CTA California Teachers Association Pushing Charters And Privatization In Richmond Schools

charter schools are public schools; they open to all and are free. they are not the same as private schools.
the unions should be organizing the charter school teachers or starting their own.
charters don't require union contracts but they don't preclude them either.
instead of wasting time trying to 'reform' no child left behind, the unions should get busy organizing.

CTA Believes In Charter Schools
http://www.cta.org/issues/other/Charter+Schools.htm

Charter Schools
The purpose of charter schools is to create new professional opportunities for teachers to improve student learning while encouraging the use of different and innovative teaching methods. Inherent in the concept of charter schools is the belief that meaningful educational reform must be developed at the local site level and with the full participation of all “stakeholders” – teachers and other school employees, school board members and other elected officials, parents, guardians and other community residents.

CTA believes charter schools have a role in California’s education system by providing students, parents and teachers with educational opportunities in the public school setting.

All charter school employees should be organized to ensure both quality education for students and professional rights for school employees. Teachers in charter schools should hold a Commission on Teacher Credentialing certificate, permit, or other document equivalent to those required for other public school teachers.

Charter schools shall comply with all state required accountability and testing requirements. All records maintained by charter schools shall be available to the public in the same manner as those of school districts. All open meetings and public record laws shall apply to charter schools.

The granting of charters shall only be through school districts for schools within the boundaries of the school district. Satellites, branches and auxiliaries of charter schools shall be approved as separate charter schools using and subject to the state-wide limit on the number of charter schools.

No charter school shall discriminate against a student because of race, language, color, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, marital status or economic status.

Charter School Website

Reality check needs a reality check. Charter schools take who they want to take and reject those who they think will give them problems or require more labor such as disabled and slow learners. They also fire teachers who try to form unions. Reality check needs to investigate before he or she puts out false information and propaganda about the goodness of charter schools. The charter school drive for privatization is aimed to destroy public education and is funded by billionaires like Gates and the Broad foundation with the purpose of destroying teachers unions. The is the history and that is the facts about these charter school drive.
Apparently Reality Check has not listened to the teachers in Richmond about why they opposed charter schools.

I did not write anything about "the goodness of charter schools," only pointed out that they are not private schools, they are public schools. nowhere in the cta post does it say the cta is pushing privatization. the article headline is misleading. the teachers' unions can start their own charter schools, as can non-profits. i don't think that's the same as privatization. some charter schools are run by private, for-profit companies, like the renaissance schools and others. they should be opposed, not efforts by the unions to support charter schools and organize the teachers. their position, as someone reposted, is to make sure the charter schools do accept all students. that's up to school boards, unions, parents, and the community to enforce. the generalization in the response to my comment is just that, a generalization. do a real survey of charter schools and see what the make up of the student population is. in oakland, many, if not a majority of students in charter schools are Latinos; some are ESL learners. why did their parents choose the charter school over one of oakland's other public schools? do all charter schools discriminate?

and it should be noted that the Gates foundation gives money to public schools through small schools initiatives, not just charter schools. unfortunately, because of the failure of the legislature to repeal prop 13 and fully fund education, public schools are becoming dependent on billionaire donors. that's unfortunate if there are strings attached (like NCLB, which the cta has supported or tried to 'reform') but it's not much different than relying on grants to fund programs that are cut and having to adhere to the guidelines of the granting agencies or foundations. is that going down the slippery slope to privatization?

The teachers unions can organize the charter schools, start their own, and demand that school boards do not renew the charters if a teacher was laid off for union organizing and wasn't re-instated. they can fight for those teachers' rights. are they? when where and who? cta says that teachers should be union, so the teachers' unions should be organizing!

i'm not a charter school supporter or opponent, but think the unions should be able to convince the teachers that being in the union is in their best interest and should be fighting against vouchers, for fully funding education, and for repeal of NCLB and an end to the standardized testing craze.

Reality Check obviously has very little knowledge about what is going on in charter schools around the country from Richmond to Chicago and New York. Instead of investigating the real role of charters, Reality Check ends up doing damage control for Gates and other big funders of charters including Obama's education secretary Arnie Duncan. These privatizers are intent on destroying public education and are now using the threat of getting no federal money as a threat to set up the private schools.


NYC Public School Spaces Turned Over To Charters-“It’s not fair to our students,” she said of the decision, which gives the charter students access to the room for most of the day. “It’s depriving them of a fully functioning library, something they deserve.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/education/30space.html?hpw


November 30, 2009
City’s Schools Share Their Space, and Bitterness

By JENNIFER MEDINA
Suzanne Tecza had spent a year redesigning the library at Middle School 126 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, including colorful new furniture and elaborate murals of leafy trees. So when her principal decided this year to give the space to the charter high schools that share the building, Ms. Tecza was furious.

“It’s not fair to our students,” she said of the decision, which gives the charter students access to the room for most of the day. “It’s depriving them of a fully functioning library, something they deserve.”

In Red Hook, Brooklyn, teachers at Public School 15 said they avoid walking their students past rooms being used by the PAVE Academy Charter School, fearing that they will envy those students for their sparkling-clean classrooms and computers. On the Lower East Side, the Girls Preparatory Charter School was forced to turn away 50 students it had hoped to accept because it was unable to find more room in the Public School 188 building.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made charter schools one of his third-term priorities, and that means that in New York, battles and resentment over space — already a way of life — will become even more common. He and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have allowed nearly two-thirds of the city’s 99 charter schools to move into public school buildings, officials expect two dozen charter schools to open next fall, and the mayor has said he will push the Legislature to allow him to add 100 more in the next four years.

In Harlem, parents have chafed and picketed against an expanding charter school network, the Harlem Success Academy, which is housed in several public schools. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, a plan to close a failing elementary school and let a charter take over the building was shelved after a lawsuit. At P.S. 15, teachers and parents were furious about plans for PAVE to expand next year, after having been told the school would be gone by the end of this academic year. Several hundred parents filled a middle school auditorium in Marine Park, Brooklyn, in the spring to rail against a proposal to house the new Hebrew Language Academy there. The school eventually found a home in a yeshiva.

Charter schools, privately run but publicly financed, are generally nonunion, freeing them from labor restrictions. They have gained traction with their promise of innovative teaching methods and more flexible work rules for teachers. Arne Duncan, President Obama’s education secretary, has told states that they must remove impediments to charter schools as a condition of winning so-called Race to the Top grants.

In New York, as in most states, charter schools receive no money for construction, forcing them to raise millions on their own — or find a willing host. In other cities, where charters are only begrudgingly accepted by public school officials, tensions between public and charter schools sharing a building would be unheard of, because the charters are forced to find their own homes.

But Mr. Bloomberg has embraced them. In his speech last week on his third-term education goals, Mr. Bloomberg called on the Legislature to lift the state’s limit on charter schools. He also called on Albany to provide money for charter school facilities, even threatening to sue the state if it did not.

In the meantime, Mr. Klein has aggressively eased the way for charter schools, citing their popularity — most have far more applicants than seats. “There are so many talented people out there, and I want them to come to New York,” Mr. Klein said in an interview. “Why would we want to put up barriers to that?”

Todd Ziebarth, the vice president of policy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, called support like Mr. Klein’s “extremely rare.”

“In starting a new school, you are also launching a small business,” Mr. Ziebarth said. “Space is the most difficult and challenging thing to think about and figure out.”

Despite its constraints, Girls Prep is eager to expand, so city officials are proposing to move it or a small special education program into another building, possibly P.S. 20 or P.S. 184, the dual-language Shuang Wen School.

This month, more than 500 people packed into the P.S. 20 auditorium on the Lower East Side to complain about the proposals. Hundreds of parents rallied outside, shouting “Save our school!” over the buzz of traffic on Essex Street.

None of the schools, it seemed, had the more than 20 classrooms that Girls Prep needed. “Nobody wants to give up the space we have fought so hard for,” said Ann Lupardi, a Shuang Wen parent. “These are science labs and art rooms that we helped find the money to get because we think they are essential.”

Miriam Lewis Raccah, who oversees Girls Prep, said charter operators are not looking for fights but are enthusiastically trying to create successful schools in areas that have lagged for years.

“Nobody wants to give up a school that’s part of a neighborhood’s identity,” she said. “The reality is that there is still a need for better schools, and the question is: Where are we going to go? It’s not as if we’re creating new kids.”

Officials estimate that over all, the city’s schools are 80 percent full. But figures vary widely school to school, with some bursting while others have as many as a dozen classrooms not being used for teaching. Even determining how many rooms are free is contentious — most schools use open space for activities like dance, tutoring and computers — but Education Department officials often treat those rooms as “underutilized space” to allow another school to come in.

Schools that share space often have other tensions just below the surface. In some cases, as in Brownsville and Harlem, the regular public school has not performed well and has seen enrollments shrink while parents flock to the charter on the other side of the building. Charter schools that have had success raising private donations have new desks and computers to show for it. And most charter school teaching staffs are not unionized, giving them vastly different work rules and pay scales.

Sometimes life inside the schools simply resembles life in New York City, with mismatched neighbors learning to tolerate each other. In the P.S. 16 building in Williamsburg, the public elementary school uses the gym most of the day while Williamsburg Collegiate, a charter middle school in the building, waits until the late afternoon. And when the charter school expanded to ninth grade this year, there was little fuss, just a move into four more classrooms.

At M.S. 126, despite the librarian’s dismay, the principal, Rosemary Ochoa, has worked out what she considers a viable plan with the Williamsburg Charter High School and its two small spinoffs, which also occupy the building. The charters get the library for most of the day, and Ms. Tecza is expected to travel to individual classrooms to teach the public students library skills.

In Red Hook, Spencer Robertson, PAVE’s founder, said he expected to stay in P.S. 15 for two more years because his plans for a new building fell through. He said that while community meetings about the school have often erupted in shouts, “they’ve been a very good neighbor in general, and we don’t even know there’s a conflict most days.”

“But the issue of space really plays on that emotional level,” he said. “Everything is about ‘they are taking your space’ even if it’s not clear who ‘they’ are.”

Scholarly Investments - Leveraging and Privatizing Public Education

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/fashion/06charter.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=charters&st=cse


December 6, 2009
Scholarly Investments

By NANCY HASS
THEIR company names were conspicuously absent from their nametags, but that is how these hedge fund managers and analysts — members of a field known for secrecy — preferred it. They filled the party space at the W Hotel on Lexington Avenue in late October, mostly men in their 30s. Balancing drinks on easels adorned with students’ colorful drawings, they juggled PDA’s and business cards, before sitting down to poker tables to raise money for New York City charter schools.

Working the room, the evening’s hosts, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt, who are partners in the hedge fund Gotham Capital, had an agenda: to identify new candidates to join their Success Charter Network, a cause they embrace with all the fervor of social reformers.

“He’s already in,” Mr. Petry said as he passed John Sabat, who manages a hedge fund for one of the industry’s big stars. (Like Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels, no one in the group would name him aloud.)

“I wasn’t hard to turn,” said Mr. Sabat, 36, whom Mr. Petry drafted last year to be a member of the board of Harlem Success Academy 4, on East 120th Street, the latest in its network of school in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Boards agree to donate or raise $1.3 million to subsidize their school for the first three years. “You can’t talk to Petry without taking about charters,” Mr. Sabat added. “You get the religion fast.”

Mr. Petry, 38, and Mr. Greenblatt, 52, may spend their days poring over spreadsheets and overseeing trades, but their obsession — one shared with many other hedge funders — is creating charter schools, the tax-funded, independently run schools that they see as an entrepreneurial answer to the nation’s education woes. Charters have attracted benefactors from many fields. But it is impossible to ignore that in New York, hedge funds are at the movement’s epicenter.

“These guys get it,” said Eva S. Moskowitz, a former New York City Council member, whom Mr. Petry and Mr. Greenblatt hired in 2006 to run the Success Charter Network, for which they provide the financial muscle, including compensation for Ms. Moskowitz of $371,000 her first year. “They aren’t afraid of competition or upsetting the system. They thrive on that.”

Hedge fund managers may be better known for eight-figure incomes with which they scoop up the choicest Manhattan penthouses and Greenwich, Conn., waterfront estates. But they also dominate the boards of many of the city’s charters schools and support organizations. They include Whitney Tilson, who runs T2 Partners; David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital; Tony Davis of Anchorage Advisors; and Ravenel Boykin Curry IV of Eagle Capital Management.

The Tiger Foundation, started by the hedge fund billionaire Julian Robertson, provides a large chunk of financing for several dozen charters across the city. Mr. Robertson’s son, Spencer, founded his own school last year, PAVE Academy in the Brooklyn, while his daughter-in-law, Sarah Robertson, is chairwoman of the Girls Preparatory Charter School on the Lower East Side.

The Robin Hood Foundation, the high-profile Wall Street charity founded by Paul Tudor Jones II, a legendary hedge fund manager, considers charter schools “right there at the top of our list of priorities,” said Marianne Macrae, a spokeswoman.

Ms. Macrae said that the foundation has given more than $150 million to schools and management organizations, especially in New York, over the last decade.

“If you’re at a hedge fund, this is definitely the hot cause,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a nonprofit group that lobbies for charters and is financed by hedge fund heavies. “These are the kind of guys who a decade ago would have been spending their time angling to get on the junior board of the Met, the ballet.”

That hedge fund multimillionaires have embraced the charter movement may seem odd: their own children are unlikely ever to see the inside of a neighborhood school, and there are more traditional routes to social prominence through philanthropy, like support of hospitals and cultural institutions. But to those who know the sociology of Wall Street, it makes sense. Charter schools appeal to the maverick instincts of many who run hedge funds.

Younger on average than top executives at financial giants like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, hedge fund managers are often numbers-driven refugees of those banks, who chuck the suit and tie and work with a small staff, studying spreadsheets for investment opportunities.

“At heart we are still the kids who in eighth grade were in the backyard doing science experiments while the cool kids were at football practice,” said Mr. Curry, 43. “We’re the kind of people who could never survive in the slick political environment of an investment bank.”

The claim of Mr. Curry to nerdiness is undercut by the fact he is married to Celerie Kemble, a Palm Beach-raised decorator and socialite, and is partners in a planned Caribbean resort with Moby,Richard Meier and Charlie Rose.

Still, Mr. Curry has been “knee deep in educational issues” since his 20s, he said. He co-founded two Girls Prep schools and is head of the board of the newer one, in the Bronx. The schools are “exactly the kind of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on,” Mr. Curry said, “with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves get any of it.”

The reference is to the fact that New York State contributes 75 to 90 percent of the amount per student that public schools receive. State law mandates that each charter have its own board, and the need to recruit trustees, including many from Wall Street, has turned “a group of unlikely people into an army of foot soldiers for the movement,” said Joel I. Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, who along with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is a strong charter-school advocate.

The mayor has asked the State Legislature to nearly double the number of charters allowed in the city, to 200, over the next four years. Although the New York charity world trembled last year as financial firms bled — the Robin Hood Foundation’s annual gala raised a disappointing $56.6 million in 2008, 21 percent less than the previous year — Wall Street, and its expected bonuses, are back in a big way. (Robin Hood raised more than $72 million at its auction this spring.)

Across the country, charters are a focus of debate, often bitter, over their hiring of nonunion teachers, experimental curricula and potential siphoning off of motivated students. In New York, space issues have exacerbated the conflict. The city allows some charters to share space with under-used public schools; the new desks, computers and small teacher-student ratios paid for by private donors draw envious stares. There have been protests in some neighborhoods.

“I think it’s all good and well that these people are finally stepping up to support education,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, referring to wealthy hedge funders. “But I would wish they would do it in a more foundational way, a way that would help all the children instead of just a small group.”

Charter schools often have a longer school year, Saturday classes, uniforms and a passion for measuring results. Most of them are in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and admit children by lottery. Approximately 30,000, or 2.5 percent of the city’s public school students, attend charters, although in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn the figure is closer to 20 percent.

The schools present the kind of opportunity that “electrifies” hedge fund managers, said Mr. Tilson, 43, who is on the board of the Knowledge Is Power Program, which manages charter schools around the country. A founding member of Teach for America in the late 1980s (before earning an M.B.A.), Mr. Tilson also blogs about charters at edreform.blogspot.com. “It’s the most important cause in the nation, obviously, and with the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged,” he said.

Charter schools’ reliance on metrics and tests to measure progress is another attraction for hedge funders. Mr. Petry, who cultivates a schlumpy aura that is more headmaster than Master of the Universe — he carries an eight-year-old Blackberry the size of a Stephen King paperback stuffed in a nylon backpack and favors fleece pullovers — said he reads spreadsheets of education statistics as much as those for new investments he’s chasing. “I can’t understand how anyone could look at the raw numbers and not see what’s at stake,” he said during an interview in a restaurant near the Upper West Side apartment where he lives with his wife, a former teacher, and three young children.

Whether charters do a better job of educating children, even with the extra help from private donors, is much debated. A study released in September by researchers headed by Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, concluded that on average New York City charters outperform local schools. But another study by a different group of Stanford researchers last summer suggested that nationally the numbers are muddier.

The idea that eventually their schools might be “scalable,” that is, provide a model that could be rolled out in many communities, also excites the hedge fund crowd. “The underlying drive is to build something that can spread, can be recreated in different cities; otherwise it’s not as meaningful to us,” Mr. Petry said.

He said the most important thing he learned tutoring illiterate adults after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania was that “helping the world one person at a time just isn’t for me.”

In addition to raising money, charter school boards, which also include educators and community activists, evaluate test scores and curriculum approaches, oversee budgets and develop teacher hiring protocol, said James Merriman, chief executive officer of the New York City Center for Charter Schools, a nonprofit group that offers planning and grants to those thinking of starting a school.

“It takes a lot more time and energy that being on the junior committee of an art museum,” he said.

The workload didn’t scare off Robert Reffkin, 30, a vice president in the private equity department of Goldman Sachs who is chairman of the board of the Success Charter Network’s newest school, scheduled to open in the Bronx this summer pending state approval. It took only a week for Mr. Reffkin, who jokes that in charter circles working for an investment bank makes him a rebel, to recruit a half-dozen of his friends from banks and hedge funds, all between 25 to 32, to join his board. All have pledged $50,000 a year for three years.

Mr. Reffkin, who was raised poor by a single mother in Oakland, Calif., and says he aspires to run for city office one day, considers charter schools “the civil rights struggle of my generation.”

Persuading pals to join his school’s 13-member board was “much, much easier than it would have been convincing them to give half as much to, say, a mainstream cultural institution,” he said. In October, his board rounded up 400 contributors for a $125-a-head fund-raiser for the school at the nightclub 1 Oak, with music by DJ Cassidy and D-Nice, an event intended to recruit other young financiers to the cause.

“In the past, we’ve had one or two big hedge fund guys footing most of the bill for each school,” Mr. Reffkin said. “But now enough of my peers in this industry who may not have the money to carry the whole thing understand what’s at stake and what the return can be.”

Charter School Look: Feel-Good Education

http://www.counterpunch.org/wolff12142009.html

December 14, 2009

Feel-Good Education

Styling: the Charter School Look

By DANIEL WOLFF

It only makes sense that the article appeared in the Style section of theNew York Times. Sure, it’s about hedge fund managers supporting New York City’s charter schools. But if we are to believe the breezy slant of the piece (Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009, “Scholarly Investments”), these young turks pick out charters the way their fathers shopped for the latest fedora. Cause it’s fashionable. Cause it reflects their inner selves. Cause it makes them feel good.

The author, Nancy Hass, admits that thirty-something multimillionaires embracing public education “may seem odd.” Their kids, after all, are far more likely to go to Greenwich Country Day. But the explanation is simple enough if you know what she calls “the sociology of Wall Street.” These guys from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have a certain level of “nerdiness,” and charter schools appeal to their “maverick instincts.”

According to this benign scenario, the same analysts who spend all day in cut-throat financial competition toss away their Blackberries come dusk and do the right thing by joining the boards of charter schools. Privately run and often non-union, charters are seen by their advocates as the free market alternative to traditional public schools. Or, as the article puts it, “an entrepreneurial answer to the nation’s education woes.”

Typically, we’re told, a charter board consists of a dozen or so memberswho are asked to donate or raise $1.3 million over three years. Let’s see … that’s around $36,000 a board member per year. Certainly sizable but not gigantic given their annual “eight-figure incomes.” Especially since donations to organizations like Democrats for Education Reform are tax deductible.

Whitney Tilson, on the board of a company that manages charter schools, says they “present the kind of opportunity that ‘electrifies’ hedge fund managers.” Tilson calls it “the most important cause in the nation, obviously.” He adds, “With the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged.”

Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere. New York State provides 75 to 90 percent of the per-student cost at a charter school. That’s because schools like the Harlem Success Academies are still technically public and draw from public funds. So if the young analysts look at their donations as an investment – which the article insists they do not … or not that kind of investment – then their dollars are heavily backed by tax dollars. That is to say, by our dollars.

Ravenal Boykin Curry IV of Eagle Capital Management has co-founded two girls prep schools and is head of the board of a third. He explains that he’s been “knee deep in educational issues” since his 20’s. Almost in passing he adds that these schools are: “exactly the kind of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on, with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves get any of it.”

So maybe the Blackberries and the financial acumen don’t disappear at night? Perhaps charter schools appeal to the investors’ “maverick instincts” because they look a lot like the instruments these guys fight over (or in Mr. Curry’s more benevolent term “stumble on”) during the day? That has certainly proven the case across the country, where start-up management firms see charters as prime, for-profit ventures. Through various real estate deals and cost-cutting practices (like paying teachers less), these private/public schools have already shown themselves to be potential money makers. One real estate trust recently sunk $170 million into 22 charters. Said its CEO: “The charter public schools offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”

The young turks may not profit directly from their board work. But as the Style article makes clear, New York City’s charter school network is the new country club. It’s where the elite meet, where potential business connections are made. And even if these Masters of the Universe don’t “get any” from the schools they back, they’re in on the ground floor of a growth industry. Their experience in New York City may well influence their financial recommendations and investments elsewhere.

“The underlying drive,” as John Petry, partner at Gotham Capital and member of the Success Charter Network, puts it, “is to build something that can spread, can be recreated in different cities; otherwise it’s not as meaningful to us.” Only 2.5% of the city’s public school students are in charters, the article states, but that’s more like 20% in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn. And the movement gets that much more “meaningful” in New Orleans, for example, where over half the kids are in newly formed charters. A national string of hedge-fund-backed, privately run schools begins to look like a real option: a chain competing with and siphoning funding from standard public schools. As Robert Reffkin, a vice president at Goldman Sachs, puts it his peers now “understand what’s at stake and what the return can be.”

Except the educational return is still unclear. There’s no conclusive evidence that charters do a better job than traditional public schools. Meanwhile, the investments these young tycoons have made are already changing public education – and changing it to more closely resemble the financial models they work with during the day. Those models, as we’ve learned over the last couple years, don’t always pan out.

If they don’t? If the charter bubble bursts? Where does that leave the kids who’ve switched over from the less sexy, less well-funded, regular system? Charter schools, the article states, are today’s “hot cause.” But what happens tomorrow, when styles change?

Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return." He can be reached at:ziwolff [at] optonline.net