Go to http://www.google.com and search for “senate voting records”. The first four links that come up are for McCain and Obama voting records. The first two are links to pages on http://www.senate.gov, and the next two are pages on http://www.votesmart.com.

If that’s not enough help, you really need to talk to your teacher and/or your parents.

Please reply.
Mikenna Koth 7th Grade. (RESA)

It may be “no secret” that Jonathan Schorr is involved with charter schools, but he was a teacher and a reporter in Oakland before that when he researched and wrote the book. His book is also quite open about the problems with several charter corporations. So the conspiracy theory doesn’t fit. Anyway, don’t you work in public schools? Then you must be hiding a ‘public school bias.’ That’s a silly ad hominem attack that’s characteristic of the Oakland ‘anti-corporate’ school activist. Hope you all aren’t teaching those logical fallacies to students.

Your version of the OCO history doesn’t fit the history I have heard from parents. You say “OCO leaders wanted to create a school for their children.” OCO only has a few paid leaders, the rest are parents. They were creating schools “for their children,” as you say, not for “a corporation.” OCO parents are and were involved in several charters and several district schools.

As far as Cox’s test scores, I’m not arguing that all charters outperform district schools on tests. I’m aware that research has found that charters on average do not outperform regular schools. But in many cities, they were a reasonable, usually grassroots response to a history of poor performance by the district. I agree that the ideal of public schools is unity, but districts that fail repreatedly to educate students who are poor, black, and brown have long ago broken that compact. The charter movement is fueled in part by deep anger among urban families over the history of terrible local education. I know that free market types are trying to exploit that anger for their own ends, but nothing is simple. Something has to be done to shake up the complacency of urban districts and charters are one way to do that. I know that it is far from a solution but at least it is creating openings for further change. That I think is a pragmatic rather than an ideological view.
You can have the last word.

Slick points you make. You say you chose not to use corporate in connection with public charter schools because someone might confuse non-profit with profit making corporation. Kaiser is a non-profit corporation but I suspect its CEO is well paid.

Corporate rules are leading KIPP Bridge Oakland to try and make one consolidated governing board for the Bay Area and 5 different districts. Instead of an elected school boardm KIPP is trying to put in place a non-elected governing board that is absent from the district that has responsibility of oversight. Parents of KIPP students have to leave the district to be heard by the KIPP governing board. The rules are different for a corporation than the public school system Americans grew up with. And, these rules, in my opinion, are contrary to the American public concept of a public and government by and for the people.

And, speaking of KIPP, it is no secret that Jonathan Schorr is closely connected with Oakland KIPP having served on their governing board thus implying a bias for promotion of charter schools. Slick that you mention him.

Slick that you talk about OCO leaders starting up the first charter school and make it seem as the families at Hawthorne and Cox had something to do with that movement.

What happened was that some of the OCO leaders wanted to create a school for their children that had a curriculum that was culturally sensitive to their children speaking English as a second language and was smaller, and safer than the large overcrowded public schools. That school was taken over by a leader that dumped the original goal of the school for a back to basic English only curriculum. Now the school seems very successful with the second highest scores in the City of Oakland. But, in a sense the original goal of the school to provide a English as a second language and cultural Spanish/American experience was a failure in that the school has been transformed into an English only test prep school. But, the history of the Oakland Charter Academy is not the history of the converting of two large elementary schools by State Administrator Randy Ward. Conflating the two different stories is slick and misleading.

Speaking of the performance of Cox and Hawthorne. I didn’t locate Hawthorne scores but the latest for Cox is a 1 on a 1 to 10 scale.

Finally 15% or 18 million give away to the successful charter school programs is only fair to the families that are attending successful charter school programs because, if they own property and paid their property tax under Measure N, they’ll not get any benefit and they’ll be left out just like the charter school teachers that will get only what their at will employer will decide to pay out of the $18 million.

The idea of public implies a unity and what charter schools do is break the bound with the idea of a unified public. Sure those without kids pay for public schools but few have a concept of what a corporate public school means. They think of a public school as the schools they attended.

Jim Mordecai

I don’t say “corporate charters” because that implies they are for-profit, when most are nonprofit (I do not support for-profit charters). The charter at the old Hawthorne and Cox campuses, Education for Change, is a nonprofit. It was founded by Oakland administrators, as you say, not by some corporation somewhere.

Hawthorne was actually called “Hawthorne Year-LOng ELementary” because it was so overcrowded that it had to run year-round at great inconvenience to families and to the detriment of students and teachers. It was in fact parent and family dissatisfaction with the abysmal state of schools in East Oakland that led to charters coming in. The Walmart family funder met with parents, not with business people, about starting schools here.

So it is inaccurate and somewhat insulting to say that these largely Spanish-speaking families did not and do not know that they have chosen charters, or that they were “forced” to attend charters. In fact, it was the Oakland COmmunity Orgnizations, a church-based family organization with a majority Latino base, that pushed for charters and new small schools SO THAT families would have choices of small schools.

The threat of charters forced the district to do better (under Chaconas) and continues to work as a lever. The forced attendance of terrible schools was a feature of the bad old days (which you seem to fondly recollect through the distorted lens of hatred for the state takeover and Randy Ward.) This is all documented in the book Hard Lessons: the Promise of an Inner City Charter School, by Jonathan Schorr, and in materials published by OCO and researchers.

Next, your point that ‘charters are more prone to being terrible because of lack of district oversight and regulation’ assumes that district oversight and regulation are advantages, when there is no evidence that they are and plenty that they are not, as evidenced by the performance of Hawthorne, Cox, Castlemont, Jefferson, etc etc all the schools that have been rightfuly closed in recent years.

The anti-charter, local control, status quo activist cadre had its chance for many years and really has nothing positive to say about how good a job they did up to 2002 or how good a job they are going to do now, so they resort to a purely negative stance toward supposed “corporate control.”

Finally, the 15% is obviously a matter of fairness to the taxpaying families that attend charters . It is also the case that many students transfer between city public schools undetected by county. Whatever, many families will pay the tax who don’t have kids at all, it’s not to the point.

Comments I am about to make attacking the public corporate charter school system of California are not comments authorized by a chorus but by Jim Mordecai .

Measure N does not let taxpayers (they are people too) choose charter schools because Measure N forced on the ballot by the dictates of Jack O’Connell, and his Oakland State Administrator serving him, mixed corporate charter schools incentive money with a pay raise for public school teachers.

Why Cranky Researcher keep repeating charter schools are public schools and leaving out that they are corporate public schools? The difference between public schools and corporate public schools is significant even if charter school operators, and supports, try to divert the public from the truth that corporate public charter schools and public school operate under different rules and those differences are important.

The largely Spanish-speaking families that used to attend both Hawthorne and E. Morris Cox were forced to attend corporate charter schools when these neighborhood schools became converted by the State Administrator Randy Ward because they neither understood difference between corporate public charter school and a public school nor did it matter what they understood because they were powerless to stop the change.

The over thousand students that became a charter at E. Morris Cox was not a parent choice; it was an illegal transfer of E Morris Cox to a corporation set up by the Assistant Superintendent working for Randy Ward, State Administrator who abused his power in an obvious conflict of interest.

The transfer was illegal because the required number of permanent teachers never signed off on the conversion. It was also unethical to transfer power to a corporation that was set up by someone close to the Oakland State Administer. And, it was also unethical not to allow other charter operators the opportunity to take over a school property and over a thousand students per.

Add on the transfer of over another thousand enrolled students from the former Hawthorne, and the use of the Hawthorne campus, by the same corporation headed by Randy Ward’s Assistant Superintendent on leave, and parent choice was a cruel joke. Actually, anything parents said didn’t matter because State Administrator Ward held all the cards that mattered.

As for the idea that somehow charter schools are entitled to 15% of parcel taxes, it is an idea that charter schools would like to establish. Pasage of Measure N will help to establish that principle.

But, until charter school enrollment become a larger percentage of a district’s enrollment than public school enrollment, corporate charter schools will have to hide their request for parcel tax money embedded in requests by a district for the public to tax itself for “public schools” and hope to keep the word corporate burried.

In San Francisco its recent parcel tax passed,- in part, because wealthy individuals favoring charter schools let it be known that they would throw their money and political power behind blocking San Francisco public school teacher pay raises if there wasn’t an agreement to include charter schools.

San Francisco has about 5% charter school students but the agreement was for charter schools to get about 3% of the parcel tax. The percentage of San Francisco charter school enrollment was not part of the deal.

Piggy-backing on public school parcel tax was different in San Francisco than proposed Measure N in Oakland because the terms of the San Francisco parcel tax was that the 3% charter school money was to go to charter school teachers’ pay raises. Measure N requires all 15% of the parcel is spent on an incentive for “successful educational programs at Oakland’s public charter schools”.

Oakland Measure N by providing $18 million dollar parcel tax incentive for charter school programs, instead of charter school teacher pay, provides unencumbered right for to provide terrible corporate charter-run schools.

And corporate charter-run schools have a greater opportunity to be terrible-run schools because they have less oversight and regulation than public schools. The irony of Chranky Researcher’s comment that public schools are “terrible district-run schools…” is that it is the district that is responsible for the oversight of corporate charter schools. Out of the mud he is claiming grows the lotus, in this case a better child than its parent the terrible run district. Nice trick but not reality.

Arguing that regulation by a terrible district makes for a better system defines common sense. In practice charter school are an opportunity for taking the public to the cleaners with $250,000 state loan to anyone wanting to play charter school operator and nothing to lose if the loan is not repaid.

Finally, your statement that 15% of residents in Oakland attend charter schools also may not be accurate because charter schools can admit students from anywhere whereas the County Board of Education has to rule on district transfers for public school students. Rules that apply to the public schools do not necessarily apply to corporate public charter schools. One of Oakland’s charter schools has a number of students from Richmond.

Jim Mordecai

I hope you’re wrong. But, I fear you aren’t.

Turner

I ditto your comment. touche’

The Urban School Districts have always had more than enough money to accomplish education, they just waste it. They will continue to waste any additional funds printed for them. It’s not the money it’s the operating conditions that make the schools fail.