Seattle Schools Community Forum

You may recall our discussion about whether charter schools are really public schools ?  This particular thread was around rights students/staff may have under the U.S. Constitution and the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that for staff, charters aren't public schools. Now, there is yet another case - this around the public funding of charters - out of California.  Here's the headline from Ed Week's " Living in Dialogue " - Charter School Defenders Insist They are "Private Entities." A California couple, Yevgeny "Eugene" Selivanov and Tatyana Berkovich, who were convicted in April of multiple counts of fraud related to their practice of using their charter school bank account for personal expenses and thousands of dollars worth of meals.   According to the LA School Report ,  The couple is appealing their conviction, however, asserting that this amounts to a misunderstanding over the nature of charter school finances. An amicus brief ...

The push is on to expand charters, TFA, student data and yet, more and more people (including some legislators) are finally saying, "What is going on here?" A highly acclaimed charter group in NYC were found to be trying to push out a child with disabilities - it was recorded on tape. From the Daily News : The tapes, a copy of which the mother supplied the Daily News, poke a hole in claims by the fast-growing Success Academy chain founded by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz that it doesn’t try to push out students with special needs or behavior problems. Nancy Zapata said she resorted to the secret tapes last December and again in March after school officials used their “zero tolerance” discipline policy to repeatedly suspend her son, Yael, kept telephoning her at work to pick him up from school in the middle of the day and urged her to transfer him. The News reported earlier this week that the Success network, which boasts some of the highest test ...