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“King previously served as a managing director at Uncommon Schools, a network of charter schools, and founded the high-performing Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston. He is widely respected inside the community of education activists who support charter schools”
Here we go..Tisch’s family has a financial interest in charter schools and now King is the charter school advocate who head’s NY States Dept of Educaiton…..there won’t be any public in public education any more, just profit.

It’s funny that you would write this at exactly the same time the board is discussing the likely revocation of a charter given to a school in the Bronx. Between the expensive failures at this school, Harlem Day, East New York Prep, Ross Global, and a few others I’m sure I’m missing, it would seem that you are at least equally guilty of making blanket false statements, even if we are confining the discussion to the world of charter schools in New York City. 

State some fact,

It is you who needs to inform yourself about the tremendous differences between public schools and charter schools, and who needs to educate yourself before making “false blanket statements.” Your reply to nosurprisehere is full of inaccuracies.

Charter schools are private entities that receive public dollars. They are privately managed, with virtually no input from parent associations. In fact, Uncommon Schools, which was formerly headed by the new head of the New York SED, explicitly forbids parent associations. As for meeting the same requirements, that is hardly the case: only the most egregious failures among charters, and sometimes not even then, receive sanctions from the state or city.

They do not accept the same students as public schools, having been repeatedly shown to have far lower numbers of special ed, ELL, SIFE and homeless students. They are notorious for creaming their students on the front and back ends: threatening to hold back students who score poorly on entrance exams as an incentive to get them to leave, and counseling out students who test poorly or who have trouble adjusting to what can only be described as the behavior modification techniques (a la KIPP) that too often pass for classroom management in these schools. The charter schools that do well on standardized tests also tend to have extremely high student  attrition rates, furthering the argument that they “counsel out” students.

As for being “non-profits,” that is in name only, and just for the time being in New York State; in other states, profit-making charters are common. When Eva Moskowitz earns considerably more than the Chancellor for managing a tiny fraction of the schools he does, the term non-profit has been distorted out of all meaning. Additionally, charters are known to strike sweetheart management or real estate deals with relatives or cronies of management. Calling them non-profits is a misnomer.

As for your claim that better education leads to higher incomes: if only that were so.  Take a look a US Department of Labor statistics on current and projected employment and you will see that the overwhelming majority of jobs created in this country neither require a college degree nor pay a living wage (as will soon be the case with teaching if the oligarchs pushing charters get their way, one of the reasons they are so enthusiastic about them).
 
Sorry, but you are very misinformed on this topic, and are in fact guilty of “blanket false statements.”

Maybe you’re not aware of the study that was done that concluded that there was no practical difference between for profit and not for profit agencies in the ed reform world. Their leaders are paid roughly the same. They’re funded by roughly the same groups. Their agenda is the roughly the same, and they’re both private entities.
Michelle rhee ran a non profit. Word is that she was paid over 300000 while she ran it… Taxpayers money. Money for students. She cares about kids so much that she charges 50gs for speaking engagements and cares not if it’s taxpayers money that could be going to kids that is paying for her.

If she were a public official training teachers and principals in nyc, which was her role, her salary would be held to a scrutiny in the name of taxpayers lower than what she made and her speaking engagement fee would fall under the conflict of interest statute.
Difference…big difference.

It’s interesting how all the ed reformers pay a keen attention to that half of the truth that benefits you….I mean them.

Hi John G. Did you know that private, for profit companies have been making these exams for years and years?  Profiteering preceded charters – and hasn’t changed because of charters.  For profit charter school firms were, in New York State at least, a failed experiment. All charter schools are and always have been not-for-profit.   The educatin-industrial complex, however, goes back a long ways!

Hi KS. Actually, not all exams are yet created by the profiteers. I know the social studies high school exams were, as late as 2007, still written by teachers in conjunction with college professors and the bor in albany. My understanding is that the for profits just recently got their grubby little hand on the high school ela regents exam. I’m sure the results from this june will create the perception that they need more of that …. That somehow the top educators from the state are no longer capable of assessing the students.
Sad times, ks. Sad times.

 In fact, there were charter schools in the 19th century. Read The Great School Wars and you’ll see how far back we’ve moved. That was, of course, before they had regular public schools to overcrowd, load up with special needs kids, and close them, taking no responsibility whatsoever.

 So Michael F, or anyone:

If charters want to be regarded as public schools, because they use public funds, then where is the outcry — even from charter supporters — over the above listed salaries?

Can you imagine the hue and cry if any public school principals — non-charter I mean — were paid that well?

(No wonder they’re non-profit: if they were trying to turn a profit, CEO salaries would be the first thing to look at.)

I think that’s a fair question.  I don’t think those salaries are necessarily inappropriate — I think it depends on the the circumstances and results.  From what I know, one of those numbers seems like a great deal and one seems high!  I think the traditional public compensation model for school leaders (everyone gets basically the same compensation) is not optimal for our system.  However, it might be best for government-run schools to the extent that corruption and incompetence may preclude sensible judgments with regards to differential compensation.   

Separately, I think you correctly point out the potential irony that non-profits often compensate people differentially and far beyond subsistence wages.  This, of course, is true for all sorts of non-profits, including private schools, hospitals, etc.  As Wikipedia notes, a non-profit organization is one “that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals.”  For better or worse, it doesn’t dictate employee compensation.  I think that’s a good thing, but I understand the concern.

Just to be clear, those schools are non-profit schools that contract with for-profit agencies (like a “for profit PSO”) for those of you who remember that recent DOE re-org. The schools themselves are and have always been nonprofit in accordance with the state law.  

KS,
Replying to you below, “Just to be clear…”

In short, pish-tosh.  Then please expliquee-moi why the change in state law?

To Ken below,

Thanks, but I’m not buying.  Not at all.

Why then should non-profit charters suck up that much PUBLIC money, but the traditional schools can not?

Those salaries are beyond inappropriate — they’re outrageous!  That these charter CEO’s should be paid more than the VP of the USA, and far in excess of civil service scale boggles the mind.

If these CEO’s won’t do the job for, say, HALF the money, then good riddance.

Charters want to be free of all manner of oversight.  Just put the money in a plain brown wrapper. 

KS,

You asked a rhetorical question, implying that big money is not being made in the charter business, and I responded with some facts (and a charter operator who pays himself half a mil, runs a “non-profit” with over $200 million in assets, is a character witness for Wall Street felons, and expels entire classes of students who don’t make his stats look good). 

I think you know to whom I’m referring, Ken. 

As for the point that non-profits do not turn surpluses over to stockholders, in the realm of corporate ed deform, non-profits are simply another appendage of the same profit-driven body, whose falsely benign appearance masks their functioning as fronts and Trojan Horses for those who seek control over the schools, their facilities and their entire “production” cycle.

I’m not against private property, but an insufficiently regulated profit system – and let’s face it, ed deform (literally) incorporates the values, world views and interests of its sponsors, many of them from the predatory/parasitic world of finance –  whose tentacles reach into every aspect of educating children is perverse, and is guaranteed to have perverse effects.

So, come on KS: you know in your heart, or should know, that despite their patronizing, condescending, throwaway rhetoric toward educators, the Big Money guys think we’re chumps. Think of the contracts, the consultancies, the real estate: there’s gold in them thar schools, and somebody’s fixin’ to get it. Don’t get left behind!

Outraged?  Write to me at: unfairlyblamingtheteachers@gmail.com 

 I want to know why Mr. King didn’t request a 50% salary decrease…  15% is really just a gesture.  How about 100k, Mr. King?  Could you survive on that?  Ok.  Not in this city, you couldn’t…