Conservative consultant and former Republican congressman Newt Gingrich visits charter school students in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: American Solutions/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

The right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and private education management firms are pushing for new “parent trigger” laws in states across the U.S. by lobbying many Republican and some Democratic legislators to make it easier to convert more traditional public schools to charter schools.

Charter schools are a fairly new phenomenon in the U.S., with the first charter schools opening in the 1990s. The founders of a charter school are able to create a charter that defines the purpose and mission of the school, which does not have to necessarily follow the purpose and mission of a traditional public school.

Charter schools are considered public schools and typically receive some public funds. However, at the same time, they have a private charter and are not part of the public school system.You can have the red apple or you can have the green apple, and both of them are sour.

“The choice for parents is, are you going to trust a corporation where the CEO and the board are unaccountable, or are you going to trust the government?” said Kim Kahwach, an Atlanta parent who took an active role when the city’s public school system faced a recent accreditation crisis, and said she has concerns about the parent trigger proposal.

“Those are the choices that are being put in front of you. You go charter or you go government. You can have the red apple or you can have the green apple, and both of them are sour,” Kahwach told IPS.

In a traditional school, parents can voice their concerns to their school board members, who have some influence to potentially address their concerns. This is not always the case with charter schools.

“Some charter schools give parents a greater role, many do not. They let the parents work there or raise money,” said John Rogers, an associate professor at the University of California-Los Angeles’s (UCLA) Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

“That’s different than acting as civic agents to shape that school,” he told IPS. “There’s no promise that they will (engage parents).”

Charter schools are the latest scheme to privatise public education in the U.S., and are seen as more politically feasible than “voucher” proposals that would give students vouchers to purchase private schooling.

Many charter schools are operated by for-profit educational management firms, which receive sometimes lucrative contracts to operate the schools.

Critics note that one consequence of this is to shift teachers and other school employees away from being public sector, unionised workers who receive decent pay and benefits and who have some job protections, to being private, non-unionised workers who may not receive the same pay, benefits, and protections.

In recent years there has been increasing conversion of U.S. public schools to charter schools, as new charter schools have opened and traditional public schools have closed.

For example, Atlanta recently closed several public schools due to under-enrollment of students. However, the decrease in the student population of those schools was caused largely by the transfer of many students to new, nearby charter schools.

After Hurricane Katrina, pro-charter school advocates capitalised on the crisis to convert most of the schools in the Orleans Parish School System to charter schools.

The parent trigger legislation being pushed by ALEC and other pro-charter lobbyists creates a petition process, whereby a majority of dissatisfied parents at a school could force the school to take one of several actions. Often the preferred action is to convert to a charter school to be managed by a private company.

Another type of legislation being pushed by ALEC is to create a statewide charter school commission that could override the decisions of local school boards. Such a commission has been established in Georgia.

As of June 2012, seven U.S. states had enacted parent trigger legislation, beginning with California in 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The other six states are Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas.

In California, a group called Parent Revolution was founded with more than one million dollars from foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation to push for the parent trigger law.

“An integral part of improving education in Georgia is greater parent buy-in to their children’s education. The parent trigger proposal will assist parents with this,” State Rep. Ed Lindsey, a Republican from Atlanta, said in a statement.

According to Rogers, however, Parent Revolution has not been so revolutionary.

“The approach taken by Parent Revolution has been to send in paid organisers to local communities to try to gather parent petitions. Once the trigger is pulled so to speak – that is an unfortunate metaphor, I would add – and the traditional public school changes over to a charter school, parents arguably have less power than they did before,” Rogers told IPS.

That is because once the school system enters into a contract with the charter school, the school system – and the parents and students – are bound to the terms of the charter.

Rogers argues that Parent Revolution mobilises, but does not organise, parents. An organising approach would build capacity among parents and build relationships between parents, “versus a one-time single shot effort that tries to get signatures and is going to be on to the next campaign.”

Parents are often frustrated about the lack of quality of their child’s education, especially if their school does not receive enough support from local property taxes. However, converting the school to a charter school does not address the resource issue.

As a whole, charter schools perform little or no better than traditional public schools in terms of educating students, test scores and other data show.

In addition, charter schools often further segregation. A 2009 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project showed that “charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation.”

“Across the board, in many cases, charter schools are doing worse than some schools,” Kahwach said. “In some cases, they are better. It’s not such an overwhelming choice to jump ship over. You don’t have control over how the charter school spends its money – they are a business.

“People need to take a stand and make their schools what they want them to be,” she said.

As the United States struggles to level the racial disparities in its education system, the birth rate of minorities has been rising steadily. Experts say this confluence of statistics should compel Americans to seriously address the flaws and failures of the country’s public education system.

Public education statistics underscore an already alarming achievement gap that could widen depending on how successfully the United States addresses a host of issues, among them equal access to quality education.

Although high school dropout rates for all students between 1990 and 2010 have decreased overall, the 2010 dropout rate of African-Americans and Hispanics was nevertheless at least 50 percent higher than that of white students, according to “The Condition of Education 2012“, published by the National Centre for Education Statistics.

“Black students went from (a dropout rate of) 13 percent in 1990 to 8 percent in 2010, Hispanics went from 32 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2010 and whites went from 9 percent in 1990 to 5 percent in 2010,” the report stated.

Of children under the age of one year, 50.4 percent were minorities as of July 2011, up 49.5 percent from 2010, according to the latest census results.

Hispanics in the United States numbered 52 million in 2011. They also had the fastest growing population, boosting the Hispanic share of the nation’s total population from 16.3 percent in 2010 to 16.7 percent in 2011.

African-Americans are considered the second largest minority group, at 43.9 million in 2011. Asian-Americans numbered 18.2 million in 2011 and were the second fastest growing minority group.

Significant disparities in quality and access

“There is a twofold problem with advanced placement courses in public school system(s) because some heavily minority populated schools have limited access to advanced placement courses,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau.

“Other schools have ‘segregation’ in their advanced placement courses because the classes tend to have a majority of white students,” he noted.

States play a major role in combating education disparities in the United States, Shelton added. “It is really at the state level that we need to focus on resources,” he said. “Only 10 percent of public school funding comes from federal funds and the other 90 percent comes from the state.”

Still, the federal government remains important for changing the quality of schools and education.

Shelton advocated for the NAACP’s six-point education plan, a blueprint for public schools that calls for federal law to fund schools equally and to ensure that all students have the necessary resources and quality of teaching to achieve high standards. It also calls upon the government to “protect the voice of communities in school decisions”.

Ideally, the NAACP’s plan will evolve over time, Shelton said, because “there is enough flexibility in the plan for communities to bring in their community culture into the process….It is a blueprint for the public school.”

The organisation hopes that “the population will become more and more diverse” until eventually one “can disregard a minority group”.

The Centre for American Progress (CAP) published a report, “Increasing Education Effectiveness and Efficiency of Existing Public Investments in Early Childhood Education” on June 1 that noted “the keys to boosting program quality, efficiency, and student results rest with federal officials who already have sufficient legislative authority to continue to streamline, innovate, and improve the early learning services” throughout the country.

The report called for recognising students’ diversity and giving all students access to the same quality of education.

“We need to provide pre-school for lower income children. Right now, you have lower income children, African-American and Latino children who are disproportionately low income start school less prepared than more affluent kids and white kids who are more likely to get high quality pre-school education,” said Cynthia Brown, vice president for education policy at CAP.

Vanessa Cardenas, director of Progress 2050, a CAP project, said in a press statement, “The success of children of colour needs to be at the top of our list.”

The demise of ethnic studies

Yet the achievement gap is only one area of public education in which minorities are losing out.

In a controversial initiative, the community of Tucson, Arizona suspended its Mexican-American studies (MAS) program in a district with one of the largest populations of Hispanic students in country; during the 2009-2010 school year, 49.4 percent of students were Hispanic, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.

The curriculum is being rewritten and will be integrated into a general social studies program. The school board made the decision after a federal judge ruled that the program violated Arizona state law and ordered that what would amount to millions of dollars in state aid be withheld until the district complied and ended the program.

Sally Rusk, a MAS teacher in Tucson, Arizona explained why the program is important and why students, activities and teachers are fighting hard to bring it back.

“If young people do not see the contributions of their ancestors or see themselves as part of the fabric of this country this marginalisation is hurting society. It is desperately hurting society. It is making young people and adults not participate. It is just horrible. Killing these classes now, (when) instead they should be expanded.”