Author: suem

The IDEA charter chain continues to raid public schools for students and tax dollars, and one of the latest districts it has targeted is Round Rock ISD in suburban Austin, one of the better districts in Central Texas. Round Rock got a B for “recognized performance” in the state’s latest accountability ratings.

About three-fourths of its campuses got As for “exemplary performance” or Bs on their report cards, and 29 campuses earned a total of 109 distinction designations. Only a few campuses got Ds or Fs.

You may recall that the reason the Legislature authorized charter schools more than 20 years ago was to create a new class of “public” schools that would be free from some state restrictions. The idea was to give these schools the freedom to be innovative in teaching children who may have more difficultly learning in traditional public schools.

So, if Texas is going to allow a charter chain that claims to perform educational wonders to continue expanding, it would seem that there are other districts that would offer IDEA a greater challenge. I suspect though that IDEA, in preparing to open its Round Rock Tech campus, is more interested in the tax dollars it will take from Round Rock ISD than it is in taking on a more challenging student body.

Round Rock Tech, by the way, doesn’t mean wood shop. It means high tech. The new school will be located very close to Dell’s Round Rock campus. I don’t know if there will be a working relationship between the two institutions, but the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has been a major donor to IDEA and other charter schools.

One of IDEA’s Round Rock recruiting emails was shared with TSTA. It was addressed to a family with a child at Brushy Creek Elementary School, an A-rated campus with special distinctions for ELA/reading and closing the gaps. It would seem that this particular school doesn’t need much help, and it isn’t located in the Dell-IDEA neighborhood.

So, IDEA may have blanketed the district with its emailed letters, in both English and Spanish, soliciting parents to enter a lottery that will be held this weekend. I wonder though if it solicited students from D and F campuses as aggressively as it did students from A and B schools. The charter is seeking applicants for the 2020-21 school year for most elementary grades with plans to add additional grades later.

In the letter, IDEA all but promises that all of its students will graduate not only from high school but also from college. It also claims, “All IDEA schools are rated either A or B by the TEA (Texas Education Agency).” In fact, there is no way that any school can guarantee that all of its students will graduate from college, and it is NOT true that all IDEA schools have been rated A or B on the state accountability system.

Two of IDEA’s schools, one in San Antonio and one in Austin, got Ds on the 2018-19 TEA report cards, and five in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley got Cs.

The parents who received the letter that I saw were particularly upset that it referred to their child by name. In an obvious pressure tactic, the letter also urged parents to hurry because “we already have more applicants than seats.”

The existing Round Rock schools in the vicinity of the new IDEA campus include one F-rated elementary school, two D-rated schools (an elementary and a middle school), one C-rated elementary school, a high school and an elementary school with Bs and two A-rated schools (an elementary and a middle school).

The principal of the B-rated elementary, Berkman, was a finalist last year for an HEB Excellence in Education Principal Award.

IDEA will conduct its lottery, exclude those students with disciplinary problems, as is its policy, and prepare to take a bite out of Round Rock ISD’s and the state’s budget, a statewide bite by all charters that is approaching $3 billion a year.

Meanwhile, Round Rock ISD will continue accepting every child who lives in the district and registers, even as it loses tax revenue to IDEA. They will include the children with discipline problems, who IDEA refuses to accept, and eventually some of the special education students who may enroll in IDEA, only to learn that most charters don’t provide the level of services that traditional public schools offer.

Texas needs to stop this transformation into a dual “public education” system, at least until it adequately pays for the underfunded public schools that are being raided.

—Clay Robison

After TSTA issued a statement opposing the Donald Trump-Betsy DeVos-Ted Cruz voucher proposal, which would divert $5 billion a year in federal funds to private and religious schools and home-schoolers, we received an email from a woman who disagreed.

Her reason? “The state of education in public schools is abysmal at best now,” she said.

Abysmal? Public education in Texas has problems, but it is not abysmal.

The Texas public education system graduates thousands of young people every year who will go on to successfully complete college, many with honors. That is not an abysmal education system.

Thousands of products of Texas public schools are successful leaders in business, academia, the military and their communities. Millions more live productive, comfortable lives made possible by the strong educational foundations they received in Texas public schools.

But the Texas public education system does have issues that need to be addressed. Foremost among these is inadequate funding. The hardest hit by this government failure are struggling schools overwhelmingly populated by low-income children who not only suffer from inadequate resources for their classrooms but also from insufficient health care and social supports, which also are essential to student success and which the political-powers-that-be in Austin and Washington refuse to adequately address.

Instead people like Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Ted Cruz and Dan Patrick want to take tax money from these kids and send it to private and religious schools. What kind of thinking is that?

It reflects a low level of respect for public schools, the dedicated men and women who work in them and the vast majority of children who — all privatization gimmicks aside — will continue to be educated in them.

—Clay Robison

The IDEA charter chain’s high-flying business model for public education had to make an emergency landing after public outrage over what CEO Tom Torkelson admitted were some “really dumb” ideas. Ideas like spending $2 million a year to lease a private jet for the convenience of IDEA officials and paying $400,000 a year for a luxury box and tickets for San Antonio Spurs’ games.

The Spurs’ box and tickets supposedly were used to reward IDEA employees for reaching employment goals and reward students for good academic work, but you will have a difficult time convincing me that state legislators and other public officials also weren’t invited to enjoy the amenities of the luxury suite while their influence was being peddled to benefit IDEA’s ambitious expansion plans.

This is still another example of how corporate charter chains think they can operate in Texas’ insufficient regulatory climate. I wonder if any of the charter regulators over at the Texas Education Agency ever enjoyed IDEA’s hospitality for an NBA game.

IDEA – like other corporate-style charter chains – is classified as “public” by state law, but it is operated by a private board of directors who are not answerable to the taxpayers. IDEA Public Schools is what the chain calls itself, but it is “public” mainly in the sense that it gets state tax dollars for every student it enrolls, including those it takes from traditional public schools.

Charters are now taking about $3 billion a year from Texas’ underfunded school districts because where the students go, the tax dollars go.

Because of the public outrage – and not the Texas Education Agency – IDEA has jettisoned the private jet idea and, Torkelson says, will quit spending money on Spurs’ entertainment after this NBA season ends.

The CEO said all the money spent on the Spurs — and what would have been spent on the jet – would have come from private donations, which supplement the tax funding. Donors to IDEA have included the Walton Family Foundation and other organizations dedicated to expanding the privatization of public schools throughout the country.

But every donated dollar spent on a jet or basketball ticket is a dollar not spent on educating children.

The Houston Chronicle reported that IDEA also will end insider business deals with its own leaders and their relatives for supplies and services to the charter chain, a practice that often ends in criminal indictments if uncovered in most public school districts.

IDEA now enrolls about 51,000 students in about 50 schools in Texas, mainly in the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio and Austin, but it has ambitious expansion plans in Texas and elsewhere. It claims great academic success, but questions have been raised about its claims. And, like other charters but unlike traditional public schools, IDEA can cherry-pick its students. It refuses to take students with serious disciplinary records, for example.

Torkelson, who co-founded IDEA, is a former Teach for America teacher. According to Source Watch, his total compensation in 2016 was $465,015, higher than most, if not all, public school district superintendents in Texas.

The CEO said IDEA’s aim is to be “entrepreneurial and different from traditional education systems.” Public education, though, needs fewer high-flying entrepreneurs who seem to be more interested in their “business models” than their students.

—Clay Robison

This is “School Choice Week” in Texas, so proclaimed by Gov. Greg Abbott, but this is less about parental choice, as Abbott and his allies would have you believe, than about a growing nationwide effort to divert billions of additional tax dollars to enrich private school owners and charter school operators. And the campaign has picked up steam with an education commissioner in Texas who prefers to promote charters rather than regulate them and a right-wing ideological bloc on the U.S. Supreme Court that seems eager to open state treasuries to private religious schools.

But educators and parents who truly value public schools – real public schools – can still have the final say, and the final say is more than grousing or hand-wringing. The final say is voting, voting in large numbers and voting for genuine, pro-public education candidates for the Legislature, school board and other key offices.

Sound simple? It is. But it requires a lot of work persuading other teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, parents and other people who value our neighborhood public schools to register to vote, go to the polls and not be derailed by other issues or deceived by candidates who claim to be pro-education but fully support the privatization agenda. During this election cycle alone, our school privatization foes will be spending millions of dollars promoting candidates who supposedly will campaign for school children but, if elected, will vote for vouchers and charter expansion.

Even as we prepare for the March 3 party primaries, which will kick off the election season in Texas, Education Commissioner Mike Morath is proposing the relaxation of rules that will make it easier for charter chains to expand in Texas, without regard for their necessity or the financial impact on school districts, which already are losing about $3 billion a year to charter schools.

Meanwhile, many educators fear that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to approve the expenditure of tax dollars (vouchers) for private religious schools, overriding constitutional restrictions in many states, including Texas, against spending public money to benefit religious institutions. It all depends on the outcome of a case from Montana, which the high court heard last week and is expected to decide later this year.

The solution for Texas to any adverse Supreme Court ruling is to continue to hold the line against vouchers for any type of private school, religious or secular. The only way to do that is to elect state legislators who will continue to vote against vouchers.

The only way to curb Commissioner Morath’s advocacy for charter chains is to elect legislators who will enact tough laws clamping down on charter expansion in Texas and clamping down on any attempt by the commissioner to water-down those laws.

TSTA has endorsed pro-public education candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, for the Legislature and other state offices in the March 3 party primaries. Here they are. Our only issue is education, and we will be making more endorsements before the general election.

If you are not registered to vote, please do so before the Feb. 3 registration deadline. Here is how to do that.

If you are already registered and live in House District 28 in Fort Bend County, please vote tomorrow (Tuesday, Jan. 28) for Eliz Markowitz in the special election runoff for an empty Texas House seat. Eliz is the pro-public education candidate in that race.

Educators elected pro-public education candidates for the Legislature in 2018, and lawmakers responded with several billion dollars in additional state education funding in 2019. If we want our voices heard again during the 2021 session, we have to turn out in force again and keep electing pro-public school candidates this year.

As we are reminded by “School Choice Week,” we still have a lot of work to do.

—Clay Robison