From TEA: Charter Schools bill up in Senate, Tennessee public schools at risk

[Jamey Dobbs]

Does anyone have any information on this? Copied from TEA website http://www.teateachers.org/News.asp?s=1&nid=149

Tennessee public schools at risk

Three extremely costly and dangerous charter school bills go before the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday. If passed the bills would send public tax dollars to for-profit companies and private organizations to operate and manage, what would no longer be, public charter schools. At a time when Tennessee is strapped to pay for public schools, these bills would skim off millions of dollars to pay for the unproven experiment that is charter schools. The cost to Memphis public school children alone is over $23 million this year according to figures from Memphis City Schools.

As currently structured, Tennessee school systems must pay public charter schools the full per pupil expenditure for each child who transfers to a charter school. This money comes from the school systems' operating budget each year.

If one child from every classroom in every school in a school system transferred, the regular school costs to that community would not change. Why? Because the remaining children would still need their classroom, their teacher, their lights/heat/air, transportation, etc.

For an estimate of what the loss of just one child per school would cost Tennessee public school systems, click here. http://www.teateachers.org/Images/Users/Research/CostOfCharters.pdf [note: for Knox County, the estimate is $716,967]

[granma2]

Vic, the site I referenced has it broken down nationally and state by state. You have to do a little digging, but what I looked at said there is little difference between the results of charter schools and district run public schools. And Sheri is right that charter schools, like private schools, will be able to reject certain students that public schools must take. I lean against charter schools. They are simply publically funded exclusive private schools. If they were created for specific disabilities, they may be beneficial, but so could public schools that were created like that. However, PL94-142 requires students with disabilities to be educated in the least restrictive environment, so separate facilities are no longer the norm for children with disabilities. Why would we want to create them now after years of integrating disabled children into regular schools?

[Ginevra]

Sorry your husband lost his job, Sheri. By the time we manage to get rid of all our corporations and businesses, my husband will probably have lost his also. (As it is, I've worked two jobs most of my life... don't know what we'll do then)

Lots of people don't see this is a "business" or "corporate" thing, but rather as a CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE (sorry, hate to shout it out, but in my experience I've often seen that's the case)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/13/AR2...

Education, By Any Means
By Anthony A. Williams and Kevin P. Chavous;
Tuesday, April 14, 2009; Page A17

"We want freedom by any means necessary."

"When Malcolm X uttered those words in June 1964, a chill traveled down the spine of America. The phrase signaled a change in the tone and tenor of the civil rights movement. It was understood that those fighting for equality and justice were willing to do anything to achieve those rights. Malcolm's words made clear that tedious, incremental steps toward freedom for African Americans were unacceptable and would not be tolerated. "By any means necessary" represented a crossroads in the civil rights movement.

Our nation faces a similar crossroads today regarding education reform. Ensuring that every American child receives equal access to high-quality education represents our last civil rights struggle..." more at the link

[Debi]

It sounds that your charter issues may be more with your state's management than charter schools across the nation. Here is part of an excerpt from the study I cited a few posts back. 1/5 of the charter schools serve minorities, economically disadvantaged, or disabled according to this study. The point I walk away with is for our state to be sure we have well-represented demographics:

"In addition to the findings discussed above, the survey data show that almost all the children in a significant number of charter schools are minorities, economically disadvantaged, or students with disabilities. We estimate that approximately one-fifth of charter schools may serve such a particular student population....Such concentrations are not accidental. Many charter schools have been founded specifically to meet the needs of a particular population of children... The second most cited reason was to serve a special population of students. Sixty charter schools (17 percent) stated this was their most important motivation for starting a charter school."

[Bob Hunter]

Sheri,
I agree with several of your comments and disagree with just as many - but some of those disagreements would be for another place and time.
Not supporting charter, or private schools for that matter, has anyone considered that maybe one of the big differences is that the parents and students in those schools are more dedicated to achieving higher standards and got sick and tired of their kids being left behind in the public school system because the focus is on the underachievers (many times because of their own choice to be underachievers). I think this is the biggest factor you see in the different scores - not teacher pay (not saying they don't deserve more) or some of the other factors often mentioned on this site. And as far as running the schools like a business - I think we have to bring in more accountability and review like we have in the business world or the system will NEVER improve. You mention the economy and the capitalistic attitude but the real problem is the government intervention. When a business makes a poor decision the government should not bail them out - by doing so they take away all risk and make the business another welfare dependent on the state with no concern about future failure (because the government will bail them out again). We then begin to throw good money away to solve an unsolvable problem. And guess what - that is very much what we have done in the education systems and now we are paying the price. It is time to hold someone accountable for millions of wasted dollars with no results or in many cases worse results. And right or wrong that is why you are seeing a move toward private education, charter schools, etc. whether they are the solution or not. Folks are just fed up....

[Vic Spencer]

Sheri, Bob and Debi are right. I did a fair amount of research on this topic. The management style of our and other school districts is early 20th century autocratic, not participative, non-delegating, highly centralized. Back then the only planning top management did was a rough expense budget. No planning, only gut feel. To date that is what we have, and such a style carries an enormous overhead and is very slow to improvement, therefore quality focus on its primary task, educating our children, is virtually unknown. It can be so bad that that one student in school A and another in school B can get an A in Algebra 2 as an example, but in national tests in Algebra 2 they would get an A in one school and a C in another. WE do not even teach the same subject to the same standard in the entire school system. The buck stops with the Board of Education. Dr. McIntyre the superintendent is new. He looks promising to me but...if he improves things, it will not be because of the Board, but purely to his credit, because his predecessors could not do it. This is not a unique problem to us. We have been sinking nationally, although not quite as much as Tennessee. We as a nation have been throwing money at this huge problem all along without results. People with enough business experience have known for a long time that additional money is very rarely the solution and never the only solution to operating problem. As a result, Magnet and Charter schools came into being between public and private schools. Knox County was not successful with Magnet schools. A form of Charter schools may work. Nothing is going to work well until we go back to fundamentals again. For example it was not a bright idea to permit the use of calculators so that the kids do not have to think harder about basic math. You cannot tolerate bad behavior in school. It disrupts about 20 other kids each time it happens. If a kid does it 2-3 times, kick him out of school. Same with those who are not willing to study hard and do not do homework. Such kids eat up 10 times the teacher time and for what? Nothing. Give them two chances also and then kick them out. "We have to educate all children" is not reality. It is pure BS for politicians because it sounds encouraging to parents with kids who are not willing to work. You cannot educate those who do not want to be educated and behave. THAT IS reality. The parents of these kids cannot do it either. That IS ALSO reality. A bootcamp for such kids is the only hope in my opinion. They might sober up some day, want to become educated, and then we should have the option to do it. Finally schools need to manage their business. Expenses vs planned expenses, test results vs planned test results a lot more often than once per year because when problems develop, they need to turn it around a lot faster. In other words you have to learn to manage schools on the basis of what test results the generate for the money invested, planned vs actual. Anything above the operating units or schools must be lean for fast decision making. No kingdoms allowed that people tend to form in large HQ operations. This is new only for a very antiquated system like ours.
We need something highly structured, like a military boot camp style education for kids who are kicked out. The home environment did not work either, but many could be saved. I have seen that with older kids when military draft was alive. We need an educational institute for those, even at a younger age in my opinion. We must give possible tasks to our teachers, instead of an obstacle course. And the education system must present annual expense budgets with an operating plan right up front, that has measurable educational performance targets every month or two with actual results, and the same with expenses, highly visible to the public, with detailed explanations. No smoke and mirrors that are very possible to create in antiquated management systems. AND THAT IS HOW YOU START. The existing management practices absolutely defy logic. They will simply not succeed because you cannot direct anything that way. When you don't know where you are in both results and expenses at any point on a road with many intersections, how can you navigate to good results?
YOU CANNOT.

[granma2]

Bob, I often disagree with some of the things you say, but most of this I agree with. I DO think the process of receiving an education in the US needs to change. However, in our own little corner of the world here, we had an uprising simply because our superintendent wanted to change the start times of some schools. How do you think REAL change is going to happen when people here can't accept simple suggestions like that? The Save Our Tennessee Summers group is adamantly against increasing the length of the school year, and increasing the length of the school day would be met with the same resistance. Just changing an accounting method is NOT going to improve educational results. As I've said on here many times, we can't change education until there is a cultural change in the US about the value of education. When we stop taking care of those who choose to be underachievers, perhaps something will change.

[Vic Spencer]

Granma2, we are not going to have anywhere near 95% agreement on the great majority of things. Charter Schools have been approved. They are aimed at low performing areas. I hope that this will be changed so that they can be established anywhere where the people want them. Charter schools do not take money away from public schools. They get paid as now, per student. If the number of students for public schools go down because better school opportunities arose in the parents' judgement, then they will get less money, but the same amount per student.

Public schools will have to be directed better and they could achieve higher ACT scores. That is the key measure of education achievement from grade 1 to 11. Education achievement is the schools' sole business, the biggest competition is overseas, and Boards of Education and central district offices are not being creative enough, are not interested in how the big winners have changed their methods, and managed to dumb down all students by teaching to increasingly dumbed down tests over the decades, so that the scores look better for superintendents and politicians. All of them care about our children's future only in words people, because none of them stood up and remained standing to change this down trend, that eventually destroys our children's future job prospects. AND WE ARE THERE ALREADY. NOW IT IS PANIC TIME, but these fine people are just hiding in the wood pile. AND THEY DID IT WITH OUR HARD-EARNED TAX DOLLARS PEOPLE, AND A LOT OF IT!!!

[Debi]

Changing the accounting method sounds as if it needs to be done because if what Vic is reporting is true (and I believe him) that KCS cannot give a complete accounting of transactions, they are in violation of GAAP. So either KCS is lying when they say they cannot provide accounting records which makes them a liar, or they are needing an investigation from the GAO.

[Vic Spencer]

Debi, I would not go that far. They seem to have non-compatible bits and pieces that get audited. However, nothing exists like in public corporations, that allows a shareholder (same as us as tax payers) to find out pretty much anything about operating ratios at any operation (such as schools for KCS). My question of a year ago of what total ADA dollars we spend per student per school per year for each of the past five years is still not delivered, but with someone's special help, I received something that is close. KCS claims that it would take too much manual work to collect some of the things I would like to have, and Jim McIntyre flat told me at my one and only meeting with him that his needs will be number one, and anything I would like to have will be limited by the amount of man hours they can make available. That means in an impolite way, that we do not have systems in place that can be queried to obtain specific operating data per school in a few minutes. The Data Warehouse that is mentioned as a solution to all this cost $1.5 million or 0.5% of KCS operating expenses per year. And the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce is paying for it.

It would be an interesting question to ask as to why KCS has not been able to make a 0.5% investment in getting a transparent accounting system, so that they have the right management tool for decisions, and for the public, who actually pay for this fiasco called Knox County Education with bad results more than a million dollars each calendar day. Another interesting question could be if anything is going on behind the impenetrable curtains of financial and operational visibility, where money is used not as the public is lead to believe. $370 million dollars can present a lot of tempting opportunities, but hopefully such funny business is not going on.

What has been going on for sure is the dumbing down of state tests in a very systematic way, to show higher test results benefitting politicians and the schools reputation, while dumbing down our children - all done at our expense. That is a fact. That is why they are hustling like mad now to increase the graduation requirements and to toughen up the TN tests. The scores will go down showing what they did to our children. And then they will get raked over the coals a bit, although I think that some people should go to jail for what they have done with our money. But too many just did not do anything when they should have stood up and stopped what was going on. I don't have to tell you what I think of such people in positions of responsibility. By the way, I think the GAO handles only federal cases. And you can meet GAAP requirements and end up with a screwed up system like this one. You can blame it on the blending of 2-3 different accounting systems.

[Debi]

There should be a transaction for every credit and every debit. If they can't find the time to make the calculations they could at least show you the transaction registers of every school & central office & we could figure it all out. I've been out of the accounting loop for almost 10 yrs now but when I was active GAAP had some pretty clear guidelines. I would also question whether or not GAO could get involved since KCS receives federal dollars allocated by Congress and GAO carries out investigations on spending for Congress.