That's a quote from one of the parents whose child was supposed to be going to going to Colorado Skies Academy, an aviation-centered charter school that turned out to be the 1,472.334th (estimated) charter school operated by educational amateurs who couldn't hold things together. They anounced their closing about two weeks before the school year was supposed to start.
It is one of the most undiscussed features of the charter school world-- the vast amounts of money and opportunity and, worst of all, family resources and children's education that are wasted by charter schools that are so amateur hour they can't get the job done and/or manage to stay open. It has been six years-- six years!-- since the Network for Public Education released a study showing the vast amount of federal money going to charter fraud and waste. One out of every four dollars, to the tune of a billion!
Why are we still playing at this? The deal was supposed to be a simple trade-- charter schools would get autonomy in exchange for accountability. But in some states, it's just not happening.
The weak link in Colorado is the weak link in too many other states. A charter system is supposed to depend on authorizers. Authorizers have the job of checking that charter operators can deliver on the promises they make, and shut them down if they don't. A charter is supposed to be like a contract, a deal in which the school says "We will do A, B, and C. Also, we absolutely know how to handle the nuts and bolts of staffing and funding and, you know, educating. And if we can't deliver on all that, you can shut us down."
This sounds great in theory. In practice, not so much.
One major problem is that authorizers often have a vested interest in saying, "Yes." Take Bay Mills Community College, a two-year school with 400ish students and a location on the Might As Well Be Canada portion of Michigan. Bay Mills made a ton of money by authorizing all manner of charter schools, most of them far, far away from the college. In Michigan, as in many states, authorizers get a cut of the charter school's funding, and that's a mighty appealing argument for saying yes.
In Colorado, there's a diffrerent incentive at play. Colorado has the Colorado Charter School Instittute. CSI was formed in 2004 as an arm of state government; several states have one of these boards, and their main purpose is to answer the question, "What if I want to start a charter school and authorizers keep telling me no?" CSI has a nine-member board, seven of whom are appointed by the governor, so if the governor's policy is "Gimme more of those charter schools," the board can help implement that policy.
In other words, CSI's purpose is not to provide accountability for charter schools, but to get lots of charter schools started. Or as Manuel Solano puts it at Colorado Times Recorder,
The majority of the CSI Board of Directors are appointed by the governor and operate by advancing their goal of approving more charter schools. CSI’s existence creates fragmented oversight, undermines local governance, and enables schools to escape accountability by switching authorizers. The result is a system where financial collapse can go unnoticed until it’s too late.
Charter schools are too often businesses masquerading as public schools, and that word "public" helps them project an image of stabilty and competence that they don't deserve. According to Solano, 32 charters have collpased under CSI's watch in the last decade. The sudden collapse of 32 schools may not seem like much, but I guarantee that if you are among the families that were counting on those schools, it's a huge deal. And or taxpayers who are footing the bill, it should also be a big deal.
The really annoying thing about charter school accountability is that it doesn't have to be this way. But too much of the charter movement believes in the Visionary CEO model, where some Elon Musk looking whizbang dudebro is free to hire and fire and remake policy as he sees fit without rules or regulations (or unions) telling him how to run his business. Let him move fast and break things, and if one of the things he breaks is the school, oh well--that's genius for you. And if someone suggests that this guy is actually an education amateur who doesn't know what the hell he's doing--well, how dare you.
The charer accountability sec tor also suffers from a problematic worship of the invisible hand of the market place. Every closure like Colorado Skies Academy comes with at least one market clown declaring, "Well, that's just the market working the way it's supposed to," as if the workings of the market are so sacred and wise that it would be folly to take measures to, you know, protect the young human beings who are trying to get an education (or to watch out for the taxpayers whose contributions fund all these market shenanigans).
There could be accountability for charter schools, actual accountability. Standards to be met, rigorous measures before they even open their doors. It could even be done without strangling the notion of innovation (though innovation is extraordinarily rare in the charter biz). It wouldnt be any harder than what we now do with magnet or CTE schools.
We could protect the interests of young humans and their families. We could provide accountability for the taxpayers. But we don't because in some states, charter fans think the most important thing is not protecting the interests of students or providing accountability to taxpayers, but in protecting the ability of entrepreneurs to operate with little oversight and accountability. And as long as that's the primary driving force in the charter biz, we will keep hearing parents ask,
NPE is a group co-founded by Diane Ravitch, the Bush-era Assistant Secretary of Education who has since become an outspoken critic of education reform, and by Anthony Cody, activist and author ofThe Educator and the Oligarch. The organization's executive director is Carol Burris, a former award-winning New York principal. Burris was the primary author of this report. (NPE gets no money from Bill Gates of the Waltons.)
The reports examine what happened to money disbursed by the Federal Charter Fund, a charter grant source created in 1994 as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Since 1995, it has handed out almost $4 billion.
Some new findings in this follow-up report:
The original report underestimated the number of charters that had taken federal grant funds and then either closed or never opened at all. That report found 1,000 such charters; the number now appears to be closer to 1,800. That means the failure rate is close to 37% nationally. Michigan gave grants of at least $100,000 to 72 schools that never opened at all; California gave grants to 61 unopened schools. Those two states alone account for over $16 million dollars spent without educating a single child. A grand total of 537 schools never actually opened; tax dollars spent on literally nothing.
Between 1995 and 2005, the Department of Education did not require states to give any accounting of where the money went.
For-profit charters have never been allowed to receive monies from this grant program, but plenty of for-profit charter management companies have had their schools apply successfully. It’s a reminder that “for profit” and “non-profit” are, when it comes to charter schools, a distinction without a difference. Hot Stuff Podunk Academy may well be a non-profit school, but if it is wholly operated by Hot Stuff Academies Charter management Company, a for profit company that handles the operation of the charter, the academy is still generating profits.
The report provides a state-by-state breakdown for some of these numbers, both raw numbers and percentages. Some states have made modest attempts at charter launches, with little success. Hawaii has launched 19; 10 of those have failed. Delaware has seen 14 attempts; 8 of those are defunct. Washington state had 6; of those, only 2 are still open (one charter abruptly closed in October, months after opening).
Larger scale is no promise of better results. New York lost 23 out of 233 charters, but Florida has seen a full third of its 503 charters close. California had a similar rate, with 298 failed charters out of 802. Ohio lost 120 out of 293, and in Tennessee, 59 out of 121— just shy of 50% charter failure rate. Betsy DeVos’s home state of Michigan has a failure rate of 44%— 112 out of 257 closed, costing federal taxpayers about $22 million.
The report also includes many stories that provide striking illustrations of just how the money is wasted. While some charter operators are simply in over their heads, others are clearly far more interested in profit than education.
In Michigan, almost $110,000 was drawn to develop the Harris Academy. $72,957 of that went to a property leasing company whose sole director was Patricia Lewis. Lewis was also a project leader for the academy. Lewis had worked the same deal in Georgia with a charter school that was denied renewal due to financial irregularities and probable cheating on the state test. The Harris Academy never opened.
Consultant Lorilyn Coggins operated two consulting companies that made money from four different ghost schools. She was not the only consultant making good money from charter schools that never actually opened.
The report also provides several examples of how a non-profit charter is simply a pass through for a for profit corporation. For example, the White Hat Management company was an Ohio-based for profit charter management organization that operated sixteen Life Skills charter schools in five different states. Some of those charters paid 97% of their income to White Hat, which also operated a real estate company that leased buildings to schools. Thirteen of the Life Skills charters have ceased operations.
The report also drills down in two charter-heavy (Arizona and Ohio) to see why charters fail. In both states, enrollment was the primary cause (despite the fabled charter waiting list we often hear about) followed by mismanagement/fraud, then financial issues and academic concerns. The study also found a surprising number of charters that closed because the operator simply abandoned them. Stories also illustrate the shock and surprise that occurs when charters simply and suddenly close up shop mid year.
Among the report’s conclusion is this:
We have concluded that the practice of allowing unauthorized schools to receive funds, which has been in effect since 2001, has become a magnet for grifters, consultants and charter entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash in.
It’s worth remembering that the report only covers the grants dispersed by the feds; this doesn’t tell us anything about how much state or philanthropist money took the school bus ride to nowhere.
Charter supporters are going to say that when charter schools close, that’s just the free market doing its magic to thin out the charter herd to leave us with stronger, better charter schools. Even if this burn and churn is a feature and not a bug, it’s a very expensive feature, costing not just a billion dollars in taxpayer money, but in the human cost of families who are disrupted and displaced by charters that leave them high and dry. As one parent of a student at the hastily-closed Detroit Delta Prep Academy is quoted in the report, “I entrusted her education to a group of people—they're making me feel like I failed her, like I didn’t do enough research.”
It’s not just research that’s needed; the time is long past for charters to be subject to tighter regulation and accountability with bigger teeth. After twenty-five years of costly waste and fraud, it’s long past time for taxpayers’ dollars and children to get more protection from the operators who have entered the charter school business simply to fleece the public.
When the Washington State supreme court ruled charters unconstitutional just before the school year started, charter fans were outraged. "How can you just toss those charter students into the street? How can you destabilize their educational life?" That's a legitimate complaint. But if charter boosters feel that way about the loss of Washington's modest charter school fleet, how must they feel about the charters of Ohio?
Ohio has worked hard to establish itself as the Nation's Bad Example when it comes to charter, providing ample examples of every possible way to do charters poorly.
Earlier in the month, we were reminded of the scandal that unrolled when David Hansen, Ohio's department of education charter czar and husband of John Kasich's campaign manager, was forced to resign after it was discovered that he was cooking the books to pretty up the charters operated by big GOP donors (his defense was something along the lines of "Well, the rules are confusing and I don't see where it says I can't do this").
But the new year is barely under way and we are reminded, again, that Ohio wants to lead the nation in the vast number of charter schools that go belly up.
In East Columbus, families who thought they were sending their children to FCI Academy received a phone message the day before school was to start "reminding" them not to send their children to the school on Wednesday. Sure enough-- on Wednesday the building was locked and no officials to be found. The school turned out to be a half million dollars in debt, though that took some figuring since they also weren't keeping proper records or paying taxes.
FCI Academy was part of one more trend in John Kasich's Ohio-- religious-based charter schools. The school was headed by Tracey Posey, wife of Bishop Edgar Allen Posey of Living Faith Apostolic Church, and co-located with the church itself. The school had a history of financial issues, probably not unrelated to their employment of Carly Shye who was previously convicted of embezzling from various charter schools. FCI is not alone in its church-charter school model, which is unsurprising given Kasich's belief in churches as a replacement for the social service arm of government. Remember his school mentor program that initially required schools to partner with a church?
But there are so many, many charter stories in Ohio-- stories of corruption and incompetence and failure and if it seems like there are more stories than I can tell, more stories than we remember, a recent story from the Akron Beacon Journal tells us why.
The Beacon Journal's education writer is Doug Livingston, who does yeoman's work. In last week's story, he covers the death of yet another charter-- this time its the Next Frontier Academy of Akron-- and while the school's story is one more example of charter shenanigans, it's the context that Livingston creates that really shows how big a charter mess Ohio has become.
Next Frontier was just one more charter opened by educational amateurs; one of the co-founders appeared to want a school that he could use as a case example to sell his book about How To Fix Students. Mismanaged and unable to attract enough students, the school floundered quickly and blew through a stack of money, though as yet nobody knows how much because, once again, nobody really kept any useful records that they will yet share with the state. Their sponsor wanted to get pull the plug; the state said they could not. And, a la New Orleans, nobody is really sure which students attended the school or what has become of them since.
Livingston says that Next Frontier was one of 43 charters that opened in 2013. Today only 8 of those are still open. That's an 82% failure rate. And consider this:
Among the nearly 6,000 publicly funded agencies in operation during Next
Frontier’s two-year lifetime, state audits found that three of every
four missing taxpayer dollars were in charter schools — $6.3 million —
among the 400 in operation.
Livingston marks 2013 as the peak year in Ohio, when the number of charters that had been opened crossed the 400 mark. And now Next Frontier has become the 200th charter school in Ohio to close. And that is a 50% failure rate.
It also represents 200 times that students, families, and communities have been tossed and turned, their stability whacked on the head, by some charter operator. It represents a whole lot of students who have been left to twist in the wind. And it represents a huge amount of tax dollars wasted.
One could argue that Ohio is particularly egregious in its lack of charter regulation and oversight, and to their credit, many charter advocates have called for better policing of charter schools (though when one operator asks the state to help clear out messy competitors, that opens another can of worms).
But it's not just that Ohio has tried to set itself up as a charter wild west; the problems in the state are not unique to Ohio, but are the same old charter school problems writ in a large, messy scribble. The modern charter industry invites people to get in the business for all the wrong reasons, so that from Day One, a new charter has priorities over and above educating students. That set of priorities (make money) in turn invites shenanigans, because like the health insurance biz, a successful charter school runs on NOT providing the service it contracted for-- the less you can get away with doing for the "customer," the more money you keep.
And while the churn and competition and winners and losers of the free market have a place in many businesses, they have no place in public education. A 50% failure rate is fine for some businesses; it is not remotely fine for public schools. You can close as many restaurants as you want, and people can still eat. But schools should be near-permanent stable institutions in a community, answerable to the community, and committed to serving them (you know-- like the public schools that charter students are dumped back into when the charters tank). Charter schools are not inclined toward any of those goals or standards. The modern business-style model of a charter school is fundamentally flawed, inherently a mismatch for the mission of public education. The scale and scope of charter failure in Ohio is spectacular, but it is not fundamentally different from the charter problem in any other state.
This week Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale raised questions about more than $2.5 million dollars in lease reimbursements to nine different PA charter schools ( the Propel Charter School System in Allegheny County, the Chester Community Charter School in Delaware County and School Lane Charter School in Bucks County).
What we found in some of our audits is that the same people who own and operate charter schools, they themselves create separate legal entities to own the buildings and lease them to charter schools.
Folks advocating for public education often miss this aspect of the charter industry because it's not really education related. It is, however, big money related. It's why some critics of charters characterize them as more of a real estate scheme than an educational one. In Pennsylvania, what DePasquale found works like this-- Pat McGotbux starts a PM Charter School, a non-profit entity ( so you know it's not one of those evil for profits that everyone condemns). Pat then gets a building and forms PM Realty to lease the building from himself and ka-ching-- a whole lot of taxpayer money goes to make Pat rich with his "non-profit" school.
In Pennsylvania, part of the problem with these self-profiting arrangements is the same problem with all the other charter misbehavior in the state. DePasquale explains:
The problem is that we find zero evidence that the Pennsylvania Department of Education makes any effort to verify ownership of the buildings or look for conflicts of interest between the school and related parties. They simply write a check for whatever amount the charter school submits.
That's how we roll in PA. When charter operators get in trouble, it's likely to be because the feds caught him, not because the state was paying any attention.
The real estate side of charters is one of several loopholes that make non-profit charters highly profitable. A couple of years ago, the Wall Street Journal noted that the real estate side was attracting many players for a highly profitable bit of business. And states are helping:
Some states are beginning to make financing tools available to charter schools that had been limited to traditional public schools. For example, the states of Texas, Colorado and Utah now backstop tax exempt bond issues for some charter schools, reducing their capital costs when acquiring facilities, according to Scott Rolfs, managing director of B.C. Ziegler & Co., a niche investment-banking firm that has underwritten more than $600 million in charter school bonds.
But the growing role of for-profit real-estate developers has added a new dimension to the debate over charters, which are taxpayer funded and independently operated schools that are largely free of union rules. Critics say charter schools are in danger of cutting costly deals with developers who are more concerned with investment return than educating children. The result can lead to failed schools.
Carl Paladino, the notorious bad boy of the Buffalo school board, has made a mint in charter-related real estate deals. Not only does Paladino build the charters and lease them, but he builds the new apartment buildings near the shiny new school-- a one-man gentrification operation. And he sits on the public school board, where he can vote to approve and support the growth of charters.
That's not even the most astonishing sort of charter real estate scam. A 2015 report from the National Education Policy Center outlined what might be the worst. Take a public school building, built and paid for with public tax dollars. That building is purchased by a charter school, which is using public tax dollars. At the end of this, you've got a building that the public has paid for twice-- but does not now own.
In February of this year, researchers Preston Green, Bruce Baker and Joseph Oluwole dropped the provocative notion that charter schools may be the new Enron. It's a lot to take in, but Steven Rosenfeld pulled out five takeaways for Alternet, if you'd like a quicker look. But just some little factoids give you a taste. For instance, Imagine Schools take 40% of the money they collect from taxpayers and put that right back into lease agreements. In Los Angeles, owners of a private school leased room on their campus for a charter school that they were also involved in running-- then jacked that rent up astronomically.
In too many cases, a charter school is really just an education-flavored business, a means of driving some real estate profits for the owners of the building, and what goes on inside the building is unimportant and immaterial to the major players in the transaction. In other words, while we may sometimes get preoccupied with the education implications of a charter school, Auditor General Pasquale is right to remind us that sometimes it's not about the education at all.
Florida has long struggled to take the lead in the State Most Hostile To Public Education contest, with North Carolina, Wisconsin and Nevada giving some real competition. But this week, Florida's legislature and governor took a decisive leap forward.
Let there be no doubt-- no state is more hostile to the very idea of public education than Florida.
But then, letting terrible crap happen without standing in its way (well, unless it's those third graders trying to avoid passing the Big Standardized Test) is what Florida does best. They have left the field for charter schools wide open, while doing their best to hamper public schools so that charters would look by comparison. Which is a challenge, because in Florida we have so many awesome charters to choose from. How about the charter that fired an English teacher for assigning actual reading? How about a charter organization making money for a former model, but not actually educating anyone? Or a charter that's run only to enrich a family, but which fires its whole staff. Or a charter that abruptly closes mid-year. Here's an entire report that captures pages of Florida charter frauds and scams, because none of these examples is unique within the state.
But for some of Florida's education-- well, "leaders" isn't exactly the word, so let's call them Buckaneers, after the brave pirates who used to raid Florida in days of old, and yes, I spelled it with a K on purpose-- anyway, those guys didn't see enough destruction happening fast enough, and so, HB 7069.
Florida HB 7069 is everything there is to hate about the legislative process. The Miami Herald figures there are pieces of 55 old bills stapled together in this ugly dog.Cobbled together in some collection of dark back rooms, it offers a giant poop sandwich with a pickle on top, in hopes that people who like pickles will buy it.
Except that, in the end, the Florida GOP didn't make any real effort to sell it to anyone, though some of the charters that stood to profit from it assigned letter-writing duties to their parents. And some newspapers played along-- the Orlando Sentinel, in a truly amazing display of journalistic malpractice, covered the story as a bill "to scale back testing." The whole business came down to an 11th-hour hope that if enough opposition could be mustered to the bill, Gov. Rick Scott would accidentally follow his naked self-interested into doing the right thing and veto this unholy bastard of a bill.
That did not happen. In fact, because simply signing the bill wasn't enough of a big fat "F@#! You!" to all supporters of public education, Scott signed the bill in a Catholic School, like the faithless jerk who cheats on you with some loose sleazebag, and then brings the sleazebag to the family picnic, just to rub it in your face.
The bill includes hundreds of pages, but opponents and supporters agree on what it does-- the bill shifts millions of taxpayer dollars from public education to the charter industry. Senator Linda Stewart summed it up pretty well here in her comments:
The legislation you signed today gives to the charter school industry a free hand and promises them a bountiful reward. It allows corporations with no track record of success, no obligation to struggling students, and no mandated standards of accountability to flourish, with the sole obligation to their shareholders. Not the public. Not to well-intentioned parents desperate to see their children succeed – but to a group of investors who have made a business decision to add these companies to their portfolios because they are interested in making money.
Rep. Michael Bileca, a Miami Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee, said legislators met with charter school operators and asked what it would take for them to set up schools in the neighborhoods now served by traditional public schools. He said one answer was that they needed help paying for new buildings to house the school.
Voila! HB 7069 gives charters the ability to just go ahead and suck up tax dollars for purposes like buying or building facilities.
The bill also provides the cynically-named "Schools of Hope," which is an unbridled license for charter schools to expand in markets where the public school has been sufficiently weakened-- and no requirement to accept the students from that community. The state's voucher program has been expanded. And a charter no longer needs the permission of a local district to expand-- just its money.
There are yet more amazing features (after all, it's almost 300 pages). Charter schools get to "grade" districts (but not, of course, vice versa). Title I funds are up for redistribution. New charters may ignore local zoning laws. Charters may of course hire any warm body they like, regardless of qualifications. And in a particularly baldfaced unsupportable move, HB 7069 says that if Chris does a lousy job as a student at Gotrox Charter Academy, then goes back to public school, the public school has to count all of Chris's failure in their public school grade.
It is true that HB 7069 does stop short of, say, allowing charter operators to take the food from in front of students in public school cafeterias. Nor does it allow charter operators to attack public school buildings with tanks or bazookas. But charter advocates are peeing themselves with glee. It is absolutely open season on public education in Florida, with the traditional system to be replaced with a corporate marketplace with a single purpose-- to make a bunch of money while pretending to sort of educate a select few students, kind of. Students will be at the mercy of whatever the market wants to offer them, while the children of the rich will head off to private schools. What happens when the state burns down your public school and no reputable or competent charter wants you? Some Floridians are about to find out.
There is no pretending this will serve students. Florida's education system has already been failing masses of students by gutting public schools and replacing them with unregulated, unqualified, unscrupulous charter operators, and this bill openly and deliberately accelerates that process. North Carolina has been trying hard to show us what one-party rule with no regard for democracy or the rights of citizens looks like, but it turns out they are just wanna-be's compared to the money-hungry back-room operators of the Florida GOP. I have seen on the twitterverse that some legislators may have voted for this abomination thinking that Scott would veto it (which-- really? Have you met your governor) and that other folks failed to speak out because they really like pickles and didn't believe the poop would be that hard to choke down. Shame on all of them. I know there are still good schools and good teachers left in Florida, but after this week's action, I wouldn't send my worst enemy to teach in Florida, nor their children to go to school there.
And do not forget--
This is what Betsy DeVos thinks is an example for us all. This is what she thinks the whole country should look like.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced Friday that the department will pump yet another $131 million into the charter school industry (you may have missed the news; a few other things have happened in the last 48 hours).
The grants go to 19 different organizations, primarily charter school "developers." Amounts range from a tiny $299,988 to Acadia Academy in Maine up to $18 mill to Florida's department of education and $23 mill to the Texas ed department. There are a couple of state-level agencies, and a couple of charter-financing groups. Most intriguing [digression alert] is the $592K award to the ALL FOOTBALL CLUB LANCASTER LIONS CORPORATION. I don't know why they're in all caps, but then, I'm not sure why they're in the running for one of these grants. The AFC Lancaster Lions are an "American professional development soccer team" based in Lancaster PA. The corporation was formed in 2014. The organization was founded by Brian Ombiji, a pro "soccer player-turned-CEO" who came here from Kenya. He wants to start a "sports-infused charter school" for grades five through eight.
In addition to the typical core subjects, the school would offer courses related to print and broadcast journalism, fitness and nutrition, scouting, analytics and other sports-centered topics.
It would not be a shock if AFCLL Academy Charter School crashed and burned or even experienced failure to lift off, because that is the not-uncommon historic pattern of such grants. DeVos is doling out tax dollars from the Charter Schools Program (CSP) fund. You may recall that this is the program that has, over its lifetime, lost over a billion dollars to waste and fraud. Like really a lot of waste and fraud and the charter school equivalent of vaporware--schools that never even open.
But DeVos is kind of stuck in her covid talking point loop.
“The coronavirus pandemic has made it clearer than ever before that students need the freedom to choose where, when and how they learn,” said Secretary DeVos. “All too many students, particularly the most vulnerable, have fallen further behind because the one-size-fits-all system couldn’t transition and adapt to meet their needs. A bright spot has been high-quality charter schools, many of which pivoted quickly and kept learning going. These grants will help to ensure these high-quality options are available to even more students in the future.”
Well, no. Charter schools haven't been any better at pivoting than anyone else. Heck, the shining sun that is Success Academy has announced it will be doing distance learning till at least January. But then, Succes Academy is more one-size-fits-all than any public school; like too many charters, it has its one size and it accepts only the students who fit.
The DeVos covid argument highlights one of the fallacies of market-based education. Because it's true that many parents want a choice--they want to be able to choose a school that's open for regular face-to-face learning without any impediments like masking and PPE and weird social distancing rules, and they would also like that school to be completely free of the virus and their children and their family at no medical risk, and while that is a super-appealing choice, no matter how much families want it--the market is not going to provide it.
The market provides what it wants to provide, not what the customers want it to provide. And the charter (and voucher) school market don't have to provide what everybody wants--they just have to please enough people to fill their schools, which means all you families with difficult or expensive students to educate can just go away.
But hey-- let's dump another $131 million into charter school prop-ups and profiteers. It's not like public schools have any special pressing extra needs at the moment.
Her 9 things make a nice compendium of what choice advocates offer as arguments these days. Let's consider them in the order she presents them.
1) Sullivan cites the American Federation for Children poll as proof that Americans want school choice for realsies. As Diane Ravitch pointed out to me when I wrote about that poll, it's interesting that in all the times choice has been on a ballot in the states, it has never won once (update: my mistake-- with huge backing, a charter bill did finally just pass in Washington) . At any rate, looking to AFC for information about school choice is like looking to R. J. Reynolds for information about the effects of smoking.
2) More than 100K students use vouchers to attend private school (according to Center for Education Reform, another school choice booster group). There are a little under 50 million K-12 students in the US, making voucher students about 0.2% of the student population. It's a good number to remember the next time anybody offers students in a voucher program as proof of anything.
3) There are 6,500 charter schools open now. Well, probably, more or less. Hard to say exactly how many have opened or closed this week. According to the National Alliance for Public School Charters, 2.5 million students are enrolled. Sullivan did include one actually interesting factoid here-- half of all charters are in four states (California, Texas, Florida and Arizona).
4) The Center for Education Reform offers grades each state on its charter school swellness. It's a fifty-five-point scale, and twenty-five of those points are based on independent authorizers and number of schools allowed. Fifteen more points for a combination of state and district autonomy, along with "teacher freedom," whatever that is supposed to be. Final fifteen are for funding. The A states are DC, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan and Arizona.
5) Eight states don't allow charters (North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Vermont, West Virginia, Alabama and Kentucky, though Nebraska is likely to change under a new pro-charter governor). It's an interesting list. Do you suppose the lack of any juicy urban profit centers is a factor for these states?
6) Charter schools go out of business. Sigh. I wish this weren't news to people, but as we repeatedly see, it is. The NAPSC reported that 200 2012-13 charters didn't open again the following year. The Center for Ed Reform says that of 6,700 that ever were, 1,036 have closed since 1992. I do not know how to make those figures fit with the figures in item 3.
7) Charter schools are getting better results. This is based on the wishful thinking and fluffy unicorns study released bu CATO studying Texas charters. In fact, there are no conclusive studies showing that charters do it better, and where marginally better results occur (and also when they don't, which is sad for the charter) those results are readily explained by how the charter manages its student body with selective intake and pushing out low performers. There are virtually no examples of charters attempting to educate an entire student population in the same way that a public school system must. So far we've had one all-charter district, and it failed to have any positive effect whatsoever.
8) The US Senate passed a resolution recognizing National School Choice Week, sponsored by Tim Scott (Rep-SC) with ten co-sponsors including Ted Cruz , Rand Paul, and Dianne Feinstein.
9) The two biggest teachers' unions got their asses handed to them by pro-school-choice candidates, achieving victory only over Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, who arguably could have been beaten by my dog. There's a whole host of explanations for those electoral victories, and they do underline how disconnected AFT and NEA leadership are from absolutely anything at all. I suspect the elections mostly show that political fooferawing only moves the needle so far. Scott Walker wasn't going to lose unless someone caught him on video beating a nun to death with a puppy. Tom Corbett wasn't going to win even if someone had a video of Jesus endorsing him.
Sullivan's article is one more example of the long game that charter and choice advocates are playing. Just keep insisting something is true long enough (public schools are failing, vaccines are dangerous, fluoride makes you communist, The Bachelor is a show about finding true love, charter schools are popular and successful) and eventually it enters Conventional Wisdom as, at a minimum, a "valid alternative view." It's not necessary for the things to be true, or even supported by facts-- just keep repeating them uncritically and without argument, and eventually, they stick.
The Texas business couple who wanted to launch a Pennsylvania cyber charter that used 2 hours of AI in place of more hours with actual teachers has been denied, and denied hard, by the state department of education.
MacKenzie and Andrew Price have pioneered a new school model in which students spend two hours in front of screens and the rest of the day pursuing life lessons, all with no adult involved other than a "guide." The proposed school-- Unbound Academy-- involved a set of interlocking businesses all connected to the Prices. It was going to be a sweet deal allowing them to hoover up piles of Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars. (You can read all about it here.)
Arizona (the "We'll Try Anything Except Support Public Schools" state) said yes to the Prices. Three other states said no, and now Pennsylvania has joined the list of folks passing. The 25-page letter of rejection highlights just how amateur-hour the Prices' application was (You can view the application here).
Pennsylvania considers five criteria when considering a cyber charter application. Writes the department:
While a single deficiency would be grounds for denial, the Department has identified deficiencies in all five of the required criteria.
0 out of 5! That's a hard fail. Let's break it down.
Criterion 1: Unbound Academic has provided no evidence of sustainable support for the cyber charter school plan by teachers, parents or guardians, and students.
Does anybody actually want these guys? The application contained no letters or petitions supporting the school, and no supporters took advantage of the period of public support. The Prices mobilized zero ground troops to show the commonwealth that someone really wanted one more cyber charter in Pennsylvania.
Criterion 2: Unbound Academic lacks the capability, in terms of both support and planning, to
provide comprehensive learning experiences to students.
This broke down to several points. For one, the school didn't have insurance. "We're working on it, and we are totally insurable," they claimed. But they didn't have any quotes other than numbers from their other schools, which are neither cyber charters nor located in Pennsylvania.
They also failed to show that their proposed location was adequate for their offices, especially in light of their proposed expansion. They claimed it was a co-working space. My googling research suggests that it's actually a FedEx where you can rent a mailbox. The department notes that the application was pretty thin on physical details about the office space. And they don't appear to have an actual lease (which is normal for mailboxes).
Most brutal here is the third point: "The Applicant fails to reflect an understanding of cyber charter school finances." They appear to have failed to distinguish between general and special ed student rates, and a bunch of the enrollment assumption data turned out to be suspect (and beyond their ability to explain at their hearing). Nor do their figures match what's happening in Pennsylvania's other cyber charters. The Prices do not appear to have done their homework.
The state notes that the Prices project becoming the 8th largest cyber in the state within five years, but appear to not grasp how churn affects cyber charter enrollment. (Fun side fact-- the letter includes some data about other cyber churn rates, which averages 20% or higher, meaning at least one in five cyber students leaves every year).
Criterion 3: There is no compelling evidence that Unbound Academic’s proposed programs
will enable students to meet academic standards
The Prices included precious little information about their actual curriculum with their magical 2HourLearning program.
The Applicant did not provide documentation or description of the curriculum framework which could have provided evidence that learning objectives and outcomes have been established for each course offering in the Application or during the November 7 Hearing. The Applicant also did not provide any information regarding the number of courses required for students, materials to be used, planned activities, or procedures for measurement of the objectives, nor did it adequately explain the amount of time required for students to be online in order to meet the course standards for offered grades.
The other schools run by the Prices are all private, high-tuition, entrance exam schools. Their cyber proposal was weak-to-empty on programs for special needs or other students from vulnerable groups. Nothing at all for English Learners.
Nor do they have any plan for professional development of staff. And while the commonwealth has some requirements for inducting new staff into a school, the Prices had nothing at all in mind for meeting those requirements.
During the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant shared that the teacher induction plan builds upon itself, and training would be based on an observed teacher’s needs, using assessment benchmarks along the way to determine future employability.
The Prices haven't hired or worked with teachers before--their private school uses AI and guides, supposedly. Looking at their application, I was a little fuzzy on whether they intend to hire actual certified teachers for Unbound. If that was the plan, there was no plan for onboarding them.
Criterion 4: Unbound Academic’s Application is non-compliant with requirements of Section
1747-A.
This is formal governance stuff, and the letter lists 16 criteria--and how Unbound failed each one.
Highlights include the need for a board. Unbound has a board of five Pennsylvania residents, but it has never met, and as of the hearing, it had no meeting scheduled. No curriculum. No mission. No actual admissions policies. No suspension or expulsion policies written down. No agreements worked out with local districts for student participation in extracurriculars (in PA, cyber students can still be active in local extracurriculars and sports). No official clearances for student-facing personnel. No clear explanation of how instruction will be delivered. No explanation of what actual hardware will students be issued. No procedure for how student attendance and school day will be defined. No technical support for parents and students. No explanation of how data will be protected. No explanation of how student work will be deemed authentic. No truancy policies.
Each of these items could have been addressed in either the application or the hearing before the board.
Criterion 5: Unbound Academic fails to substantiate that it will serve as a model for other
public schools.
In all fairness to the Prices, I'm not sure any cyber charter in Pennsylvania meets this criterion. But the Prices were pretty much banking on the AI education thing (which, in their case basically seems to mean Khan Academy and the like). The board saw straight through this pitch.
Artificial intelligence (AI) presents unique opportunities that educators across Pennsylvania are exploring through effective, safe, and ethical implementation. However, the artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods, and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards. When questioned at the public November 7 Hearing, the Applicant stated that this model was used “in several private schools across Texas”, although the model has been used for Ukrainian refugees in Poland [both examples are other Price operations]. At the time of the November 7 Hearing, the Applicant had not been approved for a virtual charter school, so there is no data that supports the efficacy of this model.
In other words, AI is cool and all, but you guys have only used it on select live students, and since you've never tried it on a cyber-school, nobody knows if it works, including you.
And so
I wish that were the end of it, but the Prices do have the opportunity to revise and resubmit their application, so I suppose we'll see how badly they want this. But in the meantime, hats off to the department for doing their job.
Trombetta is the founder-operator of PA Cyber Charter School (until 2013, just as the fertilizer met the fan) and also the founder of Lincoln Performing Arts Center School and some other charter-related businesses. PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (the guy who called PA charter laws the worst in the nation) found a number of issues, including hiring family members for big-money jobs, and funneling giant gouts of money to a no-oversight management company. All shady and costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, but also, as DePasquale notes, perfectly legal under Pennsylvania charter law. The state of Pennsylvania was never going to so much as bother him because, by PA charter law, he was perfectly within his rights to hire a computer company that was co-owned by a trustee (board member).
The feds, however, were another matter. They caught Trombetta stuffing his own pockets with $8 million of taxpayer money. Trombetta fought the charges, but in 2016 finally fessed up. Since then, his sentencing has been repeatedly postponed, but is now scheduled for his sentencing for tax fraud and conspiracy in July. The conspiracy part is because Trombetta had some partners in this web of fraud who helped him cook the books.
PA Cyber would like everyone to know that they are among the wronged parties here, and that they are like a whole new land of upright swellness ever since Trombetta et al were ousted.
Of course, like all PA cyber charters, they have failed to meet the standard for Big Standardized Test scoring, and the state of Pennsylvania is no more ready to ferret out charter misbehavior than they were back when the feds had to step in and stop Trombetta.
Or as former state legislator and thorn in PA Cyber's side Karen Beyer said back in 2013: I figured that justice would ultimately be served, that they would be found out — how he had defrauded the taxpayers of Pennsylvania. We still have cybercharter schools that are unregulated. This plea should stand as a warning to the Legislature that they have got to do something about regulating these schools.
Spoiler alert: they still haven't. Will things get any better in PA? Who knows. But Nick Trombetta will have up to five years to figure out his next business enterprise.
The Center for Education Reform is a hard-driving reformster that works hard to promote charter schools. Or as they put it on their website, "Since 1993, CER has created opportunities that give families choices, teachers freedom and students more pathways to achieve a great education."
CER joined many ther players at the ASU GSV Summit, which the New York Times calls "the must-attend event for education technjology investors." Co-sponsored by Arizona State University and GSV Capital, the conference started seven years ago " in the desert they braved the desert of San Diego."
CER presented a panel at the summit that is just riveting (in the sense that some portions make you want to drive rivets into your own skull. It does this for almost a full hour, and while I will embed the video at the end of this post, you may still owe me, because I watched the whole damned thing, taking notes, so that you don't have to.
It was not pretty, and it was not fun, but it was at time fascinating and illuminating. I'm just going to walk you through it, and if any time we stumble across an insight to take away, I will just shout it out. Get some popcorn and tighten your seatbelt, because this may take a little while.
Our moderator is Jeanne Allen, Founder and CEO of the Center. She's never taught a day in her life, but she's delighted to "wreak havoc on the status quo," perhaps not having gotten the memo that reformy stuff now is the status quo.
Allen opens up this panel on innovation and change by observing that charters have barely captured 6% of student population, but at the same time she notes that digital learning "is hip, it's real." Yes, all the cool kids are chartering these days. Probably while listening to the raps.
But now that we're warmed up, let's begin the long, long chartery beguine.
First up, Allen is going to ask a question of Susan Wolford, who's here on behalf of BMO Capital, an investment wing of the Bank of Montreal. So what question can we ask her about innovation in education reform? New pedagogical techniques? New ways to improve educational outcomes for students with certain types of learning challenges?
Allen: What are investors looking for? Are they happy with the state of innovation?
Yup. That's where we're starting. Wolford's main official point is that investors are most interested in what works. But Wolford has another drum she wants to beat today, and she beats it with authentic enthusiasm. "Anything having to do with making money is a dirty word in education which I scratch my head and don't understand since we live in a world that measures success" based on whether people want to buy the thing you want to sell or not.
Does that irk you? Fasten your seatbelt, then, because she will top that many times before we are done. Anyway, she gets back on message with the Investors Want To Invest In What Works, and now she will either reveal a astonishing level or naivete or display a gobsmacking level of cynicism, because she wants us to know that the "what works" thing "should give comfort to people who worry about the moneymaking thing because you can't make money over the long term if you sell what doesn't work" because--wait, really? Because investors only care about making money in the long term, and never just grab a company and try to squeeze money out of it quickly with no regard to long term effects? Because only top quality products survive and prosper in a free market? Well, that's reassuring to people who are emotionally invested in Betamax and ENRON.
Now we'll hear from Ed Fields from Hotchalk, a company working hard for "over a decade" to handle on-line educationny stuff. They made investors happy by pointing out that it would be big business and answering another important question-- "Is there a scale opportunity that would throw off meaningful profits as it served students and institutions at scale." Fields explains that serving students means giving them a "meaningful return on their educational investment" by which he means they get a better job at which they make more money, and he expects the pressure on this to escalate as "consumers" become more "discriminating" and all higher ed is held to these money-making standards.
So education is a commodity, an investment opportunity that only has value in its way to make more money for everyone involved.
Mind you, Fields says, there's a place for liberal arts. Nut the vast majority of consumers will create pressure to lead to "real return on investment." Yes, education is just like a toaster. A bland, featureless utilitarian toaster. Great.
Next up, it's Johnatan Hage, President and CEO of Charter Schools USA. CSUSA and Hage have been at this for a while. Hage rode the charter wave back in the nineties in Florida, as a buddy of Jeb Bush, where he made a killing in charter real estate, while displaying the kind of humility that leads a man to name his big yacht "Fishin' 4 Schools."
Hage is asked what conditions he needs for innovation. He waxes rhapsodic for a moment about how things have changed during his twenty years in the game (it has changed, but it hasn't). Choice only takes place if law allows it. It's no longer controversial (at least, I suppose, at cocktail parties he attends with his friends on yachts) but choice is still not available to the vast majority. Polls show people want to choose, he says, which is kind of a mystery because if the vast majority of people want vouchers and charters and choice, why don't they. I suppose he would say the Damned Teacher Unions but if the DTU is so powerful, why do I not have a yacht?
Hage talks about the need for a business model that works, and then he launches a long extended metaphor about being in a race and building the car as you race and there's no track yet, which is all kinds of tortured and raises the question of why we have to be in a race? And then he revisees his idea and says business models have to come second and having a mission comes first.
Another thing to learn: Reformsters still feel oppressed. Hage says that the great successes are not talked about. All the news focuses on the tiny charter failures instead of the great charter performances. Yes, it's all media bias. If only they could collect several million dollars to fund one or two websites devoted to pushing their own message out there, or create one or twelve think tank advocacy groups to selling policy to legislators. If only.
Allen now brings up the question of risk. Specifically, is there a resistance to "risk in the K-12 space."
Goenner says it's a miracle we've come so far. His vision is actually pretty simple. If you had $120K, could you get your kid a K-12 education? Just buy up the pieces-parts of education to suit the person. And everyone laughs and jokes about how seriously too-much-money that is, and Goenner conjectures for a second about what he'd do with the left-overs, but I'm thinking that $120 is not a hell of a lot for twelve years of education.
But now Wolford is going to jump in. She says some folks dig personalization for private sector, but investors don't have much faith in the public sector. But since charter's get better results at lower cost, she says, she should would "invest in that all day." And having thrown out a bunch of made-up support, she will now once again heap mockery on people who worry about children:
If it weren't that we were offended at the idea of making money off of children (air quotes, for some reason)-- which I always think that's funny because we sell them clothes and candy and all kinds of stuff-- okay, fine (big chuckles all around)-- don't want to hurt the little kids with all the toys--um, what a horror show that would be-- but more importantly, um, I think that, again, investors want to invest in something that actually produces a better outcome than the free alternative, and there are lots of examples, and whether or not it's personalization or not is secondary to am I delivering value for the dollar...
Got it? Treating children as profit centers is natural and normal and only big wussies object. After all, we already treat them as mini-consumerists in training (well, at least the ones that aren't too poor), and there's surely no problem with that. Why not extend it to education as well. Just little widgets buying other widgets.Everything and everybody is a widget and when we rub all the widgets together, money falls out and lands on the deserving few-- the ones who are willing to view children as monetized widgets.
Also, she notes that there is skepticism about personalized learning. I presume she means "as a means of generating ROI."
Allen asks about personalized learning in higher ed, and Fields says it's swell, that you can get a master's in education without commuting to campus. Apparently human interaction is not an important element in such things.
Hage says that CSUSA uses Hotchalk for PD, and they are trying to build a platform. And here comes the pitch for charters:
See, many companies are unable to survive, not because they aren't great, but "the dry desert of trying to sell into the existing system takes time and money." Innovation can only take place in the "fertile ground" of charter schools, which are set to be the innovation laboratories for everyone else. He quotes Reed Hastings (Netflix chieftain and notorious school board pooh-pooher) to say that companies are dying on the vine trying to get through district doors, but charters-- charters are hungry for innovation. For neither the first nor the last time, nobody will consider the possibility that educators resist "innovation" because it's crap, because they know what they're doing, and because experimenting on children is not really our thing. Nope. Reformstrers are still the hack artists who are pissed off that the Louvre won't hang their crayon drawings in the main gallery.
Hage says that districts should look to us to innovate, not hate us. So for a moment the panel considers the idea of "Innovate, Not Hate" as a slogan. If that is an example of their innovative ideas, I think I can see part of the problem.
Goenner introduces the idea that choosing certainty of results aka accountability as your main focus is the enemy of innovation, but Allen wants to redirect-- isn't it bureaucratic expectations that might destroy the "fertile ground"? Goenner says that emphasis on proven models box out new ideas, and I look forward to the first time that one of Goenner's loved ones is in the hospital and Goenner says, "Screw the proven method of treatment for this problem; I want you to try something new and innovative."
I will give him his next point, because you know I love a good comparison. Goenner says that charters are like marriage-- some people implement it poorly, but we still think marriage is a good idea. Well played, sir. Game recognizes game.
Allen asks Wolford if money people know what education people and charter people are talking about? Wolford finds that question interesting and says that some are well-informed. In fact some have been in it so long-- and here Wolford says "another horrible statement is about to come out of my mouth-- they know more than the educators do." And, no, that statement is not so much a horrible statement as it is just stupid and wrong. And she will double down. More than any other, education is a place where there are good products that never become successful.
Which first contradicts her earlier statement that you can spot success because success = people buy your product, so perhaps what she should be saying is"Companies come up with products that we think are good for ed, and they turn out to be crap that nobody will touch. Maybe we are very bad at figuring out what constitutes a good education product." But that thought is nowhere near her brain.
No, can you guess who is to blame, if not the people who come up with the product? Why, everyone else. Government, administration, parents, children. Investors, Wolford says, hate that idea.
You can have a good thing that doesn't work because there are all these people with a right to an opinion.
Yes, if people would just behave and understand that our ideas our awesome and plunk down their money, things would run so much more smoothly. Remember her first investor question? Does it work? Well, question number two asked by investors is, "Will the people who make decisions allow it to work." Which is kind of like, "Will people who make decisions allow companies to substitute corporate judgment for the professional judgment of educators?"
But boy do these foilks suffer. Wolford notes that companies that deal with the FDA have nothing on ed sector companies. Now everybody gets a fun question-- what would you tell the next President about education innovation?
Wolford: They should stop thinking of profit as a dirty word. Honestly, at any moment, I expect her to say that Greed Is Good. Innovation takes place because people are rewarded, so innovators should be rewarded for taking risks, not shamed for trying to make money off kids. But if we reward them for taking risks, then there's no risk, is there? I mean, it's only a risk if you can lose. And what I'm hearing in this conversation is that investors and companies are pissed off because they took a risk and it failed and they want their money back, which just is not how risk works. And the Invisible Hand of the Free Markey says, "Oh, you made a product that you couldn't sell. Boo-frickin'-hoo. You lose. The invisible hand says you fail and you go out of business." So I'm not sure exactly what kind of market they want to operate in. But Wolford would like us to know that the current education system sucks and so we need plan B.
Fields: The world is being disrupted by data, which is an interesting idea until he offers Netflix recommendations as an example, which, yes, okay-- my world is disrupted by that data because it does such a lousy job of trying to substitute its programmers' judgment for my own. But he thinks we don't have an adequate standards for evaluating the data stuff.
Audience participation portion. Someone asks if it might not be better to grow ideas in independent schools (meaning, apparently, what we call private schools). Wolford notes that those schools are viewed as separate universe with students who are not representative of all students. In other words, a niche market.
Hage: Takes his shot at the President question, suggesting that Pres should have "healthy tolerance between innovation and risk." He also acknowledges that we're talking about children and public dolars and there have to be rules and protections, including front end rules about money, and back-end rules about measuring success. Failure should not be tolerated or repeated. Also, charters are here to stay, so public schools should make nice and we should all partner up, which seems reasonable except for the part where many states have created a system where any win for a charter must be a loss for public schools.
Allen turns to Wolford again because, I don't know, she's delivering such reliably obnoxious material? Anyway, Allen now asks how soon investors want their money back?
Wolford says that depends. The big three of K-12 (who go unnamed) will wait-- but while she's on the subject
I'm going to defend them because everyone thinks it's a horrible thing that we make money off these poor little children [and she says poor little children in a voice dripping with mockery-- did she play Miss Hannigan in community theater at some point?]
But they will wait. Family outfits (that includes Hage) will wait forever. Venture capitalists and private equity folks would like their money in 3-5 years.
Goenner: wants his shot at the Pres question now. We learned as children not put all our eggs in one basket, so make more than one bet. Which, well-- I'd rather not talk about education as if it were gambling. I suppose that makes sense if you think of education as a financial investment rather than a public good with a mission to educate all children. These guys really do have a completely different idea about what education is for.
Wrapping it up.
Hage notes that he's now a chair of something at CER. Frankly, even though I worked on this in shifts, I was having trouble tracking on the home stretch. Kind of like all the people who gave up on reading all the way through many paragraphs ago. Congratulations to those of you who are still here, particularly those of you who are not my mom.
So, anyway, Hage trows his road metaphor around again, but he wants us to know that lobbying legislators and being part of the policy discussion is important, because a while ago we hated government interference, but we like government interference when it tilts the playing field in our favor.
And Fields wants to say, again, that while we have crash test standards for cars, we have nothing similar for education, so we can't judge what works. Because crashing a car and educating a human being should be similar. It's true that measuring educational quality is a yet-unsolved problem, but it doesn't seem that any of these folks has said, "You know, we should go easy here since we're dealing with so many unmeasurables."
But we end instead with a straight-up plug for CER as marketing partners-- "If you have a new product," Allen announces, "come see us and we'll hook you up." Because at the end of the day, and the end of this panel, education is just a business and schools are just revenue centers and children are just money generating widgets.
