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Common Dreams reports
The Seattle Times reports that
The ruling--believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country--overturns the law [I-1240] voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.
Teacher and author Mercedes Schneider offers more on the Act:
As is true of charter schools nationwide, the charters in Washington State (up to the current ruling) were eligible for public funding diverted from traditional public schools. Charter schools were approved via a November 2012 ballot initiative (I-1240, the Charter Schools Act) in which charters were declared to be "common schools" despite their not being subject to local control and local accountability. And also like America's charters in general, Washington's charters are not under the authority of elected school boards.
Thus, Washington voters had approved to give public money to private entities--a one-way street that provided no means for such funds to overseen by the public.
[...] The new ruling (pdf)[1] states that charters, "devoid of local control from their inception to their daily operation", cannot be classified as "common schools," nor have "access to restricted common school funding."
[...] "The Supreme Court has affirmed what we've said all along--charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding," said Kim Mead, president of the [Washington Education Association], in a statement.
"Instead of diverting taxpayer dollars to unaccountable charter schools, it's time for the Legislature to fully fund K-12 public schools so that all of Washington's children get the quality education the Constitution guarantees them," Mead continued.
The Associated Press reports that the state had one charter school last year, and eight more have opened in the past few weeks.
I pity Ms. Schneider's students if she routinely starts sentences with conjunctions--especially consecutive, redundant conjunctions.
[1] I had trouble with the connection.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 07 2015, @06:02PM
Fair points - but let me ask, don't the local school districts have any voice in the charter schools? If a charter school is doing a crap job, it seems that the school board that is doing business with the charter could always cancel contracts/agreements with the school. That would very likely put the school board into a bind, trying to provide for the kid's continued education on short notice. But, the school board should have control.
If the board lacks any control over the charter school, then I would have to change my position.
No school can even pretend to show a profit, no matter how screwed up the accounting procedures, if it has no students enrolled!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @08:57PM
If the board lacks any control over the charter school, then I would have to change my position
Yes, you went off half-cocked from the start.
THE WHOLE POINT of charter schools is that there are SEPARATE and get to make up THEIR OWN RULES.
All too often, they are run by crooks. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [all-len-all.com]
Charter schools are simply the most recent method to rejuvenate segregation. [alternet.org]
show a profit
Ah. Neoliberalism rears its ugly head once again.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @10:12PM
Unfortunately, a large part of the point of charter schools is precisely that they can make their own rules, because the incumbent authorities have made such a mess of the schools currently in place.
While the grandparent poster may not have read with enough attention to detail, the key element here is that the Washington court has decided that publically funded charter schools may only operate if they work through the local school board (or equivalent) which pretty much craters their whole point. Funnily enough, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that enough people in Washington are angry enough with the original school system to support the creation of charter schools.
And no, Washington doesn't have a proud history of segregation. The initiative/law was passed precisely because people wanted better schools, not to keep darkies out. This isn't the Deep South. (And even if it were, it wouldn't work because of anti-bigotry laws.)
gew_, I don't know what your big issue here is (other than some weird desire to forcefeed everyone into the system for some reason beyond my reckoning) but you need to understand that homeschooling is growing rapidly in Washington precisely because people are so upset with their public schools. There are many symptoms of disgruntlement which have nothing to do with kids sitting next to kids of a different skin tone in the same room.
Maybe what you should do is come up with a way to get the public schools here to be efficient with money (good luck on that), effective at teaching (oh yeah, definitely good luck on that one) and persuade them to stick with your solution, rather than chasing after every lunatic trend (I'd wish you luck on that one, but maybe wishing you a good therapist would be better). That would do a lot more to benefit everyone than tearing down charter schools, the motivations for which you don't even appear to grasp.
As a washingtonian, I don't mind what ideology you have, but be a sport and don't let your ideology get in the way of good public policy, thanks.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Monday September 07 2015, @08:58PM
don't the local school districts have any voice in the charter schools?
That's exactly what the ruling seems to have a problem with:
The new ruling (pdf)[1] states that charters, "devoid of local control from their inception to their daily operation", cannot be classified as "common schools," nor have "access to restricted common school funding."
Long story short, if there were better oversight of the schools, then the court might have ruled differently. Canceling contracts does sound like one possible way of overseeing them, though I think that's a bit too drastic. There should definitely be more subtle degrees of controlling them than that.
But it might not be so easy to cancel a contract anyways. The charter school's board will probably start to astroturf the local government, or they might have other ways of "penalizing" the local district if they don't feel like they're getting a fair bargain (where _they_ get to define what's fair and what isn't). Another potential problem area is when you only have one district in a large, sparsely populated area - all of a sudden, you cut a contract with a school, and now the closest one for some people is 50 miles away. And then there's the fact that Americans are so hopelessly naive when assessing the values of private organizations - you don't see pitchforks at the doors of pharmaceutical companies when there should be with the way that they're holding people's health at a $500/month ransom. So I don't think they'll be that proactive in keeping this organizations in line anyway.
I mean, just look at the state of internet access in the US. There's an example of an industry that should have never gone near the private sector and look how it has turned out. I've said it before, and will say it again: capitalism (or whatever you want to call it) utterly perverses the motive on your business's raison d'etre - that's why you have internet companies throwing bribes that will result in _worse_ internet access. And my warning to people who are so high on charters because public schools aren't doing so well - well, perhaps charters will make things even worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2015, @11:07PM
It has little to do with contracts. Since the schools were established under a law (recently found in conflict with the constitution of the state), and funded under the same law, what now falls away is their funding.
As I see it they can fold, or go private, or convert to homeschooling collectives.
As for astroturfing, I don't think that they'll need to. All those parents who lined up to get their kids into a charter school, regardless of whether or not they made it through the lottery, are probably going to be pretty darned upset about this. Astroturf? If I were their PR guy I'd be worried about finding a way to keep the level of outrage and fury under control, not fake more.
And now we have a state commission for charter schools with no school funding sources - brilliant! I would expect the bureaucrats in that commission to spend more time lobbying from within the system to save their jobs, than the schools.
You say that perhaps charters will make things even worse. You may be right (although in many places they have made things substantially better). The question you aren't answering is why all these people are so angry, and why all the spending for decade upon decade on the state's schools hasn't made them the envy of the world, and why people are casting around for something, anything to get their kids a better education, and what would be a better offering.
I'll also notice that charter schools have something of a track record of making public schools straighten up and fly right. Maybe you have an alternative plan to fit that need?
Don't be shy. Let us know all the details.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Monday September 07 2015, @09:07PM
Also, here's a great article I read a while ago detailing how things can go so drastically wrong with charters: http://www.propublica.org/article/charter-school-power-broker-turns-public-education-into-private-profits [propublica.org]
The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a group that promotes best practices for overseeing charter schools, says schools should be independent from their contractors. Mitchell's dual roles as both a charter-school board member and a vendor, for instance, were a blatant violation of those standards.
"This kind of conflict of interest is what I would consider shocking," said Parker Baxter, a program director for the group.
...
Mitchell was pushed by North Carolina regulators to step down from his schools' board last fall, a move he derides as unnecessary. "It's so silly," he told ProPublica. "Undue influence, blah blah blah."
Emphasis mine.
Summary: board members of the school also have board memberships in other companies and public funds given to run these charter schools are funneled to these other private companies which "supply" them.
Another example of what can go wrong when a private organization is trusted to provide a service that is supposed to benefit the public: NYC Pension Earns $40 Million Over 10 Years, Pays Fund Managers $2 Billion [thereformedbroker.com]