Two ex-Walker aides charged with illegal campaigning

By Daniel Bice and Dave Umhoefer of the Journal Sentinel Jan. 26, 2012

Two staffers who worked directly for Gov. Scott Walker while he was county executive were charged Thursday with illegally doing extensive political work while being paid by taxpayers to do county jobs.

One of the two, Darlene Wink, cut a deal with prosecutors under which she agreed to provide information in a related investigation about the destruction of digital evidence and to aid in further prosecutions. This is the first indication that the multifaceted John Doe investigation may be pursuing charges of evidence tampering.

Milwaukee County prosecutors also made the surprising disclosure that top Walker aides set up a private Internet network to allow them to communicate with one another by email about campaign as well as county government work without the public or co-workers’ knowledge.

The emails Walker officials traded via the shadow network could provide investigators with a trove of information as they pursue other angles in the case. Earlier this week, the Journal Sentinel reported that the probe was focusing on possible bid-rigging and other misconduct in the competition to house the county Department on Aging in private office space.

In a statement, Walker’s campaign said he had a policy against county employees using government resources to do campaign work.

“Scott Walker expected everyone to follow the law and made that clear publicly and privately,” the statement said.

Walker faces a potential recall election later this year.

On Thursday, prosecutors charged Kelly Rindfleisch, deputy chief of staff to Walker in 2010, with four felony counts of misconduct in office for working for then-Rep. Brett Davis’ 2010 campaign for lieutenant governor while on the county clock. Davis, who lost in the Republican primary, is now Walker’s state Medicaid director.

The complaint says that Rindfleisch told a friend in an Internet chat shortly after taking the job with Walker that “half of what I’m doing is policy for the campaign.”

During work hours between February 2010 and early July 2010, it says, Rindfleisch sent more than 300 emails to Davis and 1,380 fundraising emails. The John Doe also turned up more than 1,000 emails between Rindfleisch and top staffers on Walker’s 2010 campaign during work hours over the same period.

The complaint said Walker’s chief of staff, Tom Nardelli, was unaware that Rindfleisch had been hired when she showed up on her first day of work.

Franklyn Gimbel, her attorney, said he will be raising a number of legal objections to the case against his client. He said those issues need to be resolved before he can discuss the merits of the case.

“There’s no discussion of a plea,” Gimbel said.

Each of the felony counts against Rindfleisch carries a maximum penalty of 3½ years behind bars and a $10,000 fine.

Davis did not respond to repeated requests for comment made to his cellphone and office phone.

Wink, Walker’s onetime constituent services coordinator, has agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts for using county resources to raise money for Walker’s 2010 gubernatorial bid. Prosecutors will ask that a judge not lock up Wink as part of the deal.

In a letter outlining the agreement, Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf said Wink’s political activity was not as extensive as other county workers’. Plus, Landgraf wrote, she has “valuable information” that might be needed in future cases. She already has given investigators information on the destruction of some unspecified digital evidence.

“Her truthful testimony in this regard is a thing of value to the State of Wisconsin,” Landgraf wrote.

According to complaint:

Wink worked on campaign fundraisers, phone banks, Reagan Day dinners and Milwaukee County Republican Party matters while working in Walker’s office. In one 2009 chat with Timothy Russell, a longtime friend and fellow Walker aide, Wink asked how she could clear a document from her chat session. Russell told her it would disappear when she logged out.

“I just am afraid of going to jail – ha! ha!” Wink wrote in August 2009.

Russell replied, “You wouldn’t, not for that.”

Public workers are prohibited from doing campaign work at the courthouse.

Peter Wolff, Wink’s attorney, said she never intended to do anything wrong and remains adamant that Walker knew nothing of her campaign activity.

“She’s a genuine and good-hearted person,” Wolff said.

Wink, a former vice chair of the county Republican Party, resigned from her county job in May 2010 after admitting to the Journal Sentinel that she was spending part of her work day doing campaign work.

According to the Rindfleisch complaint, Walker responded to the public controversy by sending an email to a top aide from a private email account.

“We cannot afford another story like this one,” Walker wrote to Russell. “No one can give them any reason to do another story. That means no laptops, no websites, no time away during the work day, etc.”

The maximum penalty for each of Wink’s two misdemeanor counts is six months in jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted.

Milwaukee County officials expressed shock at the criminal charges and said Walker or another high-level Walker staffer should have known about the alleged campaign activity and stopped it.

“Scott’s no neophyte – he knows what the rules are,” said Supervisor Mark Borkowski, who noted that he doesn’t view Walker as someone who would condone something so blatantly illegal but was at a loss to explain it.

The charges are the latest in a 20-month John Doe investigation into the activities of Walker’s former and current staffers. A John Doe is a secret probe in which prosecutors can compel testimony and subpoena documents while looking into possible criminal activity.

Already, District Attorney John Chisholm’s office has charged Russell, former Walker deputy chief of staff, and former county veterans official Kevin Kavanaugh with stealing more than $60,000 in donations intended for Operation Freedom, an annual event honoring veterans at the county zoo. Both are facing multiple felonies.

Russell’s domestic partner, Brian Pierick, was also charged with two felony child enticement counts.

Rindfleisch, 43, went to work for Walker in January 2010 as a policy adviser before replacing Russell as the county executive’s deputy chief of staff at a salary of $59,560 a year. She left the county job on Nov. 12, 2010, less than two weeks after Walker defeated Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the governor’s race.

Now listing herself as a consultant, she previously worked in government relations for the Wisconsin Association of Health Plans and as a legislative staffer, including time as an employee of the Assembly Republican Caucus and Senate Republican Caucus.

The partisan legislative caucuses were disbanded in 2001 after investigators concluded they were taxpayer-financed campaign machines for their respective political parties. That investigation led to criminal charges and fines against five lawmakers and four legislative aides.

Though he was serving in the Assembly when the caucus scandal broke, Walker was never mentioned in connection with it.

The criminal complaint says that as part of that caucus probe, Rindfleisch told investigators that she spent part of her time organizing and planning campaign fundraisers while working for the state. She spoke with agents after being given immunity.

Records show Rindfleisch is the registered agent for JVS Consulting, a company created a little more than a week after she joined Walker’s staff.

During his campaign for lieutenant governor, Davis, a three-term Oregon Republican, paid a total of $5,000 to JVS for consulting and fundraising work between March 31 and July 1, 2010.

Walker did not officially endorse any of the four Republicans running for lieutenant governor in 2010.

The criminal complaint against Rindfleisch shows that Walker’s campaign manager, Keith Gilkes, had spoken with one donor on behalf of Davis and told the donor that Davis was “the candidate” for lieutenant governor.

Despite this behind-the-scenes support, Davis was seen as too moderate by some Republicans and ultimately lost the primary to Rebecca Kleefisch, the state’s current lieutenant governor and Walker’s running mate. After Kleefisch won the primary, Walker said he had voted for her.

Gilkes did not respond to a request for comment.

Secret network

The complaint reveals a “secret email system” that was “routinely used by selected insiders within the Walker administration” for county business as well as unofficial purposes such as campaigning.

“It should be (illegal) because it defeats the public’s right to know,” said Bob Dreps, an attorney who handles open records cases for clients such as the Journal Sentinel. “If it’s official business, it belongs in the official system.”

The existence of the email system was a closely held secret, and it was not made known to the county employee responsible for gathering county emails in response to requests for information by the public, reporters and groups, the complaint said. The secret system used personal Internet email accounts.

“In the course of the investigation, it was learned that a private email network was established and operated out of the county executive’s office and that the private network was used to communicate both political campaign and government-related information to select individuals,” Chisholm said in a statement.

The complaint does not list all the officials who used the secret system, but it does say the unofficial networking system was set up in the county executive’s office suite by Russell while he was Walker’s deputy chief of staff.

Russell’s county office was less than 25 feet from Walker’s on the third floor of the courthouse, the complaint notes.

The complaint does not say whether Walker was aware of the secret email system.

Rindfleisch and Wink did campaign work on the unofficial network, the complaint says.

The secret email system also was used for county business “which could have and which did include communications” subject to the state’s open records statute, the complaint says.

Laurie Panella, the acting director of the county’s information management division, testified that the email system was never disclosed to her, “although it would have been important for her to know.”

Because of her role on an open records committee set up to handle the public’s requests for information, Panella testified that Russell knew of requests for his emails with Wink. But Russell never told Panella that he and Wink had used the secret email system during the course of the business day, Panella testified.

Rindfleisch, who was also on the committee, never disclosed that she used the system.

The complaint includes a lengthy log of some of the hundreds of campaign-related emails sent by Rindfleisch to Davis and his campaign.

Rindfleisch was in regular contact with Walker’s campaign as well, the complaint says. She spent, it says, significant periods of county time on communications with the Friends of Scott Walker campaign committee.

The John Doe investigation “has identified in excess of 1,000 emails” between Rindfleisch and Gilkes, campaign manager Stephan Thompson or Walker campaign communications director Jill Bader.

State Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch said Thursday that to his knowledge there is no such alternate Internet and email system in state government being used by Walker appointees to avoid the open records law.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Huebsch said.

Huebsch was named as one of the people that Rindfleisch worked with to set up fundraisers for Davis. The complaint said he didn’t realize that Rindfleisch was a county employee.

Wink, 61, joined Walker’s county office shortly after he took over as county executive in 2002 after years as a Republican activist in Milwaukee County’s southern suburbs.

The criminal complaint showed Wink spending hours and hours during the work day trying desperately to organize a fundraiser in honor of Walker’s November 2009 birthday. The event was derailed by news that former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin would be attending a West Allis event on the same day.

Wink then contacted Reince Priebus, now the national Republican National Committee chairman, to use his influence to get Palin to stop by the Walker event, the complaint says.

“We are already losing people to that event,” she complained.

The fundraiser was eventually canceled, and Walker attended the Palin rally, receiving one the biggest ovations when he entered the hall. Wink immediately began spending much of her time at work putting together a replacement fundraiser for her boss, the complaint says.

She abruptly resigned her $41,269-per-year job in May 2010 after admitting doing political work on county time.

Using a pseudonym, Wink acknowledged posting scores of comments on Journal Sentinel blogs and stories – most of them praising her boss, touting his gubernatorial bid or ripping his two opponents. She also agreed that nearly all of her online comments could be described as political. Asked if that was a good idea, she said, “Probably not, no.”

“I never gave it a thought that it was going to be an issue,” Wink said.

Wink resigned two hours after the newspaper asked for her payroll records.

In the email from Walker to Russell that day, Walker wrote, “I talked to her at home last night. Feel bad. She feels worse.”

Rindfleisch scaled back on her fundraising work on county time after Wink resigned, according to the criminal complaints.

“I took the wireless down,” she wrote Russell in an email on the day Wink quit and the Journal Sentinel published its story about Wink’s comments.

The complaint reported some testy exchanges between the Walker allies.

In one May 2010 electronic chat exchange between Rindfleisch and longtime Walker associate Jim Villa, Villa made it clear that he thought both Rindfleisch and Davis were obliged to him for his fundraising efforts on behalf of Davis.

“Brett AND YOU owe me,” Villa wrote.

In an April 2010 exchange, Rindfleisch emailed Cullen Werwie, a Davis campaign aide who has gone on to become Walker’s official spokesman. She attached documents related to Davis’ campaign and asked Werwie to send them out to others on her behalf.

“I can’t have my name on it, otherwise I’d send it,” Rindfleisch said.

Werwie received immunity from prosecution to testify in the case. He declined to comment Thursday, referring questions to his attorney.

The complaint reveals that search warrants were executed on Walker’s county office on Nov. 1, 2010, the day before the gubernatorial election. Previously, it was known search warrants were served on his campaign that day, but not his county office.

In addition, the Rindfleisch complaint indicates that many top Walker aides and associates have testified in the John Doe. Among them are Villa, Walker’s former chief of staff; Huebsch, the secretary of the state Department of Administration; and Thompson, who was Walker’s deputy campaign manager and is now executive director of the state Republican Party.

Huebsch and Thompson had previously declined to discuss their involvement in the criminal probe.

Also, the complaint against Wink shows that Joe Fadness, the operations manager for Walker’s campaign, also testified before the Doe.

Patrick Marley and Jason Stein, reporting from Madison, and Bruce Vielmetti, Steve Schultze and Ben Poston, reporting from Milwaukee, contributed to this report.

UWM study of 2010 census data finds record low employment in Milwaukee

In the wake of the 2008-’09 recession, black male employment in metro Milwaukee plunged to the lowest levels on record, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The data highlight a renewed setback to an urban region that for years has helped set national extremes for poverty and unemployment, following a decades-long collapse of the city’s manufacturing economy that left a depression in the urban core.

According to the UWM analysis of the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, only 44.7% of the area’s working-age black males ages 16 to 64 were employed in 2010, which is “the lowest level in metro Milwaukee ever recorded in census data.” Only two of the nation’s 40 largest metro areas analyzed in the study – Buffalo and Detroit – reported lower black male employment rates in 2010 than Milwaukee.

“No metro area has witnessed more precipitous erosion in the labor market for black males over the past 40 years than has Milwaukee,” according to the report, which echoed findings in recent years by the Journal Sentinel. “The 2010 data, however, revealed a new nadir for black male employment in Milwaukee.”

Employment levels for the region’s black men declined sharply from 52.9% in 2008, which was the year when over-indebted banks, hobbled by subprime mortgage debt, curtailed lending and threw the brakes on the broader economy, triggering the deepest and longest recession since the Depression of the 1930s.

The decrease in black employment is even more drastic compared with 1970, the year when both the city and the nation approached their respective peaks in industrial employment. In 1970, Milwaukee led the nation in factory employment for black laborers with nearly three in four holding a job (a 73.4% employment rate), which is 28.7 percentage points higher than the current record low.

That 1970-2010 shift in black male employment – a “four-decade labor market meltdown” – represents the widest percentage change among the American cities in the ranking, wider than Detroit (28.6 percentage points), Cleveland (26.0) and Chicago (23.8).

The comparisons to 1970 go back to the pre-global era when national economies were more insular and China had not yet begun its reforms. Manufacturing jobs in those days often required little more than a high school diploma, while today’s factories are high-tech environments that demand skills in computers and math.

“It was a different world in 1970,” said Marc Levine, who heads the UWM Center for Economic Development, which released the report.

Other findings in the 41-page report:

Northern industrial cities such as Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit fare worse for black male employment prospects than southern cities such as Atlanta, Nashville, Houston and Charlotte.

For black men in the prime of their working lives (ages 25-54), Milwaukee fell to a record low employment level of 52.7% in 2010, dropping to the bottom of the 40 major cities in the report – lower than Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

In 1970, when Milwaukee boasted one of the nation’s densest concentrations of factory jobs, black male employment nearly matched the white level (73.4% vs. 85.9%, for a gap of 12.5 percentage points). By 2010, the black-white gap widened to 32.7 percentage points – the widest among the 40 major cities.

More African-American men from Milwaukee were admitted to Wisconsin correctional facilities in an average year in the 2000s than were employed at the end of the decade in factories in the city of Milwaukee.

The recession was brutal for nearly every sector of the U.S. economy. The report’s benchmark year of 2010 coincides with the end of the only decade since the 1930s that saw no net increase in jobs.

But the urban economy of Milwaukee was struggling even before the recession began. “The city of Milwaukee, where almost 90% of the region’s black males live, has lost over three-quarters of its industrial jobs since the 1960s,” the report says.

Milwaukee’s rapid exodus of manufacturers is a major reason for its low level of black employment, Levine said.

Many blacks leave the labor force for other reasons, most notably due to “mass incarceration,” it says. “An average 5,000 working-age black males have been incarcerated annually in Milwaukee since the early 2000s, a growing number for nonviolent drug offenses,” which in turn removes them from the government’s tally of the active labor force.

Another factor behind low employment rates: inconvenient and inefficient transportation links with the suburbs and surrounding counties, where manufacturing has fared better than in the city, Levine said.

Unlike many studies of employment levels, which extrapolate estimates from small monthly government population samples, the UWM study used data from the U.S. Census, which is deemed more accurate and reliable.

The study also avoids the most common barometer of jobs, which is the monthly unemployment rate, which statisticians concur is problematic. The main problem is that unemployed Americans vanish from the unemployment tally because of a statistical quirk of U.S. statistics, which only count those who actively are looking for work. That excludes those who quit looking because they are discouraged, or go to jail, go back to school or care for a child or parent.

“The mass incarceration of black males in the U.S. since the 1970s has artificially deflated the unemployment rate by removing thousands of working-age black males – who otherwise would be counted in the employment and unemployment statistics – from the labor force,” the report said.

***

To read the report, go to the UWM Center for Economic Development home page: www4.uwm.edu/ced

January 19, 2012, BusinessWeek By Brian Louis

Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) — A warehouse where workers once shaped and cut steel on Milwaukee’s north side is getting a second life. It’s being transformed into a charter school that’s scheduled to open in August.

A joint venture of Canyon Capital Realty Advisors LLC and former tennis champion Andre Agassi’s business partnerships is developing the property and will lease it to Lighthouse Academies of Wisconsin Inc. The Canyon-Agassi real estate fund has done one warehouse conversion in Philadelphia and is considering school projects in other U.S. cities, including New York and Houston.

Entertainment Properties Trust and Inland Public Properties Development Inc. also are among companies that are investing in buildings for charter schools as demand for campuses grows. More than 500 of the schools opened last year, bringing the U.S. total to about 5,600, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a Washington-based advocacy group. The investors buy or develop properties and get income from renting to companies that operate the schools.

“We don’t find a lot of competition right now, and we like that,” David Brain, chief executive officer of Entertainment Properties, said in an interview. “We’ll be ahead of the curve when other people finally wake up to the idea and come to the party.”

The real estate investment trust, primarily a movie theater landlord, owned 34 charter-school properties as of Sept. 30, accounting for $280.3 million of its $2.9 billion portfolio. Entertainment Properties spent $36.4 million on charter schools last year through the third quarter, the Kansas City, Missouri- based company said in a regulatory filing.

‘Capacity to Grow’

Charter schools “are going to be a substantial portion of the market and we have a huge capacity to grow there,” Brain said.

More than 400,000 children nationwide are on waiting lists for the schools, the national alliance said in a December statement. Demand has increased as parents seek alternatives to traditional public schools. About 2 million students were enrolled in charter schools for the 2011-12 school year, according to the alliance.

The schools charge no tuition. They receive funding from municipal, state and federal tax dollars and operate under a charter that’s granted by the state or a local authority, according to a May report by Ernst & Young LLP. Each school has its own governing board.

Academic Focus

Charters are able to offer longer days than traditional public schools and may adopt a focus, such as the arts or preparing for careers, according to the alliance. Like public schools, they’re subject to state and federal academic standards.

For Entertainment Properties, the charter-school investment yield is 9 percent to 10 percent, according to Keith Bokota, an analyst at Principal Global Investors. That compares with November’s 7 percent average capitalization rate for commercial- property deals of more than $5 million, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc., a New York-based property research company.

The Canyon-Agassi Charter School’s Facilities Fund appeals to investors seeking a good return on their money while doing something positive for education, said Glenn Pierce, its chief executive officer. Investors in the Los Angeles-based fund — which lists Citigroup Inc., Intel Corp., the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the University of Michigan among its backers — can expect yields in the “low teens after fees,” he said.

Fund’s Goal

The fund has about $200 million in equity and will use loans to reach its goal of $500 million to spend on developing campuses, according to Pierce. It’s investing about $5.1 million in the Milwaukee project, he said. The North Point Lighthouse Charter School will have an art room, library and computer lab.

“We’re taking a former warehouse building and turning it into a state-of-the-art school,” Pierce said in a telephone interview.

The fund gives a school the option to purchase the campus once it has matured to the point where it can obtain financing. “Our whole premise is not to be a long-term owner of these assets,” Pierce said.

While school landlords may eventually profit from a sale, income primarily comes from long-term lease agreements with operating companies.

Inland Purchases

In 2010, a unit of Inland American Real Estate Trust Inc., a public, non-traded REIT based in Oak Brook, Illinois, bought seven charter-school properties for $61 million from operator Imagine Schools Inc. Arlington, Virginia-based Imagine, which runs 75 schools in 12 states and the District of Columbia, agreed to lease back the properties from Inland over a 20-year period.

For Entertainment Properties, income from Imagine accounted for 9 percent of revenue from continuing operations in the third quarter.

Charter schools are “going to be a bigger piece of the business” for the landlord in the long term, Craig Mailman, a New York-based analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., said in a telephone interview.

Box office sales in U.S. and Canadian theaters fell 3.4 percent last year, while attendance dropped 4.2 percent to a 16- year low, according to Hollywood.com Box-Office.

Entertainment Properties said it planned to start construction on as many as four campuses in the fourth quarter, according to a Nov. 2 statement.

Investor Risk

Leasing properties can entail risk because schools may be shut down for reasons including poor student achievement, low enrollment and financial troubles. About 150 U.S. charter schools didn’t reopen this academic year, according to the charter-school alliance.

“That’s just not a risk that’s typical of property owners,” said Bokota of Principal Global Investors. Its parent company, Des Moines, Iowa-based Principal Financial Group Inc., owned 1.6 million shares of Entertainment Properties at the end of September, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Investors may try to reduce risk by leasing to experienced companies that operate a number of schools. The Milwaukee school is part of Lighthouse Academies Inc., a nonprofit network of 19 schools in five states. The Framingham, Massachusetts-based operator was founded in 2003.

Even large operators can run into trouble. Last month, the charter for one of Imagine’s schools in St. Louis was revoked and four other schools were placed on probation partly because of poor academic performance. Entertainment Properties is the landlord for those schools’ campuses.

Master Lease

Entertainment Properties has a master lease “that covers all the Imagine properties in our portfolio and ensures payment should a school close,” Brain, the CEO, said in an e-mailed statement. “We have a variety of options with the facility to continue to serve the education market in St. Louis.”

The school is scheduled to close in June.

Improving academic performance “is vital to the schools coming off probation” and the 11-year-old company has taken steps to raise students’ test scores, Lori Waters, a spokeswoman for Imagine, said in a telephone interview.

Charter schools’ budgets are initially small and the schools often prefer to lease because obtaining financing for a building project is difficult and seen as risky. Many schools start out in temporary space, such as an existing public school building, shuttered retail store or former offices, said Jim Griffin, president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools.

“That’s generally their lot in life,” he said. “It’s kind of get what you can.”

Starting Small

Most new charter schools start with just a few grades and try to build enrollment over a number of years. The Lighthouse school in Milwaukee will open for the fall semester with kindergarten through fourth grade and plans to add one class each year until it reaches the 12th grade.

Demolition on the Milwaukee warehouse’s interior started last month. Classrooms and offices are expected to be finished in July, a month before classes begin, said Anna Hammernik, the North Point Lighthouse principal.

Hammernik moved back to her native Milwaukee to lead the new school, after working in New Orleans. She’s spent the past year helping to plan the curriculum and get the word out.

The old warehouse’s transformation will be a “great boost to the community,” Hammernik said.

“A lot of our kids go to school in really old buildings,” she said. “I’m super-excited for our kids to have a brand-new building.”

Linda Darling-Hammond

January 10, 2012   |     The Nation.

With the nation’s public education system under siege, the need for qualified teachers who are committed to creating exciting and empowering schools is more urgent than ever.

Today a new form of redlining is emerging. If passed, the long-awaited Senate bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) would build a bigger highway between low-performing schools serving high-need students—the so-called “bottom 5 percent”—and all other schools. Tragically, the proposed plan would weaken schools in the most vulnerable communities and further entrench the problems—concentrated poverty, segregation and lack of human and fiscal resources—that underlie their failure.

Although the current draft of the law scales back some of the worst overreaches of No Child Left Behind, the sanctions for failing to make “adequate yearly progress” that have threatened all schools under NCLB are now focused solely on the 5 percent of schools designated as lowest-performing by the states. As we have learned in warm-up exercises offered by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, these schools will nearly always be the ones serving the poorest students and the greatest numbers of new immigrants. In many states they will represent a growing number of apartheid schools populated almost entirely by low-income African-American and Latino students in our increasingly race- and class-segregated system.

In the new vision for ESEA, these schools, once identified, will be subjected to school “turnaround” models that require the schools to be closed, turned into charters, reconstituted (by firing nearly half the staff) or “transformed,” according to a complicated set of requirements that include everything from instructional reforms to test-based teacher evaluation. The proposed array of punitive sanctions, coupled with unproven reforms, will increasingly destabilize schools and neighborhoods, making them even less desirable places to work and live and stimulating the flight of teachers and families who have options.

Meanwhile, the most important solutions for these students and their schools are ignored by NCLB and the proposed new bill, as well as by current federal policy in general, leaving their most serious problems unaddressed.

There is no plan in the current or proposed ESEA or in other federal legislation to stem the rapid slide of families into poverty, homelessness and food insecurity; to address the inequitable distribution of state and local funds to schools; to improve teaching and learning conditions in underfunded, high-poverty schools; or to recruit and train expert teachers who will stay in these schools and stop the revolving door of untrained novices who leave children further behind. There are no significant investments in training to better prepare teachers to teach new English learners, students with disabilities and others with a range of needs.

There is no major investment in preschool or in wraparound services that will address the many needs of children for extended learning time, healthcare and social services so they can learn. While a recent Race to the Top initiative offers some preschool funding, it is minuscule in relation to the need and will not make up for the huge cuts in these services occurring in communities across the country. (After widespread cuts, preschool spending at the end of 2010 stood at almost $700 per pupil less than in 2001. Meanwhile, state cuts to education spending reached more than $7.5 billion this year on top of $3 billion in cuts last year.)

It’s not as though we don’t know what works. We could implement the policies that have reduced the achievement gap and transformed learning outcomes for students in high-achieving nations where government policies largely prevent childhood poverty by guaranteeing housing, healthcare and basic income security. These same strategies were substantially successful in our own nation through the programs and policies of the war on poverty and the Great Society, which dramatically reduced poverty, increased employment, rebuilt depressed communities, invested in preschool and K-12 education in cities and poor rural areas, desegregated schools, funded financial aid for college and invested in teacher training programs that ended teacher shortages. In the 1970s teaching in urban communities was made desirable by the higher-than-average salaries, large scholarships and forgivable loans that subsidized teacher preparation, and by the exciting curriculum and program innovations that federal funding supported in many city school districts.

These efforts led to big improvements in achievement and attainment from the ’60s through the ’80s. The black-white reading gap shrank by two-thirds for 17-year-olds, black high school and college graduation rates more than doubled, and, in 1975, rates of college attendance among whites, blacks and Latinos reached parity for the first and only time before or since.

Almost all the programs described above were ended or shrunk in the ’80s, targets of the Reagan revolution, which systematically sought to dismantle federal supports for urban and rural development, housing, social services and education. Poverty and homelessness increased sharply. As the federal education budget was cut in half, funding for urban and poor rural schools declined precipitously, desegregation aid was discontinued and teaching supports were reduced, leading to growing shortages when teacher demand increased in the late 1980s. Despite some modest pushback during the Clinton years, the momentum toward increasing inequality was not reversed.

How Educational Redlining Works

The racial and economic segregation that sets the stage for redlining is now firmly in place. One in four American children lives in poverty, nearly 60 percent more than in 1974, and the number of people living in severe poverty has reached a record high. A national study released in 2009 found that one in fifty children in America is homeless and living in a shelter, motel, car, shared housing, abandoned building, park or orphanage. The proportions in some school districts exceed one in ten, and the number is growing rapidly.

Furthermore, this poverty is concentrated in increasingly resegregated communities and schools. More than 70 percent of black and Latino students attend predominantly minority schools, and nearly 40 percent attend intensely segregated schools, where more than 90 percent of students are minority and most are poor.

Poverty rates make a huge difference in student achievement. Few people are aware, for example, that in 2009 US schools with fewer than 10 percent of students in poverty ranked first among all nations on the Programme for International Student Achievement tests in reading, while those serving more than 75 percent of students in poverty scored alongside nations like Serbia, ranking about fiftieth.

The schools identified as low-performing not only serve a growing underclass of impoverished families; they also typically do so with fewer state and local dollars per pupil than wealthier districts around them. Unlike high-achieving nations that fund their schools centrally and equally, most American states spend three times more on their wealthiest schools than they do on their poorest.

In California, for example, urban school districts often spend less than the state average although their children have the greatest needs. With inadequate budgets, crumbling buildings, class sizes of more than thirty (in some cases nearing fifty) and not enough desks or books, many schools serving the neediest students have long ago canceled art, music and physical education, shut down libraries and fired librarians, nurses and counselors. They have lost reading specialists, science teachers and school psychologists. As they suffer cut after cut while they seek to meet the needs of children who are often hungry and homeless as well as shortchanged in terms of educational opportunities, these schools must decide how they will underserve their students, not whether they will.

These disparities in school funding also lead to disparities in salaries and working conditions, which create shortages of qualified personnel in high-need districts. A recent study found that in California and New York, for example, the highest-spending districts offer salaries more than twice as high as those in the lowest-spending districts. Even within a single region, the average teacher in high-poverty Oakland earned $54,000 in 2009 while her counterpart in wealthy Portola Valley (home to Silicon Valley industrialists) earned $89,000. Nationally, teachers in low-poverty districts earn one-third more at the top of the salary range than those in high-poverty districts. And the teachers who work in the neediest communities also manage larger classes with fewer books, materials and supports of all kinds.

These disparities are greatest across districts, but they are exacerbated further within most large districts, where resources are unequally distributed. It is no surprise then that the Education Department recently reported that schools serving mostly African-American students are twice as likely to have teachers with only one or two years of experience than schools in the same district serving mostly white students. Because they are less experienced and educated, teachers at schools with more Latino and African-American students are paid $2,500 less on average than teachers in the district as a whole.

Now comes the federal government to announce that such schools—where students score lower on tests than in more advantaged communities—should be labeled as failing and threatened with closure or staff firings. This makes educational redlining official. The federal share of less than 10 percent of school budgets is a tiny drop in the bucket, and far from enough to tip the scales that are so dramatically out of balance. Not only is there no plan in federal law to tackle poverty, segregation or the massive state and local underfunding of these schools; the plans embodied in Senate ESEA proposals are likely to undermine these communities even further.

How Federal Policy Can Make Things Worse

Today, NCLB—and plans to replace it—deliver primarily on the promise of more tests and sanctions. New proposals would focus the law’s punishments even more pointedly on schools in high-need communities and on educators who are willing to serve in these schools, where they earn lower salaries, teach larger classes, deal with more stress and spend longer hours than those who work in more affluent schools. This passes for accountability in America. It is also a recipe for educational redlining.

The test-and-punish approach to school reform has already made it more difficult for schools labeled as failing to attract and retain well-qualified educators—thus, ironically, reducing the quality of education for students still further. Rather than increasing the incentives and supports for teaching in high-need schools, recent federal policy has encouraged states to lower standards for prospective teachers, despite evidence that doing so increases teacher attrition and reduces student achievement. Blaming teachers for the ills of high-need schools lets policy-makers off the hook and keeps the more fundamental problems of severe poverty, a tattered safety net and inequitable funding under the rug.

Instead of making long-term investments in these communities, the strategies promoted in Race to the Top and the current proposals for ESEA will cordon off “failing” public schools and seek to close, replace or reconstitute them, or use them to experiment with high-risk reforms like for-profit educational management firms.

These approaches have a dubious track record. Many reconstitutions—where staff are fired and replaced—have resulted in a less qualified teaching staff and lower achievement after the reform. The largest national studies of charters have found that while some are highly successful, most are more likely to underperform than to outperform district-run schools serving similar students. Moreover, the fact that charters enroll fewer English learners and special education students makes it difficult to compare their performance with that of other public schools.

The school replacement strategy is far from a panacea. An independent evaluation of Chicago’s Renaissance initiative—which aimed to replace 100 schools with redesigned schools, charters and “contract schools” run by entrepreneurs—found that the achievement of students in the new schools had not improved relative to comparison students and that both groups continued to be very low-performing. Meanwhile, the disruptions to communities were severe. Many students were shipped out to distant schools, creating long, dangerous travel conditions; others were not accepted by the new schools; and still others dropped out when their schools were closed. An effort to launch another round of closings and turnarounds led to vehement public protests that closed down a school board meeting in December. “We see through the sound bites. You have betrayed the public trust!” one protester yelled. “You have failed Chicago’s children.”

More troubling, pressure to raise test scores has led many schools to exclude students who are hardest to teach, either by structuring admissions so that low-achieving students and those with special needs are unlikely to be admitted, or by creating conditions under which they are speedily encouraged to leave. In Houston a study documented a slew of strategies by which schools rid themselves of struggling students. In the brave new world of New Orleans, composed almost entirely of charter schools, the Southern Poverty Law Center had to sue because disabled students could not get access to public education.

Excluding low-scoring students from public schools gets scores up, but it expands the school-to-prison pipeline, which has quadrupled over the past thirty years, along with corrections costs, which now threaten to devour funds that should be spent on education. Most inmates are functionally illiterate and high school dropouts. In a devil’s bargain, the public spends as much as $50,000 a year to incarcerate young men on whom it would not spend $10,000 a year for a decent education.

The truth is that the competitive market approach leaves the most vulnerable children behind. It is impossible to punish schools that are struggling without punishing the children they serve. When schools are closed, it is the students and families who suffer the chaos and confusion. And if teaching and leadership positions in high-need communities become even more unappealing as a result of such policies, educators with options will be even less willing to come to or stay in these schools, leaving students and their schools with an even more inexperienced and transient teaching force. This is not a strategy that promises great wins for these students or for the nation.

What We Should Do Instead

We need a new approach to federal policy that makes it possible for all students to succeed and creates the momentum we need to regain our status as an educational leader among nations. The new ESEA must be better than what we’ve had for the past ten years—especially for the low-income communities it was intended to serve. To make this happen, Congress and the administration must think differently about the ends and the means of reform.

First, we need to recognize that the growing income gap, unemployment and poverty must be addressed if we are to close the education gap and maintain a stable democratic society. The Occupy movement is beginning to reawaken awareness of how much social inequities have grown in the past thirty years, but few are aware of how intolerable the situation has become in the most marginalized communities. As socioeconomic segregation has increased, policy-makers and pundits are ever more buffered from direct knowledge of how the other half lives.

Although it is not fashionable to say so, we desperately need a jobs bill that will allow all those who want and need to work to take on the many jobs that need doing in America, and we need a major anti-poverty program that will eliminate childhood poverty in the richest nation on earth. The goods bought and the taxes paid by Americans with jobs will be the most important corrective for our lagging economy, and the stability and dignity this provides for families is the most important foundation for children and their learning.

Second, we must finally address the outrageous disparities in school funding that set us apart from other industrialized nations. To help students reach the new, rigorous Common Core standards that states have developed, we must create common resource standards—and incentives to meet them. This should include benchmarks for early childhood education, well-qualified teachers, high-quality curriculums and equitable instructional resources. Consider the nearly 500,000 high school students who want to go to college but, according to the Education Department, do not have access to algebra 2 classes, and the more than 2 million who have no access to calculus classes.

It’s not fair to expect students to meet equally high standards if we do not provide them with equal opportunity to succeed. The ESEA should tie standards for equal educational opportunity to standards for learning: indicators of learning opportunities—the availability of qualified teachers, appropriate courses, materials and equipment, and necessary services—should be published alongside test results, and states should be expected to show evidence of progress toward resource equalization along with evidence of learning.

Third, we should equalize learning opportunities outside school, including high-quality preschool education and enriched summer learning opportunities for all students. A major study at Johns Hopkins University found that one-third of the achievement gap between affluent and poor high school students is present at the start of first grade, and two-thirds occurs because of summer learning loss for low-income students. Evidence shows that preschool investments create large returns as students experience less school failure, fewer special education placements and higher graduation and employment rates. High-quality summer programs also help close the achievement gap and prevent students from dropping out. Yet most low-income students do not have access to these opportunities.

Fourth, we must invest in the quality of our educators. Since federal supports for teacher training were dramatically reduced in the ’80s, teacher shortages in schools serving low-income students have increased to the point that there is a revolving door for teachers in these schools. Congress has colluded in lowering preparation standards and creating fast-track alternative certification routes for teachers to fill jobs in high-minority, low-income schools, despite research that shows that these teachers leave faster and reduce student achievement.

Frustrated by this counterproductive approach, a number of organizations representing parents, communities, educators, and civil rights and disability activists have banded together to insist on a higher standard and to advocate for more sensible federal supports for high-quality teaching. Many successful models have been created and documented, but the funding for these programs has been steadily eliminated. The new education law should maintain the NCLB expectation that teachers be fully prepared and qualified for their challenging jobs and then support those goals with service scholarships to underwrite training and high-quality preparation programs in high-need urban and rural communities.

It may sometimes be necessary to close schools, but only as a last resort, after communities have been engaged in diagnosis and decision-making and necessary investments have been made, wraparound services provided and all student needs taken into account. Increased emphasis on parent and community participation in the direction of their public schools should be a key piece of new education law. We must think and act more systemically. We need federal education policy—backed up with state policy—that builds an escalator out of poverty. The 2020 Vision Roadmap produced by the Opportunity to Learn campaign provides one image of how this can be done.

Preventing educational redlining is a moral and a practical issue. The estimated 7,000 students who drop out of school each day represent a human tragedy as well as lost potential for our society. The more than $300 billion a year forgone because of the lost wages and social service costs of dropouts could be spent building strong schools for these students in their neighborhoods.

We must be honest about our challenges and adopt solutions that give all children an opportunity to learn if our nation is going to reclaim its role as a world education leader. We cannot afford to settle for an education law that is looking backward when it is so critically important to bring our future into view.

Editorial Published: January 21, 2012

As a state legislator, he co-wrote a law cracking down on ethnic studies, and as superintendent he decided that Tucson’s district was violating it. School officials in Tucson and elsewhere strenuously disagree, saying he misunderstood and mischaracterized a program that brought much-needed attention to a neglected part of America’s history and culture. They say it engaged students, pushed them to excel, and led to better grades and attendance.

But their interpretation collided with that of Mr. Huppenthal, whose law prohibits programs that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” and “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Unless two students win a federal lawsuit arguing that the loss of the program violates their First Amendment rights, Tucson school officials and students are going to have to enrich their curriculum another way.

To say that Arizona’s Anglo and Hispanic populations have had multiple points of collision and misunderstanding is putting it mildly. Arizona (the state that also showed some of the most bitter resistance to a federal Martin Luther King holiday) enacted the first in a recent spate of extremist immigration laws and spawned the Minuteman border-vigilante movement.

If Mr. Huppenthal wanted to diminish resentment and treat Hispanic students as individuals, he picked a lousy way to do it. His action has Hispanic critics saying they feel their culture is under attack — and has students in a well-established, well-liked program feeling dejected.

For Tucson school officials, this should not mean the end of teaching texts like “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and “Rethinking Columbus.” It is a challenge to draft a new curriculum whose honesty and excellence all of Tucson’s teachers and students can be proud of.

This is reminder to those of you who follow K-12 education in Milwaukee: there’s a new plan waiting in the wings that includes another attempt at the takeover of Milwaukee public schools.

The plan, designed by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce (MMAC), was reported on by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this past November. It’s loosely designed in the image of the New Orleans “Recovery School District,” and has been a model for reform both in Tennessee and in Michigan.

While all of the specifics of the plan have not been made public, its features have been presented in an MMAC slideshow and in interviews with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. These include:

• Create 50 high-performing schools serving 20,000 students, a mere 16% of Milwaukee’s K-12 student population. The MMAC estimates it will take a total of $48 million in capital costs and $21 million in annual operating costs to get 20,000 students in high-performing schools by 2020.
• Establish a special turnaround district in MPS for low-performing schools that would be headed by a different superintendent.
• Expand vocational-technical education for large numbers of Milwaukee’s children.

Basically this proposal creates a caste system for public education. 50 high-performing schools will serve a fraction of Milwaukee’s K-12 students, while the remaining 84% take their chances in other schools, including those in a designated low-performing district.

This old tune under a new name is an affront to the majority of Milwaukee’s poor and working class kids. Instead of teaching every child to be college ready, whether or not they choose to attend college, the MMAC has a very different vision. Students not attending one of the 50 high-performing schools may be tracked into a vocational program.

Whenever the captains of industry start talking about vocational training, red flags should go up about the danger of forcing low-income students of color to fill the role of a cheap labor force. Many remember the historical debate over calls for “industrial training” for African American students in the South by Booker T. Washington, so-called “enlightened” southern segregationists and the northern industrialists.

Vocational and career training can meet student’s needs. But these programs cannot be set up at the cost of dumbing down curriculum or tracking some students into high skills areas like engineering and the trades, while the rest are destined for life to tuck bed sheets or greet customers at WalMart or stock shelves at dollar stores.

Beware, plans are in waiting. Some of our city’s business and political leaders are just waiting to see the outcome of the Governor’s recall to try to set them in motion.

Arizona’s ban on ethnic studies proscribes Mexican-American history, local authors, even Shakespeare

By Jeff Biggers Friday, Jan 13, 2012 Salon

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/singleton/

As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.”

Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson’s largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies.

The list of removed books includes the 20-year-old textbook “Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years,” which features an essay by Tucson author Leslie Silko. Recipient of a Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Silko has been an outspoken supporter of the ethnic studies program.

“By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students,” said the book’s editor Bill Bigelow. “This is a book that has sold over 300,000 copies and is used in school districts from Anchorage to Atlanta, and from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. It offers teaching strategies and readings that teachers can use to help students think about the perspectives that are too often silenced in the traditional curriculum.”

Another notable text removed from Tucson’s classrooms is Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” In a meeting this week, administrators informed Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” including the teaching of Shakespeare’s classic in Mexican-American literature courses.

Other banned books include “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by famed Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” by Rodolfo Acuña, two books often singled out by Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal, who campaigned in 2010 on the promise to “stop la raza.” Huppenthal, who once lectured state educators that he based his own school principles for children on corporate management schemes of the Fortune 500, compared Mexican-American studies to Hitler Jugend indoctrination last fall.

An independent audit of Tucson’s ethnic studies program commissioned by Huppenthal last summer actually praised “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” a 40-year-old textbook now in its seventh edition. According to the audit: “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos is an unbiased, factual textbook designed to accommodate the growing number of Mexican-American or Chicano History Courses. The auditing team refuted a number of allegations about the book, saying, ‘quotes have been taken out of context.’”

Freire’s work on pedagogy has been translated into numerous languages, and is taught at universities around the United States.

In a school district founded by a Mexican-American in which more than 60 percent of the students come from Mexican-American backgrounds, the administration also removed every textbook dealing with Mexican-American history, including “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement” by Arturo Rosales, which features a biography of longtime Tucson educator Salomon Baldenegro. Other books removed from the school include “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures,” by Elizabeth Martinez and the textbook “Critical Race Theory” by scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

“The only other time a book of mine was banned was in 1986, when the apartheid government in South Africa banned ‘Strangers in Their Own Country,’ a curriculum I’d written that included a speech by then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela,” said Bigelow, who serves as curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and co-directs the online Zinn Education Project. ”We know what the South African regime was afraid of. What is the Tucson school district afraid of?”

Jeff Biggers, the author most recently of “Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland,” is currently at work on a new book on Arizona politics and history. More Jeff Biggers

By Larry Miller from OnMilwaukee.com blog 1/11/2012

What’s the real picture on joblessness in Milwaukee?

At a conference I attended this past weekend titled OneMilwaukee and sponsored by the NAACP, Mayor Tom Barrett estimated that there are 30,000 people out of work presently and up to 20,000 jobs lost in the city since 2007. He went on to describe the dilemma he faces as mayor. People in one community talk about the devastating lack of jobs. Then he’ll hear from employers in the city who say they cannot fill the openings they have.

OneMilwaukee conference-goers were reminded of data released recently in Milwaukee Today: An Occasional Report of the NAACP:

– More than half of all African American males in Milwaukee between the ages of 16 and 64 are unemployed.

– In 2009 there were more than 70,000 job seekers in Milwaukee for fewer than 10,000 job vacancies.

– Milwaukee employers are more likely to respond to a white job seeker with a criminal record that a black job seeker without record. (See: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/09/study-black-man-and-white-felon-same-chances-for-hire/ )

– Milwaukee ranks last among 52 major cities in the forecasted role of minority entrepreneurs.

Business leaders like Tim Sullivan, president of the MMAC, claim, “…We don’t have a jobs crisis in Milwaukee, we have an education crisis.” But OneMilwaukee’s overview points to a more varied and urgent set of solutions.

The keynote speaker at the conference, Dr. Keenan Grinnell, Vice President and Dean of Diversity at Colgate University, affirmed that Milwaukee needs go far beyond some tweaking, advocating for economic development at the level of a Marshall plan. Dr. Grinnell outlined a number of steps with the goal of creating inclusive prosperity and eliminating the wealth gap in the city. He maintains that the business environment is not inclusive, and that there is a brain drain along with a lack of multi-ethnic approaches to solving the existing economic devastation. Among the solutions Dr. Grinnell called for was creation of entrepreneurial ecosystems connected to job creation, job and skill training in poor communities, and training all children at high levels.

This effort by the NAACP is refreshing and bold.

It seems high time for Milwaukee to come together, as OneMilwaukee, to create economic equality and justice for all communities.

This speech, given recently at a protest in Maplewood, N.J., against the state’s charter school policy, was delivered by Stan Karp, who taught English and journalism in Paterson for 30 years. He is now the director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey’s Education Law Center and an editor of Rethinking Schools magazine.

As delivered by Stan Karp:

Thanks for standing up for public schools and thanks for inviting some of us from Montclair to stand with you. Montclair schools, which have often been cited as a national model of quality integrated public education, are facing a similar challenge.

An application to open the Quest Academy charter school in Montclair is now a finalist after being rejected four times. If approved, the charter school would draw over $2 million from the district budget. Quest promises to serve a small group of students with “small classes,” “individualized instruction,” and “cutting edge technology.” But, if approved, it will leave students at Montclair High School with larger classes, less individualized instruction, and less cutting edge technology. It will erode programs and staff at a high school that last year sent 93% of its students to post-secondary education including 91% of its African American students.

And that’s what’s wrong with New Jersey’s broken charter school policy.

Instead of providing better opportunities for all students, it’s providing subsidized spaces for a few at the expense of the many. Because it does not give a voice to local districts and voters in deciding where to open charters and how to integrate them equitably into the public system, it promotes polarization among parents and pockets of privilege instead of districtwide improvement.

In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has changed dramatically from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts that create alternatives for a small number of students to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors, and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system. This is eroding the common ground that public education in a democracy needs to survive.

When I first moved to Montclair in the early 1980s, in large part because of the excellent public schools and the pre-K program, over 20% of the town’s school budget came from federal and state sources. There was desegregation aid, transportation aid, magnet school aid, and other support.

Today that’s all gone and instead the [state] Department of Education and the governor are promoting charters, vouchers, budget cuts, and other steps toward privatization that are hurting our kids and our schools. Montclair needs full funding of the state funding formula, including the expansion of pre-K that was promised when the formula was passed in 2008. Underfunding has cost Montclair over $10 million in the past three years; we can’t afford bleeding by charter schools on top of that.

I was a high school teacher for 30 years in Paterson so I know firsthand how much our schools need to improve and how difficult it is for them to compensate for the inequality that exists all around them. But the current push for deregulated charters and privatization is doing nothing to reduce the concentrations of 70%, 80%, and 90% poverty that remain the central problem in our urban schools.

And it’s doing nothing to address growing need and underfunding in our suburban ones. These policies are draining resources, staff, and energy for innovation away from other district schools, often while creaming better prepared students and more committed parents. This is especially a problem in big-city public systems that urgently need renewal and resources but are increasingly being left behind with the biggest challenges.

No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. And charter school teachers and parents are not our enemies. On the contrary, we should be allies in fighting some of the counterproductive testing and curriculum practices raining down on all of us from above. We should find more and better ways to integrate charters into common systems of accountability and support, and that has to mean giving local communities a bigger voice in where and how charters should be opened. Where practices like greater autonomy over curriculum or freedom from bureaucratic regulations are valid, they should be extended to all schools without sacrificing the oversight we need to preserve equity and accountability.

But at the level of state and federal education policy, charters are providing a reform cover for dismantling the [traditional] public school system and [have become] an investment opportunity for those who see education as a business rather than a fundamental institution of democratic civic life.

It’s time for a moratorium on opening all new charters in New Jersey until, as Assemblywoman Mila Jasey has called for, we have an independent assessment of their performance and their impact, and until we have a more democratic process that includes local approval and participation in setting charter school policy.

Now is exactly the right time for us to be joining together to strengthen, not weaken, the public and democratic character of our education system.