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25% of Charter Schools Owe Their Soul To the Walmart Store
theodp writes "Among the billionaires who helped Bill Gates pave the way for charter schools in WA was Walmart heiress Alice Walton. The Walton Family Foundation spent a whopping $158+ million in 2012 on what it calls 'systemic K-12 education reform,' which included $60,920,186 to 'shape public policy' and $652,209 on 'research and evaluation.' Confirming the LA Times' speculation about its influence, the Walton Foundation issued a press release Wednesday boasting it's the largest private funder of charter school 'startups,' adding that it has supported the opening of 1 in 4 charter schools in the U.S. since 1997 through its 1,500 'investments.' But as some charter school kids have learned the hard way, what the rich man giveth, he can also taketh away. For the time being, though, it looks like America's going to continue to depend on the tax-free kindness of wealthy strangers to educate its kids. For example, while it was nice to see the value of Shop Class recognized, the White House on Monday called on businesses, foundations and philanthropists to fund proposed 'Maker Spaces' in schools and libraries. Hey, when the U.S. Secretary of Education turns to corporate sponsors and auctions to fund his Mother's afterschool program for kids of low-income families in the President's hometown, don't look for things to change anytime soon."
Due to a technicality Alice was let off of on a DUI charge just recently. Maybe she should spend some of her $27 Billion on Drug and Alcohol education in the schools instead?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I have come to the conclusion that the charter school movement was conceived in sin. born in corruption and is too full of conmen and grifters to give it any support.
There may be some decent, honest people trying to make things better in the movement, but it is not the way to bet.
Good parenting means not letting your public schools become shit and not letting corporations take over your education system via backdoor like this.
Maybe schools should raise some more corporate-sponsored cash by doing product placements. For example, it would be easy to monetize homework assignments:
1a. Juan is planning a picnic. He buys packages of Sara Lee® brand 100% Wheat Home Style® Hot Dog Buns which each contain eight buns. He also buys packages of Osar Mayer® Jumbo Deluxe All-Beef Franks®, which each contain 10 wieners. What is the minimum number of Hot Dogs Juan needs to buy so that there are no unmatched buns or wieners?
1b. Juan plans to put 1/2 ounce of Heinz® Sweet Dill® Relish on each hot dog. How many 12-oz jars of relish does he need to buy? What brand of mustard would best complement the relish: (a) Heinz® Classic Yellow Hot Dog® Mustard (b) some other non-specific mustard?
1c. Extra credit: Juan asks his friend Latoya to buy ketchup for his picnic. List three benefits Latoya would receive if she bought genuine Heinz® Classic® Ketchup instead of the discount store brand. Explain how sometimes what appears to be the least expensive choice isn't the greatest value overall.
Aka corruption. Public corruption that is actually viewed as a positive thing.
It shows how far people have fallen.
No.
Good parenting means taking _complete responsibility_ for your childs education. If your public school is awesome, great - but that only goes a little way. The culture, values, education, and effort/commitment of the parents has always been the number one predictor of a childs future academic success. Public schools are also limited in what they are allowed to teach your child - forced to comply with what is polically correct, what politicians and businesses have managed to redefine the subjects and ideas to study as, and what the local/state/federal government have compromised as the textbooks and teachers that your kid will interact with. These are usually far from the best choice which you learn about in great detail if you go and investigate on your own and then put together your own educational plan which you implement via home schooling, careful selection of private schools, or selective hiring of tutors.
Having kids was never supposed to be about the state taking over most of the responsibility for education, or for being a gloried childcare center because both parents work, or something that could be handled without careful planning and ensuring one had the necessary resources ahead of time. Politicians and the public can talk all they want about improving public schools and overall childhood education, but the further responsibility and teaching moves away from responsibile active parents - the worse the result will always be. We've had a 100 year slide away from families and responsibile parenting and nothing is going to be fixed in education until we reverse it.
These charter-school folks have a long-term agenda, and that is the conversion of public education from a public service to a fully privatized profit center, with the added perk of eliminating teachers unions as a political force. A key factor in achieving this is that wealth inequality has become so extreme that local governments no longer have the resources to educate the nation's children, but billionaires do. Can parents and boards of education afford to say "no" when, in the face of decaying buildings and teacher layoffs, big-time donors come offering modern, well-staffed facilities, with all the latest IT and other equipment, if only you let the donors do it their way? Once the public school system is reduced to being merely a dumping ground for the worst, most disruptive and unresponsive students, the donors won't have to be so generous, they'll be making handsome profits as the contractors in a privatized fee-for-service education system. It's just like the 1990s when deep-pocketed for-profit HMOs offered healthcare at below-market rates. Once all the nonprofit hospitals and insurers were driven out of business, the for-profits jacked up premiums at double-digit rates for decades. It was a brilliant strategy, and it's happening all over again, in education.
Maybe the charter schools by you are good. The ones by me? Not so much. First of all, they get to pick and choose what students they accept. Inevitably, any student with special needs isn't accepted. (We had our son in a Montessori school for a bit years ago and we were pushed out. We suspected this was because our son required PT and OT services. Later we found out that all students with PT or OT were being pushed out but we felt pressure not to talk since the principal was friends with some people high up in the district.) This selective enrollment means that the public schools get a bigger percentage of students who need services. This costs more money, of course, but the charter schools don't need to pay for that.
Next, there are the high stakes tests that New York has implemented. I'm opposed to those tests in general. They are administered by Pearson, not reviewed by ANYONE to see if they are appropriate, and don't show what students have learned. They only are used as a threat against teachers - if your kids do poorly, you might be out of a job. This means that the teachers teach to the test and toss aside anything that won't be on the test. However, the charter schools are exempt from this. They don't need to take these tests and so they can do what they want.
Third is the fact that they pull money from public schools. Those same public schools that now need to spend more money on the higher percentage of student with special needs and who feel pressured to teach to the test are finding themselves with less and less money and more money flows to the charter schools instead.
Finally, what tests the charter schools DO administer, they get to decide which results to publish. So if a few kids don't do well on the tests, those scores get tossed aside while the successful kids have their scores touted as the norm.
This all combines to lead public schools to ruin while diverting more money to charter schools. It becomes a vicious cycle too. Charter schools look stellar with selective test reporting while the struggling public schools look bad. So more charter schools are opened and the public schools get less and less money. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the kids who need special services get a second class education because the charter schools don't want to touch them. (Not that I'd want my sons in one of those.)
Like I said, this might not be the case for the Charter schools by you, but by me this has been my experience. They are run by greedy corporations who see the public school system as a big piggy bank that they can suck dry and they will manipulate test results and lobby politicians as much as they need to to get those dollars.
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