New Orleans finally starts moving away from its failed all-charter approach

On a related note, believe it or not the Minnesota Star Tribune, of all outlets, has been publishing articles about how the charter industry/grifting con is failing this state.

In August, more than 300 students started the school year in the first traditional school run directly by the New Orleans school district since 2019. It’s the first time the district has opened its own school since Hurricane Katrina swept through the city nearly two decades ago.

The pre-K-8 school, named after New Orleans cultural and civil rights icon Leah Chase, came together in just a handful of months. Its opening ends the city’s five-year run as the only all-charter school district in the nation. Charter schools receive public funding, but are independently run…

(Superintendent Avis) Williams said the decision to open the school was what the board, and community, wanted.

“That was just something the community has impressed upon our board members, and they did vote unanimously for us to direct-run the Leah Chase School and for us to direct-run more schools,” Williams said.

Both the Recovery School District – a special statewide district created to manage underperforming schools – and New Orleans Public Schools had poured money into renovating and abating asbestos in the building that housed Lafayette Academy that is now the site of the Leah Chase School. That was one factor in wanting to keep this particular building open. But more than anything, the decision stemmed from a growing sentiment in the community, and among newer board members, that it’s time for the district to have a traditional school again, said Carlos Zervigon, a member of the Orleans Parish School Board whose district includes the Leah Chase School. - The Hechinger Report

Public education is being assaulted more frantically than ever

This is from an interview included in the linked item. The interview originally appeared in the Washington Post. What jumped out at me is the shameless, ultra-cynical manipulation that is going on. Page Amendment, anyone?

BURRIS: What were some of the tricks of the trade, so to speak. Were there certain individuals you searched out to carry the message?

SILER: We would seek out people with sympathetic stories, families or individuals with sincere struggles. The goal was to find people with whom the general public could empathize.

When Florida's voucher program faced a lawsuit by the teachers union there in 2014, I flew to meet with a handful of families who had children with disabilities to create a video series promoting the value of the voucher program. I met with a single mom whose daughter had Down syndrome and needed highly individualized care and therapy. I met with a home-school mom who taught her five kids, but one had severe autism, and she struggled to meet his needs on her own. I met with other families hoping to enroll their kids in special schools that focused on their kids' specific needs. These people were part of the campaign's public face around the legal defense of the voucher program.

Also, if we could ever find minority families willing to speak up about their struggles and desires for school privatization, we'd work to put their faces in as many places as possible. It's one reason privatization advocates focused so heavily on promoting vouchers within the Navajo community recently in a bid to leverage their tribal identity to expand their state's voucher program. In many ways, there's an emphasis on playing identity politics to subvert actual equity efforts, especially when it comes to privatization. - Down With Tyranny

Charters find yet another way to screw Black communities

Distressing, if unsurprising.

The charter school industry has done much during the COVID-19 pandemic to add to systemic inequities that afflict Black communities by hijacking small business relief aid originally intended for minority-owned businesses and redirecting these funds to schools that further isolate Black families...

It’s far from clear whether charter schools actually needed the funding...

The harm charter schools may have inflicted by sopping up relief funds that could have gone to Black-owned small businesses is in addition to the industry’s already troubling track record of isolating Black communities. - Jeff Bryant/Pressenza

School privatization movement looks to go shock doctrine

Entirely predictable, but nonetheless disgusting.

COVID-19 has shuttered public schools across the nation, state governments are threatening to slash education budgets due to the economic collapse caused by the outbreak, and emergency aid provided by the federal government is far short of what is needed, according to a broad coalition of education groups, but the charter school industry may benefit from its unique status to seek public funding from multiple sources and expand these schools into many more communities traumatized by the pandemic and financial fallout. - Jeff Bryant/Raw Story

Sen. Sanders calls for ban on for-profit charters. Would it fly?

I of course wholeheartedly support the concept. And if you click and read it all, he seems to have a lot of bases covered. (It's a little unclear, from what I've seen, if the proposal includes shutting down existing for-profits. I'm taking a bit of a leap of faith here and presuming that that's part of the intent of the entire package.)

Sen. Bernie Sanders will unveil a major plan to support public education and rein in privatization on Saturday, CNN reports. Sanders will call for a ban on for-profit charter schools and pledge that, as president, he would refuse to use federal funds to open new charter schools.

On the anniversary weekend of Brown v. Board of Education, Sanders will take up the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charter school expansion, at least while the schools are audited. Sanders will also propose subjecting charter schools to the same oversight as public schools—something that charter backers have oh-so-mysteriously fought tooth and nail—and transparency measures like financial disclosure and student attrition rates. That oversight and transparency would be combined with requirements for representation of parents and teachers on charter school boards.

Sanders isn’t stopping there... - Daily Kos

But:

- Even to my not-a-lawyer head it seems like there would be constitutional issues with an outright ban. Moreover, that could very possibly have been the case even before the Trump/McConnell savaging of our federal courts. Perhaps denial of federal funds to existing for-profits would have pretty much the same effect as a ban. But I wouldn't put it beyond the far-right majority on our current SCOTUS to knock that down, and even have the gall to cite Brown as a precedent requiring purported "equality of opportunity," here.

- Plenty of “non-profit” charters are being strip-mined for big bucks by greedheads. I don’t know that for-profit charters couldn’t just make a few cosmetic changes in how their cash flows are treated, label themselves non-profit, and go the same route. It’s the charter-industrial complex in general, not just the overt for-profits, that needs to be cut way, way, way down to size. Full funding of our public schools, along with much stiffer federal regulation of all charters, would be good starting points.