Backpack Full of Cash Panel Discussion

The League of Women Voters’ latest sponsored documentary was “Backpack Full of Cash.” Even though I no longer teach, I still support public schools. This particular documentary essentially showed how big business has made an enormous effort to privatize education through charters and kill public schools.

After the documentary, there was a panelist discussion,

where a moderator rifled through the collection of audience questions and three experts responded: a charter school administrator, a researcher who knew local Texas public school statistics and another expert who knew Texas statewide statistics.

Although the charter school panelist (CSP) was brave to appear, she seemed physically uncomfortable and always allowed the other two panelists to answer the questions first, ensuring that she’d be set up to give a defensive response. Not only did the documentary make charter schools look horrible, but so did two out of three panelists.

Since the movie theatre we were in served food and drink, where moviegoers could write down orders on conveniently located pieces of paper with the provided pens, I took notes (in bold) on some points that stood out to me during the movie and the panel discussion.

1. One part of the documentary showed a charter school where they teach creationism as the truth, evolution as a myth and that dinosaurs coexisted with humans. They also believed in corporal punishment, but the only one who should have been paddled was the white principal and not any of his black students who’re learning about fucking creationism as if they don’t have enough challenges being poor and black. As I reflect on this note, the only one I took during the documentary, I recall how neatly dressed and well behaved the all-black student body were as they were being intellectually set back. I can only hope that being literate will lead them to read the truth at some point. I also wondered where were the poor white students. Would creationism be taught as the truth if they were present?
2. I knew my question, which wasn’t really a question, wouldn’t be read since it was too heavy a topic, but glaringly obvious: “Please respond to the following comment: Equitable funding in education will never occur until we get rid of the concept of ‘race,’ which is a social construction that severely limits resources for people of color.” Yet I shared that with the one panelist whose answers resonated with me the most. She totally agreed and said she’d talk about race all day long. Too bad the moderator merely stuck with the topic of lack of funding without asking a single question about race. Throughout the documentary, people of color were shown reacting to and protesting against public school funding being reduced while the most enthusiastic people about establishing more charter schools were wealthy white people, including Jeb Bush. Yet not one mention of race during the panelist discussion.
3. One local charter school used to expel students if they didn’t come to school “prepared and ready to learn.” Imagine how many “undesirable” students could be eliminated with such a nebulous policy. Those would be the students who consumed many resources, either through the need for specialists or more contact time due to behavior. Those are the students who may lower the prestige of the charter since they may not score as well on the almighty standardized tests. Those are the students most in need of innovative teaching.
4. Charters are not locally accountable since their boards are private. Essentially, charters can do whatever they want without consulting with the public even though they are funded by public money.
5. SPEDs (Special Education students) cost districts twice as much, which is part of the reason charter schools get rid of them. It’s amazing how the public still hasn’t made the connection between underserving a special needs population through education, then incarcerating them later on. The community should protest with outrage every time special education funding is reduced.
6. Charter schools don’t have to admit students with discipline problems. This is also known as “cherry picking.” One would think that charter schools produced spectacular results as much as they cherry pick. Only about a third of them perform better than regular public schools, which accepts all students.
7. Charter schools don’t “backfill,” so if students want to join in the upper grades, they cannot. Lower grades have far more students and the senior class is very small. Charter schools only want students who have a proven track record at their school. Once a charter school weeds out the undesirables, they don’t want to spend additional resources on unknowns.
8. CSP looked physically ill throughout the entire conversation and wanted everyone to stop pitting charters against traditional public schools. How ironic that she wanted us to stop saying negative things about charter schools when the presence of charter schools drains money from public schools, and concentrates students who need the most resources in public schools.
9. CSP wanted to throw magnet schools under the bus as well if charter schools won’t be allowed to turn students away. Classic misery enjoys company.
10. Charter schools can simply fill out a short amendment form, which allows them to open a charter anywhere without any local notice or input although local tax payers fund them 100% and have no say in the matter.
11. CSP stated that in DC, when charter schools opened, both the traditional and charters thrived academically, but she couldn’t give a local example of such a phenomenon and the other two panelists looked dubious when they heard the claim.
12. A Yale study looked at how charter school graduates had a harder time adapting to open-ended situations more than graduates of traditional schools.
13. A more productive use of charter schools would be to teach the hardest student population. I could’ve leapt out of my seat when my favorite panelist said this. Yet, unfortunately, I believe the probability of charter schools going in this direction is as likely as the United States resigning its concept of “race.”
14. Charters should have a 10-yr wind down where the lab shuts down and the experimental charter school shares their best practices with traditional schools as the founders of charter schools originally intended. Again, my favorite panelist suggested another dream that has yet to come true–charter schools functioning as they were originally intended, as centers of educational innovation.