Two Great Charter School Resources

A couple of things you may not have had time to digest.

First, Diane Ravitch's appearance on Bill Moyers' show, which I originally read about over at Fred's. I finally got to watch the whole thing, and it's excellent. There's nobody quite like Diane Ravitch; she's cranks out so many revelations about the privatization crisis that I can't keep up. We're living in quite a time--- there's a full-blown, deep-pocketed onslaught on democratic, public education in our country; and on the other side, there's a small army of extraordinary women fighting for the greater good.

Diane Ravitch saved me from being a tech blogger, so I have that to thank her for. When I started my previous blog, her first earlier book had just come out, and it completely transformed my priorities. When Diane talks about an attack on democracy, that's something I agree with. And it's much more interesting than blogging about the wonders of online mind-mapping services, or the problems with PowerPoint, or the importance of focusing on learning, not technology. You know, the canon.

Here's the whole segment. It's a great conversation.




Second, you might have missed this report, authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Education in Integrity. It uses information from the DOE Inspector General, and it's sort of a here-what-you-get when you set up an unsupervised, opaque outsourcing of a public institution. Charter schools need to be audited, comprehensively, in every state. Why is this so controversial?

I myself was looking last night at an unpublished audit of one the Gulen-linked schools, and jaded as I am, even I was semi-flabbergasted.  I'll probably be posting portions of that audit soon.  Meanwhile, here's the charter report--- and keep in mind that this is the tip of the iceberg.  It's not even the tip. It's more like a group of little samples from the tip.

Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse