Decisions will be distantly done by Charter Management Organizations, CMOs. As they are "selling their product" that side of charters does not show, but long-term it will make the local school boards irrelevant as the charter schools take hold.
This tendency is already showing in some charter CMOs. Recently the CEO of Imagine Charter Schools, Dennis Bakke, sent an email advocating
that "school boards either should do what we say or resign."Now, the Post-Dispatch has obtained a memo in which the chief of Virginia-based Imagine Schools lays out a nationwide blueprint for controlling school boards and limiting their authority. In the year-old e-mail, CEO Dennis Bakke tells his employees they should control who stays on the board, select those who will "go along with Imagine," and ask board members to submit undated letters of resignation "that can be acted on by us at any time."
Such philosophies break a primary tenet of the charter school movement — that schools should be independently governed by local leaders — and conflict with both nonprofit law and state charter school statutes.
The other day at DU Tonysam posted an interesting link to a site called
The Broad Report.It is a site following the ways in which the Broad Foundation works. It is one of the 3 major companies pushing charter schools. The other two high profile ones are the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation by the Walmart founders. They give millions to build charter schools, push for more testing, and give incentives for merit pay.
The Broad Foundation likes to infiltrate its targets on multiple levels so it can manipulate a wider field and cause the greatest amount of disruption. Venture edu-philanthropists like Gates and Broad proudly call this invasive and destabilizing strategy The Broad Foundation likes to infiltrate its targets on multiple levels so it can manipulate a wider field and cause the greatest amount of disruption. Venture edu-philanthropists like Gates and Broad proudly call this invasive and destabilizing strategy
"investing in a disruptive force." To these billionaires and their henchmen, causing massive disruption in communities across the nation is not a big deal.At The Broad Report I discovered the home webpage of the report's author. It is a fascinating blog filled with great research and comments. Note that the only real information on how public education is being turned into something else IS from bloggers. The mainstream media does not cover it at all.
The blogger calls herself
The Perimeter PrimateShe has a way of putting into words what is being done to our schools.
It is a long page, well worth the read.
This movement really picked up steam during the pro-business Reagan years. Concurrently, the phrase “education crisis” was created so public education could be blamed for the increasing gap between the rich and the poor and the rising lack of opportunity in America.
In this phase of the charter movement, it is very important that the promoters make their schools look extra fine. This is done by creaming students and getting a lot of supplementation for programs from the venture philanthropists. In addition, they make sure the superiority of their schools is highly publicized. If you read the outline of the whole plan here, you'll learn that friendly editorial boards are very important to this faction.* You'll also learn that their goal is to gain more and more of the market share so the traditional public school system gets weaker and weaker. Make no mistake – wherever there are no charter caps, the goal will be to convert all public schools to a system of charters.
In the future, communities will not be able to be involved with any aspect of their schools. Say bye-bye to school boards, School Site Councils, teacher unions, school worker unions, and other community-member involved bodies. Say hello to a vestigial form of the school district that only takes care of the unwanteds: special ed and behavior-problem students. Decisions will be made by the CMOs (Charter Management Organizations) . CMOs like Aspire, Envision, Green Dot, KIPP, and Imagine will be the “big box store" equivalent of public schools. This is where America’s urban schools are headed.
She goes on to quote Ken Libby. He found some fascinating quotes from the AEI written "in early 2008 by AEI/Fordham's Andy Smarick, a former Bush II Domestic Policy Council member tasked with K-12 and higher education issues."
From the VaultFrom 2008
Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering's way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrict authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition). For example, in New York a concerted effort could be made to site in Albany or Buffalo a large percentage of the 100 new charters allowed under the raised cap. Other potentially fertile districts include Denver,Detroit,Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.
It has been meant all along that the charter schools become dominant over traditional public schools, schools which will not in the future likely allow local input.
Once it is done there is no going back to the true public education. This is not about real education, it is about having big money and big power to control the agenda.