lease any underutilized buildings to the charters (even the for-profit ones) for $1.00 a year, and the public district is still responsible for the costs of maintenance. Charters took over 3 of the large high schools in Indianapolis (Arlington, Howe and Manual). That's $3.00 a year for facilities that are built for about 6000 students. I hear there are about 1000 charter students total in these 3 buildings now.

If I were the Superintendent, I would have been tempted to take a wrecking ball to those three properties rather than have to keep paying the maintenance while the for-profit charters get a free ride.

There's just so much wrong with that.

Security Contractors, Health Care Corporations, Charter School Corporations. And they are working on the big prize, the Social Security Fund.

All those public funds being raided for profit for, sometimes even Foreign Corporations.

But in many ways we deserve it. They must smile as they pocket the people's money, watching the people fighting among themselves, being led by planted propaganda, name calling, personal attacks etc.

One day IF the people wake up and see how they are being robbed, as OWS did, which revealed a crack in their plans, maybe something can be done to stop them, but with both parties helping them out, that will take some time.

Declaring some schools underutilized when they really are not.

Last edited Sun Mar 30, 2014, 12:32 AM - Edit history (1)

As they open more charters and cherry-pick students away from the public system, the buildings DO become under-utilized.

DC does this, and it's managed to go from doing it pretty well do doing it terribly to doing it at least moderately well again. I don't know that the space-sharing model works very well at all; what has worked somewhat well has been charters taking over completely unused buildings in lieu of a lot of their payment (this only works for the ones that already have an endowment, obviously). What hasn't worked well at all has been the district simply declaring by fiat some schools "underutilized" and requiring them to give up X square feet of instruction space.

They cherry pick the better students so they can put out propaganda that charter schools produce better results. In fact, there isn't a single case I have seen where, when normalizing for demographics and revenue per student, a for-profit charter has produced better results.

In my state, they are able to play a game where they keep the students enrolled until Oct 1. Then the students that aren't scoring well enough, are behavior problems, or otherwise don't help feed the propaganda machine are "counseled out" to the public district. But the charter still gets FULL PAYMENT for that student as if he attended the full school year and the public district doesn't get a dime, yet is compelled to accept all the counseled-out students.

Every year they open another charter or two or 10, all playing this same bullshit game. That leaves the public district with about 2/3 the funding per student that the charters receive. So parents become dissatisfied and get in line for the next batch of charters.

That means that the public district has excess capacity. They can't have teachers with classes of 12 students and Principals with 15 teachers, so they have to consolidate. But the district is just as large as it ever was, so they have to spend about the same money on buses, gas and drivers even when the student population is dropping.

And then they have to lease those empty buildings for $1 per year to any charter that raises its hand, but the public district still has to pay millions of dollars every year for the upkeep on those charter buildings and they don't get a penny for it (well OK, they get 100 pennies per building, but nothing else.)

Talk about a rigged system, these goddamned Republicans (with loads of help from Democrats) have this system rigged from every angle.

On top of that, our previous State Superintendent (R) got caught rigging the test scores for many of the charter schools that were failing despite the huge resource advantages they had over the public districts. Fortunately that ahole got upended by a grass roots campaign that shocked the system by electing the only Democrat in statewide office here. That cheating Superintendent moved to Florida where he now works for one of those for-profit charter corporations. You can never kill the cockroaches. They just find new places to hide.

The cherry picking is much worse in the district schools, where a given percent of the seats are reserved for neighborhood kids (no cherry-picking) and the rest are open enrollment (much, much cherry-picking). Charters simply have to take all comers, so in that sense they're a way of avoiding the cherry-picking the district schools operate under.

One school in this system of charter schools sent over 12% of its 2009-2010 class back to the public school district. Two others dismissed 5% and 7% of their student enrollment.

So there you have it...one set of schools getting taxpayer money gets to pick and choose their students, the traditional public schools don't get that luxury. If schools get public money, they should keep the students and work with them.

And so they get puff articles written about how very good they are, with not a mention of how they keep such high scores. The local school board has no control over them, even as their success rewards them by letting them take even more money from these public schools.

School Board member Frank O’Reilly wants district official to start tracking how many students are transferred from charter schools to public schools as a result of their grades, social economic status or behavioral issues. During a work session this morning, O’Reilly read a letter sent by Harold Maready, superintendent of McKeel charter schools, to a parent about their third grader who flunked the FCAT.

“Your child does not meet the criteria to be a McKeel student,” O’Reilly read.

If public schools were to reject students based on their academic performance, then they could be A schools, too, O’Reilly said.

“We must take every child that comes through that door whether we like it or not,” O’Reilly said. ‘‘That is a public school paid by taxpayers’ dollars, and I like to remind Mr. Maready of that.”

Here, charters may nominally have to "take all comers", but they solve that by "counseling out" the ones they don't want. Besides, the fact that parents have to apply to the charter and attend a bunch of meetings assures that 99% of the ones applying are the more stable family situations to start with. The application process is de facto cherry picking in a very big way, and I bet your charters exploit that fact.

That is how most school districts are run.

The idea was kids from Southeast should be able to go to school in the Palisades. With the result that the "desirable" kids from across the river get cherry-picked, and remaining ones stay where they are. Lots of districts offer choice of district schools.

Therefore I am not going to argue with you. As for myself, I believe most communities are served best by having good community schools. If parents want to send their kids to private or other corporately owned schools....they should have that right.

But NOT with taxpayer money..

I'm sure you might have already seen this Mad, but just in case (or for lurkers): http://billmoyers.com/episode/public-schools-for-sale/

Moyers and Ravitch, great piece.

Heading there now.

If we just ignore it it will go away.

And the privatization of the postal service isn't going away. It's like Reagan's ideal plan has come to fruition. I'm thinking it sucks, on several different levels.

trapped in an educational Gitmo.

Side note: It's almost like nails on the chalkboard to see someone who proudly calls themselves "progressive" spouting the pro-charter talking points, bullet point by bullet point

nails on a chalkboard.