Education for Sale at Your Local Charter Store

Most open-enrollment charter schools claim to be public schools. While it is true that these charters are publicly funded, they are privately operated, and if you dig deep enough into their inner workings, you will find that most are run for somebody’s profit.

Unlike public schools, which are run by democratically elected school board members, charter schools are usually run by an appointed or self-appointed board that is accountable only to itself, or by a for-profit company. In fact, the charter school/education management organization (EMO)/charter management organization (CMO) sector is one of the fastest growing cash cows in the investment industry.

It is no accident that profit is at the center of the charter school industry.  In an article tracing the roots of  the school privatization movement, the Detroit Free Press explained, “The charter school lobby is driven, not by research or data, but by an ideology that says every government function would be improved by applying ‘free-market’ principles.” In 2015, the Walton Foundation sponsored a symposium on investing in charter schools where investors were told: “It [the charter school sector] is a very stable business, very recession resistant…the industry is growing about 12-14% a year.” The speaker emphasized that the investor cannot lose, because “…the state is the payer on this category,” with tax breaks up to 39% for an added incentive.

Here’s how it works:

·        Charter schools run outright by for-profit company (EMO or CMO)

o   The state pays on a per-pupil basis for the schooling. In some states, local public school districts are forced to pay as well. The EMO/CMO supplies the curriculum, administrative functions, textbooks, desks, computers, and buildings.

o   With little regulation of charter schools, the EMO or CMO is free to charge whatever it wants in “administrative costs,” and many charter operators get rich on this alone. A national study found that charter schools spend on average $774 more per pupil per year on administration and $1,141 less on instruction than traditional public schools. One charter school owner in Washington, D.C., was paid $14 million over 10 years.

o   One third of all charters close within 10 years. According to NCES data, 2,500 charter schools closed between 2000 and 2013.  When the charter school shuts down, the materials, equipment, and buildings paid for with public money remain the property of the charter owner.

·        Charter schools run by appointed or self-appointed nonprofit board

o   The state pays on a per-pupil basis for the schooling. In some states, local public school districts are forced to pay as well. The state may make available extra funds for building facilities and the federal government may kick in some “planning grant” moneys. Then there are generous donations by school-choice “philanthropists” (i.e., school privatization activists) such as the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, the DeVos Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and others.

o   These charters often contract with EMO’s or CMO’s for administrative services, curriculum, materials, and a variety of other services. They are free to pay administrators more and teachers less and are unhindered by fair employment practices. A quick internet search will reveal multiple instances of fraud and abuse such as kickbacks, overcharging the state for equipment and materials, claiming students who never enrolled or enrolled and never showed up, and writing fraudulent grant proposals, to name a few.

·        Virtual, or on-line, charter schools

o   The on-line charter school receives the same support per pupil from the state as the traditional brick-and-mortar public school but has none of the expense of building and maintaining facilities, providing transportation or extracurricular activities, or running high expense programs like special education.

o   The Arkansas Virtual Academy, for example, in 2016-17 received $10.7 million in state funding and paid out $7.8 million to a national management company in Herndon, Virginia, called K-12. K-12 paid its top five executives more than $12 million in 2015 and spent more than $20 million in 2012 on ads to attract students and funding. Meanwhile, a Stanford University study found that on average virtual school students lose 42 days of reading instruction and 180 days of math instruction per year. Only profit could excuse this kind of ineffectiveness.

Charter schools may claim to be public schools, but the only thing public about them is the way they are funded. They are not publicly governed nor accountable to the public, their students and parents, or their employees. They do, however, turn over a lot of money that goes into someone’s pockets.

Information for this article was taken from Network for Public Education, Business Insider, Detroit Free Press, Huffington Post, Center for the Media and Democracy, and Arkansas Times.

Voucher bill backed by Trump administration takes aim at military children's schools

President Trump and his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have made no secret of their contempt for traditional public schools. Both Trump and DeVos are wealthy products of private schools. In his 2018 budget, Trump and DeVos, a billionaire activist whose experience with education consists solely of years of funding alternatives to public schools, proposed a $250 million national private school voucher program.

Fortunately, Congress was quick to nix the voucher program. Still, Trump and DeVos seemingly will leave no stone unturned in their efforts to privatize education. First, the new tax bill overhauled so-called 529 Savings Plans, converting them from a tax-protected college savings plan to a money-laundering scheme to grant large tax breaks to parents who send their children to private schools. Arkansas lawmakers fell for that one recently, when they passed their own 529 tax break that exempts up to $10,000 annually per child for private school tuition.

Now Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill (H.R.5199) to repurpose money that supports Department of Defense schools overseas and traditional public schools that serve children of military families in the U.S. into a voucher program to be used for private school tuition, on-line learning, home school supplies, tutoring, computer hardware and software, and a number of other "educational" purposes. The bill specifies that the funds can only be used for students who are not attending a traditional public school.

DeVos has been pitching such a bill to military families for at least a year. In an April 2017 visit to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, DeVos told parents the Trump administration wanted to provide vouchers so that military families could send their children to "any school they want."

"Not so fast!" says a coalition of more than 25 organizations representing more than 5.5 million active and former members of the U.S. Military. In a letter to House leaders, the coalition claimed that the voucher program would divert vital revenue that goes to school districts that serve military children, "critically compromising the quality of education they could provide to military children and their civilian classmates."

Of nearly 600,000 school age military children, more than 80 per cent attend public schools in their local communities. The proposed voucher program would be paid for by diverting Impact Aid, which offsets the cost of educating military children for local school districts that receive no property tax revenue from federal lands, such as military bases. 

Furthermore, the advocacy group noted that it would be counter-productive to defund Impact Aid in order to provide a minimal benefit ($2,500 to most children) to the small minority of military children who would qualify for the program. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the average annual cost of private high school tuition in the U.S. is $13,030, a far cry from the $2,500-$4,500 tuition voucher the bill would provide.

The idea of private school vouchers for military-connected children has been getting pushback from those affected since DeVos first started talking up the idea. In response to her support for a similar bill to H.R.5199 in 2017, the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools (NAFIS) and the Military Impacted Schools Association issued a joint statement saying that military families want more investment in public schools, not vouchers, claiming that such legislation "would set back education for military-connected students, period."

Citing the Military Interstate Children's Compact that has been adopted by all 50 states and Washington, D.C., that addresses challenges military families encounter with enrollment, placement, attendance, eligibility and graduation, the director of NAFIS noted that "supporting military families and the unique needs of military-connected children is a top priority for public school districts and states." She further noted that "the Compact only applies to public schools."

Research into school voucher programs generally has found little to no evidence of improved academic performance in voucher schools. In fact, studies of voucher programs in Indiana and Louisiana have shown that voucher students scored significantly lower in math and reading than students attending the states' public schools. 

An ABC News poll of all likely voters found that 40 per cent support and 55 per cent oppose government funded private school vouchers. When asked if they would support vouchers even if it meant less money would go to public schools, the support fell to 23 per cent in favor of vouchers with 70 per cent against. 

In the face of this overwhelming lack of support and evidence of ineffectiveness of voucher programs, it will be interesting to see if Congress passes Rep. Banks' voucher bill. If they do, it will be one more example of ideology, not science or the will of the people, driving education policy in Washington.

Arkansas is not and never will be Oklahoma...UNLESS....

Both Arkansas and Oklahoma are deep red states. They have similar conservative majorities in their Legislature and their Constitutional offices. Both states have poverty rates of about 17%. Both states have traditionally ranked low in many education measures, including student achievement and teacher pay.

However, there is one major reason why Arkansas is not in the same boat as Oklahoma, with its drastically reduced spending on education, bottom of the ladder teacher pay, overcrowded classrooms, and pared down curriculum.

That is Arkansas' Lake View school funding lawsuit, in which the Lake View School District maintained that the state's apportioning of resources among public schools was neither equitable (citing large disparities in teacher pay, school facilities, and educational opportunities between the economically distressed areas of the state and prosperous, growing regions like Northwest Arkansas) nor adequate (the state did not invest enough money in education to fund equitable opportunities and an "adequate" education). In November 2002 the state Supreme Court ruled that the Arkansas Constitution requires the state to fund its public schools both equitably and adequately. The court ordered the Legislature to rectify the deficiencies in the state's public education system.

Thus, in 2003 and 2004 the Arkansas Legislature undertook a number of education reforms to address both equity and adequacy. Many of the reforms were based on an Adequacy Study conducted by an outside consultant to determine what constituted an "adequate" education.

To address equity, the Legislature established a state minimum teacher salary schedule that brought districts closer together in teacher pay while not entirely eliminating disparities. They adopted a state-wide curriculum requirement of 38 base credits that every high school must teach. They added funding for students in poverty and English Language Learners. Between 2004 and 2006, the state invested $60 million in the Arkansas Better Chance pre-K program.

The Legislature commissioned a Facilities Study and put policies and procedures in place to ensure that every school district would have equitable and adequate facilities. Schools were indexed by financial ability, with the state subsidizing costs of repair and construction of school facilities on a sliding scale based on need. From 2003 to 2007 the state invested more than $1 billion in public school facilities.

A pre-Lake View law that established a Uniform Rate of Tax (URT) helped in achieving equity by capturing the first 25 mills of property tax in every district and redistributing the funds to all the districts through the school funding formula. In this way, some of the disparity of opportunity was eliminated by making school districts in economically depressed areas beneficiaries of property tax collections in more prosperous areas.

Post-Lake View, the Legislature passed a law that requires education to be funded first, before any other function of state government. A Joint Adequacy Committee studies the educational needs of the public school system and makes a recommendation before each regular session of the Legislature for funding public education in the next biennium. By law, the recommendation must be based on what the districts need, not available funding.

The first year after the Lake View reforms, state spending jumped 12%. Now, 18 years later, 44% of state tax dollars are dedicated to public education. Half of school funding comes from the state, with 40% generated locally and 10% coming from the federal government. As a result of the influx of funding and reform of standards, in 2012 Arkansas had one of the fastest-improving education systems in the U.S.

As long as the Arkansas Legislature remains true to its commitment to public education, Arkansas will never see the kinds of stresses placed on its schools that Oklahoma is now experiencing.

However, each year that passes post-Lake View sees seemingly less commitment to honoring the recommendations of the Adequacy Committee. As the Legislature grows more fiscally conservative, legislators are less inclined to recommend funding that really meets the school districts' needs and less likely to grant the full recommended increase in funding. Once again, teacher salaries are stagnant, and the disparities are growing between the most prosperous and least prosperous districts.

The facilities fund remains perennially low, and does not adequately meet the needs of poorer districts for repair and construction of buildings. The school privatization lobby also threatens funding for traditional public schools, as some legislators are dedicated to introducing free-market "reforms" such as private school vouchers and financial perks for charter schools.

Drastic tax cuts such as those seen in nearby states like Oklahoma and Kansas could also reduce state revenues to the point where the quality of all government functions, including education, is affected.

Arkansas has made great strides in reforming its public school system since 2002. But the Lake View reforms were just a start. We can't rest on past accomplishments but must continue to invest in an education system that will provide every child with a 21st century education.