It seems like everyone these days is jumping on the charter school bandwagon.  Most people think that because I am a Republican, I would be a huge supporter of what has become a fashionable GOP issue, which is “school choice.”  While I do believe that parents should have full control over the education of their children, their choice should not be at the expense of taxpayers.  I have also always been a firm supporter of public education.  I do not grouse that a large portion of my property taxes is slated for the Miami-Dade County Public Schools.  To the contrary – they need all the money they can get.  Unfortunately, I don’t feel those funds are always being spent judiciously, but that’s fodder for a different column altogether.  To me, “school choice” would include the opportunity for students to attend schools outside their home district, such as magnet schools, which are operated by the public school system.

Regardless of whether or not a charter school is properly run (and there are some which are), I still cannot justify the fact that public funds are being taken away from public education and handed to a private institution.  Republicans and Libertarians are extremely fond of claiming that public education is failing and have no problem funneling funds slated for the public school system into charter schools under the guise of capitalism.  While some charter schools are operated by the local public school district (such as Ben Gamla, which advertises itself as a “Broward County Charter School”), most are owned and run privately by investors, who view these schools as profitable businesses and nothing more.  It’s very “Republican” (and especially Libertarian), to believe that anything the government does could be done better and more efficiently by the private sector.  To some degree, I believe that as well; however, there are obvious exceptions to that philosophy – public education being one of them.  To those conservatives who are convinced that education would be run better by the private sector, I’d say go for it.  That’s what private school are for – as long as they are privately funded.  Feel free to send your children (and your money) to them.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you that my personal experiences with charter schools were less than desirable.  When my daughter started the fourth grade at Greynolds Park Elementary School, there were over 40 children placed in her math class.  This was the very beginning of the school year, and I’m sure the class size would eventually have been reduced, but unfortunately my daughter wasn’t given the opportunity to find out.  Math was one of her best subjects at the time and her father was convinced that her skills would suffer if she remained in that class.  Over my objections, he decided to pull her out of Greynolds Park and place her in the newly formed Northeast Academy charter school, which was located at the Nova University campus in North Miami Beach.  By the time she graduated two years later, her math skills had suffered to the extent that she needed to repeat middle school algebra in order to pass, and she required a private tutor to keep her math grades up until she graduated high school.  Although there is probably no way of proving it, I firmly believe that the two years she spent at this charter school directly contributed to her ongoing problems with math.  (And by the way, Northeast Charter didn’t stay in business too long after my daughter graduated.)  Luckily, my daughter is now in her senior year of college, so that nightmare is way behind her.  But I have to tell you that she’s majoring in photography.  Math and science weren’t even on her short list of possible majors.  Just saying.

In a previous column, I mentioned that I’d write more about charter schools.  Since the North Miami City Council is is in the process of trying to open its own charter school, and I believe North Miami Beach may be considering one as well, I figure now is as good a time as any to run with this issue.

As I’m sure you’re already aware, charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately run, are constantly in the news these days.  They seem to be all the rage.  Sadly, it’s all about the money, while the children are collateral damage.

Although the first charter school started in Minnesota in 1991, South Florida seems to have grown exponentially in its proliferation of this type of “alternative education.”  In 2011, a Miami Herald investigation revealed that “Charter schools have grown into a $400-million-a-year business in South Florida, receiving about $6,000 in taxpayer dollars for every student enrolled but even when charter schools have been caught violating state laws, school districts have few tools to demand compliance.”

In Florida charter schools: big money, little oversight, the Herald revealed that “Charter schools have become a parallel school system unto themselves, a system controlled largely by for-profit management companies and private landlords — one and the same, in many cases — and rife with insider deals and potential conflicts of interest.”  In the same article, the Herald also reported, “At some financially weak schools, tight budgets have forced administrators to cut corners. The cash-strapped Balere Language Academy in South Miami Heights taught its seventh-grade students in a toolshed, records show. The Academy of Arts & Minds in Coconut Grove went weeks without textbooks. Schools have also been accused of using illegal tactics to bring in more money — charging students illegal fees for standard classes, or faking attendance records to earn more tax dollars, court records show.”

In a column dated March 16, 2013 by Elaine Magliaro, Charter Schools and The Profit Motive, stated,

“That same year—2010—Juan Gonzalez believed that he had uncovered one of the reasons why hedge fund managers, some wealthy Americans, and the executives of some Wall Street banks had become such big proponents of charter schools and had gotten involved in their development.  Gonzalez said the banks and other wealthy investors had been making “windfall profits” by taking advantage of “a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction.”  That little known tax break, the New Markets Tax Credit, can be so lucrative, Gonzalez said, “that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.”  He added that the tax break “gives an enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities, and it’s been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools.”

Quoting an article from the New York Times, Magliaro wrote,

“What happens is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government. In addition, this is a tax credit on money that they’re lending, so they’re also collecting interest on the loans as well as getting the thirty-nine percent tax credit. They piggy-back the tax credit on other kinds of federal tax credits like historic preservation or job creation or brownfields credits.

The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money. The problem is, that the charter schools end up paying in rents, the debt service on these loans and so now, a lot of the charter schools in Albany are straining paying their debt service–their rent has gone up from $170,000 to $500,000 in a year or–huge increases in their rents as they strain to pay off these loans, these construction loans. The rents are eating-up huge portions of their total cost. And, of course, the money is coming from the state.”

And quoting from the Daily Kos, Magliaro wrote:

“In short, education reform is a good cause. Experimentation is good — and some of the best charter schools today have experimented in what could be valuable ways. But the push, coming from Wall Street and the extremely wealthy, for this specific form of charter schools, for this specific way of funding them, is part of both short-term and long-term drives for profit that will accrue to the wealthiest while weakening the middle class. The question is not whether we should back away from the cause of education, or the cause of education reform. The question is in whose interests it should be done and who should most strongly influence the outcomes.”

The influence of big corporations on the education of our nation’s children is not the only problem associated with charter schools.  An article published October 12, 2012, The new U.S. visa rush: Build a charter school, get a green card, should raise eyebrows.

“Under a federal program known as EB-5, wealthy foreigners can in effect buy U.S. immigration visas for themselves and their families by investing at least $500,000 in certain development projects.”

Even more alarming is the statement,

“Charter schools have become particularly trendy because they are pitched as recession-proof.  An investor forum in China last spring, for instance, touted U.S. charter schools as a nearly fool-proof investment because they can count on a steady stream of government funding to stay afloat, according to a transcript posted on a Chinese website.”

I don’t know about you, I find it very disquieting when I see the word “trendy” and the phrase “steady stream of government funding” associated with education.  First of all, the education of children is not a “trend,” nor should our tax dollars be siphoned off by private companies as an investment.  Our children are not commodities.  At least, they shouldn’t be.

Another consideration is the financial burden on a school district that charter schools pose.  In an announcement dated October 15, 2013, the bond credit rating agency, Moody’s Investors Services stated, “The dramatic rise in charter school enrollments over the past decade is likely to create negative credit pressure in school districts in economically weak urban areas.”  The Moody report describes how charter schools are drawing students and funding away from districts, which then are forced to cut programs since the operating costs of public schools do not decrease quickly enough to offset the loss of those resources.  This problem is exacerbated when the school district is already at an economic disadvantage due to its demographics.

To those whose goal it is to privatize the entire educational system, this is the perfect formula for the destruction of the public school system.  And yet, they do not seem to advocate eliminating the levying of school district taxes on property owners.  To the contrary!  Charter school proponents depend on those taxes to help fund their “public/private partnerships” with local governments.  Without those tax dollars, charter schools would merely be “private schools” attended only by those students whose parents could afford to pay the tuition, while the vast majority of children would still remain in a severely underfunded public school system.  Since there is already a market for private education, which is mostly out of reach for the middle and lower classes, the eradication of public schools is nothing more than a systematic destruction of the middle class.

Charter schools are also not subject to the same accountability as public schools.  In Part 1 of a series of 2013 year-in-review articles published in Education Week beginning December 18, 2013, Charter Schools: Public, Private or Parasitic?, veteran teacher Anthony Cody admits that his “thinking has evolved regarding charter schools.”  He wrote,

“This was also the year that we ended the fiction that “charter schools are public schools, too!” And it was charter schools themselves who ended it. The California Charter Schools Association filed an amicus brief in October that asserted that charter schools are private entities, their teachers are not public employees, and their funds are not public funds (even when they come from the taxpayer).”

Again, I cannot fathom how a true free market conservative could reconcile the concept that public money should fund a private enterprise.  I know I can’t.

The most disturbing article I’ve read so far about charter schools is one published in Salon.com on January 10, 2014 entitled, The truth about charter schools: Padded cells, corruption, lousy instruction and worse results.  I’d have to quote the entire article to give you the full impact of this exposé.  Just go read it for yourself.  Be ready to cringe.

North Miami Councilwoman Marie Steril has requested that her pet project, the North Miami Charter School, be placed on the Agenda for the next Council meeting on January 28, 2014.  Her rush to build it is despite the fact that the Miami-Dade County School Board claims that this proposal allegedly violates a 2006 Inter-Local Agreement between the City and the School Board.  As the Miami Herald reported on December 13, 2013 in Miami-Dade schools, North Miami at odds over proposed charter school, “the school would compete with the buildings built and overhauled by the district and would siphon away state funding that helps finance debt incurred in constructing the schools and facilities built under the 2006 deal.”  The City of North Miami, led by Steril, is appealing the School Board’s rejection of its charter school application.

There is no end to the horror stories I could tell or the negative articles to which I could refer you about charter schools, but this column is long enough for now.  I’m hoping this one will start a continuing dialogue among residents and elected officials so that you can inform yourselves and come to your own conclusions.

This, of course, is just my opinion.  Accordingly, I would urge the North Miami City Council to vote against the approval of this or any charter school.  By the same token, I hope the information presented here will discourage the North Miami Beach City Council from likewise contemplating such a venture.

Stephanie Kienzle
“Spreading the Wealth”