Steve Nelson has written a brilliant commentary on the way we judge school “success.”
He begins by discussing the Moskowitz-de Blasio battle and notes that the $5 million attack ads were sponsored by “Families for Excellent Schools.”
He writes:
“This campaign is calculated propaganda. The only “family” materially involved in this organization is the Walton family which, through the Walton Family Foundation, is a major contributor to “Families for Excellence.” The Walton family, along with their billionaire peers the Broad family, the Koch family and the Gates family, are funding so-called school reform efforts like this around the country. The parents and children who appear in these ads may well be sincere, but they are pawns in a much larger game. Charter school operators, particularly Eva Moskowitz, head of the Success charter network, shamelessly use their students to promote their political agenda, as seen in the recent demonstrations in Albany.”
The point of the campaign is to persuade the public that charter schools are better than public schools, which is not true.
Nelson points out that the allegedly “better” schools have selection mechanisms–like Ivy League colleges or selective schools-that recruit selective populations.
He writes:
“All of these comparisons are based on the unquestioned assumption that the success of a school’s students — standardized test scores, SAT scores, college placement — is a direct reflection of the quality of the school. By this measure, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are superb schools and PS 106 is abysmal; Scarsdale schools are wonderful, public schools in Harlem are awful; Columbia University is much better than City College. This is the way we have been conditioned to judge educational institutions… and it is absolutely meaningless.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Neither Steve Nelson nor you are right. Plenty of families are involved with Families for Excellent Schools, including mine. I founded a charter school, and my own kids attend regular public schools. We have kids in the charter school whose parents work in regular public schools. You conveniently organize schools into “better” and “worse” and it’s not that simple. With each annoying book, blog and Tweet you polarize teachers, families and even the leaders who could make a difference
It is shameful that a group calling itself “Families for Excellent Schools” took $5 million from the rightwing Walton Foundation and hedge fund managers to put the wants of the 6% in charters above the needs of the 94% in public schools. How do you spell “greed.?” Have you no shame?
dianeravitch: do the shills and trolls for the charterite/privatizer movement ever actually read your postings? Or are they always providing answers to questions not posed and assertions not made?
And with all respect, I refer you to Dee Dee’s rhetorical query of some days ago about the self-styled “education reform” movement:
“Have they no shame?????”
Ionesco may not be an old dead Greek guy, but he seems to have anticipated Dee Dee:
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
😎
P.S. Sadly, for those in the thralls of Commoners Core “closet,” er, “close” reading, that need the “correct” answer or feel themselves lost on the turbulent seas of critical & independent thinking, the words that follow Dee Dee’s question are—ABSOLUTELY NONE AT ALL.
😡
It’s seems to be pretty typical for those who are at the top raking in the big bucks at charter schools to not send their own kids to them. That includes the four kids of KIPP’s Richard Barth and TFA’s Wendy Kopp and two of Eva Moskowitz’s three kids. If I had a school that I was really proud of, you can bet I would be sending my kids there.
Diane unites us much to your dismay. The “leaders” you speak of sure are making a difference, but it’s for themselves and their own wallets. Other people’s children are props for their ventures.
If the tweets and blogs are so annoying, unsubscribe. No one forces you to read her books, do they?
Why didn’t your kids attend the charter school you founded? Not good enough for your own, eh?
Linda, Dienne & Michael Fiorillo: another example of a charterite/privatizer providing a resounding answer to Dee Dee’s question—
“Have they no shame?????”
When it comes to shameless hypocrisy and the shameless pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ at the expense of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN—
None. Absolutely none at all.
Thank y’all for your comments.
😎
“I founded a charter school, and my own kids attend regular public schools.”
Why? Is the school that you founded for other people’s children not good enough for your own?
Take a look at the school’s web site, which boasts of its No Excuses – i.e. behaviorist boot camp for other people’s children – approach, and you’ll see why he doesn’t send his own kids there.
Then, after successfully siphoning money from the Mount Vernon public schools, he has the unmitigated chutzpah to accuse Diane of polarizing people.
Another classic case of psycological projection by the so-called reformers, accusing others of doing whatt hey they themselves do.
Great analysis! We should share this kind of article with people who are confused by all the propaganda in the mainstream media. There are many, because the propaganda is intended to sway public opinion by using a lot of misnomers, euphemisms, spin and outright lies. –So much that I feel like I’m living under a totalitarian regime. Therefore, in one of the assignments in a course that I teach, I now require students to identify the hidden agenda in an article from the popular press. In this climate, more than ever, people really need to learn how to be educated consumers of information.
Well, the fact is that Columbia IS better than CUNY. One of the biggest factors impacting the quality of education is the quality of the students, and higher selectivity generally equates to higher quality. That does not mean that charters are automatically better — there are other factors, including how they are administered, to consider. But what it does mean is that, generally speaking, if you take the top students from poor, struggling schools with high levels of social dysfunction and you put them in their own school (magnet, charter, whatever), they are going to be better off than where they were before. Now you can certainly argue that the kids “left behind” in the regular schools are worse off. But if you going to say that selective, well-run charters aren’t really better schools, then you have to apply the same criticism to magnets.
I’m flabbergasted by this – how can de Blasio sit back and take this? Cuomo is running a victory lap a mile wide around him while he has had control of the schools he wanted to fix torn away from him.
Frankly if I were the UFT right now, I’d be less concerned about retroactive pay, and more concerned about how we can shore up the schools’ budgets until this bastard law can be changed.
Where are those who have power and money that support NYC schools? De Blasio won in a landslide based on this issue, and now he has been neutered. This deal seems downright evil – how is Cuomo advocating for kids in this in that he just guaranteed that more schools will have to close, more communities will be broken, and for schools that are chosen from bodies outside the city, that the city will have no say in whether they take them or not.
Somewhere Albert Shanker is rolling over in his grave.
And I just came across this wonderful piece of the budget too – http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2014/03/8542852/public-campaign-finance-limited-comptroller?top-featured-1
Campaign Finance Reform….only for DiNapoli’s office. Is this retribution for his attempted audits of charter schools?
This bill reeks of corporate favoritism, privitization of the public good and political favors and retribution.