as “mirror situations”, especially since many CPS teachers hold degrees from the university. With in-state and out-of-state tuition hovering around just $11,000 and $20,000 per academic year, respectively, Chicago State remains one of the most affordable higher education institutions in the entire city, a selling point for Black and Latino students with financial hardships.
In her eyes, it is no coincidence that the only primarily-Black college in Chicago, known for encouraging it students to be unapologetically Black with its rich African American studies department and open adoption of the Black national anthem, is being forced to close its doors.
But for Charles Alexander Preston and Paris Griffin, two CSU students who have spearheaded many of the organized efforts to save their university, the silence from Black pastors and community leaders is one of the most enraging aspects of the possibility of seeing Chicago State closed. Griffin names two individuals, Pastor James Meeks and Rev. Corey Brooks, as just a few of the community leaders who have “let her down” the most.
The two south side pastors, who are known for speaking out against gun violence in Chicago, endorsed and campaigned for then — Mr. Rauner in the 2014 gubernatorial race, and received political appointments to statewide positions shortly after his election. It is this type of action, coupled with their deafening silence as one of the south side’s most integral institutions faces closure, that leads Griffin to feel profound disappointment in the leadership of the Black church.
“During the Civil Rights Movement they led us, but the pastors of today have left us”, Griffin says.
Preston, who echoed Griffin’s statements, states that he “doesn’t see the same type of care and concern for institutions like Chicago State” as [he does] when “we protest explicit violence, be it police brutality or intra-communal.”
Preston refers to Chicago State as a “second-chance school”, home to former drug abusers and ex-offenders who seized the affordable education offered by the university to turn their lives around for the better.
But those narratives, he claims, get lost in the statistics.
Both had hoped that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who was quick to capitalize on Chicago State’s publicity to host a large campaign rally last week, would seize the opportunity to share those narratives with the crowd and mobilize them into taking action. Instead, he gave little more than surface-level acknowledgement of the university’s dire situation. And while the event was jam-packed, not a plate was passed to support the very institution they were gathered in.
So much for intersectional Democratic Socialism.
Griffin interprets Sanders’ actions, or lack thereof, as a way of telling CSU students that “you matter, but you don’t really matter that much.”
While some legislators, specifically State Representative Ken Dunkin, have moved to use funds from the Roseland community’s Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to keep CSU open, the tactic might actually perpetuate more suffering for those who live in the surrounding neighborhood. Both Preston and Griffin warn against it, claiming that diverting funds from an already cash-strapped neighborhood creates a situation in which no one wins.
Yet the blame extends even further—to us. Every Chicagoan who has ever so much as uttered the phrase “black-on-black crime” while disregarding the very real and very life-altering situation that the entire CSU community faces, is complicit in this educational injustice. And according to Preston, so is every person who has chosen to prioritize the 2016 election over Chicago State.
“Institutions like Chicago State have lasted longer than election cycles, before Black Lives Matter and before the Civil Rights Movement. Why aren’t we doing to enough to preserve them?”, he questions.
When Chicago’s Black youth are constantly being told that “getting an education” is the key to overcoming systemic poverty and rampant violence, but are deprived of accessible and affordable educational opportunities, who is to blame for the continuation of these cycles? All of us.
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