Charter School fact and fiction

        When Governor Rick Scott visited Florida International Academy, a charter school - in Opa Locka in January, several years ago, he took his special advisor on education, Michell Rhee, with him. Rhee, the controversial former superintendent of the Washington DC school system, is a big believer in spending public money on privately-operated charter schools.

        “Who are we to deny a child, a low income child, who has the opportunity to take the same dollars and actually get a better education?” Rhee asks. The answer, in truth, is that kids in charter schools more often than not, simply  aren’t getting a better education.

        Although I'm not a huge fan of high stakes testing, it does offer an opportunity to evaluate charters against public performance in Florida.  When it comes to the failure rate, charter Schools – operated at public expense by private companies – markedly underperformed  on the 2011 FCAT.  Moreover, hasty explanations provided by  major charter school boosters  don't really adequately explain the phenomenon. .

        The numbers, first reported by a Miami CBS affiliate, are striking: Remember, these are 2011 numbers, however, the relevant demographics really haven't changed much in the subsequent years.  Of Florida’s 2,280 public elementary and middle schools, only 17 scored an “F” on the FCAT. For the math challenged, that's a .007% failure rate.  Of the state’s 270 Charter elementary and middle schools, 15 flunked. That's .05% .. meaning Charters were about  8 times more likely to fail, and that's just the academic story.

Almost immediately, Charter School boosters began manufacturing  reasons and working damage control.  Representative Erik Fresen, a Miami Republican who sits on several education committees and is a strong supporter of charter schools, offered this:  “Traditionally, they (the charters that failed) were in failing school neighborhoods,”  “They started as an “F” because they inherited, essentially, “F” performing students.”  Fresen said that a rule that requires charter schools to give the FCAT in their first year of operation accounts for most of the failure rate.

Sounds plausible, right? Yes, if you don't know better it almost does.  Fresen’s defense, however, does not stand up to actual critical thinking analysis, however. In truth,  of the 15 charter schools that failed, at least nine had  administered the test for at least two years. Some saw their grades drop  from an “A” to an “F.”  This diametrically controverts Fresen's  hypothesis. At least two had back-to-back “F” grades, including Broward Community Charter Middle School and Lawrence Academy Elementary Charter School in Miami-Dade.
        And now as Paul Harvey used to intone: "The rest of the story":  Fresen's  sister and brother-in-law own a charter school management company, Academica, yet he claims to  see no conflict between that and his leadership role in education in the legislature. At least five companies involved in charter school management contributed the maximum allowable donation to Fresen’s most recent election campaign. And finally, Fresen was named “legislator of the year” by Florida’s for-profit college lobbying group, the Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools & Colleges, in 2013.

        Now representing district 114, in the Florida House, Fresen has received at least $25,500 from the “career college” industry, made up mostly of for-profit schools.  A conflict of interest ethics complaint was filed against him as far back as  2011 for voting on a proposal that would give benefits to some charter schools, and in the 2016 legislative session he has fast-tracked a bill to force Florida public school districts to share their construction tax money with charters.

        Some  state lawmakers, however, simply don't buy the hype and have opined  that  the explosion of publicly-funded, privately-operated schools is a growing drain on the public education system.
“People need to get out of the business of profiting from public education,” (Rep. Dwight Bullard of Miami).

Rep. Luis Garcia, agreed:
“The present policies that….state government is taking seem to be attacking public education in favor of for-profit – to the extreme,” Garcia  said.

        In the first part of this piece I addressed performance issues related to Florida.  There are also many fiscal improprieties which, in some cases are simply mismanagement, in others are bordering on criminal enterprises, all in the name of "better" education. Nationwide, the story is probably worse.

• An Oakland Park man received $450,000 in tax dollars to open two new charter schools just months after his first collapsed. The schools shuttled students among more than four locations in Broward County, including a park, an event hall and two churches. The schools closed in seven weeks.

• A Boca Raton woman convicted of taking kickbacks when she ran a federal meal program was hired to manage a start-up charter school in Lauderdale Lakes.

• A Coral Springs man with a history of foreclosures, court-ordered payments, and bankruptcy received $100,000 to start a charter school in Margate. It closed in two months.

• A Hollywood company that founded three short-lived charters in Palm Beach and Collier counties will open a new school this fall. The two Palm Beach County schools did not return nearly $200,000 they owe the district.

 

        When members of the U.S. House of Representatives considered a recent   bill to incentivize the expansion of charter schools, there was, as expected  to be a lot of heat but not very much light in their discussion of the need for more of these institutions.

The bipartisan bill, HR 10, was passed amid rare  cross-aisle fist-bumping, and lots of floor speeches about the power of charters to help disadvantaged kids.  In today’s climate of trumped up political truisms, the alleged  "necessity" of charter schools is just the latest one.   In generally uninformed and poorly investigated treatments of education, charter schools are  regarded by many as a given “improvement.” New York Times columnist  David Leonhardt recently  illustrated this intellectual nonchalance the other day, writing for the paper’s magazine, that our nation’s “once-large international lead in educational attainment has vanished,” but “there are some reasons for optimism in education” – principally, “charter schools” that “offer some lessons about what works and doesn’t in K-12.”

        Parrotting this drivel  in Congress, Senator Mary Landrieu (D, LA) recently harangued U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan during a Senate committee meeting for not giving enough federal financial support to charter schools, chiding Duncan for proposing level funding for the federal charter program.”

        According to a report from Education Week, Landrieu scornfully said, , “We gave you billions of dollars for traditional public schools. You’ve given a very small amount of money for public high performing charters. The evidence is in, they work.”

The fact that the House vote on the HR 10 coincided with the president’s designation of a special week for charters tells you the marketing campaign for these schools has been very carefully orchestrated.

But giving the lie to this well crafted propaganda campaign (aided by significant donations to key legislators by "for profit"  educational businesses)  are a number of recent revelations showing that among “what is possible” from charter schools is a lot of bad education, ridiculous hype, wasted resources, and widespread corruption.

       In truth, and for  sure – and let’s get this straight from the get go – there are always a few “charter school success stories” that can be cherry picked from the tree, just like "some Bull Riders" don't ever get hurt but that’s not the point. Charter School boosters laud the accomplishments of the few and then imply that it is the norm. It isn't. Imagine the reaction if an advocate for traditional public schools pleading his case saying, “But look at this great public school over here.” He’d be mocked in the media and shamed by politicians. The point is that after years of studies about charter schools, there is not really any definitive proof of any “charter school magic” they bring to the field.

        Ignore the smoke and mirrors and let's look at facts.....remember facts?

        Opening the truth telling about charter schools was a recent study calling  for public schools to be replaced by charter schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee, you should note, is the city that has experienced the nation’s longest running experiment, more than 20 years, with charter schools and vouchers as replacements for traditional public schools.  Reality,  based on statistics and on the ground evaluation, however, is that charter schools in Milwaukee do no better than the public schools they replace, and many of the charter schools that perform the worst are never held accountable and continue to remain open after years of failure.

        Despite this very modest  track record for charters in Milwaukee, the report “Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education Than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” explores the latest demand from state officials who are for “enamored with a new type of charter school represented by the Rocketship chain of schools.”

The study looked closely at Rocketship’s practices and found “everything is built around the tests.” However, tests scores for students in the Rocketship programs – as measured by California’s Academic Performance Index (where Rocketship is primarily based) – have declined by just over 10 percent from 2008–2009 to 2012–2013. “Indeed, in 2012–2013, all seven of the Rocketship schools failed to make adequate yearly progress according to federal standards.”

        Despite this poor performance, Rocketship executives are bent on an “unshakeable pursuit of large-scale growth”,  and are enriching politicians nationwide in an effort to gain support.  The  Rocketship model is driven by profit, instead of good education practice. As explained by the report and , as is intuitively obvious if one reviews the curriculum,  along with a test-driven instructional method,  Rocketship  relies heavily on substituting extensive online instruction for personal instruction from teachers. This model leads to clear conflicts of interest when Rocketship (or any)  charter network partners with its own for-profit providers of curricula, and two leaders of the charter venture both sit on Rocketship’s Board and are primary investors in a for-profit company that provides the math curriculum used by Rocketship.

        Thus, as the report concludes,  “Rocketship promotes itself as a dynamic learning organization, but, any true  innovation is limited.  since it apparently will not adopt education reforms that have no potential to make money for investors.”

This profit over pedagogy mentality “would likely be prohibited as illegal conflicts of interest if they took place in a public school system,” (or not: The Bush family had "interests" in the TX company which initially produced the FCAT!)  but “Rocketship is not bound to uphold the same standard of ethics demanded of public officials.”

        On state tests in Ohio, most charter schools do more poorly than public schools. Some equal public school performance but few surpass the public schools in test scores. While test scores do not show everything that schools should be accomplishing with their students, they do indicate that the promise of charter schools has not lived up to the reality. One must question the motivation behind the continued support for charter schools. Is it a misguided belief that they will better serve students or is it to pursue a political agenda to destroy anything that the government does, even if successful?

        Another outcome of "Charter School mania" is the circulation of unfounded and unwarranted rhetoric to support them. Demands for more charter schools, and more money for charter schools, are often justified by highly suspect information masquerading as “research” and inflated arguments about their financial needs. Two recent examples of the hype machine:

First, a new report arguing for more money for charter schools and, second, the annual ritual of circulating figures representing a charter school “waitlist.”

The  calling for more funds for charter schools found that in 2011, charter schools received $3,059 less per student than traditional public schools. “Shocking,” wrote one of the report  on his personal blog. But as education journalists noted, the report came from a University of Arkansas endeavor “funded by the Walton Foundation, a group associated with Walmart that aggressively uses its philanthropy to spur the creation of new charter schools. Even so, the foundation also included a  disclaimer that its findings “[do] not necessarily reflect” the group’s views.)”

        Additionally, Further, as charter schools expert and Western Michigan University professor Gary Miron explained, “This is not research that’s helping draw good policies.” Based on the data, charter schools often get less money simply because they don’t provide many of the services traditional public schools do, in particular, special education services, student support services such as counseling and health, vocational education, and transportation.

        In fact, A significant number of  charters have a cost advantage, especially when there is a thorough accounting of “considerable money that comes into charters from private sources.”

And about that extensive charter school wait list? A small number of very popular charters disproportionately account for the charter waitlists, while traditional public schools – which are not allowed to turn away applicants or, as with popular magnet schools, offer selective enrollment – are not given a “meaningful comparison” in the charter school data. As charter proponents continue to inflate their cause, the facts continue to deflate it. Maybe we’ve had enough of this shameless hype?

        Last but by no means least, and all too frequently seen in Florida, a  recent report released by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy revealed, “Fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.”

        The report, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud And Abuse,” combed through news stories, criminal records, and other documents to find literally hundreds of cases of charter school operators embezzling funds, using tax dollars to illegally support other, non-educational businesses, taking public dollars for services they didn’t provide, inflating their enrollment numbers to boost revenues, and putting children potentially in harm's way,  danger by foregoing safety regulations or withholding services. Not an opinion, but simply a public records search!  The report summarizes:  "Despite rapid growth in the charter school industry, as of today, no agency, federal or state, has been given the resources to properly oversee it. Given this inadequate oversight, we worry that the fraud and mismanagement that has been uncovered thus far might be just the tip of the iceberg.”

        In a write up of the report, senior editor at  Bill Moyers and Company, Joshua Holland, wrote, “The report looks at problems … with dozens of case studies. In some instances, charter operators used tax dollars to prop up side businesses like restaurants and health food stores — even a failing apartment complex.”

        Washington Post reporter , Valerie Strauss, cited some of the most egregious examples including a Washington, DC-based charter that used public tax dollars to cover travel-related expenses, membership dues and dinner tabs at an exclusive club, and slew of bills from sources as diverse as wine and liquor stores, Victoria’s Secret, and a shop in France frequented by the charter school operator and his wife.

        A state audit in Ohio found nearly $3 million in unsubstantiated expenses amassed by a charter in that state. Another operator in Milwaukee “spent about $200,000 on personal expenses, including cars, funeral arrangements and home improvement.” And yet another in California pleaded guilty to “stealing more than $7.2 million worth of computers from a government program.”

        Despite these urgent and well-founded calls for a change in direction on charter schools, not to mention that most simply don't work better (or in many cases, as well), public officials still seem intent on pursuing bad policy. This push for putting tax dollars into corporate pockets would be  derided by most charter supporters if it were any other instance. If the 2008 Housing bubble collapse proved nothing else (it did!) consider the consequences for many 2008 , 9, 10, and 2011 retirees had the George W. Bush privatization plan for Social Security been adopted .'Nuff said?