Peter Greene explains why an all-charter district or state will never succeed. Charters, to the extent that they can get higher scores than public schools, do so by selecting the most desirable students, the ones who are least costly to educate. Charters that are open to all, as public schools are, get the same result. Many charters, even when they cherry pick students, nonetheless get low test scores, for various reasons, such as teacher churn, lack of experience among administrators and teachers, prioritizing profit over education, or incompetence
Greene looks at the issue of scalability and predicts that it will never happen and in fact has never happened. New Orleans, the closest thing to an all-charter district, is ranked 65th of 68 districts in Louisiana; most of the charters in the Recovery School District are rated by the state as D or F schools.
Greene cites the work of Jersey Jazzman, who has shown in numerous posts that the charters in New Jersey do not serve the same demographics as the public schools. It is not surprising that no charter chain has offered to take over an entire school district, because then they would have to educate all the students, including those with disabilities, English language learners, and kids who misbehave in class.
Charters have increased racial segregation, and most charters are more segregated than the district in which they are located. Segregation doesn’t seem to matter anymore. The media will cheer a charter with high scores even if it is 100% African American. The scores are all that matter. And the scores go up to the extent that the charter can choose its students and exclude the ones that don’t get high scores.
Greene writes:
Plenty of folks have always assumed that this was the end game: a private system for the best and the– well, if not brightest, at least the least poor and problematic– and an underfunded remnant of the public system to warehouse the students that the charter system didn’t want.
But those folks may have underestimated the greed, ambition and delusions of some charter backers. “Why stop at the icing,” operators say, “when we can have the whole cake?” And chartercrats like Arne Duncan, with dreams of scaleability dancing in their sugarplum heads, may really think that full-scale charter systems can work because A) they don’t understand that most charter “success” is illusory and B) they don’t know why.
It’s telling that while chartercrats are cheering on complete charter conversions for cities from York, PA to Memphis, TN, no charter chains have (as far as I know) expressed a desire to have a whole city to themselves. The preferred model is an urban broker like Tennessee’s ASD or the bureaucratic clusterfarfegnugen that is Philadelphia schools– charter operators can jostle for the juiciest slice of the steak and try to leave the gristle for some other poor sucker.
At what point will high scores in 100% African-American schools be used as an argument to support segregation?
I have always figured an all charter system takes us back to 19th century, but this time with provisions for taxation to support the various efforts. No cohesion, except in who is footing the bill.
A system of education that takes test scores as a measure of education will not succeed because that is not what education is.
THANK YOU!!!
YEP!
Y no es un concepto dificil.
I think you could go on with this list — a tendency to lack diverse curricular offerings, lack of special ed/student service….
“most charters are more segregated than the district in which they are located.”
I never know what to make of this statement, given the inter-district segregation that exists in so many school districts. In NYC at least, most *district* schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx are “more segregated than the district in which they are located,” too.
Discussions of all sorts often end up with one side comparing the idealized version of the institution they are advocating for against the real world institution they are advocating against.
I think the better way to phrase this is “How is this better than what came before?” If students continue to be segregated in charter schools to the same extent they were in real public schools, how are charter schools an improvement?
They’re not an improvement at all in terms of segregation. And they would rightly be judged a failure if their mission was to reduce segregation.
Iris Rotberg is a researcher whose work Diane has cited as being “decisive and unambiguous” proof that charters segregate. In a piece Rotberg put together for Ed Week to promote her report, she wrote: “The primary exceptions to increased student stratification are in communities that are already so highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and income that further increases are virtually impossible . . . ” Well, this “exception” happens to cover the overwhelming majority of charter schools located in the Boston-Washington corridor, the Great Lakes Megalopolis, and anyplace else where residential/school district hypersegregation exists.
In Chapter 31 of “Reign” Diane calls for actionable strategies to reduce residential and district school segregation. For the most part districts, with some help from the courts, have been :crickets: on the issue for 40+ years. Worse still, many of our supposedly diverse and integrated districts, even painstakingly liberal and deeply “blue” ones, turn out to be segregated at the school or even classroom level—here’s one example (https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-announces-resolution-south-orange-maplewood-nj-school-di).
If you don’t care about integration, if you want your district left out of it (“neighborhood schools!”), if you believe the myths about self-selection and market forces, well, you’re wrong and you’re not doing the right thing, but you’re certainly not alone, and luckily for you the odds look decent that nothing meaningful will be done about segregation in your lifetime. If you do care about integration and you oppose charter schools, then what are your actionable plans? Ones that will involve your district and your kids, mind you, not just other people’s.
I’m too lazy to go back and look, but hasn’t Diane posted numerous research articles demonstrating that charters increase segregation? I think Jersey Jazzman has as well (in fact, I think he’s contributed to the research).
I recall many posts mentioning research that purportedly demonstrates that, but I don’t recall seeing any research that either does a careful apples-to-apples comparison or attempts to quantify the amount of the impact on overall segregation levels (i.e., do charter schools increase segregation by 10, 2, or 0.002 percentage points?). What I do know is that the assertion that “charters are more segregated than the district in which they are located” is not very meaningful, given that there are so many districts that have a lot of segregation within them. Not to mention the huge amount of segregation between districts.
On the other hand, I think that “choice,” very broadly speaking, has a lot to do with segregation. Combating that would require remedies that attack the traditional school zoning laws and even the integrity and autonomy of entire school districts. But this is all old history that played out in the 70s.
FLERP, consider reading the research by Gary Orfield of the UCLA Civil Rights Project on charter schools and segregation. A school that is 100% black is more segregated than schools that have some integration, even if predominantly one-race.
I think community context might be important here. You might have a school with a catchment area that encompasses all the white students in the district and some of the black students, so perhaps it is 40% white and 60% black while the other schools in the district are all 100% black. Should the school board we say that the 40% white school is the most integrated or the most segregated school?
I’ve read Orfield’s last couple reports. They acknowledge the issues I’m describing and they don’t purport to resolve them. I recommend looking at the raw demographic numbers for all the boroughs. Interesting stuff. For example, did you know that there are more than 500 schools in NYC that have 5 or fewer white students?
Dienne: UCLA Civil Rights Project.
Also Myron Orfield at University of Minnesota Law Achool
And John Hechinger in segregated charters in Minneapolis:
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-22/segregated-charter-schools-evoke-separate-but-equal-era-in-u-s-education.html
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Leave to one side the misleading hype of the spin doctors of the charterite/privatizer movement that they have the magic elixir that can cure all that ails the education of the entire population. Peter Greene takes the right tack. It is wiser and more revealing to focus on their deeds rather than on their words.
And what the leading lights and heavy hitters of self-styled “education reform” don’t do is as important as what they do do. For all the massive monies and political clout and MSM fawning enjoyed by them, they go where the reward of $tudent $ucce$$ is the greatest and avoid those areas where ROI/MC [ReturnOnInvestment/MonetizingChildren] would punish the bottom line. That’s a business plan, not an educational model. Please read Peter Greene’s blog posting in its entirety, e.g., his discussion about “High Cost” and “Low Cost” students and how such “customers” are not “equally desirable” to the business-minded crowd.
In order to forestall frivolous objections, yes, there will be outliers. Look at the language I am using above to describe the power players, not those filling the walk-on roles and cameos.
I would refer viewers of this blog to approach this from a slightly different angle. Values. Goals. Priorities.
These can’t be summed up in the numerical chimeras and statistical mirages so typical of charterite/privatizer “hard data points.”
The refusal, de facto, to be “in it to win for everyone, no matter how much or how little it costs and no matter how it affects the bottom line”—
Is far more telling than pronouncements on such eduproduct launch pads as Education Nation or the latest “research study” funded by the Gates Foundation.
In fact, if they were really ready to show their “grit” and “determination” we would: 1), not have such infamous charter practices as screening out/counseling out/pushing out the more expensive and difficult-to-teach students, or the morally reprehensible “midyear dump”; and 2), we would have them literally, not figuratively, begging for and giving priority to taking the students that are ‘test suppressors’ and ELLs and most-difficult-to-teach SpecEd and those with the most severe behavioral problems.
In other words, those touting “choice” that have more “voice” than public school advocates and supporters have made it clear that their “choices” not only trump our “choices” but that they aren’t even interested in our “voices”—Dr. Frederick Hess of AEI wouldn’t want to disturb his good bud Cami Anderson with the raucous noise of the “shrill” and “strident” rabble, now would he?
😒
The “program” of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement is all about business, not education.
And it’s failed over and over and over again.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” [Albert Einstein]
A little sanity would be welcome right about now…
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
😕
How did I know she would say that?
😎
Krazy — the Einstein “insanity” quote needs to die. Change starts with you:)
FLERP!: ah, but death is so final, kind of like Michelle Rhee and John Deasy and Paul Vallas and such losing their luster in the firmament of “education reform” supernovas…
Speaking only for myself, I’ll retire it for a while.
😎
Propublica followed up on the for-profit charter chain that calls itself a non-profit.
The chain finally revealed administrative salaries (which they claimed were trade secrets), with one glaring omission:
“about why the son of the schools’ founder was not included in salary disclosures despite being listed one of the charter school’s organizational chart. Chairman John Ferrante called it “a mistake” for the son”
The email from the charter lawyer to the reporter is bizarre. It’s just CRAZILY personal.
She really seems to have gotten under their skin 🙂
http://www.propublica.org/article/charter-school-chain-finally-discloses-salaries-with-one-missing
When politicians usurp the role of educators, what else can you expect. Ignorance, abysmal ignorance, supplants reason, quality research etc. One might hope that enough people would wake up and act before it is way too late. Time will tell.
Cyber charters is an opportunity for mining and compilation of info from the student education record, the content of all ongoing school submissions, reprimands, special needs … and [using IP, names, DOB … identifiers from the student records] cross-referencing it with non-school online activity and info from the public domain FOR EACH ENROLLED STUDENT/FAMILY. This is done by way of schools having parents click on “Agree” button of the text where many pages down, the vendor reserves its ownership to all info submitted to the server. Brilliant!
For profit charters don’t want to take over the whole market any more than Walmart wants to… Do you see a Walmart in Scarsdale? In New Trier? In Radnor PA? Conversely do you see any Walmarts in poor urban neighborhoods? Walmart is willing to cede the upscale market and abandon the urban poor to make as much profit as possible on the mass market. For profit charter operators think the same way. They’ll go after the market of engaged urban parents and middle class neighborhoods and towns that are seeking relief from high taxes. The for profit charters are not cherry picking to destroy public education, they are cherry picking to make money.
So why have charters continued to spread? Where are the children coming from that go to charters? Charters offer a program that takes the best students or the students with the strongest parent cooperation. The parents put their children in charters away from the students with special needs that often slow down the class and away from those students who don’t want to be there at all. I know charters run by corporations are destroying the public schools but parents are still sending their children. How can public schools offer what charters offer to keep the children? Look at the regulations that public schools work under. Maybe change needs to start there.
Public schools do offer the selectivity that charter schools provide in G&T programs. However, for some reason these programs are not as heavily promoted in poor communities of color as the charter schools. For instance, why is there no citywide G&T program in the Bronx? Why is TAG tucked away in a decrepit building in East Harlem, while a charter school was able to take space in the same building and expand to a K-12? The test is free, so income is not a barrier. It’s all about the choices made at the top, and the Bloomberg Administration decided that they were more interested in picking fights with the teachers union than educating students. Of course though, when TAG scored well on the state tests, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott were there for the photo op.
The schools co-located with TAG in the Tito Puente complex, including Esperanza Prep, the 6-12 school you refer to, are all NYC DOE district schools, no charters.
The neighborhood is rough, and the architecture of the school itself and the surrounding housing projects is undeniably dreary and drab (very identifiably late 50s/early 60s NYC public works), but I think “decrepit” is overstating it a bit.
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7928462,-73.9417107,3a,75y,206.35h,90.12t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s9P7nnqW8WbcAiCKgUXgF9Q!2e0