Perhaps Its Time for a "Screenless" Charter School Focused on Teaching How to Be Human

Perhaps it is time to establish a “screenless” charter school in NC. It could have as its central mission to educate without using EdTech as a crutch for learning and technology as a means of controlling teachers, students and the learning.

The school could make a commitment to teaching students to be critical, independent and responsible citizens not proper consumers of the latest product on offer from Silicon Valley and Big Tech.

The school could still utilize technology, but that technology would be in control of the teachers and parents not Ed Leaders and EdTech consultants.

The goal of this screenless charter school would be to create a space where teachers connect with students and their parents without the constant mediation of impersonal devices whose goals are to addict and capture attention. A place for people not machines.

Students would learn the foundations that would make them critical consumers instead of EdTech fad chasers.

NC Legislature Shows Love for Charters & Hostility to Traditional Public Schools

Here’s some more evidence that our North Carolina State Legislature despises traditional public schools and favors charter schools that don’t have to play by the same rules as other public schools. Yesterday, the North Carolina House voted to allow charter schools to once again play by different rules.
While traditional public schools have been required to disclose to names and salaries of all its employees to newspapers and the other media under public records laws, it seems our legislature does not believe charter schools should have to do the same. The bill passed by the North Carolina House does not require charter schools to disclose the names of employees with the salaries with public records requests. The logic used to justify this measure by NC Representatives Charles Jeter and David Lewis? “Disclosing the charter school salaries by name creates a hostile work environment.” (See “NC House Votes to Block Charter Employees’ Names with Pay.”)

As far as I am concerned, the logic and intentions of this legislature is clear. It simply despises public schools. period. Through this bill, our legislature finally admits, though tacitly, that it “wants to create a hostile work environment” in traditional public schools, because they are unwilling to protect public school employees from some “theoretical hostile work environment.”

Once again, this North Carolina Legislature proves its hostile intentions toward traditional public education. For the past several years, all employees in school districts in our region have endured having their salaries publicly available in data-bases located on newspaper web sites. Has it caused a hostile work environment? I’m not sure it has. Most of us don’t even bother to access that data anymore. But the fact that our political leaders somehow want to hide how charter schools operate and spend money, definitely shows hostile intentions toward traditional public schools.

These two state legislators, Jeter and Lewis, prove that what they really want to protect is how charter schools actually spend public money. Charters in our area have been known to pay exorbitant salaries to administrators. One charter in Charlotte, North Carolina recently imploded due to bloated administrator salaries. (See “Troubled StudentFirst Charter School Closes Abruptly")

If anyone needs names and salaries disclosed it is public charter schools. Because they are not required to play by the same employment laws as traditional public schools, the public has an even greater interest in making sure these schools do not waste tax payer money. Perhaps this is once again that the signs of intelligent life in our North Carolina Legislature grow even dimmer.

StudentFirst Charter School Found to Be Putting Administrators First in Charlotte NC

In a recent Charlotte Observer article entitled "StudentFirst Charter School to Close Next Week" 300 students will find themselves without a school next week due to the foundering of this charter school on the rocks of mismanagement and downright incompetence. According to the article, state consultants hired to investigate this charter school found:

• academic shortcomings
• unopened mail
• unpaid bills
• overpaid and overstaffed administration
• tens of thousands of spending not properly documented

Of course the irony of the name of this charter school rings loud and clear once you read the grocery list of issues above. 

I have long understood that the theory most have about charter schools is to create schools that can avoid the red tape and regulation that regular schools face. Say what you want, but in regular public schools, it is fairly difficult for this kind of thing to happen. There are "pay scales" that control how much administrators are paid. There are regulations dictating how money is handled and paid. As much as we administrators might fuss about these regulations sometimes when we're dealing with administrative matters, this incident is a reminder that not all regulation is bad. 

When you create an governmental entity that can operate outside the rules the rest of us have to follow, corruption will follow. Now North Carolina has increased the possibility of more charter school corruption by lifting the ceiling, and we have a current United States president and secretary of education who are avid charter school supporters. 

Should we be really surprised when a charter school called "StudentFirst Academy," whose actual name sounds like it should be "Administrators First" suddenly becomes so corrupt that 300 students are cast into the street to find their education elsewhere? As a whole charter schools are no better than regular public schools. Their ability to avoid regulation is a recipe for more corruption and wasting of tax payer money like StudentFirst academy in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Carpet Bombing of Public Schools by a Pro School-Privatization Movement

The assumption behind "Parent Trigger" laws, according to Diane Ravitch in her new book Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, is "If parents seize control of their school, they can make it better." As Ravitch points out, with a great deal of data, there is no evidence to support this assumption. What is amazing to me is how this so-called "parent empowerment" legislation came into existence in the first place. At the heart of the development of "parent trigger" laws have been key players in the for-profit charter school industry, who, with an obvious conflict of self-interest, have combined forces with organizations of free market fanatics (the American Legislative Exchange Council comes to mind here) to introduce these measures in state legislatures. But what has really happened here? How have these people like Ben Austin, who founded the pro-charter, pro-parent trigger organization Parent Revolution, been able to both successfully push through a mechanism that makes it possible for parents to commandeer a public school then turn around and hand that school to a for-profit charter school company? It would appear that they have done so through a combination of tactics and maneuvers that belittle public education as a whole, and that use popular media to push their specific agenda of privatization.

One tactic the pro-charter movement has used extremely well is to blanket attack the quality of public schools in general. It is actually akin to carpet-bombing the media with movies, think tank reports, and pseudo-studies denigrating public schools, thereby supporting their cause.They do this by misrepresenting data, focusing on public school examples of extreme failure, and by undermining general public faith in public schools. Aided by both politicians who would like nothing better than shutting down public schools altogether and educators who have bought into the audit culture of testing and accountability, this job of mis-representing the reality of public education is made much easier. Politicians have passed laws such as those in North Carolina and Florida that assign letter grades to public schools based on test scores. Educators, specifically those in state departments of testing and accountability are providing "the data" that ultimately feeds this system and the assumptions that all public schools are failing. What's amazing in all this is the simple fact that data clearly shows that charter schools do not as a whole do any better than public schools, and because there is no unified measure of private schools, there is no way to empirically support the assumption that they do any better either. By blanketing the media with "gloom and doom" reports surrounding the latest test scores, the public's confidence in public schools has eroded and will continue to do so, at least until educators begin calling out those engaged in this tactic.

Another tactic employed by the pro-charter movement is evident in the series of pro-charter school movies that have recently appeared. Waiting for Superman, Won't Back Down, and The Cartel, are all part of concerted effort to undermine confidence in public schools and promote charter schools and vouchers. Using movies to promote causes is common. What might be just a bit sleazy about these movies is how they misrepresent reality and mask who's really behind the movie. Waiting for Superman and Won't Back Down are made by Walden Media, funded by billionaire libertarian Philip Anschutz who funds a variety of think tanks and organizations pushing free market philosophy and thinking. His interest in the destruction of public schools and pushing for market-based education reforms  is obvious. Bob Bowdon, the maker of the film The Cartel also has strong ties to free market libertarian organizations, so it is clear also what his real agenda is. One other film, The Lottery, is also another movie that promotes charter schools and denigrates public schools. One can add this movie to the "Charter School Commercial Genre" of movies created by the those with the financial means to push this free market, public school privatization agenda in the guise of teary scenes of kids and parents not getting the education they so desperately want. Those creating these movies and documentaries have learned well how to attack public schools and promote privatization as the only way to save education.

Ultimately, at the heart of all this is that there are those who are willing to distort facts, misrepresent reality, and even implement mechanisms like parent trigger laws to undermine public education. I can't help but wonder though whether this whole attack on public schools is a symptom of a larger struggle taking place within American culture. That struggle is between those who advocate libertarian, free market systems where pursuit of selfish interest is in the interest of society and those who understand that government has and must play a role in refereeing and being a part of all our systems because pursuit of self-interests can't always be trusted, whether they be economic, political or educational. This struggle is being waged across all aspects of American culture, with education being one of those battlefields. What makes all this really frightening to me in some ways is that those pushing this free market, libertarian agenda, have a license to push their self-interest at all costs. Because what they are doing is automatically assumed to be for the good of all, no one looks critically at their actions, or if someone does, they're immediately criticized for not supporting free market interests or worse: being a socialist.