Chris Cerf, the acting commissioner of education in New Jersey, published an article today defending charter schools, which have become very controversial in his state. They have become controversial because the state is trying to push them into suburbs that have great public schools and don’t want them, and they have become controversial because the public is beginning to revolt against for-profit charters, especially for-profit online charters, which Cerf is promoting.
People in New Jersey are beginning to realize that every dollar that goes to a privately managed charter school is a dollar taken away from their own public school. Because the budget is not expanding, it IS a zero sum game. Fixed costs do not decline when children leave the school.
Despite Governor Chris Christie’s frequent belittling of New Jersey teachers and schools, New Jersey is one of the highest performing states in the nation on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. So, citizens of the state have good reason to oppose the Christie administration’s efforts to turn more taxpayer dollars over to private entrepreneurs.
In his article, Chris Cerf writes:
“...it is often forgotten that one of the first advocates for public charter schools was Albert Shanker, the former New York City teachers’ union leader, who supported charter schools as a way to empower public school educators to innovate.”
Chris Cerf needs to know what Albert Shanker really said about charter schools. This is what he would learn if he read pp. 122-124 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System:
1. Albert Shanker was president of the American Federation of Teachers, not the New York City union, when he first proposed the charter school idea in 1988.
2. Shanker proposed that any new charter should be jointly approved by the union and the school district. More than 90% of charters today are non-union. Shanker would not have approved any school that did not respect the rights of teachers to bargain collectively.
3. Shanker proposed that new charters should target the hardest-to-educate students: those who had dropped out or were failing. He never imagined that charters would have a selection process or that charters might avoid students with disabilities or English-language learners as is now the case in many charters.
3. Shanker wanted charters to collaborate, not compete, with existing public schools. He proposed them as a way to solve the problems of public schools. Whatever they learned, he said, should be shared with the public schools that sponsored them.
4. MOST IMPORTANT: In 1993, when Shanker saw that the charter idea was going to be used to privatize public education, he turned against charter schools. He opposed the takeover of the charter idea by corporations, entrepreneurs, and for-profit vendors. He became a vocal opponent of charter schools when he realized that his idea was embraced by “the education industry.” In his weekly column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker repeatedly denounced charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit management as “quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”
Here is an idea for Commissioner Cerf. You can fix the charter idea if you align it with Shanker’s original idea.
First, insist that all new charters are endorsed by the local school district and the union representing teachers.
Second, bar all for-profit management.
Third, insist that all charters recruit and enroll only the lowest-performing students, the students who have dropped out, and the students who are doing poorly in their present public school.
Fourth, require that charters collaborate with the public schools and share whatever they learn.
Fifth, to truly revive the spirit of Shanker’s proposal, bar all corporate-owned charter chains. Authorize only stand-alone charters that are created by teachers and parents in the district to serve the children of that district. No chains, just local charters committed to that community.
So, yes, Commissioner Cerf, you are on the right track when you quote Albert Shanker. Now, if you take his advice, you can save the charter school idea from the privatizers and profiteers who are giving it a bad name.
Thanks for all your blogs. Am learning so much with all that you share and the comments posted. It’s fascinating how things can be bent to fit anyone’s bias. But I still hold on to the “truism” The truth will out!
I teach in Jersey City and I’m still waiting for all of that innovation to be shared with me. Longer days and years is not innovation.
Why is he the acting commissioner?
I read that all the time. Is he moving on to charter gig soon?
As I understand it, the Democratic controlled part of the legislature has not approved his appointment.
Correct: specifically, by State Sen Ron Rice, Democrat from Newark, who has stated he wants Cerf before the Joint Education Committee, not just Judiciary:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/03/sen_ron_rice_vows_to_block_cer.html
Rice is concerned about the shady dealings and privatization surrounding the remaking of Newark’s state-controlled schools. For this stance, Rice has been mocked in the local press:
http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2012/02/nj_lawmakers_should_at_last_co.html
I think you can guess how I feel about that stance. It also tells us quite a bit about how the punditocracy in NJ treats education reforminess.
It’s worth pointing out Cerf tried to play fast and lose with the senatorial privilege rules by “moving” to another county. That was too much, even for Cerf’s supporters.
I’ve started to think maybe the best thing is to have a confirmation hearing after all – as long as it is real and complete. The NJDOE has much to answer for, and they operate under a man who is unelected AND unconfirmed, yet overrides the will of elected school boards all the time.
We have an odd rule here called “Senatorial courtesy”–no nominee vote comes up if the Senator from your district declines, for whatever reason. (It’s tradition–which, oddly, prevents the courts from over-ruling the practice since it is not formally recognized anywhere.)
Ronald Rice believes (and he has some evidence) that Chris Cerf has less than the genuine best interests of public ed at heart. Senator Rice will not present Cerf’s name for vote.
It gets better–Cerf pretended to move to another district, but admitted that his primary address is still in Rice’s district, so his nomination remains in limbo.
And it gets better yet–that same address was used by the company Global Education Enterprises that received $1.9 million of the Facebook money that went to Newark. Cerf had apparently “left” the company by then. http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/10/one-third_of_facebook_donation.html
It really is one man blocking his nomination; Sen. Ron Rice from Newark. He sees Cerf for who and what he is, and has blocked his nomination. Rice and Cerf are both in Essex County, so Cerf needs Rice’s approval because of senatorial courtesy.
Cerf and Christie went so far as to attempt to lie about Cerf moving to avoid Rice’s block on his nomination. Of course it backfired, and in the end was just another example of Cerf’s credibility problem.
Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:
http://mothercrusader.blogspot.com/2012/02/tale-of-two-residences-and-offices.html
How long can they drag this out? Sound like it needs to be moved along as quickly as possible and then get rid of him….I know I am politically naive, but why can’t that happen or how can that happen?
What is this Cerf guys background?
To Darcie,
Just read your post. Disgusting, despicable, nasty people. What a shell game! Why aren’t more of your locally elected politicians speaking out? This makes my head spin. God bless you and Jersey Jazzman!
Linda, the history of Chris Cerf is long, twisted, and complex:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2011/01/chris-cerf-story-summary.html
I wrote that 18 months ago. Since then, there has been much to tell:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/02/five-questions-for-chris-cerf.html
And that’s only FIVE months ago, and there’s STILL more to tell:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/06/chris-cerf-will-tell-you-what-he-thinks.html
Read Darcie’s link above as well. The two of us could go on and on, as could Leonie Haimson, who followed Cerf’s career in NYC.
Despite all this, most observers will tell you that if were there a hearing today, Cerf would most likely be confirmed. Every Republican and a lot of the South Jersey Dem machine would vote in favor, as would a good bit of the North Jersey Dem machine.
NJ parents and teachers need to understand this: the only way to truly change the NJDOE is to elect another governor. But it can’t be any old Democrat.
In this, NJ is like every other state in the nation. You can’t expect to replace the Chris Christies and Rick Scotts and Mitch Danielses with Rahm Emanuels and Andrew Cuomos and Dannel Malloys and expect much to change.
If Chris Christie loses the next election to Cory Booker, nothing will change in Trenton as far as education goes. Sad but true.
“You can’t expect to replace the Chris Christies and Rick Scotts and Mitch Danielses with Rahm Emanuels and Andrew Cuomos and Dannel Malloys and expect much to change. ”
Yep, different sides of the same coin.
Much of what has happened in education in the last few years has been related and enabled by the Great Recession. Now that it is abating, people are waking up to the fact that their public schools are being hijacked by the very people who caused the recession in the first place.
While it is sadly true that our poorest children have not been achieving well in our public schools, we aren’t going to help them by placing them in profit-making, all-black test-prep academies. These children need what the “reformers'” children need: small classes, experienced teachers, medical care, enrichment. Teachers know how to help them but it can’t be done with a ten-dollar group test.
“. . .by the Great Recession. Now that it is abating”. Man, I don’t know where you live but I see no signs of “it abating”. We haven’t hit the bottom yet and it’s going to take a decade at least to climb out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves, that is if good ol ma earth let’s us-you know the whole climate change thingy.
Actually Diane, he has to read your entire book, not just these three pages, although that would be a start. The arrogance and ignorance is certainly in abundance these days.
Whenever I hear Albert Shanker’s name, I remember a scene in Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper. As I remember it, the main character has just woken up from a Rip Van Winkle-like sleep and finds the world a much different place. When he asks what happened to the world he once knew, he is told, “All we know is, a man named Albert Shanker got hold of the bomb.”
I sometimes wonder what would be happening right now if the man who closed down all of New York City’s schools with that months-long teachers’ strike over the transfer of less than two dozen teachers out from one experimental community mini-school district were still alive and heading the teachers’ union. I can’t imagine the union would be so passive as it has become.
Adding, I didn’t mean it to sound as if I didn’t think two dozen teachers were worth going to bat for; I meant, look at the reaction then versus now, when countless teachers’ rights and careers are at stake. It is quite a contrast.
Dianne-Rather than fighting against Charter schools, wouldn’t it be more productive to argue for better regulation of Charters? Specifically, all Charters should be managed by a NFP, located in communities with underperforming schools, and no ability for Charters to turn away special needs students. This approach would be a middle ground that would alleviate many of the concerns you have expressed.
This post has the regulations that are necessary to make charter schools a good neighbor: They should be required to enroll the lowest performing students; they should be nonprofit; they should win the support of the local district and teachers’ union; and they should be free-standing schools, not part of a chain. And one thing: no one in the charter should be paid a salary larger than that of the local district superintendent, even in a nonprofit charter.
I can agree with that, but why not advocate for these specific changes? I think there is a reflexive assumption that folks opposed to for-profit charters are anti-charter schools. This is clearly not the case. Why not advocate for change.
IMO, Jay, Diane is saying just that in her last paragraph.
Jay,
Save Our Schools NJ, a grassroots pro-public education organization that now has more than 9,000 members, has been advocating for charter school reforms since we formed two years ago.
We have worked with the Legislature to craft two bills to require local democratic approval of new charter schools; to require charter schools to educate the same demographics of children as the traditional public school districts; and to be more accountable and transparent. These bills have passed the NJ Assembly and are waiting for a hearing in the State Senate.
You can read more about us at http://www.saveourschoolsnj.org and follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/SaveOurSchoolsNJ
What’s an NFP?
I believe that in Finland private schools have to be non-selective, like the public schools, and they must offer all the social services that the public schools offer. There aren’t too many private schools.
As always, a helpful post, Diane.
What some readers may also need to know about Cerf is the TFA/KIPP/Edison connection.
Wendy Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, is a Director of KIPP, founded by TFA alums, and like Cerf came out of Edison Schools, the zombie ne’er do well of corporate ed reform. It’s a tight little club.
It also needs to be pointed out that, even on their own terms, these over-hyped organizations cannot provide an answer to the many problems facing public education. That’s either because they are explicit failures – Edison has virtually never earned a profit, has basically given up trying to manage schools, and is on life support from its hedge fund owners – or because as currently constituted (TFA and KIPP) cannot realistically achieve the scale necessary to bring their dubious blessings to most public school students.
So even temporarily placing to the side the well-documented dark side of these groups, they are at best either failures or non-solutions.
Richard Barth is CEO of KIPP. Wendy Kopp is CEO of TFA. A great alliance, no?
While I support your recommendations, Diane, what would you say to the poor urban minority parent who, due to her life situation, is forced to send her child to the chronically under-performing neighborhood public school? Would you still be in favor of leaving this parent with no options? There are many such urban parents who desperately want something better for their children. Where would your recommendations leave them?
My recommendations would send them to a good, local school, not a corporate school looking to exploit them for profit.
This might sound naive, but wouldn’t it make more sense for parents to be bring collective pressure to bear on local politicians and school officials towards helping to make their local schools work better? I think one of the key ways the corporatists get away with their manipulation of schooling in high-needs districts is that they count on a key segment of parents (the better informed, more motivated, more resourceful, etc.) to take their kids (and, more importantly, the money they represent from the state/feds) and run to any option that pops up and appears to be some sort of improvement over the local public school.
Divide and conquer is a central part of the strategy, and it works very well unless there is organized LOCAL resistance. To get that, people in each community have to get themselves educated as to what game is being played and how to play it well. Letting the greed-heads tear the community apart, pitting parent against parent, student against student, and school against school is going to make the vast majority lose. When folks understand that, they may be a bit more inclined to band together rather than take a completely individualistic approach. There’s simply very little power if each person does that, as far as I’ve been able to see from working in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Willow Run/Ypsilanti, and NYC.
Diane, I take issue with your contention that it ‘IS a zero sum game,’ fiancially. Yes, incremental fixed costs do not decline with the removal of the individual student, but at some point, some level of student loss, they must.
Your contention, taken to its logical end, would lead to the largest districts (which can distribute those ‘fixed costs’ across the largest student populations) would be the most efficent, with the lowest classroom sizes.
This is not the case and can be demonstated all over the state of New Jersey. Districts that have budgets of 16 million or 160 million have roughly the same class sizes. For whateever reason, economies of scale are not realized.
A parent in Rhode Island helped to defeat a proposal to open a charter school in his town with this metaphor. Suppose, he said, I am driving from Cranston to Providence, and I offer a ride to three people. I know how much it will cost in gasoline. But one of the passengers decides not to go. I still have to pay the same for gasoline whether there are two or three passengers. Consider the school. It costs the same to heat and clean the school, even if 10 percent of the students leave for a charter school, taking their state funding with them. But the budget must be cut, so teachers are laid off, and soon the public school is in crisis. It does not get better, it just gets poorer as a result of the competition with what the charter sector. If the charters are siphoning off the best students, then the public school is not only in a financial crisis, but its test scores will drop even though nothing else changed.
I understand fixed costs. But taking your analogy above, what if the removal of 10% of the students allowed the school to relocate to a smaller/chearer facility? What if the removal of 10% of the students allowed the school to remove trailers at the school because they are no longer needed? What if they could lease the unused 10% of the builiding to a 3rd party? I understand this is an unprecedented situation for public schools, but surely they can learn how to downsize efficiently.
Moving the school could cost millions. How is that cost cutting? Why not improve the school instead of creating a dual system. We have a history of dual systems of education in this country. It’s nothing to be proud of.
Building and/or expanding schools costs millions as well. My point is that students leaving the district should have not adverse financial consequences. In New Jersey we also have the interdistrict school choice program, no one ever argues about that program draining resourses from sending districts. The financial dynamics are exactly the same or worse (I think with the interdistrict program the student gets 100% of their funding to follow them, with charters it’s only 90%).
Read Bruce Baker on funding of charters. Because of heavy philanthropic support and Wall Street backing, they typically have more money to spend, regardless of state funding.
Diane,
I think that you know that this isn’t true. Most charters get much less than their local District schools regardless of philanthropy. In NY, charter schools get no building money, which amounts to at least $3,000 per student. An average school would have to get $1M per year in philanthropy. Most get little or nothing after startup grants.
Regarding suburban charters, you say that nobody wants them and that they will take money away from “public” schools. Will you acknowledge that if no parents “want them”, they will in fact take no money from the district schools because they will get no students and therefore no tuition?
Read Bruce Baker research, blogged earlier on this site.
This “study”, funded by union groups, was extremely sloppy, and doesn’t even include the data they based their findings on. They seemed not to include central office spending or capital budgets in the “per school” spending by district schools, which is ludicrous, since charter schools bear these costs themselves.
Also, I’ll ask again: Do you acknowledge that if “nobody wants” a suburban charter school then it will not take any money from the district school? Charters only get funded when parents opt to send their children to them. It’s disingenous to say that nobody wants them and that they are going to take money from the district schools. Those two things simply can’t both be true.
The Piscatawy school district in New Jersey is actually suing to get $700,000 in slush funds sitting in bank accounts at 4 charter schools while the district’s 7,000 plus students are educated with funding levels that are $11 million below minimum required by law. http://www.edlawcenter.org/news/archives/school-funding/elc-supports-piscataway-lawsuit-to-cap-charter-school-surplus.html
The issue with suburban charter schools is no different than with urban ones. The decision to open a school must be made by the sending communities, not individual parents. Otherwise, we might as well give every family a voucher. What’s the difference?
Public education is a communal good, like roads and public safety. We pay for it communally and it belongs to all of us, regardless of whether we use it or not. I may not drive or travel by car, but my taxes still go towards road construction and maintenance. And, drivers do not have the right to decide how their portion of road funding is spent. Why should individual parents?
We also cannot afford customized schools for every child and it is very unfair to allow some children to receive a customized public education while other children are forced to function with sub-par schools because of the resulting reduction in resources.
Finally, this kind of individual “choice” leads to dramatic increases in segregation as people self-sort by ethnicity, income level, and race.
That’s why the “open the charter schools and see if they come” theory is an absolutely broken idea for public education. These decisions must be made by entire communities, as is the case with public schools in general.
Interdistrct choice takes only a few students per school district, so its financial impact is limited. Still, we have been pushing to modify the program to have the State pick up more of the funding.
Another reason that interdistrict choice is less objectionable to residents is because it moves students between existing public schools vs. creating new costly and redundant school districts, as is the case with charter schools.
Here’s some of the differences between Interdistrict Choice and charters:
1) Schools that participate in IC are PUBLIC schools, run by ELECTED board members, ACCOUNTABLE to the taxpayers of the district. Charters use public funds but are essential NON-PUBLIC schools that do not follow the same rules as state actors, have UNELECTED boards, and are UNACCOUNTABLE to the taxpayers who fund them. See Bruce Baker’s excellent posts on this.
2) IC schools, as public schools, cannot require parental pledges, extensive codes of conduct, uniforms, or engage in other non-state actor procedures. Expulsions take place at the discretion of the charter’s board, who, again, are unelected and unbound by many state laws. Charters are exempt from many state regulations at the discretion of the ACTING Commissioner; IC schools are not.
3) The IC law specifically states that the ACTING Commissioner must take into account the impact on the SENDING district of sending a student to an IC school; charter law requires no such consideration (if it did, many charters would be closed).
4) The IC law specifically addresses the notion that the program will help the IC district improve its diversity. Not only does the charter law not address diversity, there is VERY good reason to believe charters are increasing segregation: by special needs, by socio-economic status, and by race. IC is an attempted remedy for the very bad segregation we have in NJ; charters seem to make that segregation even worse.
I have issues with IC, but it is not even in the same ballpark as charters.
All nice responses, but not one addresses the fincanical argument made against charters. Which is to say, that when students leave the district and take 90% of their money with them, the district is left at a FINANCIAL disadvantage.
Yes, I realize charters are different than interdistrict school choice for a myriad of reasons.
But FINANCIALLY, it’s the same. Will anyone admit that?
And to Save our Schools, again, your argument flies in the face of logic. The argument is losing a FEW students to charters is detrimental because the loss of ‘only a few’ doesn’t allow the school to modify its cost structure to realize any savings. Magically, though, with interdistrict school choice, the loss of ‘only a few’ is advantageous and losing a bunch a students (maybe enough to close a school) is FINANCIALLY detrimental?
WjcW, I was explaining why interdistrict choice elicits less opposition, not addressing your financial argument. Because interdistrict choice is of a smaller scale and keeps the students within the existing public school system, it is less contentious.
As to your broader point, yes, losing a lot of students to charters does result in potential savings for the sending schools. However, it also results in inefficiencies for the system as a whole since the funds are now being used to finance a lot of small school districts. Districts with fewer than 3,000 students are financial less efficient than larger ones, and individual charter schools generally number in the hundreds of students. For example, adding three charter schools and closing a traditional school means three times the administrative financial burden for educating the same number of students. Any cost savings to offset that have to come from instructional funding, via things like lower paid teachers or larger classes. And that’s without even factoring in the cost of Charter Management Organizations, which can bleed another 10% or more off the top. While some CMOs bring outside private resources to the table,others just make money off of our kids and tax dollars.
By the way, Save Our Schools NJ’s position is that the higher costs of charter schools are OK if they are the choice of a district’s voters. They are not legitimate, however, if externally forced upon the host communities, as is the case right now in New Jersey, where the decision is entirely the Commissioner’s of Education. Unfortunately, this top-down imposition of charter schools on unwilling communities is growing as more States adopt the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools and American Legislative Exchange Council model legislation that enables unelected commissions to force charter schools on unwilling communities. A similarly broken model exists in cities like NY and Chicago, where mayors have way too much power and are willing to use it to oppose community wishes on public education. This totalitarian approach to the creation of new charter schools is what is fueling the backlash against them in my State.
Thank you. I would agree wholeheartedly. Charters should never be forced on a district. That has always been my contention. If the demand is really as great as what is shown in Hollywood documentaries and the like, there should be no problem getting them past a democratic vote.