If you’ve got that kind of information for any public schools or boards of education, I’d love to see it. While charter school board members have to file annual conflict of interest forms with the State Ed department, I think this is definitely one area their authorizers should scrutinize more carefully and board members with clear conflicts should be kicked off those boards. How would you suggest making them more transparent? As a start, I’d like to see their conflict of interest forms posted on their authorizer’s website.

I was checking out that transparent data re charter schools but I couldn’t find which friends of Malcolm Smith held jobs at the Merrick Charter School, or, the relationships between contracters and charter school owners, or which relative of funders of charter schools had jobs in the schools, guess I just didn’t look hard enough …

and, those lotteries, how many parents had their names picked out of the hat but whose kids weren’t accepted because they have handicaps, or just plain weren’t the right people … I’ll have to look more closely

(And by the way, it’s only five seconds to find that information for SUNY schools. But it would increase transparency and accountability to remove SUNY as an authorizer?)

“Is what you have to hide so serious that you have to punish all the schools in the State?”

Precisely.

As (witting or unwitting) fronts for Wall Street’s hostile takeover of the public schools, they care nothing about the overall destruction they cause. It’s smash and grab, and all about the re-direction of power and resources away from (however imperfect) democratically-controlled implementation and oversight, to private government.

Publicly funded, privately-managed infrastructure.
Publicly-funded, privately-managed schools.
Publicly-funded, privately-managed prisons.
Publicly-funded, privately-managed armies.

It’s the investment opportunity of a lifetime.

To what fear of scrutiny are you referring? Is it the evaluations of charter schools that result in detailed analysis of their leaders, boards and programs and lengthy reports that get posted on their authorizer’s websites? Is it the independent audits that get posted on their authorizer’s websites? Is it the financial statements they have to send in to State Ed Department? Is it the fact that charter school students take the same tests every other public school has to administer and their results are as public as the next school. Is it the renewal process every charter school has to go through every five years in order to stay open? Where exactly do you see charter schools hiding anything?

Let us not forget charter schools are public schools funded with public dollars, in theory “laboratories for innovation” the fear of scrutiny begs the question, “Is what you have to hide so serious that you are willing to punish all the schools in the State?”

Maybe you are mistaken and you are really talking about school districts, such as the pre-Klein NYC BOE with its Kafkaesque website. By comparison to districts, charters have a severe case of over-oversightitis. SUNY has closed 25% of its schools up for initial charter review. Every charter school’s audit is available for free online thanks to Ken. What other form of accountability is there? Do you want a complete listing of how many pencils are in each classroom?

At your conference on Saturday, there was a long-winded (deserverdly so) discussion of the obfuscated DOE charter school website. How does one get information about non-SUNY charters? It’s almost as impossible as getting information about non-charter public schools. But with SUNY, ANY parent at ANY time with an internet connection or library card can download the complete history of reports for ANY SUNY authorized charter. It’s all right there at http://newyorkcharters.org/parentSchoolList.htm.

The most meaningful input a parent can have in a school is the choice of where to enroll his or her child. Every day I thank our parents for having the courage to risk the scorn of their peers and enroll in our school, trusting us with the most important people in their lives. SUNY allows that choice to be fully informed.

HOW ON EARTH IS REMOVING SUNY, POSSIBLY THE MOST EFFECTIVE AUTHORIZER IN THE COUNTRY, HELPING ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY AND MEANINGFUL PARENT INVOLVEMENT?

Forgive me for shouting, but putting all the charters through SED is taking this jewel of a reform initiative and returning it to same old, same old.

I’d feel more comfortable having the intergalactic senate from Star Wars make decisions than Perkins and company.