Left-wing photoblogger has the story here .
LA Times has it, too .
Could be an interesting Rohrschach for recalcitrant BMGers on charter public schools, those who've argued that Clintons, Gore, Obama, Kerry et al are traitors for their charter support.
1. Teacher Power.
Majority of teachers at a big high school in Watts just voted to cut ties with their union (the UTLA) and the district.
Their school will turn into 10 small charter schools, run by a group called Green Dot.
2. Conservative coup? Nope.
a. The teachers will actually join a new union — organized under the SEIU (janitors et al).
b. Green Dot, a nonprofit (like almost every charter school), is nonprofit. Head guy is former union head himself, did MTV Rock the Vote, longtime Dem stalwart — Steve Barr.
Backed by Gates Foundation (left leaning) and Eli Broad (one of nation's largest Dem givers ).
c. School board — all Dems — vote for it, 5-2.
(Disclosure: I work at a charter school, which makes me a tool of the evil conspiracy).
So….
What say you, reality-based community?
Finally a charter you can get behind 100%, not only good for inner-city kids, but also gets the union checkmark?
Or Antichrist light, with SEIU as Judas?
P.S. I'm mostly in the tank, but not totally. Charters are a mix. Some great, good, fair, bad. Here are two really lousy ones in Ohio .
Please share widely!
centralmaguy says
While I’m skeptical about the motives of many charter school advocates, there are success stories (like Roxbury Prep). This LA cluster of charters could work, especially since it has the backing of the bargaining unit. After all, if the teachers are on board and they pushed for the conversion, then there’s a good chance they’ll make it succeed.
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I’m a big supporter of innovative ideas to revolutionize education, from how children are taught to how schools as institutions are organized. I’m interested to see where this LA model goes. As long as public funds are being utilized for the good of students (especially inner-city students), and the faculty are behind it strongly, then I hope it works.
goldsteingonewild says
The 2 guys who founded Roxbury Prep now are in NYC.
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They wanted to open more schools like RP, and NYC has rolled out the welcome mat, so they left Boston.
joeltpatterson says
LA’s public schools are a mess.
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My sister has taught at LA elementary schools for 6 years, and the HR dept has yo-yo’ed everyone’s paycheck up and down, without really explaining why the changes occurred. Some people are missing paychecks and accounting firms that were supposed to fix it have not fixed it.
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I’m sure other teachers have had rougher experiences than my sister did, and I can’t say I blame them for trying this new way.
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But, about the Gates Foundation, I have to say I have serious reservations about the realism in their actions. They offer all this money for a school to transform itself, but once the transformation is done, they’ll cut off the money. And I don’t think it’s realistic to expect transformed school to actually operate on the same financial level after it has changed drastically. For example, they bring in lots of expensive equipment, which Gates pays for, but that stuff will have maintenance costs years down the line.
goldsteingonewild says
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a. It is possible for prize-winning Boston Public Schools to be MUCH better run than many other urban districts — DC and LA and Detroit — with very similar demographics. Stories like your sister’s do not come up much in BPS.
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and yet
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b. It is possible for BPS to also be the best of a struggling bunch, where almost none of the black and Hispanic kids in Boston or other urban districts will ever earn a college degree, and most of the 4th graders can’t read CLOSE to grade level.
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That’s the wave-particle duality here.
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2. As for your thoughts about Gates, I’d agree, and I think that THEY’d probably agree to an extent.
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Weirdly, the law that says a charitable foundation must give away 5% of its assets per year — minimum — means that the Gates Foundation must give away hundreds of millions per year, before they can figure out what works. So they’re doing an expensive trial and error approach.
ryepower12 says
It's that I'm opposed to the funding they siphon off. I like the idea of all sorts of different kinds of schools, especially in this day and age when everything is so standardized based. If students love the performing arts, they should be able to attend a high school focusing on it – same with aggies, techs and all sorts. But, like I said, the funding mechanism has to come from somewhere other than cities and towns (at least in Massachusetts).
The LA project certainly sounds different and worth a closer look, but there's another point important to remember: while many charters will do well, if they're siphoning off resources from other public schools in the area that are doing abysmal, they may not be having a net positive effect. At best, they'll give some students an opportunity to get out of a bad neighborhood – instead of doing something to turn a neighborhood into a great place for everyone.
peter-porcupine says
It was infinitely superior to the local middle school. He's turned out well, has a good paying job, etc.
Why SHOULDN'T my tax dollars have folllowed him to the charter school? When he went to a 'choice' public high school instead of the enormous and inferior regional he should have attended, the money was sent from my town to that high school. If he had gone to the local tech school instead, my town would have paid for his tuition thre as well.
Why is a public charter school any different than choice, magnet or vocational schools?
nopolitician says
The answer is that you did not pay for your child’s education with your tax dollars. You paid for the public education of your community’s children. You just happened to have a child in the game. Your taxes would have been the same either way.
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Your tax dollars buy the benefits that come with all children being educated, regardless of ability to pay. If people had to pay for their own education, although some would value it more, others simply wouldn’t be able to pay, and the end result would be a lot of trouble and poverty. Look at India, or many Latin American countries.
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Ever check the price of private schools? How many people can afford to pony up $10-20k per child per year? I doubt your annual property taxes, even paid over your lifetime, covers the cost of public education, particularly if you have more than 2 kids (because remember, those taxes pay for other things too). It only works because a lot of people don’t have 2+ kids. But everyone benefits from that education, so it’s incorrect to describe the process as a “pay your own way” system.
peter-porcupine says
But why are charter schools different than choice, maget or vocational schools which involve similar transfers of money?
ryepower12 says
Maybe because they came in late to the game? Perhaps cities and towns can afford the money they've been used to sending to charters and aggies, but charters added on to that have become the straw that broke the camel's back. Particularly when you factor in who would want to go to a charter school, versus a tech, I think this becomes a problem. Most high schools in Massachusetts can't really allow a tech-desiring student to shine, but many (if not most) charters seem to be teaching just about what regular public schools are teaching, but perhaps doing so in a different way. If you keep adding all of these 'different ways' to communities in the form of more and more charters, the strain to have a great public school system at all of our cities and towns' public schools becomes larger and larger. Certain students have a desire to go to a tech school, a number that isn't going to put at risk the ability for towns to service the general population, but potentially everyone could want to go to a charter – and I don't think public education could sustain itself in that way, at least if we're going to gaurantee that everyone receive a quality education.
All of this is why I'm a fan of pilot schools – we should bring new ways of learning and opportunities for each student to have an education suited to them – that works for them – in every public school in America. Pilots, in my mind, teach us how to do that just as well as any charter can. But, that said, I'm not opposed to funding charter schools if it doesn't hurt the funding of our entire public school infrastructure in the process – which means we'll have to spend more on education, not divert educational spending to charters.
ryepower12 says
2nd sentence:
Perhaps cities and towns can afford the money they've been used to sending to charters techs and aggies, but charters added on to that have become the straw that broke the camel's back.
pablo says
The charter was welcomed by all stakeholders.
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The school is still under the jurisdiction of elected local officials.
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The funding is identical to any other school.
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The student assignment plan is unchanged.
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The teachers were able to unionize, and craft a collective bargaining agreement aligned to the goals and mission of the school.
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No animals were harmed in the filming of this motion picture.
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I wish them well.
centralmaguy says
the kind of charter school “vision” former BOE Chair Peyser and his right-wing friends had in mind, i.e. all schools are charter schools, no more unions, etc.
goldsteingonewild says
Wasn’t quite welcomed by all stakeholders:
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Teachers union (UTLA) strongly and aggressively fought it (and plans to continue to fight).
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District officials hate the idea, fighting it too.
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A number of teachers want to keep status quo.
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Still okay?
pablo says
If a majority of the teachers voted for new representation, I count that as endorsement of the teacher/stakeholders.
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If the school board votes approval, I view that as endorsement by the district. After all, the district officials work for the local school board.
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This is a critical point for me, as a charter school entering a community that is paid for from local funds (such as a state aid garnishment), without the support of the appropriating authority or local school board, is my key problem with Commonwealth Charters. Without some sort of oversight by locally elected and accountable officials, you end up with the kind of problems you see right now at the charter school in Marblehead.
goldsteingonewild says
if i can link to many more corruption and mismanagement cases in traditional schools — all “overseen” by locally electable and accountable officials — do i “win” this point?
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granted, i don’t have time, not with the amount of TV sports consumption i plan to do this weekend. and then there’s the making of the snacks.
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still, in the last decade, out of 1,500 or whatever public schools in MA all governed by local officials, how many have been shut down for mismanagement or poor performance? Zero? because they’re all worthy enterprises? even the 75 schools always stuck in the bottom 5%?
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meanwhile, the DOE has shut down 3 out of 60 charters. State officials are more likely to step up on school issues than local ones.
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raj says
…It suggest that the teachers voted to de-unionize. They did not–they merely switched from one union to another.
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BTW, the SEIU’s membership is not limited to janitors. My spouse, when he was a MA government employee, was an SEIU member (a requirement for his position) and he was very much a professional.
joeltpatterson says
Apart from NEA and AFT for teachers, in Seattle Schools, the lunch workers are part of the Teamsters.
peter-porcupine says
sabutai says
The dramatics are a bit misleading, GGW. I'd love to switch from the NEA to the AFT. I never considered SEIU as an option, but I'd love to be a Purple Person. Doesn't mean I own a set of charter pom-poms to match yours.
Anyway, the blog you linked to — clearly inspired by Perez Hilton — has a pretty confusing and one-sided account, so I went to the grown-ups at the LA Times and learned this:
The “teachers firing their union” is nonsense. Of a massive 71 tenured teachers, 38 expressed written support for the change. That's a whopping 53.5%. At that's tenured teachers — the type so many charter-pushers complain about as being burnt out. In a district such as thi, the majority of the teachers are goingto be non-tenured due to high turnover. We never get to hear what they think…only the ones in their cushy, safe positions.
GGW, you got the headline wrong. This is man bites dog — a sensationalized story that bucks the trend.
nopolitician says
More like “man bites man”, or “self-interest always wins out”.
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Read this quote:
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The biggest drawback to public schools in a distressed urban area is that they must take all students. The bolded sentence in the quote shows that this will not be true for the new charter school. They will be able to exclude in some ways, some subtle, some direct.
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They have the advantage of not needing to answer the question of “what happens if we throw that student out”. A public school must answer that question. Any public school system could adopt a “get tough” policy on its students, expelling them for moderately bad behavior. The result would be thousands of kids on the streets, without any chance whatsoever. From society’s point of view, that’s bad, so it makes more sense to be more forgiving, which has the unfortunate result of making the schools weaker.
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This would appear to be a huge win for the teachers in that school. They were in the worst school in the district, they presumably had the worst mix of students. They now have the ability to alter their mix of students. The application process alone screens out the parents who are so disinterested with their children that they can’t bother to fill out an application. Requiring parental involvement implies that students with uninvolved parents will simply not be attending this school. That alone should make their jobs 50% easier right off the bat.
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I struggle with two perspectives on charters. From a parent’s point of view, I think a charter school that is geared toward parents who want educational excellence for their children, and who will be involved and supportive of a school system, is a great thing for an urban system. It gives parents an option other than moving from the system.
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But the result of the charter on the rest of the system is substantial, because if every concerned and involved parent is allowed to move their kids from the public schools to charter schools, the only students left in the public schools will be from households that don’t give a rat’s ass about education. Do you think the public schools will improve or get worse when the better students are siphoned out and only the worst remain?
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The other edge of the sword is that money is often taken from the public system and given to the charter based on the “average” student, but the students leaving are those that “cost” less than average. In other words, the charter success is based on arbitrage of the difference between cost of the students you receive and the price of students that you’re paid for. They use the difference to pay better, purchase better resources, or pay profits to their owners (for those that are for-profit).
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That’s a double-whammy for the public system, because they’re faced with higher concentrations of more expensive students with the same amount of per-student funding, and since many costs are fixed, it actually translates to less money spent per pupil on education.
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What is the answer? Ultimately, economics. Our economy has changed significantly. Jobs that provided a decent, although unstellar life for uneducated people are now scarce. Because of this, more people are just screwed. They can’t even meet their own needs so they’re not that worried about the needs of their kids. We’ve chosen a governmentally-based approach of providing public assistance to such people, funded by increased taxes, instead of an economically-based approach of economic rules on companies that result in higher employment at better wages, but which translates into higher prices for goods and services. Given the dependency that can stem from public assistance, I think the latter is the better approach.
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Another approach would be to break down the walls of economic segregation. If we can’t figure out how to create good jobs for those who want them, then let’s at least stop concentrating the kids of poor people in to a handful of schools. Concentrated poverty makes problems unsolvable. If poverty couldn’t be escaped, then the public might actually get concerned when it increased in their communities.
goldsteingonewild says
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You’re in Springfield, right? Aren’t you already losing thousands of kids?
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Status quo: Almost nobody is formally expelled, unless really violent assault.
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Result: Kids and teachers leave by choice. 50% of kids choose to drop out. Don’t you think that most persistently moderately bad behaving kids are in the 50%? Also, teacher departure rate is very high.
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My question: Let’s say you had a fair, transparent system of rules and accountability. Stipulate “fair” for a second, I realize devil is in details.
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And let’s say under that system, 40% of the kids got into trouble quite a bit for “moderately bad behavior”, and followed some sort of clearly escalating path — warning, detention, 3-hour Saturday detention, multiple parent meetings, contracts stipulating next steps, suspension, expulsion.
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In that pipeline, 30 of the 40% ultimately shaped up enough to stay in school. But 10% were expelled.
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And let’s say that cut down enough craziness in classroom and hallways that teachers were able to conduct more productive, useful classes, such that the dropout rate fell from 50% to 30%.
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Is that a good tradeoff?
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You lose 10% of kids for persistent bad, but not acutely violent, behavior. You’d have lost them anyway, based on your status quo numbers.
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Your graduation rate rises from 50% to 70%.
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Good deal?