Research and links on why public money shouldn't be given to unregulated charter schools.

[madfloridian]

I am making a list of part of my research and links about how I believe charter schools harm public education. There are good charter schools, the idea itself is a good one. However it's an idea that was hijacked by greedy companies that manage schools for money, formulate standardized tests in secret, and companies that use charter schools to dabble in real estate with public money.

That is basically the gist of my argument....that taxpayer money is being given over to private companies which are NOT regulated and have almost no oversight. That is the reason for charters. The powers that be say that if schools are not burdened with rules they will be better schools.

So ask yourself why then are public schools regulated and have oversight? Why start a system of schools that has none. When you do that the greedy step in and take over, and there is no one willing to speak against them or stop them.

When someone tells me I don't know what I'm talking about or that I am not qualified to talk in a negative way against Arne Duncan's policies...then I can link to these articles. Not all are my posts, and there are valuable links.

And I think 33 years of teaching with new training every few years at a nearby college at least make me more qualified than the billionaire boys' club (to quote Diane Ravitch).

Unregulated charter school finances wasting taxpayer money. Rampant fraud, harm to students.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/8440

Florida charter schools get 91 million for facilities. Public school funding dwindles.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022774952

FL charter schools claim 80,000 on waiting list. Not true.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022344727

FBI raids Kenilworth charter school
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014670340

FL budget: $133 per charter student, $18 per public school student
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/30/1296034/-FL-budget-133-per-charter-student-18-per-public-school-student

"The Invasion of the Charter Schools"
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2009/06/invasion-of-charter-schools.html

Charter school leader pushes kids to become her personal lobbyists
http://pando.com/2014/03/06/charter-school-leader-pushes-kids-to-become-her-personal-lobbyists/

"Stand and Deliver" school, Garfield High, sadly is one of 12 public schools available to outside bidders
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/4973

2009 Some Catholic schools in Florida converting to charter schools this fall.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/5085

Charter school company hired felon on probation. He stole $202, 837.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/8537

Unregulated charter school finances wasting taxpayer money with rampant fraud.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/8532

Imagine Charter Schools sells 5 schools for 44 million...will have them leased back to them.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/5586

Compilation of charter school scandals over the past year.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6012

Charter schools are a tip of the hat to deregulation supporters.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/3753

Two FL charter schools owe half a million to Lee county. Gave wrong number of students.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/8431

NYT's investigative article about Imagine Charter Schools and Dennis Bakke.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6057

Charter school offers to give $100 to each student who recruits someone new.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6260

"Parent Revolution"? Not really. Not grassroots. Started by charter school companies.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/8098

Charter schools in TX receive $19 million from state, red flags raised in audit.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/4963

Charter school director: When "test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.”
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6707

Metro Nashville Public Schools lose $3.4 million funding for rejecting charter school. Power play.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/8481

More charter school problems in FL. Where's the oversight of taxpayer money?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024282410

Four states, 4 examples of charter schools fraud. Oversight needed badly.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024106466

Labor board decides Chicago charter school is really private, subject to private sector laws.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022121286

This is how they are declaring schools "failing" so they can be turned into charter schools.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024966712

Forcing brain damaged students to take the same test as everyone else and counting their scores with the others.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024956116

Turkish charter schools, Harmony, finalist for 30 million from Race to the Top federal money.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022131852

States are being forced by Arne to raise the number of charter schools or lose millions in federal money.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024939550

When FL charters close money doesn't get back to the public schools.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024934579

One testing company put a gag order on teachers to keep them from talking about how sorry the tests are that calls schools failures and turns them over to charters.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024882119

Florida's largest charter school under investigation.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024854017

The kind of testing that fails public schools so they can be turned into charters run by private companies.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024848990

Thank you, Raul Grijalva: Obama’s Market-Based Policies Endanger Public Education.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024843639

"we have not spoken earlier, as we are a staff that exists in fear of bullying, retaliation...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024832541

White Hat Charter schools got about 1 billion from Ohio, claimed public property as theirs

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024800260

Arne Duncan complicit as forces of privatization take over public schools.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024752043

NY legislature: Charter schools get free space in public schools. Hostile takeover of public arenas?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024751666

Build an F-Rated Charter School? WITHOUT Approval? Only in Florida. From Daily Kos today.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024694215

Eva Moskowitz moves charter school into another public school's space, boots them from classrooms.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6703

FL gave $25 million to pro-profit charter schools for non-attending students in 2006-2007

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024472708

Online charter school, K12, got 730.8 million from taxpayers in 2013. Teacher speaks out.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024291075

That's just a few things. Adding more later on.

[daleanime]

1. K&R....

[snot]

2. I might could use this.

Pls make sure that as far as you can tell, all sources are accurate. Don't want to get discredited if I try to push this.

[madfloridian]

16. Pretty sure..

I have to be very accurate with what I post or I really do hear about it. I check and double check sources, but opinions are my own.

Going to post some more later because I think there is no one pulling stuff into one place on the topic.

Hope you can use some of it.

[snot]

17. Thank you!

[littlemissmartypants]

3. Love it! nt

[madfloridian]

12. Love your sig pic and sig line.

[truedelphi]

4. We had a cartoon in our local newspaper -

It showed the traditional schoolhouse in the foreground, with workers removing the lumber from the walls, and shingles from the roof, and plopping all into wheelbarrows, and then taking the wheelbarrows down the road to the sleek modern schoolhouse in the background, with other workers bringing wheelbarrows of money to the "modern" schoolhouse as well.

Of course, the money doesn't really end up inside the modern schoolhouse - it is mostly diverted into the bank accounts of the sleezeballs and politicians who are making this nightmare into a reality.

[madfloridian]

8. Like this one? I had retweeted it from the Newark Students sit in page. A little different.

[Scuba]

9. That toon should follow this one ...

[madfloridian]

10. .....

That is so true. The reformers found a scapegoat who couldn't fight back because they had no money to do so....and even less of a voice because of years of being told how sorry they are.

Scapegoat the teacher who has little control over most of the child's environment.

[blkmusclmachine]

5. Big K&R

[nikto]

6. The point is, It's Empirical

Livin' in a Gangster's (Investor's) Paradise.

[emsimon33]

7. Great research and resource as always!

Thank you!

[madfloridian]

11. .....

Thanks for the kind words. Most people don't want to hear about dissenting views on education reform. They really truly do not. I just haven't gotten the message yet.

[Supersedeas]

19. Yes, many thanks for this

[Xyzse]

13. Thank you... I may have to actually make this my first subscription.

[madfloridian]

14. I know it looks like I'm tooting my own horn so to speak....

and I guess it could be construed that way. But I am going to add more from my posts and other sources because it draws together important stuff about harm being done to public education.

Our country has always had a free public education system. But going down this route means it will not be that way. Charter schools do not have to keep students who are not producing good work. They send them back to public schools. Often the money doesn't go back with them because it is invested somewhere else.

Wonder what will happen when there aren't enough public schools to receive back the students the charter schools reject? It's a possibility down the road if things continue like this.

[Xyzse]

15. It is fine, I appreciate the resource.

[truedelphi]

24. If anyone deserves tooting their own horn, you sure do.

I would still be thinking that it is great that the new charter movement has come along,with the "needed" standards and great curriculum, if you had not taken the time to put together all the posts you have made.

[FloriTexan]

18. Kicking this!

[jwirr]

20. For profit means just what it says. The bottom line in profit not learning. Services should never be

privatized unless that government has limits on what they can charge. And it should never be more than the government would pay to run it themselves.

[madfloridian]

22. Good point. TFA gets several thousand for each recruit hired. With 5 weeks training.

And districts are laying off teachers in order to pay for the "privilege" of hiring TFA teachers???

[woo me with science]

21. Education is a MASSIVE profit stream in a nationwide epidemic of corporate exploitation,

i.e., finding a way to extract profit from every aspect of our lives.

Once people understand that, they are given the tools to see through the charter school propaganda.

Education: The "Big Enchilada"
http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/08/big-enchilada.html

Some years ago, a friend who works on Wall Street handed me a stock-market prospectus in which a group of analysts at an investment-banking firm known as Montgomery Securities described the financial benefits to be derived from privatizing our public schools. "The education industry", according to these analysts, "represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control" that "have either voluntarily opened" or, they note in pointed terms, have "been forced" to open up to private enterprise.

Indeed, they write, "the education industry represents the largest market opportunity" since health-care services were privatized during the 1970s... "The larger developing opportunity is in the K-12 EMO market, led by private elementary school providers..." From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, "the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada."

[madfloridian]

23. Great article by Kozol. Reminds me that Jeb bailed out Edison schools from OUR FL pension fund.

http://susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=146

But by 2002 Edison was on the ropes. Its stock had crashed from $37 to as little as 14 cents. Whittle had long since abandoned his original, controversial goal of building a network of private, for-profit schools, but even the strategy of contracting to privately manage public and charter schools proved flawed. Plagued by local opposition and severely criticized for its educational performance, Edison was hemorrhaging money ($354 million in twelve years), and had lost one-fourth of its contracts.

Edison's collapse would have been a major embarrassment for boosters of educational privatization--that is, if an unlikely white knight hadn't come to the rescue, purchasing the company for $182 million. Edison's savior, ironically, was the Florida Retirement System (FRS)--the pension fund for public employees, roughly half of them teachers, whose union has vigorously criticized both Edison and privatization. The purchase, made by Liberty Partners, an investment firm that made private equity investments exclusively with FRS money, not only put the retirement security of public employees at risk; it financially underwrote the cause of privatization, which public employee unions oppose as a threat to jobs and the pensions of its members. But neither public employees nor their unions had a voice in the matter.