--Tony Bennett,
Superintendent of Public Schools,
September 2010.
--Michael
Milken, venture capitalist billionaire,
convicted felon for racketeering and securities fraud,
established controversial K12
company,
investor in Tony Bennett's re-election campaign
State Superintendent Tony Bennett has
received nearly 1.5 million dollars in campaign donations, but only a handful cannot be traced to
the corporate school reform movement. These donors are not
acting out of benevolence to Hoosier children. Through recent changes in the law, charter schools are manipulating
real estate purchases then extorting rent from the public tax payer.
Estimates are Bennett will "grade" more than 20% of schools in serious need of improvement or failing. This ploy is so the Indiana Department of Education can hand over these schools to charter corporations. One can easily imagine that at the end of his tenure as superintendent, Bennett will be richly rewarded.
Hoosiers, don't be charter fooled. What most people want from charter schools is simply what we should want from all public schools. Instead, Bennett's system of charters do not outperform public schools and simultaneously weaken the public school system. As John Kuhn demonstrates,
Our nation’s model charters haven’t cracked a code for educating inner city students; they have cracked a code for isolating motivated inner city students and parents who see education as a way out of poverty, and filtering out the rest.
…When they hold up choice and charters as our nation’s panacea, their sleight of hand may temporarily obstruct our view of the kids left out on the sidewalk, the kids unwelcome in their brave new dynamic, but it doesn’t disappear them from the face of the earth.
Tony Bennett's strategy for improving pubic education is not a "public" solution at all. It excludes and shuffles poorer students around like a hustler with a shell game. All the while, Bennett continues to open markets to his corporate sponsors while never once addressing that Governor Daniels cut $300 million dollars from the state's educational budget, or that nearly 25% of Hoosier Children now live in poverty.
Hoosiers must recognize that Tony Bennett's charter school solution is nothing more than a bit of trickery: it funnels public tax dollars to big corporations while providing an illusion of choice to Hoosier families.
Glenda Ritz is Bennett's challenger. She is in favor of restricting charter school distinctions and reining in the corporate siphoning of public education tax dollars.
Please talk with
neighbors and friends who are not familiar with education issues to enlist
their support for Glenda Ritz. That is a vital step to counteract
the enormous advantage in TV advertising held by Tony Bennett and his campaign
that has been so well funded by those profiteering from Hoosier
education. Your actions will make all the difference if Glenda Ritz
is going to win in this grassroots campaign.
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Below are just a few of the stories of Bennett's phony reform plan.
My last post described my concerns about one charter school application, Nexus Academy of Indianapolis, that seems to be more about profits and expansion than meeting educational needs of a community. Another similar charter school type is also being proposed during this Fall 2012 charter application cycle called Premier High School by Responsive Education Solutions, Inc.
If a number of schools in a single district fail, Bennett says the state’s takeover model may be expandable.
“I think that is a discussion I hope the General Assembly has in 2013 is how we address systemic failure of districts,” (Bennett) says.
September 3, 2012
Indiana Public Media
Indiana Public Media
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"I'm fed up," (parent, Kelly Shafer) said.
"For somebody who supported Charter Schools USA and believed in them, they
have lost my trust and respect. It breaks my heart."
In general, parents and others do not believe Charter Schools
USA has done enough to ensure safety at the Eastside school. Hallways are
chaotic. Fights have broken out.
Beyond that, Shaffer says her daughter's health class had no
permanent teacher for six weeks, and what was supposed to be an Advanced
Placement calculus class was folded into a college preparatory calculus
section. She also said about a half-dozen teachers have quit.
--by Scott Elliot
September 21, 2012, IndyStar
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In his university lectures on business ethics, Dennis Bakke, President and CEO of Imagine Charter Schools, often says that “leadership is about… freeing people to make decisions,” but his actions running over 70 public charter schools in 12 states and the District of Columbia shows that money and control are the main issues, not civil rights or children’s educational or safety issues.
Headquartered in Virginia, Bakke often sends his people into poverty-stricken areas in big U.S. cities, hand-picks a school board to use Imagine’s non-profit branch to become a charter school, then uses Schoolhouse Finance, Imagine’s for-profit real estate affiliate, to buy the school buildings. Then Schoolhouse Finance charges the school rent, which is sometimes nearly 40 percent of the school’s overall budget. Or, as is the case with Imagine Schools’ selling of 27 school buildings for $206 million to Entertainment Properties Trust, a real estate owner of theaters, Imagine leases back the buildings and then subleases them to the charter school holders. If anyone on the school boards, or in the schools themselves, protests, Imagine quickly gets rid of them.
Tony Bennett, and Dennis Bakke's Imagine Schools
September 3, 2011
September 3, 2011
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But Bennett, an unabashed charter-school supporter, also
stands to benefit directly if the education bills are approved. His wife, Tina
Bennett, is school improvement/new schools development consultant for the
Indiana Public Charter Schools Association. Her work would presumably increase
with the opening of new Indiana charter schools.
Tina Bennett is also assistant director of the Teach for
America program at Marian University in Indianapolis. Marian's president is
Daniel J. Elsener, who also happens to serve on the Indiana State Board of
Education.
The small Catholic university was awarded a $500,000
principal training grant from the Indiana Department of Education last year. A
spokeswoman for Tony Bennett told the Indianapolis Star at the time that the
superintendent's wife wasn't involved in the program, but the contract proposal
cites Marian's partnership with Teach for America as an example of prior
leadership in the area of school turnaround programs.
February 7, 2011, Journal Gazette
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If you are willing to believe that the market will solve school quality problems you must also believe that, by its nature, the market will also bring Hoosier school children and our education system racketeering, security fraud, and insider scandals. They always accompany each other. In fact, under Tony Bennett, it's already here.
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Even More Resources
Charter
schools appear to have about 17% high achieving, 46% average, and 37% low
achieving characteristics when compared to public schools.
… charter
schools were substantially more segregated by race, wealth, disabling
condition, and language. While charter schools have rapidly grown, the
strong segregative pattern found in 2001 is virtually unchanged through 2007.
Many states appear committed, then, to contradictorypolicies: Increasing charter schools and thus their autonomy while decreasing
public school autonomy within an accountability system that prescribes
curriculum and expands the testing regime.
http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/
A Teacher's Fight
Reflections on teaching from my experiences as a 6th grade
public school teacher and 5th grade charter school teacher in Indiana.
Excellent resource about charter school myths from
Massachusetts. Hilarious.
In the near future when the intricate web of deceit and subterfuge by corporate education reformers are fully realized by the American Public, historians are going to ask the question, "What the hell were they thinking?"
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