Sunday, April 15, 2012

Florida Charter School "Boom": Warning Signs

There is a charter boom going on with too many oddities:

1) 15 of 30 "F" schools in Florida are charters. "Then last year in Florida, charter schools received 15 out of 31 of all the failing FCAT grades that went to public schools. Charter elementary and middle schools were seven times more likely to get an F than traditional public schools."
Read full article here.

2) VP Joe Biden's brother is associated with charter Mavericks HS, which has accounting and performance issues - plus a desire to open 100. Third whistle blower on alleged fraud emerges. Frank Biden has real estate experience.
Read full article here.


3) Parents signed up for an arts-oriented charter, but were not told of its association with Scientology.
Read more here.


4) Duval School Board, in North Florida, followed the rules on charter applications and denied an application. The charter took it to an Charter School Appeal Board established by the State School Board. The appeal board sided with the school board and against the charter. The charter took it to the State Board (all members are appointed), which overturned the appeal board and the district. The district is taking this one to court. What are the rules? Who decides? Murky. More loss of local control?
Read more here.

5) Then there was the recent Parent Trigger mess. Florida residents were denied opportunity to speak at committee meetings and at hearings to give opposing views, while proponents from outside the State were given that access. This is hardly an example of democracy. The good news is that the bill failed. It deserved to fail...the "devil is in the details."
Read more here and here.

6) Florida took RT3 funding and school districts are under strain trying to meet the requirements.

7) In Florida, former Governor Jeb Bush and his Foundation exert too much power.  The Director of his foundation, Patricia Levesque, is adviser to Governor Scott. Her husband is also General Counsel to the Florida House. When voting on charter bills, he advised no conflict of interest nor ethics violation for legislators with personal ties or ties via family to vote on those bills IF the bill did not affect only that family business. Read more here.

8) Last week the Florida DOE issued a report on public charter progress. While some point to the report as clear evidence that charters are "better" than traditional schools, the report itself does not identify variances. One critical factor is that of the total number of public charters in Florida, the performance of only 40% are included in the report. The remaining 60% are not required to be "graded" because the size of the student population is too small to be statistically relevant and under Florida law are excluded. So while we applaud student achievement, growth, and progress wherever it exists, taxpayers still have no information that affirms the disruption leads to any return on investment. There are too many unknowns to recommend Florida's charter boom as a scalable model to replicate.
Read more here.


What happens in Florida is worth watching. These initiatives are heralded in other states as models to follow; however, they do not hold up under scrutiny. Legislators should analyze carefully what is in the best interests of their states students, parents, community members, and taxpayers. Careful deliberation and legislative accountability is not a sign of being anti-charter nor anti-accountability; but rather a sign of doing the job they were elected to do.

3 comments:

  1. This is an excellent summary of what is happening in Florida. Parents and educators in ALL states need to read this! If it is happening in Florida you can count on it being spread to other states by Jeb Bush and his foundation.

    Donna Mace

    ReplyDelete
  2. If roughly 50% of Florida's failing schools are charter schools-that would indicate public schools overall have a substantially better ratio of success than the charter, simply because there are many times as many public schools

    A simple extension of that logic indicates the positive statistics, based of less than half of the charters may not be a fully representative sampling-

    ReplyDelete
  3. Florida seems to be on the cutting edge of educational "reform" that does nothing to reform education, but will pad the pockets of the education "reformers". Charters are not much better and in many cases, even worse than traditional public schools. The education itself is not reformed...most of the charters nationwide are under the common core standards as traditional schools.

    Nothing will change educationally. All we are doing is witnessing the movement of money to the ed reformers until the taxpayer money runs out. It's like when the dot.com bubble burst and there was no more money (except this time, it's taxpayer vs private money padding investor pockets). The charter model will be dropped like a hot potato.

    The increased centralization of education will not improve test scores, learning, identify "great teachers", ensure "educational equity" or whatever talking point Arne Duncan picks for the week.

    Do you want the truth about what's happening in American education? Access this link

    http://truthinamericaneducation.com/

    written by non-lobbyists...written by taxpayers and educators concerned about the special interests in education. This current reform is not about "the children" in the least.

    ReplyDelete