The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reviewed the performance of the state’s charter schools and concluded that most were not meeting their academic targets and not closing achievement gaps.
Minnesota was the home of the charter movement, which began with high expectations as a progressive experiment but has turned into a favorite mechanism in many states to promote privatization of public education and to generate profits for charter corporations like Imagine, Charter Schools USA, and K12. Today, charter advocates claim that their privately managed charters will “save low-income students from failing public schools,” but the Minnesota experience suggests that charters face the same challenges as public schools, which is magnified by high teacher turnover in charter schools.
The Star-Tribune article by reporter Kim McGuire begins:
Students in most Minnesota charter schools are failing to hit learning targets and are not achieving adequate academic growth, according to a Star Tribune analysis of school performance data.
The analysis of 128 of the state’s 157 charter schools show that the gulf between the academic success of its white and minority students widened at nearly two-thirds of those schools last year. Slightly more than half of charter schools students were proficient in reading, dramatically worse than traditional public schools, where 72 percent were proficient.
Between 2011 and 2014, 20 charter schools failed every year to meet the state’s expectations for academic growth each year, signaling that some of Minnesota’s most vulnerable students had stagnated academically.
A top official with the Minnesota Department of Education says she is troubled by the data, which runs counter to “the public narrative” that charter schools are generally superior to public schools.
“We hear, as we should, about the highfliers and the schools that are beating the odds, but I think we need to pay even more attention to the schools that are persistently failing to meet expectations,” said Charlene Briner, the Minnesota Department of Education’s chief of staff. Charter school advocates strongly defend their performance. They say the vast majority of schools that aren’t showing enough improvement serve at-risk populations, students who are poor, homeless, with limited English proficiency, or are in danger of dropping out.
“Our students, they’re coming from different environments, both home and school, where they’ve never had the chance to be successful,” said April Harrison, executive director of LoveWorks Academy, a Minneapolis charter school that has the state’s lowest rating. “No one has ever taken the time to say, ‘What’s going on with you? How can I help you?’ That’s what we do.”
Minnesota is the birthplace of the charter school movement and a handful of schools have received national acclaim for their accomplishments, particularly when it comes to making strong academic gains with low-income students of color. But the new information is fueling critics who say the charter school experiment has failed to deliver on teaching innovation.
“Schools promised they were going to help turn around things for these very challenging student populations,” said Kyle Serrette, director of education for the New York City-based Center for Popular Democracy. “Now, here we are 20 years later and they’re realizing that they have the same troubles of public schools systems.”
More than half of schools analyzed from 2011 to 2014 were also failing to meet the department’s expectations for academic growth, the gains made from year to year in reading and math.
When are we going to stop backing off from facing the facts that kids coming from home deficient UN food, clothing, warmth, and reading opportunity from birth are going to gave difficulties in schools? Why is that so hard to get people to accept?
Teachers can work their butts off and never make a real lasting difference. But it seems to be “the teachers’ fault”… wrong.
Just as it isn’t a doctor’s fault when a baby is born with a genetic difficulty.
We need to get our heads out of the sand as a nation and a culture. Too much idiocy prevails.
cross posted to the original article, with this commentary , which at the OPED site has all the links to the Ravitch site:
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Charter-schools-struggling-in-General_News-Charter-Schools_Data_Expectations_Learning-150217-694.html#comment533956
No surprise here. Charter schools are NOT the fix or the replacement of public education. The truth about what is happening in the 50 states, is easy to find, if you are interested…put in charter schools in the search field here, and find out the reality.
I did and….
Atlanta is impressed by the elimination of public education in New Orleans. The school board is planning to become an all-charter district.
Ruth Conniff, editor of the Progressive, has gathered here some of the most recent charter scandals, and they just keep coming.
“The pro-charter Philadelphia School Partnership has offered the School Reform Commission $35 million to expand the number of charters in the cash-strapped district.”
“Jeff Bryant here reviews some of the egregious examples of charter school corruption in Ohio, Michigan, and Florida. Billions of taxpayer dollars are being transferred to the private sector, where no one supervises how those dollars are spent. Worse, the businesses that get the money spend large sums to hire lobbyists and to contribute to key legislators to make sure their charters remain free of oversight.”
“Politico reports that school choice advocates are flocking to Capitol Hill in hopes of getting federal legislation to promote vouchers. The irony of vouchers is that they have been on state ballots many times but have never won popular approval. Most recently, they were turned down in Florida by a decisive majority, although that didn’t stop the state legislature from pushing vouchers wherever they could get them past the courts. When the Utah legislature passed the nation’s most sweeping voucher bill in 2007, giving vouchers to all students to attend a private or religious school, voters rejected the plan by a 60%+ margin in November 2007. Voucher advocates who paid for the campaign to pass them (led by the CEO of overstock.com) said that the voters were stupid and had failed an I.Q. test.”
Peter Greene reports on an audit in Ohio about phantom students in charter schools. Charters are paid by headcount, and some charters have seen the advantage of inflating their enrollment, although it is illegal.
or that Moody’s Investors Servicrs paints a gloomy picture of the effects of charter schools on public schools in Pennsylvania.
Charter School Corruption in North Carolina
Larry Miller: The Charter Disaster in Milwaukee Learn how How Imagine Charter Schools Make $$$ or
The Unholy Alliance: Charters, the Media, and “Research”
Bill Gates stated in 2013 that:
[start quote]
“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”
[end quote]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/09/30/bill-gates-we-wont-know-for-a-decade-whether-our-ideas-work/comment-page-1/
Okey dokey. Minnesota has had twenty years. I know Bill loves numbers & stats so let me refresh his memory—
20 is 10 times 2.
We don’t need 8 more years.
We already know whether your rheephormish petulance will work or not.
Time to fund and support genuine learning and teaching.
Or riffing off the late comedian Henny Youngman:
“Take Lakeside School as our standard, please!”
😎
I think it is time for the taxpayers to ask if they are getting their money’s worth. If the results don’t justify the extra expense of splintering expenses on fixed costs such as transportation, utilities, facilities, insurance etc., which could be rolled into existing public school budgets, the people of Minnesota need to examine the facts and make an informed decision about the future of education in their state. They should decide what is in the best interest of the state’s children, not corporate influence.
Well, charter schools may not be achieving the official hype they’ve received for the better part of a generation, and they may not be adequately educating the students they claim to (both because there are only so many “miracles” you can claim, and because the majority of them never had any intention of doing so – but they’ve been quite successful at siphoning money from the public schools, creating “facts on the ground” for the semi-covert school privatization project, functioning as taxpayer-subsidized real estate plays, turning teaching into a temp job and weakening the unions.
By and large, I’d say their Overclass patrons are pleased with the many things charter schools are able to do for them.
There’s a real divergence between state-level reporting and the national narrative, though.
Those two tracks will eventually collide. It’s inevitable.
It’s like two different worlds, reading the individual stories in Ohio and then listening to Duncan or any of the other thousands of national promoters. The same is true in PA and MI.
Michigan is tracking Ohio almost exactly – the sort of slow build-up of negative local press we saw here is now happening there.
Charter schools redistribute the public monies in a way that keeps the money at the top. Public schools promote the economic well being of the middle class, who are more likely to spend most of it, fairly quickly rather than reinvesting it in some passive investment. Thus, through their purchase of goods and services, the middle class further contributes to the growth of the middle class. Public schools make better economic sense for America.
I wish it mattered, but it doesn’t. Lawmakers at both the state and federal level are ga-ga over charter schools.
You can’t pay them to do anything positive for public schools in Ohio. In fact, we ARE all paying them and that doesn’t matter either. They just finished comparing public schools and charter schools in Ohio. Public schools did better, so guess which sector just had their funding cut again? Public schools. Charter and private schools got more funding.
That’s because the politicians answer to the corporate influence in Ohio and other states as well. Corporations have no answers for our children. They just want to use them to make a profit. Starving public schools is part of their agenda. Parents need to wake up to this nonsense and pressure their representatives to represent them. The legislators are the ones that need a lesson in accountability.
Will publicly funded charters have to comply with the new NCLB re-write (*Every Child Ready for College and Career Act of 2015)? Even the HQT provision? What about the SBR clause?
(*The actual name of Lamar Alexander’s bill)
128 of 157 have not gotten the job done? Don’t worry, charter backers will ONLY talk about the less than 20% that are not failing. And act like the other 80%+ don’t exist. This is the narrative.
And, yeah, 20 years is enough time. Michigan has had charters for 20 years. Detroit has been inundated with them. Competition was supposed to improve outcomes, right? For all schools, right? Hasn’t happened.
But people have said that choice is good and many have made a lot of money. So I guess there are some winners.
“Don’t worry, charter backers will ONLY talk about the less than 20% that are not failing. And act like the other 80%+ don’t exist. This is the narrative.”
And public schools could do the same thing. They could pick out solid schools and use exactly the same argument.
“It’s working! We just need to expand and support the schools that work!”
Why doesn’t that argument work both ways?
Supporters of traditional public schools do this all the time. “US schools with fewer than 10% FRPL-eligible are the highest scoring in the world,” e.g. “When you factor out the poorest kids, we do great.” I didn’t make up that second one; it was said by the “progressive” New York Regent Harry Phillips.
Regarding this particular analysis, which compares the average traditional Minnesota district school and the average Minnesota charter school: is this an apples to apples comparison, demographically?
Tim,
I would love to see all charter schools take in the lowest performing students and stop boasting about test scores. When you make test scores your goal, when you boast that charters are superior to public schools (which they are not), charters get hoist by that petard.
Tim, since you’re interested in apples-to-apples comparisons, charters don’t fit that model either. Even if they are in the same neighborhood, they do not take on the same type of student body. This has been well-documented. I don’t want to go to the trouble of counting the ways in which they game their student bodies over time, but we know the secret sauce: Anyone can apply for the lottery (but everybody doesn’t) but not everyone gets to stay. Using excessive suspensions and threatening to hold kids back on flimsy pretexts ensure that the numbers shrink and there is no backfill of the empty seats since there is only one grade point entry.
Public schools cannot do this. In fact, I just had a student added to my class today. And the state tests are in two weeks. He came from a charter. (Guess what school will include him in their test scores? Clue: It won’t be the charter.)
Different rules. So good luck ever finding an actual apples-to-apples comparison.
Doesn’t your state use Batelle’ s? We had yo document week by week, month by month, each student’s time in our classroom. It was “fun” figuring out how little time some students were in my room. One kid was in and out three times before leaving. Others were there only 3 days out of 2 weeks. This was the beginning of data mining in 2011-12. It was documentation o determine who to blame for a child’s failure, when the problem was the child’s transient parent.
Listening for Joe Nathan. Only hearing crickets.
Well, I bet he has a lot of things to say, but if he wants to take a jab at charter’s being Fukushimatized, he should do that to Star-Tribune, instead of us.
I hear crickets and cicadas 24/7.
It’s nerve damage hearing loss. Perhaps you should get your hearing checked-ha ha!!!
“Sources report that when last seen, a desperate-eyed Mr. Nathan was accosting strangers on the street, grabbing them by their collars and screaming, “Charter schools are public schools, charter schools are public schools!”
“Even as Ohio’s private school vouchers remain dramatically underused, there appears to be no rush to re-examine their need.
The state offers 60,000 EdChoice vouchers for children in struggling public schools, and fewer than one-third were used this school year, according to data released Friday by the Ohio Department of Education.”
Doesn’t matter. They push to expand them every year.
This has absolutely nothing to do with “great schools” or even “choice”. It’s pure ideology.
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2015/01/24/ohio-vouchers-expand-thousands-remain-unused/22292553/
Ohio has a huge contingent of voters who listen to those who claim that public schools are anti-christian, anti-moral, anti-American history, pro-science, secular, “liberal” advocates for a country without God.
Even amongst the teachers there is a hesitancy to teach about global warming, climate change, molecular evolution, honesty about treatment of slaves and Native Americans, etc. You can’t even discuss certain topics with other teachers since they close their minds to anything not fed to them by their nondenominational Christian ministers and by the influence of mega-pastors who preach prosperity gospel ideas. They and many parents often take their own kids to the “Creation Museum” in northern Kentucky and even object to teaching 4th graders about the sexual parts if flowers, let alone to tell them that their child was not brought by the stork.
For many people, home schooling gives them the opportunity to indoctrinate their children with blinders and deaf ears. Charter schools seem to them to be a way to dictate that their child be given a “proper” education, free from the evilness of non-religious thought.
I am not poking fun. I was raised amongst those viewpoints. I never understood why people went off the deep end with their blind beliefs. I try not to do that with religion or science. Both take a kind of faith in the unknown. Pretty ridiculous.
In any case, Ohio’s governor got where he has influence not because of who he is. It is because of who he isn’t. As long as he is in place and others who favor private and charter indoctrination of children are representing a fight against “the other” it doesn’t matter what else they do or say. They have a blank check in this world of politics and education.
“Even amongst the teachers there is a hesitancy to teach about global warming, climate change, molecular evolution, honesty about treatment of slaves and Native Americans, etc. ”
I know they’re scared of “controversial” subjects. I don’t blame them.
My daughter was one of only two students in her high school science class who would admit to “believing in” evolution. She went on to college and is (now) trying to get into a graduate program with a science focus, so it didn’t stop her, but I agree with what you’re saying. I’ve seen it happen here.
I assume that for a lot of teachers, it’s a matter of belief rather than courage. Polls show that very large numbers of Americans believe man was created in his present form. It’s reasonable to assume that large numbers of teachers believe that, too.
Teaching about molecular evolution, which occurs every day with mutations and further changes that render antibacterial medications useless is not the same as “man was always in his current form” thought.
My point was that the blindness to science creates an irrational “fear” in some people.
Remember G W ended stem cell research during his term.
And I have friends who said that G W couldn’t do anything wrong because he says he is a born again Christian. That included listening to Cheney, I suppose.
Minneapolis is being raped by the charter movement.
FLERP!
February 17, 2015 at 4:02 pm
I assume that for a lot of teachers, it’s a matter of belief rather than courage. Polls show that very large numbers of Americans believe man was created in his present form. It’s reasonable to assume that large numbers of teachers believe that, too.”
Sure, that’s fair and probably true but some of them just avoid it. They had a piece in the paper where 60% of teachers said they work really hard to avoid the controversy. It can be intimidating to me and I’m not a public employee.
Like I said, I don’t blame them, They have to attempt to walk this tightrope, and I recognize one of the tradeoffs for “public” entities is, well, THE PUBLIC. All of us.
It never works but they have to try to reach some consensus. 🙂
I was glad my daughter and her classmates hashed it out themselves. She has to decide for herself where she’s going to pick her battles.
It makes sense to me. Most people want to get along with others (excluding immediate family, of course), and I think that’s a good thing on balance.
I wasn’t really referring to what they choose to teach, but rather how they vote. Somehow, voting for a “liberal” has people shaking in their boots if their church has proclaimed that there is only one way to believe and that any other choice is to be on the “wrong side” when Jesus returns.
My question is: which side is wrong? No one knows for certain. But we have a whole industry of people who claim to have righteous knowledge who write fictional books or so-called spiritual help books. These are not “divinely inspired”, but people live to have answers.
These people vote for conservatives based on this kind of thinking in my neck of the woods. They vote against their own selves because they are convinced that God is telling them not to worry. They are against taking care of the environment because God told them He wouldn’t allow anything to destroy the earth after the flood. So they pit themselves as conservatives are Godly and liberals are unGodly. And here we are with an idiot for a governor. It is totally absurd. They don’t think. They just “follow”. They scare me in their “blankness.”
Here’s a well done column by a St Paul teacher describing the satisfaction of working at a teacher led (charter) public school.
http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2015/02/18/what-its-like-to-teach-in-a.html
As many have noted here, families select schools for a variety of reasons. Test scores often are not the only criteria Moreover, many people working in charters share views with many people who post here that the way to assess schools should be much broader than just test scores.