Charter Schools: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

school if Pink Floyd had gone to one they'd have known its we don't need any education you undermined your point now it is it's currently back-to-school season and for millions the school they'll be attending will be a charter school the things the politicians love to praise I called for a doubling of our investment in charter schools I'm a big believer in charter schools I believe in public Trotta schools charter schools work and they work very well charter schools are so successful that almost every politician can find something good to say about them yes Seana schools unite both sides of the aisle more quickly than when a wedding DJ throws on hay yah oh look at Nana dancing we can never let her know what this song is about charters are basically public schools that the taxpayer funded but privately run and now the first ones in most 25 years ago as places to experiment with new educational approaches and since then they've exploded there are now over 6700 charter schools educating almost 3 million students and some have celebrity backers like Puff Daddy Andre Agassi and even pitbull who helps helped launch Miami's slam Academy he was a keynote speaker at a charter school conference in 2013 and his speech has not aged well for reasons that all become painfully clear they told me that uh Bill Cosby has spoken here before which i think is amazing someone that I really relate to I also love jello you know yes yes that does look bad now but to be fair it was not commonly known at the time that jello was responsible for dozens of cases of sexual assault turns out jello is a monster I think I'm legally okay to say that the point is jello and and look when pitbull has a charter school it seems like it might be worth taking a look at them and first let me acknowledge this is a controversial area charter proponents will point to positive news stories like this one about the Kipp charter schools network most Kipp students are chosen by lottery regardless of prior academic record almost all meet federal poverty guy lines and yet 82% go on to college I think one thing that I learned that Kipp really well is that a lot of your effort doesn't reap any success until way later in the future now honestly any philosophy that can get those kind of results might be worth considering in the same way that if we found out they boosted our immunity we'd seriously consider eating koalas but but critics critics argue charters overstate their successes siphon off talented students and divert precious resources within a school district now for this piece and I know this is going to make some people on both sides very angry we're going to set aside whether or not charter schools are a good idea in principle because whether they are or not in 42 states and DC we're doing them so instead we're going to look at how they operate in practice one group found on average charters have a slight edge over traditional public schools in reading indeed about the same in math but acknowledged charter quality is uneven across the states and across schools and that is putting it mildly because around the country there have been charter schools so flawed they don't make it through the school year this charter school suddenly closed its doors in the middle of the day in Orange County charter schools suddenly closed its doors without notice the local charter school is suddenly and unexpectedly closing its doors on our dining room table my son left these two notes to us one says dear mom is the school going out of business yes yes you are right that kid spelled business business which I'd argue is a much better way to spell it now that that school was actually shut down just six weeks into the school year so to be honest they probably should have been much better at business and charters in some states can have an alarming failure rate two years ago a Florida paper found that since 2008 a hundred and nineteen charter schools had closed there fourteen of which had never even finished their first school year so fourteen schools in Florida were outlasted by nbc's mysteries of laura a show which once ended an episode like this i have a hot date tonight who threesome actually but a threesome joke about of king children it was in the first season and they gave her another one and the point is when schools closed that fast it's shocking because you would assume someone would rigorously screen a school before it was allowed to open making sure it was financially and academically sound but that is not always the case take forwarders ruv academies which shut down after just seven weeks due to a lack of among other things a school the schools were repeatedly kicked out of their buildings shuttled students among multiple sites including the signature grand reception hall in Davie two local churches in Fort Lauderdale and holiday park they also bus students on Daley field trips because they didn't have enough classrooms Daley field trips how's that even possible surely by day ten you've run out of ideas and they're taking kids to Marshalls to return a belt hey pretty pretty great right kids I'll probably get store credit so put on your adventure hats we're about to go on a magical twelve dollar scavenger hunt so how did those schools get approved well Florida's charter process begins with a lengthy application and Ivy Academy's was four hundred pages long and their founder Trayvon Mitchell included passages like this one beginning instruction is scaffolded to provide targeted support with the goal of increasing independence it goes on and it sounds great but weirdly we found this application by a school called Franklin Academy in Fort Lauderdale which predates that by two years and which features this passage which begins instruction will scaffold and then continues in almost exactly the same way it's basically identical but for a few small differences like the Olsen twins I mean you know you know one of them came first and then Mary Kate plagiarized her face now that behavior might not be illegal but it's certainly unethical or if I make once from the IV Academy handbook you will not plagiarize works that you find on the Internet plagiarism is taking the ideas or writings of others and presenting them as if they were yours so the application for Mitchel school would also have been grounds for him getting thrown out of that school and incidentally that's not the only thing he may have stolen he has since been accused of spending funds for students on himself and is awaiting trial for grand theft and the problem with the approval process being to Easy's there is a lot at stake in charter schools they get paid on a per student basis on average that's about seven thousand dollars for every enrollment and that adds up take Philadelphia's Harambee charter school I know I know they named it a long time ago and it's spelled differently your king monsters rest in peace now that's gone that's gone received more than five million dollars in taxpayer money at the same year that this story emerged by day the Harambee Institute charter school looks like any other educating some 450 students from kindergarten through eighth grade but by night the cafeteria turns into club domani a bar that authorities say is unlicensed and illegal oh wow a nightclub in an elementary school is a recipe for disaster because those are the two most vomit prong populations in the world they must've had to Febreze the out of that place now you'll be glad to hear that that schools under new leadership now although that might be because its CEO pled guilty to fraud for embezzling nearly 80 thousand dollars from the Harambee Institute rest in peace and and look you can say that's an isolated incident but it isn't in Philadelphia alone at least 10 executives or top administrators have pled guilty in the last decade to charges like fraud misusing funds and obstruction of justice which may be why Philly magazine advises parents don't forget to Google any schools you're looking at to make sure they won't once unexpectedly shut down or run by a CEO who pleaded guilty to theft all of which speaks to a general atmosphere perhaps best articulated by the state auditor I said it before and I will say it again Pennsylvania has the worst charter school in the United States that is not good because it is not like having the worst something is new for Pennsylvania remember this is a state that has the worst football fans the worst Bell and the worst regional delicacy yes if I wanted Cheez Whiz on my steak sandwich I need a kiddy cafeteria the restaurant run by six-year-olds and and I'm not even sure Pennsylvania deserves to be called the worst because Ohio's charter law was for decades so lacks even charter advocates have called it the Wild West the state has around 360 charters and their Governor John Kasich speaks often about how much he loves choice and competition in schools we will improve the public schools if there's a sense of competition it's just like a pizza shop in the town if there's only one and and there's not much pepperoni on it you can call til you're blue in the face but the best way to get pepperoni on more pepperoni on that pizza is to open up a second pizza shop and that's what's going to improve our public schools okay okay that doesn't work on any level first no one has ever called it a pizza shop second it's a little hard to hear the man who just defunded Planned Parenthood talked about the importance of choice third there's such a thing there is such a thing as paying for extra pepperoni like a normal person and finally the notion that the more pizza shops there are the better pizza becomes is effectively undercut by the two words Papa John's but but Ohio's charters have had huge problems with lack of oversight a review of one year's state audits found charters misspent public money nearly four times more often than any other form of taxpayer-funded agency and some cases are incredible like that of Lisa ham a school superintendent who was accused of spending money for her school on sparse jewelry luggage plays Vetri care and trips to Europe and to see Oprah she took a plea deal without admitting guilt but not before delivering this fantastic explanation proverbs says without vision people perish and it's very important for people to have a vision for their own lives and in order to do that they need to experience what's possible in life and in order to transfer that to the children they have to experience it themselves that is amazing she's just spouting a bunch of vague about inspiration crossing her fingers and hoping people will buy it and you know what when you put it like that I feel like she has learned a lot from Oprah money well-spent and it's Nellie for the record when she quoted proverb saying where there is no vision the people perish she's leaving out the very next line which is but he that keepeth the law happy is he and that's a king important caveat and what's crazy is there are ways to profit off of charter schools perfectly legally in Ohio and there have been for years look at this episode of frontline from 2000 by law charter schools must be nonprofit but the schools can hire an educational management company or a mo to run the school and the e mo can try to make a profit Brennan calls his e mo white hat management education is first last and always a business if it's run like a business it can be done profitably yes education is first last and always a business take the L off the word learning and what do you got earning take the e off it what do you got then arning yeah sure that's not a word but it could be in one of our English classes now that man's company white hat management worked on two contracts where each charter would pay ninety five percent or more of its government funding to white hats which as a private company isn't obligated to provide the same level of transparency as say a school district so taxpayers could have little idea how that money was being spent and who can say if that's a good system or not all I know is white hat ran thirty two of the lowest performing schools in the state and if you do essentially the same terrible thing more than 30 times in a row you're not a management company you basically Billy Joel's Greatest Hits volumes two and three and at this point you may be thinking charters were completely unmonitored but that is where you would actually be wrong because they are approved and overseen by what are called authorizes and while some states sharply limit who can be an authorizer Ohio allowed many different groups including nonprofits to do it meaning well let's say I wanted to open the John Oliver Academy for nervous boys and let's say I had a pre-existing nonprofit called Johnny's kids that could potentially have overseen my school and that basically happened take the Richard Allen chain of schools in Ohio whose president was a woman called Jeannette Harris they were overseen by Kids Count a non-profit founded by Jeannette Harris which oversaw the schools as they spent a million tax dollars on management and consulting firms founded by wait for it Jeannette King Harris now Harris denies a conflict of interest because she claims she wasn't directly involved in decision-making and maybe maybe the school's just chose Kids Count because it had a proven track record of great oversight so let's let's just check in on one of the other schools they oversaw a local charter school padded its attendance records resulting in more than a million dollars in extra money state auditors interviewed students and staff their findings show that on any given day there would only be about 30 students in the building a fraction of the reported 459 enrolled there oh it gets worse because when an auditor looked into it they found Kids Count had done the legal minimum oversight required which I would argue suggests a problem with the legal minimum because thirty kids showed up and the school claims they had four hundred and fifty which doesn't speak well of an oversight group calling itself Kids Count now though oh hi oh has passed a new law to try and clean up some of the problems you've seen but serious damage has already been done and incredibly there is one more way that charter schools around the country have been allowed to run wild because we haven't even mentioned online charters yet they serve a hundred eighty thousand students and even if they just get the average seven thousand dollars per student that's over a billion dollars in taxpayer money going to cyber charters annually and some have an attendant system you would not believe sometimes kids aren't counted absent until they have failed to log on for five days in a row and some are never required to attend class but the state still requires the schools to report attendance so most just report a hundred percent even though that's not what's really going on that's just crazy you're basically giving kids a box containing videogames pornography and long division and claiming a hundred percent of them chose the right one and look some kids might need online education but it has got to be monitored better because one major study found compared to kids in traditional public schools students in online charters lost the equivalent of 72 days of learning and reading and 180 days in math during the course of a 180 day school year and 180 - 180 is as those kids might put it three now charter advocates will tell you that even they are concerned about online schools and they'll argue some states have much better oversight than the ones that we've seen and that is true though for the record some may even be worse once you're a researcher told Ohio be very glad that you have Nevada so you are not the worst which I believe is the motto on Nevada state licensed place but the point is we don't even have time to get into Nevada and advocates will argue all these closings shall accountability inaction just like in business bad schools closed but there's a king problem there as one former charter school employee explains this isn't just a regular business this isn't a restaurant that you just open up you serve your food people don't like it you close it and you move on this is Education this is students are getting left in the middle of the year without a school to go to so I just think that there needs to be some filter as to who's opening up these charter schools exactly the problem with letting the free market decide when it comes to kids is that kids change faster than the market and by the time it's obvious the school is failing futures may have been ruined so if we are going to treat charter schools like pizza shops we should monitor them at least as well as we do pizzerias it's like the old saying give a kid a shitty pizza you've got their day treat a kid like a shitty pizza you could cut their entire life you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 11,606,687

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Keywords: last week tonight with john oliver, last week tonight, john oliver, charter schools

Id: l_htSPGAY7I

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/PolishMusic]

Story from Ohio I wish were mentioned that more people need to know:

A top representative in charge of Charter Schools in Ohio was caught faking test scores to improve the overall funding that Charter Schools receive. Essentially he tried to make Charter Schools look better by giving them higher than actual reported test scores. The representative's name is David Hansen. He did not get fired, but instead resigned from his position.

A large/poor city in Ohio, Youngstown, was the center of some controversy this past year as the state passed a bill (with very little public knowledge and very little time) that allows Ohio to appoint a private CEO to have complete power over the school district. The controversy of course coming from the school board losing all of their power to some private person appointed by the state. A large reason why this even happened is because David Hansen helped get that bill passed shortly before resigning.

John Kasich ran for president this past year as a member of the republican party. His campaign manager, Beth Hansen, is the wife of douchebag and "cheats on his state tests" David Hansen.

[u/Maverick_Forefinger]

As a non-American it seems to me that everything in America is treated as a commodity. Things like education, healthcare and to a lesser extent elections. Is this something Americans just accept? Has it always been that way? Just seems a little strange to me but each to their own.

[u/wcsmom]

This is anecdotal but I went to a math and science Charter school for High School in Delaware it was one of the best schools around, people left privates schools to come. But the school was able to reject kids based on performance, one of the reasons it was so good. we had a 98 percent grad rate and the majority of kids went to college. It did create a great environment and culture for learning when all the kids were scholastically minded. I benefited from that kind of education vs a normal state education but i understand the experience is uneven for each school. with anything that is fast growing people will do spotty jobs to get in on something good. They need over site.

[u/obbie1kenoby]

Charter schools game the system by weeding out students they don't want anymore. They have lower percentages of special ed kids (and actively recruit/keep those with disabilities that are more manageable to keep their number not too embarrassing), ELL kids, and students who struggle are shown the door. Then they gloat and claim they have better scores.

Multiple sources from the New York Times exposé of the Success Academy network in New York City: - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-student-paper.html?_r=0 / Discipline method at Success Academy by their "model teacher" - the video is disgusting - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html / Principals make list of kids who "have got to go"

Not too mention that they brain-drain public schools, leaving them with higher numbers of struggling students than before, the cash-drain public schools out of tax money, and they space-drain public schools out of buildings by forcing them to shrink, have higher class sizes to accommodate charters sharing a building with them.

For teachers, retention rate is atrocious compared to public schools. Teachers are overworked, often have no union or collective bargaining

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/nyregion/at-success-academy-charter-schools-polarizing-methods-and-superior-results.html

[u/HugeEgo_Sorry]

John; Please tell me you didn't open a charter school to make a point!

Edit: "Let's say i wanted to open the John Oliver Academy for Nervous boys..." NO. YOU DIDN'T!!

Edit 2.0: You, tease. Granted, it would have undermined the point you're trying to make so yeah; i understand :)

[u/thecodingdude]

Off for another month??? They just got back...

[u/Kikra]

I wouldn't mind a school named after Harambe....

[u/[deleted]]

An interesting piece to watch. But the main flaw is the lack of a comparison to public schools.

Yes, John shows that some charter schools are terrible. But some public schools are terrible too. Are charter schools actually worse on average than public schools?

That's the main question we should be asking. John didn't address that at all.

[u/qdobe]

I was always pretty anti charter schools.

Public schools don't get enough funding but we are funding these schools which have littler oversight and have private interest.

You see some charter schools which are, arguably, not schools, but cater to athletics, such as football or basketball. Some charter schools are made just to have a football or basketball team of all-stars. I don't get why we are funding charter schools for "a better option" when the other option is being drained of resources because of charter schools.

Kids are literally being used as profit tools, and a lot of times success has a lot to do with funding, so in order to get funding, you pass every kid, regardless of if they learned anything. Making things up to continue to get funding is NOT an uncommon tactic in charter schools. Like you saw, attendance is one of them, success and graduates is another. With the oversight being private, you cannot safely assume these kids are actually learning anything.

Some charter schools are successful and done right and have the right goals. Many do not though.