Democratic candidates have started drawing battle lines on charter schools

This is our weekly analysis of privatization in the news and in communities nationwide. Not a subscriber? Sign up.

This week’s highlights

• Here’s a summary of how Democratic presidential candidates are talking about charter schools.
• Edison, New Jersey, has voted to block privatization and keep the townships’ water system in public hands.
• Alabama seems to be following Kansas’s footsteps in being “hoodwinked” by private prison public-private partnership

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Education

1) National: Reacting to last week’s Democratic presidential debate, Jeff Bryant and Randi Weingarten note a sea change in the education policy discussion. The conversation has expanded beyond just privatization and test and punish. “The leading presidential candidates are putting forward ideas to actually resource & support the schools 90% of America’s children,” says Weingarten. “Political debate about education has changed in the Democratic party from ‘bipartisanship’ and a ‘Washington Consensus’ to championing policies that are starkly opposed to what Republicans promote. This is good,” says Bryant. For a summary of how the candidates talked about charter schools at the debate, see this article by Chalkbeat’s Kalyn Belsha and Matt Barnum.

2) National: Public education supporter Steven Singer of the gadflyonthewall blog says, “Every Charter School Must Be Closed Down — Every. Single. One.” A lively discussion ensued in the comments section.

3) National: Shawgi Tell looks at the teacher turnover rate in charter schools reported in a recent study. “Yet another academic study shows what many have documented for years: the teacher turnover rate in charter schools remains much higher than the teacher turnover rate in public schools.” The study is Gulosino, C., Ni, Y., & Rorrer, A. K. (2019, August). Newly hired teacher mobility in charter schools and traditional public schools: An application of segmented labor market theory. American Journal of Education, 125(4), 547–592.

4) California: “It’s charter-school déjà vu,” says the Pasadena Star-News. “The same campus Montebello Unified denied is back again.” The charter operator has refiled its application, which the board has 60 days to act upon. Among the problems cited in the first rejection: “Inadequate fiscal controls, such as limits on credit card usage; Inability to tell how it will meet the needs of non-English speaking students, and homeless and foster youth; Measurements of student outcomes were ‘not reasonably comprehensive’; Doesn’t identify general qualifications of its employees.”

5) California: Dehesa School District has drafted new charter school oversight guidelines. “The move comes after three of its charter schools were found to have been entrenched in scandal. Three have since been closed by court order and [a] charter school, Dehesa Charter School, left the district on its own accord. (…) Dehesa’s proposed plan for charter school oversight would entail a year-long process, starting with requests for essential documents from the schools in the fall and ending with a report to the district board in the spring, according to the presentation by Leslie Lacher, attorney for the education-focused law firm Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost LLP. Lacher said the proposed oversight plan involves reviewing charter school documents, making announced and unannounced visits to the schools, interviewing key personnel and conducting focused audits when necessary. ‘It’s going to be imperative that there’s this system of essentially checks and balances, where charters are able to carry out their educational mission and provide an opportunity for students to learn in a different way,’ Lacher said.”

6) Indiana: A school district is suing the state, claiming that the law asking for only $1 from charter schools to buy unused school buildings from districts is unconstitutional. “Superintendent Rocky Killion says local homeowners invest in community school buildings with their property taxes. Yet they don’t get a say in if a school is sold or leased for $1. ‘I think this is a question for every school district community to answer,’ Killion says. ‘And to think that legislation could be passed in Indianapolis, bypassing those local taxpayers, bypassing any due process or input, I think it is unfair.’ West Lafayette School leaders hope the lawsuit makes it to the Indiana Supreme Court.”

7) Minnesota: A former Duluth Edison parent claims racial bias led her to remove her child from a charter school. “Kali Proctor never imagined when she sent her son off to kindergarten at Raleigh Academy, a Duluth Edison Charter School, he would come home one day and tell his mom he didn’t want to be black anymore. (…) She said one of the many reasons she decided to pull her son from Raleigh Academy was because the then-African-American cultural liaison, Chrystal Gardner, whom her son relied on a lot, was let go in June 2018. ‘Chrystal was a safe person for him,’ Proctor said. ‘He would seek her out when he was distressed. The problem being that she wasn’t always there.’” Proctor “is one of four parents who have filed a lawsuit against Duluth Edison alleging racial discrimination and violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Gardner has also filed suit for “wrongful termination, retaliation and discrimination based on race. The lawsuit says Duluth Edison administration retaliated against her for calling out racial discrimination among students, teachers and administration and for asking the schools to make changes.”

8) North Carolina: Writing in NC Policy Watch, veteran journalist Greg Childress compares the performance of a traditional public school whose community resisted state incorporation and a school placed in the state’s new statewide district. “Contrast Southside-Ashpole’s performance with that of Lakewood’s, which was granted ‘restart’ status and charter-like flexibility. That means that while the school remains under control of the Durham County Schools, it can operate free of some of the red tape leaders of traditional public schools contend make their job more difficult. Lakewood’s school performance grade went from an ‘F’ to a ‘C’ and it gained an impressive 16 percentage points in academic growth, which was the highest in the district. The school exceeded state growth expectations.”

9) Oklahoma: Nearly two decades after charter schools came to Oklahoma, the state will finally assess how those schools are being managed. “A group of lawmakers on Wednesday launched two interim studies that look at how charter schools are funded, and the cost-per-student between brick-and-mortar schools and their virtual counterparts. A third interim study also launched on Wednesday will look into the responsibilities of those who oversee charter school sponsors.”

10) Pennsylvania: Susquehanna Valley school administrators want to shift more of the funding it sends to outside cyber charter schools to in-house cyber charter schools run by the district. “In a letter to taxpayers last school year, the superintendents of school districts in the Central Susquehanna Intermediate Unit — which covers 17 public school districts and three technical schools — supported two bills in the state legislature, House Bill 526 and Senate Bill 34 — that they say would save millions of dollars for school districts that pay tuition payments for their students to attend cyber charter schools. The bills would require parents to pay for their child’s education in an outside cyber charter school if the school district where they live offers a full-time cyber school.”

11) Pennsylvania: A former food service coordinator says an Easton charter school owes her $7,000. Lehighvalleylive.com reports “Keyes was quoted in a lehighvalleylive.com story critical of Chief Administrative Officer Shawn Ferrara. She said he behaved ‘like a madman’ and terrorized children. Ferrara did not respond to requests for comments for that previous article, and eventually went on leave then left the school on June 3. Another ex-employee has a lawsuit pending in Northampton County Court. Former principal Susan Bostian claims Ferrara helped rig grades and rewrote her employee evaluations. On Tuesday, Northampton County Judge Jennifer Sletvold denied a request by the school to throw out Bostian’s lawsuit.”

12) Pennsylvania: State lawmakers are gearing up to deal with charter school issues, but the outcome is unclear at this point. “Cyber school funding and charter reform is another issue that’s getting more attention from both lawmakers and the governor, [State Rep. Mark Longietti, D-Mercer County] said. ‘The discussion on charters, particularly cyber charters, seems to be getting traction,’ he said. Longietti said that the charter school law, which dates to 1997, was supposed to allow the charter schools to innovate and potentially model new practices that can be employed in traditional school. Since then, the state has done little to confirm what innovations are taking place in the charters or whether their practices are less effective than those used in traditional school. At the same time, traditional school district officials have been clamoring for changes to the way cyber schools, in particular, are funded. School district leaders say that the schools charge more than they spend to educate students. Charter school reform has been debated frequently at the Capitol in recent years without ever crossing the finish line. ‘It’s been elusive,’ Longietti said. State Rep. Tedd Nesbit, R-Mercer County, said that while there will likely be a lot of talk about some of these controversial pieces of legislation, it’s far from clear that there will be sufficient consensus to pass them.”

13) International: Alberta, Canada’s UCP government has removed the word “public” from all Alberta school boards, “affecting eight of 41 divisions across the province and leaving educators and administrators scrambling to figure out why.” Barbara Silva of Support Our Students Alberta says “it’s another way to conflate and confuse and blur the lines between public schools, charter schools, private schools, and we think it’s very deliberate.”

Infrastructure

14) National/New Jersey: Are investor-owned utilities ripping off water customers and promoting privatization to benefit their private shareholders?Peggy Gallos, the executive director of the Association of Environmental Authorities, says they are, and gives the particulars. “The investor-owned utilities (IOUs) have recognized that the backlog of capital upgrades and repairs in aging water and sewer systems presents an opportunity to make huge profits for shareholders. It may not always be apparent, but shareholder primacy seems to have guided many of the activities of IOUs in New Jersey and around the country. It underpins aggressive efforts to privatize public water and sewer systems through sales and lease/concession agreements, and it has been behind successful efforts to change regulations and laws. In order to create a more favorable investment environment for shareholders, the IOUs have sought to reduce public input, limit transparency, accelerate the selling process, and maximize the value they can draw out of water and sewer systems. Aqua has characterized these efforts as overcoming ‘regulatory hurdles.’”

15) New Jersey: In a major victory for citizen activists, Edison has voted to block privatization and keep the townships’ water system in public hands. “‘My Administration will follow the direction that our voters have charted for Edison’s future. We have already begun making preparations for a new municipal department to operate and maintain the South Edison water system,’ Mayor Thomas Lankey said. A spokesperson for the town said that a department to manage the township’s sewage system already exists.”

16) Missouri: The St. Louis Airport Privatization Working Group has fired its embattled spokesperson, the high-priced consultant Douglass Petty. “The reason for Petty’s termination has not been released, however, last month Petty’s credibility came into question” when suspicions arose that he had called into a radio program using a false name to defend privatization of the airport.

Criminal justice and immigration

17) National/California: In a major victory for human rights campaigners and public interest advocates, California has passed Bill AB32, banning all for-profit prisons and immigrant detention facilities in the state. “The legislation is being hailed as a major victory for criminal justice reform because it removes the profit motive from incarceration. It also marks a dramatic departure from California’s past, when private prisons were relied on to reduce crowding in state-run facilities. Private prison companies used to view California as one of their fastest-growing markets.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), must still sign the bill, “but last year he signaled support for the ban and said during his inaugural speech in January that the state should “end the outrage of private prisons once and for all.’”

In June, East Bay assemblymember Rob Bonta “amended the bill to apply to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s four major California detention centers. Bonta’s amendment, say immigrant rights advocates, appears to have caught Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the private prison companies at a moment when their current contracts are expiring. The result is that instead of slowly phasing out immigration detention centers as their existing contracts expire years down the road, most will face closure next year — unless Ice and its private prison contractors find a workaround.”

18) National: A previously confidential Department of Homeland Security review obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) found that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Adelanto detention center “has kept an ‘alarming’ number of detainees with serious mental illness confined in solitary, and many have been isolated for ‘shockingly’ long periods. (…) Adelanto is run by the GEO Group, a private prison company that several former top ICE officials have gone to work for.” [Report]

19) National: Grassroots Leadership has filed suit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for violating the Freedom of Information Act. The organization hopes its suit will compel the federal court to allow public access to the contract and procurement documentation for the contract and procurement documentation for the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. “They want to know ‘how long the contract extension will last, and how ICE was able to enter a new contract with a private corporation without engaging in a competitive bidding process as designated in federal procurement law.’”

20) National: Who lobbies for prison labor? It’s unclear, but according to a 2014 Republic Report article by Lee Fang, the Correctional Vendors Association “represents companies that use prison labor to produce everything from furniture to clothing goods. CVA has spent $240,000 on lobbying over the past year, and forms show the organization is interested in shaping the outcome of the Justice Safety Valve Act, or S.619, a bill proposed Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) to allow judges to impose a sentence below the mandatory minimum in many cases, including drug-related sentences. The prison labor group, which is managed and represented by a lobbying firm called the Leonard Group, has refused to answer multiple e-mails and phone calls from Republic Report. We have attempted to reach the Leonard Group for comment since early January.” See also Fang’s report on Unicor/FPI.

21) Alabama: Eddie Burkhalter of Alabama Political Reporter (APR) says that “the secrecy behind Alabama’s plan to build three new prisons using private prison companies mirrors a project in Kansas that left some lawmakers there feeling that the state got ‘hoodwinked.’” APR “was able to confirm that B.L. Harbert International and Star America Infrastructures are two of the entities behind Alabama Prison Transformation Partners, but additional partners haven’t been identified, and the state isn’t saying.”

22) Tennessee/National: In an editorial letter in Out and About Nashville targeting business groups (including the Nashville LGBT Chamber, which just granted CoreCivic membership), James Grady says the private, for-profit prison and immigration detention corporation “Can’t Be Granted Respectability.” After detailing some of CoreCivic’s practices, Grady says “all of this is simply to demonstrate that the moral evil at the core of CoreCivic’s business model — see the above — has infected every aspect of its operations. I believe that any organization doing business with CCA/CoreCivic risks the same infection. You can’t, as they say, roll around in the mud and not get dirty. It does not benefit an organization, which lives by its reputation and lobbies for human rights, to attach its name to such an organization.”

23) International: UK-based investment funds are mum on the money they’ve poured into the private prisons/immigration detention companies like General Dynamics, GEO Group, and CoreCivic.

Public services

24) National: In the Public Interest’s Jeremy Mohler says public broadband is the answer if we want to make affordable broadband service available. “Comcast and Verizon have left vast swathes of Southern Maryland without broadband infrastructure. As for-profit corporations, it’s simply not profitable for them to invest in rural areas. Then, there’s Washington, D.C., where I live today. Back in 2006, the nation’s capital built the country’s first 100 Gbps fiber network. Yet, it’s only available to the local government and certain nonprofit institutions. Why? Because of Comcast and Verizon. The District’s franchise agreements with private internet service providers prohibit it from competing with these companies by offering its own public service. D.C. isn’t alone. Telecom companies spend big on lobbying nationwide to stop communities from building their own internet access. Nineteen states have legislation in place that put up significant barriers to or outright ban public networks. Meanwhile, thousands of D.C. residents have slow internet or lack access altogether, predominately in the poor areas of town.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Comcast has spent $6.68 million on its own in-house federal lobbying this year, and has hired no less than 40 outside lobbying firms for another $2.88 million. And they’ve spread money around in the states too. The National Institute on Money in Politics reports that “Comcast has given $38,119,600 to 6,327 different filers spanning 26 years.”

25) National: Writing in Jacobin, Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early call for a more vigorous defense of the Veterans Health Administration. “Most constructive critics of the VHA know that further underfunding and expanded outsourcing of care is not the answer. That’s why union-represented VHA staff and their labor and veteran organization allies are blowing the whistle on Trump’s privatization push. On June 5, hundreds of activists around the country participated in protest rallies, press conferences, or informational picketing as part of a ‘National Day to Save the VA.’” Central to this defense will be support for VA staff and their unions. “According to [Vietnam veteran Skip Delano], if Trump succeeds in weakening federal employee unions, VHA staff will be stripped of legal protections they need to be effective patient advocates and privatization foes. ‘Without that collective voice, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professional will have far less ability to speak out on behalf of veterans,’ he warns.”

26) National: As the Trump administration moves to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a government “backstop,” the federally secured home loan agencies, critics are warning about the impact on the affordable housing crisis. “The Trump plan will make mortgages more expensive and harder to get,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the Senate banking committee’s senior Democrat. “A flashpoint came over the issue of affordable housing. Fannie and Freddie have government-mandated targets for helping low-income and minority borrowers to buy homes. A change outlined in the plan — which still needs approval from Congress — would replace Fannie and Freddie’s affordable housing goals with more ‘tailored support for first-time home buyers and low- and moderate-income borrowers.” Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says the move would disproportionately affect working class families — “especially families of color.”

“‘Investors will be much pickier and charge more for the loans they are willing to invest in,’ said Jim Parrott, a former Obama administration housing adviser who is now an industry consultant. ‘That’s not to say we shouldn’t consider reducing the government’s role in places, but we should be honest about its impact.’” [Sub required]

Economist Richard Wolff also discussed the privatization plans on The Real News Network. “What Mr. Trump and Mr. Mnuchin have done,” Wolff explains, “as they have done across the board in deregulating every other aspect of our economy, taking away the role of the government to protect us, and giving us back to the private enterprises that got us into the Great Depression in the first place and into the Great Recession in 2008. We’re going backwards to re-establish the private control that led to the creation of these ‘special entities,’ as they are called, in the first place. So think of this simply as a big fat regressive going backwards for the benefit of private finance, at the expense of government control.” [Video, about 13 minutes]

And as if that’s not bad enough, climate change is making the affordable housing crunch worse.

27) Mississippi: The city of Jackson has sent a demand letter to Waste Management claiming the company is in breach of its contract. “The letter follows a discovery by new Jackson Mayor Scott Conger’s administration that the city is doing nearly 80% of the bulky waste pickup — picking up items like couches, fridges, mattresses, etc. — despite what they say is clear language that Waste Management is supposed to provide this service. ‘We are just asking them to hold up their end of the contract,’ Conger said. ‘That is not unreasonable.’”

28) North Carolina: The Pinehurst Village Council has approved a $45,000 study on the public’s library needs. So who did they choose to do the study? A library privatization company. “After interviewing four firms in August, the council chose Library IQ, a division of Library Systems & Services, based in Rockville, Md., for $35,000. The random survey will cost $8,000, according to Hawkins. It will be done in the third phase of the project and will help ‘test’ some of the possible recommendations for inclusion in the final report.”

29) International: As campaigning for Canada’s October 21 national elections kicks into high gear, @AlineSociology says, “The $15 billion deficit was a lie. The 23 thousand kids in the waitlist for autism services/funding was a lie. What is not a lie is that @fordnation have started privatization of autism services, destroyed therapy capacity, and pushed families into crisis mode.”

30) Think tanks: Sludge shines a light on the moneyed interests fighting public antipoverty programs. “Last December, an innocuously named nonprofit, the Foundation for Government Accountability(FGA), wined and dined Republican politicians and White House staffers at a Walt Disney World resort, according to a new report from the Center for Public Integrity. The pitch: make it harder for poor Americans to access government programs meant to help them get on secure financial ground, especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, and Medicaid. The group has already achieved some victories, as states including Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and West Virginia have imposed work requirements on SNAP recipients, sometimes using FGA model legislation. A nationwide version of work requirements proposed by the Trump administration is expected to kick hundreds of thousands of poor Americans off of SNAP. A Sludge investigation has found that FGA is heavily financed by a powerful Wisconsin foundation birthed by the wealthy, conservative Bradley brothers, multiple nonprofits affiliated with rightwing billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, and two dark money vehicles funded by Koch and Bradley charitable nonprofits. A number of FGA executives and board members work or have worked for other connected Bradley- and Koch-funded think tanks and political groups.”

Odds and ends

31) National: The Center for American Progress’ Jenny Rowland-Shea, Sung Chung, Sally Hardin, Matt Lee-Ashley, and Kate Kelly warn that “a vast liquidation of public lands is underway in Alaska.” They write, “the Trump administration’s effort represents one of the largest disposals and privatizations of national public lands since the late 19th century, when the U.S. government, under the Homestead Act of 1862, deeded more than 160 million acres of federal lands in the West to private citizens. The public land liquidation currently being pursued in Alaska could result in an area of land that combined is as big as the state of Georgia being privatized, privately developed, or transferred to state or corporate ownership.”

32) National: Nomiki Konst says “Next time you hear someone make the case for privatization of government services, mention this insane idea.”

33) National: Writing in The American Prospect, Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt report on how private equity firms in the health care system “are using the typical tools to protect their investments from a legislative onslaught: lobbying cash, dark-money front groups, and allies in Congress pushing loopholes and half measures.” They write, “now, even as compromise bills appear ready to advance, the question is whether politicians will stand up to the multimillion-dollar dark-money campaign launched in the summer. Will intense negative lobbying scuttle attempts to rein in surprise billing? Patients hit with these bills will be the biggest losers, but everyone will lose as health care costs and insurance premiums rise.”

Healthcare costs are a central issue in the nationwide strike by autoworkers that begins today, and outsourcing is a key issue in a looming possible strike by Kaiser Permanente workers, who “allege the non-profit health care giant has been outsourcing and automating union jobs, understaffing facilities, raising patient premiums, and is seeking to reduce worker wages and benefits in union contract negotiations — despite bringing in more than $11 billion in profits since January 2017, sitting on $38 billion in reserves and paying its CEO $16 million a year.”

34) Think tanks: In a new book, University of Oklahoma Professor Lawrence Baines analyzes the Privatization of America’s Public Institutions: ​The Story of the American Sellout. “Privatization continues to infiltrate American life, whether we desire it or not. Tireless lobbying efforts by well-funded special interest groups have promoted more corporate involvement in military affairs, schools, and prisons. Future privatization targets include veterans’ affairs, air traffic control, environmental protection, water and sanitation, the national parks, and social security. Privatization is changing the nature of America’s public institutions and consequently, the character of the country. What is startling about privatization in America today is the immensity of its scale. Privatization is no longer an occasional strategy to help improve the efficiency of a particular public service.” In a recent article, Baines discusses “Seven concerning facts about privatization of the military.”

35) National: @AltYelloNatPark, an unofficial group of employees, scientists and activists in and around Yellowstone National Park, warns that the Trump administration’s proposed massive budget cuts to the National Park Service are paving the way for privatization.

36) Think tanks/National/International: This week, “a delegation of Partnership for Working Families staff, leaders and close allies will be in Barcelona learning from the incredible organizers and leaders of Barcelona En Comú. We’ll be posting live updates on our Instagram, + FB & Twitter with hashtags #WeMakeThisCity and #FearlessCities. Follow along and send us your questions and reactions!”

37) Think tanks/International: In her new book, The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth, Linda McQuaig asks “why are we selling off the impressive public enterprises we often battled as a nation to create? In the early 1900s, thousands of Canadians battled wealthy interests, winning control of Niagara Falls and creating a public power company. Another popular movement succeeded in creating Canada’s public broadcasting system to counter American dominance of the airwaves. And a Canadian doctor established a publicly owned laboratory that saved countless lives by producing affordable medications, contributing to medical breakthroughs and helping to eradicate smallpox throughout the world. But in recent decades, we have allowed our inspiring public enterprises to be privatized and our vital public programs downsized, leaving us increasingly dominated by the forces of private greed that rule the marketplace.”

Governing for the Common Good

38) National: Some good news on governing for the common good from Route Fifty, the daily newsletter covering state and local government:

This State’s Parks are Full of “Happy Little Trees”
Teaching Caregivers to Also Care for Themselves
A State Will Require Civics Education in Prisons
Wisconsin Funds Mental Health Services for Farmers
A City-Run Database to Boost Local Arts and Culture