This where we are now in Minneapolis. Stop sending your kids to charter schools and get involved. If you are involved, get more involved and bring someone in with you. The charter school movement is corporate takeover of our communities through schools. That simple.... thenation/article/181754/how-destroy-public-school-system This article is long but fantastic. It’s a in-depth look at how school privatization has affected the city of Philadelphia, highlighting race and class issues in the city’s history that continue to affect its present. “The older woman wore gloves as she stooped to pick up trash outside Steel Elementary School, tucked into a quiet block of black working-class homes in Philadelphia’s Nicetown section. Apparently, the volunteer had made an impromptu decision to stop by and tidy the place up on her way to wherever she was going. ‘This is a community school,’ boasts Steel School Advisory Council president Kendra Brooks, a parent of two Steel students, standing next to banners proclaiming WE ARE FAMILY and WE LOVE OUR SCHOOL. ‘We have generations and generations of families who have been through Steel School. We have teachers who have been here eighteen, twenty-eight years. So we’ve built a community.’… In April, parents and teachers launched a high-profile fight to block a takeover of Steel by a charter-school network after the district, citing the school’s low test scores, declared it in need of an overhaul. Brooks believes that her school—which, like others, has reeled under the budget cuts implemented by Pennsylvania’s Republican governor, Tom Corbett—had been set up to fail. Last spring, apart from the principal and a secretary, she says, Steel had ‘a teacher for each class’ and almost ‘nothing extra.’… But Mastery [Charter School] has its critics, who accuse the network of practicing rote teach-to-the-test instruction and burning through young teachers. Even Michael Masch, the school district’s former chief financial officer and a progressive fan of Mastery’s work, makes a point of noting that the charter network engages in prodigious outside fundraising. Mastery is ‘not doing more with less,’ Masch says. ‘They’re doing more with more.’ In fact, the basic structure of school financing in Philadelphia is rigged to benefit these privately managed companies. Public-school money follows students when they move to charter schools, but the public schools’ costs do not fall by the same amount. For example, if 100 students leave a district-run school at a cost of $8,596 per head (the district’s per-pupil expenditure minus certain administrative costs), that school’s cost for paying teachers, staff and building expenses doesn’t actually decline by that amount. It has been estimated that partly because of these costs, each student who enrolls in a charter school costs the district as much as $7,000…. These votes were among the few successful coordinated efforts by parents and teachers to block charter expansion in Philadelphia. They constituted a pivotal moment in a struggle involving Corbett, well-funded education reformers bent on privatizing public schools, a battered teachers union, and students and parents attempting to navigate a school system in which fiscal crisis has become the only constant. Gordon [CEO of Master Charter Schools], Brooks notes, ‘said his job was “to help poor people.” Well, no one asked for your help…. Every couple years, they come up with a new philosophy about what’s best—instead of funding the schools.’…. As the urban industrial base vanished [in the mid-20th century], Philadelphia was left with a rapidly declining middle class. Relatively affluent whites funded separate school districts, while poorer urbanites were left to fund the impoverished schools left behind. [Former Philadelphia Mayor Richardson] Dilworth insisted that a unified metropolitan school system was the only path to true desegregation. But since his time, the noose has tightened. The effects of segregation were so ugly that in 1998, then–Schools Superintendent David Hornbeck filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit contending that state funding discriminated against nonwhite students. Hornbeck also issued a stark ultimatum, declaring that he would make no more cuts—instead, the schools would run with the necessary resources and be shut down early if the money ran out…. In response, furious legislators passed a law authorizing a state takeover of Philadelphia’s schools and barring its teachers from striking. In the end, Hornbeck resigned in the face of further cuts. What followed was likely the largest state takeover—and, at the time, the largest experiment in privatization—in the history of US public education. The message was clear: public management, not underfunding and segregation, was the problem. The takeover went into effect on December 21, 2001, with advocates and city politicians filing lawsuits and students walking out of class and staging large protests, wearing stickers that read: ‘I am not for sale. Say no to privatization.’… By 2007, it had become clear that the initial experiment with private providers had failed. A study by the RAND Corporation and Research for Action found that ‘despite additional per-pupil resources,’ privately managed schools like Edison’s ‘did not produce average increases in student achievement that were any larger than those seen in the rest of the district,” while “district-managed restructured schools outpaced the gains of the rest of the district in math.’ Edison’s contract for its last four schools quietly expired a few years later. In 2010, State Attorney General Tom Corbett was elected as governor, his political network heavily populated by advocates for private-sector education reform. Backed by a conservative state legislature, Corbett cut about $860 million from public education in his first budget rather than tax the state’s booming natural-gas industry. He also expanded Pennsylvania’s ‘voucher lite’ programs, popular among conservatives, which provide corporations with major tax credits in exchange for donations for private-school tuition…. Philadelphia was forced to eliminate more than 3,500 teacher and staff positions. The crisis also set off the most aggressive privatization campaign since the state takeover, embodied by the so-called ‘Blueprint for Transformation’ plan. The plan was drafted by the Boston Consulting Group, an elite corporate consulting firm with a record of contract assignments for public-school districts. The proposal called for closing sixty-four schools, gutting the central office staff, privatizing blue-collar jobs if the unions didn’t offer major concessions, and carving up the remaining schools into ‘achievement networks’ potentially managed by private third parties. Public displeasure caused the plan for achievement networks to be shelved, but twenty-four schools were closed. For privatization-minded reformers, the creative destruction unleashed by Corbett’s budget cuts presented an opportunity to implement a new round of privately managed restructuring. In May 2013, just before the School Reform Commission approved what Philadelphians called the ‘doomsday budget,’ Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp—an icon of the self-described reform movement—tweeted: ‘In Philadelphia today, so much more to be done, but I can’t get over the progress in this city’s schools in the last decade!’ Wealthy donors and local and national foundations poured funding into a new reform-movement infrastructure to back the growth of nonprofit charters, which had continued their rapid expansion even as the for-profit experiment collapsed. The Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), founded in 2010, quickly grew into the city’s most powerful pro-charter and anti-union organization, thanks to a $15 million grant from the local William Penn Foundation—the same entity that had funded the ‘Blueprint for Transformation’ plan…. The new reform groups built ties with a pre-existing conservative network in the state, including pro-school- voucher groups like the Students First PAC, a wealthy political-action committee funded by the libertarian managers of a suburban Philadelphia investment firm. StudentsFirst, a separate group led at the time by former Washington, DC, schools superintendent Michelle Rhee, also founded a state chapter. PennCAN, the state affiliate of the national group 50CAN, was launched in the PSP’s office. The Gates Foundation, a major backer of reform projects nationwide, funded the creation of a quasi-governmental body staffed by the PSP, the Great Schools Compact, dedicated to promoting its vision for change…. In 2013–14, the School District of Philadelphia had 6,321 fewer staff than it did at the end of 2011, according to district figures—a decrease of nearly 27 percent. The reduction included 2,723 fewer teachers, fifty-eight nurses, 406 counselors, 286 secretaries and 411 noon-time aides…. It’s what scholars have bluntly called an apartheid system: wealthy districts spend more on wealthy students, and poor districts struggle to spend less on the poor students who need the most. According to state data from 2012–13, Philadelphia spent $13,077 per pupil, while [suburban] Abington spent $15,148—on students in much less need of intensive services and support. Wealthy Lower Merion spent $22,962 per pupil…. But while reformers want to make it easy to fire bad teachers, being able to attract and retain the best teachers is a much bigger problem. In Philadelphia, teachers are often paid less than their suburban counterparts to teach in far more difficult schools…. The posture of the teachers union, widely perceived as parochial and hostile to change, has doubtless allowed reformers to paint it as the defender of a status quo that no one can rationally defend. But if the reform movement continues to push a radical plan for dismantling the district, it will turn potential allies into a unified opposition, and all of its proposed innovations will be distrusted rather than embraced.”
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 17:29:03 +0000
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