Jack Lessenberry: time has come to get rid of charter schools

[MinM]

Shame on the charter schools
By Jack Lessenberry • 21 hours ago

Jack Lessenberry talks about how the U.S. Department of Education turned down this state’s request for a $45 million dollar grant to expand charter schools.

One thing is beyond doubt: Michigan has proven vastly incompetent at chartering, administering and overseeing these schools.

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education turned down this state’s request for a $45 million dollar grant to expand charter schools. This was mostly because Michigan doesn’t provide sufficient oversight of those who authorize and supposedly oversee them.

The Department of Education did the right thing. Nobody should give charter schools in this state another dime. Sixteen months ago, the Detroit Free Press did a masterful, comprehensive and eye-opening series on the state of charters here that uncovered horror story after horror story of waste, fraud and abuse.

Most importantly, the series revealed that state oversight is incredibly weak; the worst-performing charters are allowed to stay open year after year, and that overall, charter schools have been no better than traditional schools in educating our poorest students.

We spend a billion tax dollars a year on charter schools. More of this money goes to for-profit private companies than in any other state...

http://michiganradio.org/post/shame-charter-schools

Here's a post with some links from that Free Press story Jack alludes to...

The Detroit Free Press had an excellent exposé on the charter schools here in Michigan..

@MichiganRadio · Charter school supporters’ response to investigations is "Soviet" in style -- from @JackLessenberry http://ow.ly/yRzws

WDET 101.9FM @wdet · Big investigation at the @Freep on charter schools and we bring in the two reporters working on it to chat: http://ow.ly/yxopl

State of charter schools: How Michigan spends $1 billion but fails to hold schools accountable

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025242936

Teacher 'wins the right' to be paid $10/hr

[PatrickforO]

1. Every dollar spent on a charter school is a dollar less for the public school system.

Public schools should be public and they should be so good that we can all be proud of them.

[CTyankee]

7. My grandson in CA is in a charter school and it is a PUBLIC school. They have unionized

teachers. All it is is an alternative for him -- he is in a foreign language academy where they teach immersion French, Italian, German and Spanish. He has a vision disability requiring special accommodations, which he gets. Because of his Italian heritage, he has learned Italian from kindergarten (90% in Italian, 10% in English his native language -- now at 6th grade it's 50-50). It is also a public school with a standard curriculum side by side with the foreign language curriculum. And all that means is that most of the subjects, such as math, history and science are taught in the target language with English also. The ratio of the foreign language classes vs the English classes gets more and more equal each year.

Parents who want their kids to learn a foreign language for whatever reason (mostly for heritage reasons) simply want their kids to have this opportunity at an early age when kids absorb the language so easily. If they don't, they have the regular curriculum for their children. Interestingly, the Spanish speakers in the community often do not like the Spanish that is taught and anyway prefer their kids get assimilated, so they opt for the regular curriculum.

I fail to see what is the problem here. Aren't we going a little overboard on how awful charter schools are when everything I read here is in direct conflict with my family's own personal experience with a charter school?

Maybe it is different in CA. I really don't know. But folks here need to know that every charter school in this country is not like what it is painted to be...not at all...

[iemitsu]

2. Charter Schools are also a union busting ploy.

They ought to be banned in the whole country.

[appalachiablue]

6. Breaking teachers unions, enemy No. 1 was absolutey part of the plan.

[Igel]

8. There is no coherent definition of "charter school."

Everybody touches a part of the elephant and knows for a certainty what the rest of the critter looks like.

Some are unionized, some aren't; some are public, some are for profit, some are non-profit; some get not so much public money, some are fully paid for by public funds; some are magnet schools and specialized, some are general and open to everybody and need to take 504 and SpEd kids, some are in-between; some are high-achieving and some are where wannabe drop-outs are warehoused and their non-achievement papered over; some have to administer standardized tests, some don't. Some score consistently above public schools, some score consistently below public schools (so the fact that they score *like* public schools isn't a very meaningful average). Some are conservative, some are liberal, some are high-discipline and some are Montessori. There are even "unschool-oriented" charter schools.

It varies from place to place, and in many states there are even different kinds of things called "charter schools."

I know a PhD physicist who works for a charter school and her juniors have no problems with trig and pre-AP level physics or AP 1 or 2, and they send most of their kids to college. Around the corner from me there's a charter school that's ridiculous for having essentially no achievement, the kids go and if they can add two-digit numbers by the time they're ready to graduate high school, if they can read a newspaper paragraph given a vocabulary list and a text-to-speech program, they feel like they're geniuses and should be accepted to an Ivy League school when my elementary school wouldn't have judged them ready for 7th grade.

[Wellstone ruled]

3. Seems to me this Charter School thing

started as 1% er way of not having to deal with the 99% ers. Observations: Won't have to deal with Challenged Children. Segregation legally paid for with State and Federal Tax Dollars. Use every possible two bit excuse to bend or twist rules and regs to keep what the Administration of these so called Schools call possible Student issues. Meaning Race Color or Creed. The real tragedy happening,are these so called Home Schooled. Thank you Arnie Duncan.

[Doctor_J]

4. there is pretty much no service that can be provided better by profiteers than

by public servants. The private sector's goal, by definition, is to maximize profit by any means necessary, especially cutting service. We already have the worst healthcare in the world thanks to privatization. School and retirement are next if the neo-liberals have their way.

[appalachiablue]

5. No more corrupt private and for profit schools, prisons or any other public agencies & services.

Recently the President said it's time to stop the excess school testing, ditto Arne Duncan who's leaving his Sec. of Education position in Dec. Last spring Bill Clinton told the NAACP that 'we went too far' with his 1990s crime bill et al, twenty years later.
How many millionaires and others profited from corporatization while children, adults, families and communities have been damaged irreparably by the policies.

[jaysunb]

9. +1 n/t