Krazy TA asks a relevant question: Do reformers put their own children in no-excuses schools?
He writes:
The charterites/privatizers have toned it down a bit, but remember the electrifying mantra “we want to give poor kids the same education that rich kids get”? [chant in alternating patterns with “poverty is not destiny.”]
All right then. Go to the websites of the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, Cranbrook, Harpeth Hall, Chicago Lab Schools, Sidwell Friends. If you don’t like my choices pick similar ones that suit your individual tastes. Read what they offer—I am not speaking rhetorically; I really mean go through all their offerings.
Yes, [sigh] these schools do serve some students whose SES status is not Rocketing out of the Earth’s atmosphere. But these are the kinds of schools that the children of the wealthy, well-connected, well-educated and powerful attend. These sorts of schools don’t just exist in someone’s online piece about what he would do if he were Secretary of Education.
No need for the rheephormy crowd to “make it up as they go along” like Rocketshipsters claim is necessary. They’ve got highly successful proven models right in front of them.
Charterites/privatizers: actions speak louder than words. I invoke what seems to be your highest moral imperative: put your money where your mouth is.
Oh, and I almost forgot: put your own children in your charters, not in the Waldorfs or the Cranbrooks or any of the rest. If it’s good enough for the children of others it’s good enough for yours.
Not too much to ask, is it?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I believe 16 of the 17 Regents of the state of ny send or sent their own children to private schools.
See the excellent book, Learning on Other People’s Kids by Barbara Torre Veltri–she exposes Teach For America for exactly this sort of hypocrisy.
Agreed. That’s why my daughter attends Success Academy Upper West along with other Success board member kids and many of our friends. Oh, and we have a LOT of other CMO leaders applying for spots for their kids at several of our integrated schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn for the next school year.
Where do some of the most vehemently anti-reformers send their kids / grand kids?
I think it’s a fair question…
Gideon
Define reformer…the word has been hijacked. For your viewing pleasure.
MORE UFT Campaign Commerical- NYC Teachers Educators Union
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=XusIasWTHrg&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DXusIasWTHrg
So the Kopp/Barth kids must be attending an NYC KIPP?
A² Politico • “Your Child Can Be Educated For $6K Per Year, But $20K Per Year Not Enough To Educate My Kid”
The only thing more hypocritical than the hypocrisy of the public education destroyers is the hypocrisy of the apologists who pretend they don’t see exactly where their hypocrisy lies.
Jon Awbrey: you state a simple truth in plain language.
Evidence? Look at a few of the comments on this posting and on another today [“Michelle Rhee’s Dishonorable Attacks on the Garfield Teachers”]. When someone points out that the leading lights of the charterite/privatizer movement—the same folks that declare themselves to be the champions of the “new civil rights” movement—haven’t a moral leg to stand on [so to speak] the refutation of that understated fact is, well, about as effective and pertinent as Michelle Rhee’s clumsy sleight-of-hand censure of the Garfield HS teachers who refuse to sacrifice their students’ education for the sake of a misguided test.
I remember reading decades ago about a very old debaters’ trick: when caught off-guard by a question you can’t answer or a topic you have difficulty discussing, redirect the conversation in a way that conceals your weaknesses and plays on your strengths.
I can appreciate the effectiveness of the strategy but that doesn’t mean I respect it. Too often it means winning at any cost—like winning the ‘edubully wars’ at the expense of public schools and democracy.
Keep posting. I don’t always agree with you, but you go right at it, whatever the topic.
🙂
This week the Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-cps-school-closing-class-size-20130306,0,3397514.story) finally reported the fact that the mass school closings based on alleged “underutilization” rest on 30 kids per class as an “ideal” quantity but allow for up to 36 and label anything less than 24 “underutilized”—despite the fact that the average class size in the state is far smaller (http://iirc.niu.edu/District.aspx?source=About_Students&source2=Class_Size&districtID=15016299025&level=D)
Class sizes at the U of C Lab School where Rahm sends his kids are half that size:
1st-4th grade: “Each homeroom has about 23 pupils, with a head teacher as well as an assistant teacher through the second grade.” http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/schools/lower-school/ls-overview/index.aspx
“Lab’s Middle School consists of nearly 400students and 47 faculty members plus a set of fulltime counselors, a ratio that ensures our students get the attention they need.” http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/schools/middle-school/index.aspx
And speaking of the kinds of schools reformers like: https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/bill-gates-tells-us-why-his-high-school-was-a-great-learning-environment/
Unfortunately, it is too much to ask when the teachers unions want other people to pay for the children of the non-rich. If one is rich, one has options. Good schools of the sort you mention charge about $25,000 per pupil. Are you asking taxpayers to foot that sort of bill for every child in America?
Right, it’s only those dastardly teachers unions that want publicly-funded education.
BTW, my daughter’s progressive school charges less than $10,000 per student, which I think is perfectly reasonable.
Do your daughter’s teachers have defined-benefit pension plans? At $10k tuition, I would think not.
What’s your point?
My point is Harlan has a point. Elite private schools in NYC don’t cost $25,000 per year, they cost $40,000 per year. And their labor costs are *lower* because they offer 403(b) retirement plans, not defined-benefit pensions, and they generally require teachers to contribute more toward their healthcare. You cannot run a public school system on $10,000 per student. If you want public schools to be more like the best private schools, it’s going to cost a LOT of money. We can add it up and have a vote on whether we think it’s affordable and/or worth paying for, or we can keep deferring that discussion to another day because we’re afraid we know what the answer is already.
According to the following report, the national average for per pupil expenditures is $9,698 per student. The district that spends the highest per pupil in my state, at $29,951 per student, is #175 in the nation, so 174 districts in our country spend more than that:
http://www.homesurfer.com/schoolreports/view/schoolreports.cfm?LEAID=1700001
“You cannot run a public school system on $10,000 per student”
As I previously indicated, Chicago spends $9,538 per pupil.
“As I previously indicated, Chicago spends $9,538 per pupil.”
How’s that working out? Pretty well?
DeMatha Catholic High School provides an excellent education in the costly Washington DC area for $13,200.
Tax payers are already footing the bill, and the bill is not the same everywhere. If we had equitable funding methods and spent money on things that actually educated kids rather than on policies that use the schools as a big cash pipeline to corporate profit centers then yes, we could do quite a lot of what elite private schools do. I’d skip the frills like multiple pools though.
I don’t know what this has to do with the union. What we’re asking for is equity. Per pupil expenditures vary wildly across districts in states where schools are funded primarily by property taxes. In Illinois, the highest spending district spends $29,951 per student and the lowest spending district spends $4,877 per student. Chicago spends $9,538 per student and 87% of our students are from low income families. http://www.homesurfer.com/schoolreports/view/schoolrankreports.cfm?state=IL
Also, within district expenditures can vary significantly, as some urban districts like Chicago routinely fund scholos in more affluent areas and selective enrollment schools at a higher rate than schools in low income neighborhoods.
Teachers don’t typically support such disparity in education. The Chicago Teachers Union has campaigned for equity in per pupil spending and investing in under-resourced schools serving high needs students, instead of starving them, shutting them down and giving them away to privately run charter management organizations. .
Just to be clear, when you say “what we are asking for is equity”, do you mean that all districts have the same spending per student as the highest district or do you want to force those districts with high expenditure per student to lower expenditure to match the existing average?
I mentioned this in Diane’s post on Kevin Huffman’s zombie policies. Huffman has voiced his desire to overhaul the state’s teacher compensation system, eliminating step increases and additional pay for advanced degrees. Meanwhile, he sends one of his daughters to Harpeth Hall, who lists as Reason #14 to attend the school: “Our faculty average more than 18 years of teaching experience and 80 percent hold advanced degrees.”
And an 8:1 ratio
My guess is that “reformers” want to choose a school for their children.
I see this complaint a lot — that rich “ed reformers” don’t send their own kids to the kind of schools they advocate for others — and it’s just not interesting to me. So they don’t send their kids to charter schools. They wouldn’t send them to regular public schools either. Because they can afford to pay for something better than either of those options. No surprise.
I don’t think the major point is where they send their kids as much as what they are pushing of all the other kids: larger class sizes, no arts, no libraries, temporary interns, test prep and testing…so why don’t they want those conditions for their kids no matter where they send them? Huh?
Are you concerned about the cost of pensions and health care for fireman and policeman or just teachers?
Too bad we’re not all old spinsters living in boarding houses anymore
Class sizes are going to get larger without any pushing from education reformers. The municipal budget crises haven’t even really gotten started yet. I don’t like the testing, but nobody much cares what I like. But that’s a story that’s been unfolding for decades. Don’t blame me, I haven’t worked for a think tank and written articles and books about how our schools are failing. I was a teenager back when the conservatives were laying this groundwork. I’m just another guy who can’t afford a private school education for my kids.
But I bet you’re a great dad and you will advocate for you kids. You can and should opt out. You can supplement: museums, libraries, field trips, discussions, etc. Who cares if those in charge agree with you? Speak up!
What makes those schools better?
“What makes those schools better?”
Small classes, experienced teachers, a full and rich curriculum, lots of arts programs, excellent facilities…..
Heh that was my point – if reformers thinks those schools are better, then that should be the reformers’ goal for all schools. They are of course free to send their children wherever they want but don’t at the same time send everyone else’s schooling in the opposite direction.
Diane’s posting reproduces a comment I made on 1-27-13 on this blog in response to a piece entitled “What If YOU Were Secretary of Education?” I suggest people reread that posting and all the comments it inspired.
With all due respect to several of those who have already responded to today’s posting, IMHO, I honestly think that my remarks have been misunderstood. They were not a complaint or anything of the sort, like a whine or a nasty comment.
They made a simple but clear contrast between what many of the leading charterites/privatizers have claimed in public about what they want to provide and mandate for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN with what they do and say as parents for THEIR OWN CHILDREN. For example, if people feel that there is a problem with adequately financing a “better education for all,” that is a legitimate and necessary discussion. Good. Let’s have it, in depth, with those knowledgeable about such things weighing in with their facts, arguments and conclusions here on this blog, in full view and with all viewers of that discussion being able to jump with questions, challenges and requests for clarification. But that’s precisely the discussion that is glossed over when the charterites/privatizers make promises about providing the average parent and student an education on the cheap that is as good as the expensive enriched education they are familiar with as parents who send their children to such institutions as Waldorf School of the Pacific or Cranbrook or Harpeth Hall or U of Chicago Lab Schools or Sidwell Friends.
In other words, your argument is with the charterites/privatizers, not with me. Challenge them on their websites and let us know when it starts and how it goes [perhaps Gary Rubinstein’s “Open Letters to Reformers I Know” might serve as a partial guide on how to approach such challenges].
Addendum: just before I posted this, I saw Linda’s last two comments. Yes! She and I are in agreement.
🙂
Is there a traditional zoned school that is a Waldorf school?
Having attended mostly public schools, but also done stints in a private school and a parochial school, I know better than to believe that a better education necessarily comes through higher tuition or having teachers take a vow of poverty. Still, parents have always been free to expend their private funds in pursuit of their private beliefs. But the justification for using public funds must be based on something more general than private beliefs.
A nation possessed of any wisdom at all — as our nation used to be once upon a time — does not force its citizens to go chasing after quality educations the way they go chasing after private commodities, because each individual’s education is a public good that serves the public. A nation possessed of wisdom knows that it benefits as a whole from the fullest possible actualization of each citizen’s potential, and so it does its level best to bring the best possible education to its citizens and to distribute that education as widely as it can.
A nation that fails to do all of that is probably too stupid to live.
True, all too true. The public good is under attack by those who suck mightily at it’s teat while denying it gives them any nutritive value. No one else may access the teat unless those who monopolize it (by having paid off the cow) get a big cut off the top. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/
How Did It Come To This?
A couple of commenters have already made most of these points, both on this post and on several others from the last few months, but I’ll give it a go at least one more time:
A key feature of these elite private schools is their flexibility in hiring (no certification/credentialing minimums) and firing (there’s no tenure and no hoops to jump through other than local and Federal employment laws). Teachers pay a much bigger share of and receive far fewer benefits than their public school counterparts. These schools are lean and streamlined: there’s no giant administrative blob, so a far greater proportion of resources reaches the classroom.
Furthermore, these schools don’t take all comers. In New York City, e.g., the application process involves a lengthy and expensive IQ test, at least one extended interview/”playdate” with the child, and often a visit by a school admissions officer to the child’s preschool to observe them in a class setting. Fully 80% of the families at these schools pay full tuition, which is now $40,000 year. ELLs and kids requiring special education services? Surely you jest. We’re talking about schools that typically don’t allow boys to start kindergarten prior to turning 6!
Perhaps Diane can put on her educational historian hat here and confirm the obvious–the nation’s elite private schools have always been very different from our public schools, even the very best public schools, and a high percentage of our ruling class has always sent their kids to these elite private schools. So rather than use elite schools as a benchmark, I think it’s a simpler and more persuasive argument to use the public schools that most of us attended: we had a real curriculum, meat-and-potatoes social studies and science instruction, lots of art and music, and recess (I had three recesses a day in early elementary school!). It’s easy to grasp and by definition it’s achievable because it’s been done before.
I understand that it makes for a nice rant to complain about where reformers went to school and where they send their own kids, but it’s not going to change anyone’s mind about anything.
There are no famous private schools in my little town on the high plains. There is, however, a Montessori private school, a Waldorf private school, and a progressive private school. There will never be a traditionally zoned public school like those private schools because too many parents in the catchment area would object. Allowing everyone to choose from a set of different kinds of schools is advocating that all have the same choices as the relatively wealthy.
Tim,
“Teachers pay a much bigger share of and receive far fewer benefits than their public school counterparts”
Not true at all elite private schools.
Perhaps this is a regional issue, but, the examples (truly elite private schools )in Atlanta have pay and benefits very “on par” with the pay/benefits of the public school employees.
Speaking for myself, I don’t care that wealthy people send their kids to elite private schools. More power to them. What I do care about is those same wealthy people wielding considerable power in education policy, pushing reform agendas for public schools that are antithetical to what they really believe (and everyone else knows) constitutes a solid education.
Dufrense, I agree with you.
In a free country like ours, people have the right to send their children to private or religious schools–at their own expense.
What is hypocritical is to advocate that other people’s children should have a test-obsessed schooling, inexperienced teachers, and a narrow curriculum that they would never tolerate for their own children.
I have never understood why private schools seem to be immune from the criticisms made here about charter schools. Most of the arguments put forward against charter schools (skimming, neighborhood destruction, etc.) apply to price schools as well. Our free society outlaws households from spending money on things that we deem harmful to society. If charter schools are harmful, so are private schools, and they should be banned as well.
Teaching Economist, did you notice that private schools are funded by private funds, and charter schools take public funds but are free to exclude kids nd are not required to follow the same rules as public funds?
One argument against charter schools is that the skim students, making the pool of students in traditional public schools on average more difficult to educate. This argument applies with even more force to private schools because they often explicitly screen for high academic ability and twice as many students are enrolled in private schools compared to charter schools. Surely the skimming by private schools has a much larger impact on the pool of students in traditional public schools.
Another argument against charter schools is that they destroy neighborhoods by dividing the self interests of each household in the neighborhood. Private schools do the same.
If these are reasons to close charter schools, they are also reasons to close private schools. The fact that private schools have existed in the past is not an argument that they should exist in the future.
And not only that they would not tolerate for their own children, but one they are set to profit from hugely. The issue is why do the elite get to decide how everyone’s kids get educated? Public education is funded by tax dollars which means the public should have a voice in the decision making. This just isn’t happening. We do not want all these tests. And it stands to argue that this new testing obsession is a very costly venture which will suck more funds from the ever decreasing rich curriculum our kids are receiving in public schools. Lets get real, anyone who doesn’t see that something fishy is going on is either not paying attention or set to profit. These reforms are not intended to help close the “achievement gap.”
Dufrense & All —
That has always been the rather simple, common sense point of making these comparisons. It is really just pointing out the hypocrisies of those who use their influence and their political power to corrode the Golden Rule.
Which is why the apologists for corporate raiders have to work so hard trying to pretend they don’t see the point.
Jon Awbrey: if you would permit me to riff off of your reference to the Golden Rule…
Back in the depths of the twentieth century when I was a teenager, I remember lo these decades and decades later a cartoon I saw in one of the Detroit dailies.
First panel. One grizzled looking character looks at another and says “You do know about the Golden Rule?” The second panel features the questioned party with a baffled expression. The third and last panel: “Those who have the gold, rule.”
🙂
That must be the rule they teach in some schools.
What an easy answer to the title of this article:
For their own offspring in private schools, the reformers want pretty much the polar opposite of what they want for other people’s children in public schools.
That was simple.
What an easy answer to the title of this article:
For their own offspring in private schools, the reformers want pretty much the polar opposite of what they want for other people’s children in public schools.
That was simple.
Exactly. What we need to do with other people’s children, especially poor children, is offer them what we would want for our own children – an enriched curriculum. Provide high quality education from infancy. Start where the children are when they enter school, provide the environment that my children had – particularly being read aloud to from infancy, and expand their worlds by moving learning to include the outside community. We want to develop in children curiosity, a love for learning, and creativity to invent the next “new thing.”
I would not put my children/grandchildren into an environment that bans children from talking to each other during the day, including lunch, (charter in which my niece teaches) and where children are treated like they are in the military.
I think we need to stop thinking about one-size-fits-all approaches to education. What works in a high poverty school may not work in low poverty schools, and vice versa. Even two high poverty schools with different school climates (or a number of different variables) may need different approaches to curriculum, instruction, etc.
In short, the fact that an approach might not be desirable or effective in one school is NOT evidence that it won’t work in another. I’m not defending the “no excuse” approach toward discipline, but it would immensely more effective and ethical for you to start posting critiques of the approach based on characteristics of the actual approach, not based on whether some rich people like it or not.
Re: “start posting critiques”
Start posting critiques, indeed❢
Just in case you are not aware, or temporarily forgot, that sort of critique has been going on in the research and university education on teaching and learning for as long as anyone can remember.
But the problem that brings us here is the fact that corporate raiders could not care less what professional educators have learned about the realities of teaching and learning with real human beings in real world environments over the last hundred years. They have their prior and hidden agendas and they will crank out the think-tank-ology to promote it no matter what anyone else has to say about it.
I’m not following how this related to my post – looks like you may have meant this as a response to someone else?
There is an unspeakably easy answer to the title of this article:
Reformers want for other people’s children in public school nothing more than pretty much the polar opposite of what they want for their own chidlren in private school.
There! That was simple.
Nothing speaks louder than a public school educator who sends their children to private or charter schools. As a former site principal of a very challenging school, we made the decision to it enroll them at my site. The message was clear, if I didn’t have faith in the quality of the educational program that we offered enough to enroll my own kids, why should anyone else…. My job was then to make sure every child received the quality program I wanted for my own.
STATUS QUO
The children of the “reformers” who are attending tony private schools will be the next generation of wealthy elites who will believe that they are destined to rule by virtue of their wealth, connections and skin color.
They’re learning how to “put the boot on the neck” of the working class and poor, just like their parents do now.
This historical class domination will continue unless there is mass social upheaval for real change.