Last Thursday, May 10th, District attorney Edward
Sklar presented a summary of the Initial
Analysis of the Charter School Petition prepared by the joint County and
District staff and legal team to a packed house. The District also made
available Part
1 and Part
2 of a Memo responding to questions submitted by the community about the
charter petition. As I noted in a recent post, it looks very bad for the
charter school advocates and their corporate funded lawyer. In this posting I
will summarize the key observations the District made in the Initial Analysis
and Memo as to the many flaws, faulty assumptions, and outright mistakes found
in the charter petition. As you will see the charter petition fails on three of
the 5 key items (1, 2 and 5) in the state Education Code by which the Board of
Trustees may vote to deny the petition and the Board of Trustees’s own
policies. (p. 2-6) The District is refusing to allow the charter petitioners to
make any amendments which would otherwise nullify the petition forcing them to
start over and have instead asked them for clarifications. The petitioners have
been given until May 24th to provide their written response to the
Initial Analysis. The staff will issue its final recommendation to the Board in
advance of the June 12th Board meeting at which time it will vote on
the charter petition.
The Initial Analysis makes it crystal clear that “a
significant concern requiring clarification is the likelihood that Petitioners
can successfully implement their educational program as set forth in the
Petition.” (p. 1) The key issue raising doubt that they may achieve their goals
is the assumption that the District will turn over a supposedly $165,000 in
“discretionary” funds. Since the Initial Analysis states that “staff does not
recommend that the District transfer these discretionary funds to Petitioner”
and the petition itself admits that it would have to chop out eurythmy,
language and music from the Waldorf curriculum it seems that the charter
advocates have shot themselves in the foot. The charter, according to the staff
report and the charter petitioners’ own admission, cannot achieve its own
educational goals and student outcomes. (p. 1 and 12)
That’s the global picture. When you zoom into the details it
only gets worse for the charter. There are many important plans, details, and
assessments missing and many mistakes in their claims.
Missing in Action
Let’s take a look at what is missing from the charter
petition. If you read my two part analysis of the charter petition you will
recognize some of issues I previously raised as well as a number of new issues.
Here’s what is missing or flawed:
o A
plan to provide adequate professional development, instructional materials and
time to ensure that students meet the newly adopted Common Core Standards (p.
8)
o 1st
and 2nd grade assessment tools (p. 11)
o A
plan to hire an interventionist specialist for low and high achieving students,
English learners, and special needs students (p. 11)
o A
plan for transitional kindergarden (p.11)
o Demonstrable
proof of skills development in reading, math, science, and history/social
science (especially dear to my heart as a social science professor) (p. 8, 10)
o A
thoroughly adequate special education plan (p. 12-13)
o A
plan to achieve racial and ethnic balance matching the District’s current 8.5%
Latino/Hispanic student population (p. 13-14)
o A
detailed description of their entrance interview and application process and
forms (p. 14)
o A
clearly delineated expulsion and suspension policy with a practical
administrative panel review process (p. 14)
o A
commitment to participate in a specific retirement system for its staff (p. 15)
o As
discussed below, a clear budget that can successfully deliver their educational
program (p. 15)
o A
salary pay scale and benefits package for staff (p. 16)
o Pay
for substitutes (p. 16)
o A
funding plan to acquire all the equipment and supplies needed to operate a
Waldorf school since the District says everything we currently use is owned by
the District (p. 17)
o A
clear plan for what administrative services the charter will pay the District
to carry out (p. 18)
o A
resolution to the inevitable conflict of interest if the District both conducts
many of the administrative functions of the charter and then evaluates them (p.
21)
o A
plan for carrying out housekeeping and maintenance (p. 18)
o A
disclosure of their list of consultants. (p. 4) We now know that that have
hired the corporate charter school law firm of Middleton, Young & Minney. What we don’t yet know if
they are working on a contingency (which would pay out only if they can
successfully sue and pillage our District) or if they are still being paid by
the hour.
o A
complete academic calendar (p. 5)
o A
plan for building maintenance, replacement and expansion (p. 5)
o An
address for each applicant (which may be a problem for the petitioners if one
of the main petitioners still doesn’t actually live in the District and has not
obtained an out of district transfer for her 2nd grader as was the
case in early 2011) (p. 20)
o An
attorney’s opinion about the potential financial liability to the District (p.
20)
Case Study #1: Drain
the District, Feed the Charter
Despite the thinly veiled threats by the charter petitioner’s
corporate lawyer, the charter has explicitly identified the devastating
fiscal impact on the District if it were to approve the charter. The Initial
Analysis states straightforwardly that “the Charter School would have a
negative fiscal impact upon the District in each of its first three years of
operation” from both the “Fair Share” and “Regular” budgets which “would cause
the District to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars causing the District to
reduce services elsewhere to compensate.” (p. 18-19)
Although the Initial Analysis doesn’t provide the full
estimate of the cost to the District for the 2nd and 3rd
years if the charter’s “Fair Share” budget were approved, it does note that the
District would lose a whopping $274,000 in the first year alone. The Regular
budget (which cuts out instructional aides for 3 Waldorf programs) would cost
the District $109,000, $162,000 and $193,000 in the first three years totaling
$303,000 in lost revenue (minus $191,000 currently spent on the LWIP).
As I also noted in an earlier analysis on this blog that
comes close to the estimates in the Initial Analysis, this is a far cry from
the charter petitioners’ wildly exaggerated claim that it would save the
District $365,000. This estimate, the report explains, is “grossly inaccurate”
and “not correct.” (p. 19)
One of the key factors the charter petition overlooks is
that the charter cannot hope to get all of the administrative work done by the
District for a mere $20,000 while the District is losing this much money. This
estimate “is not realistic,” according to the staff report. (p. 19) The
District warns that it will charge a much higher rate to recoup any loses
caused by the charter, if it even has the capacity to provide these services
for hire. (p. 19, and Memo, p. 2) Doing so would put to a lie the myth that
charter schools are more “efficient” than normal public schools. The charter’s
whose raison d'être is a shell game in which it would effectively
be taking from Paul with one hand and trying to underpay Paul with the other
for everything Paul already gave it for free to begin with.
Case Study #2: Flawed
Special Education Plan
The charter petition’s flawed coverage of special education
comes under particularly harsh scrutiny. According to the Initial Analysis, “a
number of elements of a ‘reasonably comprehensive’ special education plan are
missing from the Petition” which leads the analysts to conclude that “there is
no indication in the Petition that they understand their responsibility to
ensure that all eligible pupils are to be provided with a free appropriate
public education.” (p. 12) This observation should give everyone pause:
“Petitioners appear to be unclear as to how the provision of special education
services to eligible Charter School students will actually occur.” (p. 13)
One need not look very far to see that this is not an
oversight but rather a strategy used by the charter industry to socialize the
costs even as it privatizes public assets. As I noted in a recent posting,
their legal counsel advocates charter applications avoid making any financial
commitments to provide special education. The charter petition is missing an
adequate special education plan for the same reasons it is also missing a plan
to achieve ethnic and racial diversity—they have no intention of providing
them. Charters are not financially sustainable unless they can dump the most
“costly” children to the public while filtering out the whiter and wealthier
students who offer more “donations” and less need for ESL, free and reduced
lunches, transportation, and remedial and special education. HMOs do the same
thing in our market based health care delivery system by covering only the
healthy and passing along the higher cost sick, children, elderly, and even pregnant
patients to the public programs such as MediCare, MediCaid, the VA, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP or
Healthy Families in CA) public insurance
programs.
Case Study #3: Lack
of Racial and Ethnic Diversity
Take a look at the blistering criticism leveled at the
charter petition for its incompetence in planning for racial and ethnic diversity.
(p. 13-14) The petitioners not only failed to even identify the current racial
and ethnic diversity of the District (which I pointed out in my analysis) but
their focus on only recruiting from among the existing LWIP student population
“appears misplaced and inappropriately narrow” to put it extremely diplomatically.
Some could perceive this as racist and xenophobic. The claim that
the charter will enroll no immigrant students even though at least 6 of our
families—including mine—have at least one immigrant parent, demonstrates that
the petitioners don’t even know our own families. Perhaps three of the key
charter advocates are just too busy working for the Valley based Kelleher International, a multinational corporate dating service for millionaires and billionaires owned by family of the charter spokesman—the real
1%—to notice the rest of us here in the real world.
A Note of Outrage
If all of this hasn’t split your gizzard yet you should read
this last item sitting down. According to the Memo it is perfectly legal for
the charter school, if it is approved, to use taxpayer money paid to support
public education to pay for legal costs even if the legal services are used to
the sue the District which funds it. (“Operations of the Charter School,” #6
and 7, p. 6) Furthermore, it is also legal to use the same taxpayer money
intended for running a public school to pay membership fees for the Walmart and
Gates Foundation funded California Charter Schools Association which seeks to
break up and pillage our public schools and transform them into publicly funded
private schools.
A 3 year Long Trainwreck?
All of these missing elements illustrate not only the
charter petitioners’ lack of experience working in and administering a school,
and obtaining adequate professional assistance, but more importantly that they
are unlikely to successfully implement their educational goals.
In particular, note the question posed in the Initial
Analysis asking “How will the Charter School’s teaching staff address the
differences in skills and content between Petitioners’ Waldorf curriculum and
the California Common Core Standards, especially given that students will be
expected to perform proficiently on state tests that are based upon the Common
Core?” (p. 9)
The obvious answer is that, mindful that I am also talking
about my own daughter, they cannot. The charter will fail and should be denied.
Yet, even if it is granted by the District, County or the State Department of
Education (which I suspect is their strategy considering their corporate
lawyer’s links to the charter office) and then fails it will be closed down.
When and if that comes to pass it would wipe out an extraordinary experiment in
providing a public Waldorf education in a small school setting. But by
then the key charter advocates may already have their children enrolled in one
of the pricey private Waldorf Schools around the Bay Area, if of course they
are willing to make that daily commute from the Valley.
In either case, the board has solid ground to vote to deny
the charter petition.
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