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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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 Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 5:13 am Post subject: Charter Schools, Take 2 |
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Last time we talked about charter schools on this forum, data came to light that implied on average, charter schools produce worse results than public schools (note: a pro-charter school advocate challenged the methodology of the study in question, but even in a best case scenario, their criticism would mean that charter schools still performed worse than public schools on average, just by a less severe degree). Now let's have a look at some information about how certain scrutinized charter schools have been spending tax payer dollars.
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During its first years of operation, the Niagara Charter School in Niagara Falls spent thousands of dollars on plane tickets, restaurant meals and alcohol, and more than $100,000 on no-bid consulting contracts. Yet the school�s teachers resorted to organizing a fund-raiser to buy playground equipment.
When the Roosevelt Children�s Academy, a charter school on Long Island, fired its management company after paying it more than $1 million a year, it hired two of the school�s board members as new managers � and paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And in the Bronx, the Family Life Charter School pays $400,000 annually to rent classroom space from the Latino Pastoral Action Center, a �Christ-centered holistic ministry� led by the Rev. Raymond Rivera. Mr. Rivera also happens to be the school�s founder.
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Charter school advocates argue that the schools� freedom from traditional rules enables them to make major improvements. But that same freedom can present problems: a review of public documents shows that many charter schools have spent money in questionable ways and have experienced significant conflicts of interest.
The documents, including state Education Department reports, federal tax filings and audits of charter schools prepared by outside firms, were obtained by the state teachers union, and provided to The New York Times, which corroborated the data. Teachers unions have traditionally been sharply critical of charter schools, whose teachers usually are not unionized.
The problems underscore what many critics say is a weak system in New York for policing spending by charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately run.
Charter schools, for example, are not specifically prohibited by state law from hiring their own board members or employees as consultants. While the state comptroller�s office � the state government�s fiscal watchdog � can audit public schools, it is prohibited by a court ruling from examining charter schools.
Before that court ruling was issued last year, the comptroller�s office completed audits of 18 charter schools around the state. Fourteen had significant financial irregularities, including one school that spent $67,951 on staff trips to the Caribbean, according to officials.
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In New York, the Merrick Academy in Queens, which was founded by State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors over the possible misuse of school money to benefit Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith, who is no longer affiliated with the school, has denied wrongdoing.
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In New York City, the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, has ordered the closing of East New York Preparatory Charter School in Brooklyn at the end of this academic year following revelations that the school�s founder and principal had named herself superintendent and granted herself a $60,000 raise.
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But charter schools have at times resisted tougher monitoring. In 2007, a group of charter schools and advocates sued the comptroller�s office, challenging its right to audit the finances and academic performance of such schools. Critics said the comptroller�s office had no expertise to assess academics.
Last year, the Court of Appeals, the state�s highest court, ruled that charter schools were in effect independent contractors and beyond the comptroller�s reach.
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The Oracle Charter School in Buffalo, for example, will make more than $5 million in payments to a real estate partnership called KBSD to eventually own a building that sold for $875,000. The annual interest rate, according to loan documents, is 20 percent. Two years after the transaction was arranged, a KBSD partner joined Oracle�s board.
A lawyer for the school, Peter Morrow, said Oracle had turned to KBSD because no local bank would extend to the school a line of credit. The deal had been structured to give KBSD a reasonable rate of return, he said, while saving the school more than $1 million in property taxes it would otherwise owe. |
Nothing I've seen about charter schools so far has impressed me, and the fact that they're being used to channel millions of dollars of taxpayer money into private pockets in typical corporate fashion doesn't improve my estimation of them.
Further, while some people seem to support charter schools out of opposition to teachers unions, charter school teachers are increasingly moving towards unionization.
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Dissatisfied with long hours, churning turnover and, in some cases, lower pay than instructors at other public schools, an increasing number of teachers at charter schools are unionizing.
Labor organizing that began two years ago at seven charter schools in Florida has proliferated over the last year to at least a dozen more charters from Massachusetts and New York to California and Oregon.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts, have been a mainstay of the education reform movement and widely embraced by parents. Because most of the nation�s 4,600 charter schools operate without unions, they have been freer to innovate, their advocates say, allowing them to lengthen the class day, dismiss underperforming teachers at will, and experiment with merit pay and other changes that are often banned by work rules governing traditional public schools. |
Unsurprisingly, non-unionized teachers get bullied into all sorts of frankly unacceptable teaching arrangements, and the natural response is to unionize. And because charter schools are small private entities instead of governmental ones, if anything unions will be stronger; a teacher's union can obstruct a public school, but it can drive a charter school right out of business. The end result is going to be charter school costs going up, and teachers being harder to fire, erasing whatever hypothetical advantage these schools might have had in the first place, while maintaining all the disadvantages (lack of oversight and transparency, tendency towards misuse of funds for personal gain, risk of going bankrupt, etc). |
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Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 6:46 am Post subject: |
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If the school is under performing it SHOULD go bankrupt.
Unions in the private sector are mostly weaker than those formed by public sector employees.
I agree that charter schools probably are being set up in order to funnel public money into private hands. If this is the case, the perpetrators should be in hand cuffs if they broke any laws.
What ever the problems with charter schools, can you not see that public schools are producing a poor outcome for their cost per student? |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Senior wrote: |
| What ever the problems with charter schools, can you not see that public schools are producing a poor outcome for their cost per student? |
Obviously that varies from school to school, but yes, I think you have a point. I'm still inclined to take them over the current iteration of charter schools at this point in time, but if a new charter system were set up, with a focus on transparency and accountability instead of essentially being full-time American hagwons, perhaps that could change. |
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Mr. Pink
Joined: 21 Oct 2003
Location: China
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| Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 8:50 pm Post subject: |
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The US should follow Canada's policy: we don't give public money for schools that aren't public.
Private schools can be setup as non-profit corporations though and not have to pay taxes, but that is mostly what religious schools do, or schools that are run by a board and has no direct ownership.
These private schools expect 10-30k a year in tuition, so if parents don't get results, usually their wallet does the talking and walking.
Previously I had thought American charter schools were private elite schools...I realize I was wrong. |
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Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 9:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Mr. Pink wrote: |
The US should follow Canada's policy: we don't give public money for schools that aren't public.
Private schools can be setup as non-profit corporations though and not have to pay taxes, but that is mostly what religious schools do, or schools that are run by a board and has no direct ownership.
These private schools expect 10-30k a year in tuition, so if parents don't get results, usually their wallet does the talking and walking.
Previously I had thought American charter schools were private elite schools...I realize I was wrong. |
Public schools have utterly failed. The cost per student is a major issue that I have wailed about ad infinitum on this board.
As big of an issue is the horrendous waste of time that public school is for the majority of students. At least half of the kids have learned 70% of what will be useful to them by the time they finish elementary school. Imprisoning them for a further 10 years is an absolute crime. You see it all over the world. Schools filled with kids who simply don't want to be there.
There are plenty of other constructive things they could be doing. Formal education is probably part of that, but they need to be given a choice. Currently, we have a system that assumes every one is the same. Every single student HAS to follow an identical courses of study.
It isn't perfect, but as far more efficient system is to attach the money to the student, instead of allocating it to the school and then arbitrarily forcing families to send their kids to the school that is decreed for their area. This way people have a choice as how to spend their education dollars. The good schools will prosper and the bad ones will wither. We have more choice in laundry detergent, than we do the educational path ways for our kids. |
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cybermutiny
Joined: 02 Mar 2010
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| Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 6:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Mr. Pink wrote: |
| The US should follow Canada's policy: we don't give public money for schools that aren't public. |
Charter schools are public schools. They receive public money and are open to the public. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school |
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Mr. Pink
Joined: 21 Oct 2003
Location: China
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| Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 6:32 pm Post subject: |
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| cybermutiny wrote: |
| Mr. Pink wrote: |
| The US should follow Canada's policy: we don't give public money for schools that aren't public. |
Charter schools are public schools. They receive public money and are open to the public. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school |
Interesting, I didn't know Alberta had them. I know in the province I am from, Ontario there was talk but it got quashed by the ultra powerful teacher's unions.
What is a 100% private school then, just a private school? We have those in Canada and I know of some of them in the US as I've had students leave Korea to attend them. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 6:40 pm Post subject: |
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| Mr. Pink wrote: |
| cybermutiny wrote: |
| Mr. Pink wrote: |
| The US should follow Canada's policy: we don't give public money for schools that aren't public. |
Charter schools are public schools. They receive public money and are open to the public. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school |
Interesting, I didn't know Alberta had them. I know in the province I am from, Ontario there was talk but it got quashed by the ultra powerful teacher's unions.
What is a 100% private school then, just a private school? We have those in Canada and I know of some of them in the US as I've had students leave Korea to attend them. |
A charter school is a "public school" (I use the term loosely because they aren't really public schools, being neither government operated nor located on government-owned facilities) that is privately owned. They must meet specific requirements as listed in their charter in order to continue receiving funding on a per-student basis, and cannot charge tuition beyond what they receive from said funding, and generally they cannot turn away students without good reason, but beyond that have few real regulations. They're essentially government-funded, full time hagwons (which is why they have issues like lower performance on average, high teacher turn over rate, excessive work and low pay for teachers who do remain on staff, etc).
A private school is paid for by tuition. There is no charter whose requirements they must meet; so long as they can keep parents willingly paying the tuition, they can do more or less as they please. |
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jvalmer
Joined: 06 Jun 2003
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| Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 9:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Senior wrote: |
| As big of an issue is the horrendous waste of time that public school is for the majority of students. At least half of the kids have learned 70% of what will be useful to them by the time they finish elementary school. Imprisoning them for a further 10 years is an absolute crime. You see it all over the world. Schools filled with kids who simply don't want to be there. |
Are you saying once a kid is 12, or 13, we should release the average non-university bound kid into the work force? Well, I guess that would really raise the value of a university degree.
Isn't there a reason governments made schooling free until 16 or 18? To prevent abusive behavior in the workforce. I could see potential benefits by making high school optional, since if you aren't headed to a post-secondary institution high school isn't that useful. |
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Koveras
Joined: 09 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 10:25 pm Post subject: |
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If I taught a chatar school this is what I w3ould teach:"
one: ancient greek
two" survival skillz
three ? mushroom hunting
four: fractionz
five" free period |
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Senior
Joined: 31 Jan 2010
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2010 1:41 am Post subject: |
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| jvalmer wrote: |
| Senior wrote: |
| As big of an issue is the horrendous waste of time that public school is for the majority of students. At least half of the kids have learned 70% of what will be useful to them by the time they finish elementary school. Imprisoning them for a further 10 years is an absolute crime. You see it all over the world. Schools filled with kids who simply don't want to be there. |
Are you saying once a kid is 12, or 13, we should release the average non-university bound kid into the work force? Well, I guess that would really raise the value of a university degree.
Isn't there a reason governments made schooling free until 16 or 18? To prevent abusive behavior in the workforce. I could see potential benefits by making high school optional, since if you aren't headed to a post-secondary institution high school isn't that useful. |
The majority of kids would stay in school. Just because you can leave doesn't mean you would. High school isn't compulsory in Korea, yet something like 99% of students graduate. |
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wesharris
Joined: 10 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 4:25 am Post subject: |
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| Mr. Pink wrote: |
| cybermutiny wrote: |
| Mr. Pink wrote: |
| The US should follow Canada's policy: we don't give public money for schools that aren't public. |
Charter schools are public schools. They receive public money and are open to the public. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school |
Interesting, I didn't know Alberta had them. I know in the province I am from, Ontario there was talk but it got quashed by the ultra powerful teacher's unions.
What is a 100% private school then, just a private school? We have those in Canada and I know of some of them in the US as I've had students leave Korea to attend them. |
Canada, the other dark meat.
Honestly, defund ALL public schools.
Provide stipends and vouchers for private education.
Let the private market take care of education. |
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