Re: Charter Schools, Unions and Death Wishes

[Csubstance@aol.com]

In a message dated 6/22/06 8:32:44 AM, leoecasey@optonline.net writes:

<< So the great strategic solution is to abandon charter schools altogether 
to the right wing, and give them free rein to use them against us. >>

June 23, 2006

Leo,

I'm not sure we disagree on this, except on whether the UFT should waste time 
with its own charters. I know you're very involved, but I still don't think 
it was a wise strategic decision.

Let's recap some points. 

First, I'll summarize some of my main points: organize them; restrict their 
expansion; answer their bullshit marketing with facts; counter every attempt 
they make to attack public schools (e.g., that "60 Minutes" piece on the guy 
from Harlem); demand a level playing field (same audits and standards for 
charters and regular public schools). 

A couple of other things worth looking at closely include handicapped access 
(for staff, parents, and students). Most Chicago charters are forcing severely 
handicapped children to attend the regular public school, adding to the load 
there. Many are in non-accessible leased building (former Catholic schools 
that were closed). 

1. The charters have to be organized, viz. unionized. They are also being 
used to replace public schools. New Orleans and Chicago are very real examples, 
all of your disagreements aside. 

2. For four years, the Chicago Board of Education has refused to itemize the 
charter schools in its annual budgets, buring the information under 
"Professional and Contractual Services", a general line (which is almost a half billion 
dollars here).

3. After more than a year of Freedom of Information pushing, I finally got 
the summary data on the cost of Chicago charters, and it even shocked some 
people who thought they knew a lot. As of this school year, the incomplete data 
show the charters are costing $100 million a year here, expected to increase by 
more than 30 percent next year.

4. As far as anyone can tell here, the "deregulation" that goes with the 
charters means free reign. Neither their financials nor their pedagogical 
practices are monitored with anywhere near the care that we face in the regula public 
schools. There are dozens of examples, but here are my two favorites from 
Chicago:

5. There are growing rumors that charter high school "credits" (a very 
valuable commodity, you'll have to admit, once you see them as commodities) are easy 
to cop at some "charters". My major suspect is a "charter school" dubbed 
"Youth Connections" here in Chicago. Once the pieces of "Youth Connections" were 
local tutoring programs and "alternative schools." Now they've been amalgamated 
into one "school" whose official address is on the campus of the Illinois 
Institute of Technolocy. However, the actual sites are scattered across Chicago, 
with no apparent oversight of what the kids are doing there to get high school 
credits. But at each site (some of which serve very few students) there is at 
least a "director" (or principal) and one other administrator.

6. As a result, Youth Connections, as far as I can tell from the preliminary b
udget data, is now the most expensive "school" in Chicago, projecting more 
than $18 million for next school year.

There are lots of other things that a factual check on the charters turns up, 
but the fact as of now is that nobody officially is doing fact checking of 
the charters here. We have an inspector general who microfocuses on "employee 
corruption" cases (can you imagine any system with more than 40,000 employees 
that wouldn't have some corruption) and a Board of Education that manipulates 
headlines about staff corruption the way that guy used to do in New York. 

But nothing is done to even examine the basic financial and program 
information about the charters.

This is all I have enough to go through today. 

My suggestion is that the union(s) organize the charters (fast) but also 
scrutinize them closely and demand that the same standards applied to public 
employees in the non-charter places be applied to the charters.

Any teacher who spends 20 weeks making kids read books, do science labs, work 
on essays, and the usual "boring" stuff that goes with earning a high school 
credit towards graduation in the real world ought to be as worried about the 
copping of credits from charters as investors ought to have been worried about 
Enron's "asset lite" business model and Arthur Andersen's version of auditing 
and accounting ten years ago. 

Then, as now, there were people who said these things.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance, Chicago