Mary Butz worked in the Néw York City public schools for 35 years. She was a teacher of social studies; an assistant principal; founded her own small high school, which was part of Deborah Meier’s group and Ted Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools. After seven years as principal, she stepped down and became a mentor to other principals. Chancellor Harold Levy asked her to take charge of a program to help 500 new principals. She created a group of 50 highly accomplished principals who were called the Distinguished Faculty. This group mentored new principals. In the summers, all the principals attended a “Principals’ University,” where they chose the practical workshops that met their needs. Many of the principals praised the program as the best professional development they ever had.
I mention all this detail because I know Mary well. She has been my partner for 30 years. While I was traveling in Waco and Dallas, she was glued to the TV, watching Pope Francis. She has her differences with the Church, but she loves the nuns who educated her, and she loves this Pope. I am Jewish, and I love this Pope too.
I have a principle: public money for public schools; private money for nonpublic schools. As readers of the blog know, I do not consider charters to be public schools; whenever they are sued for violating a state law, they say they are private corporations, not state actors. I agree with them.
Mary writes:
I am a product of Catholic education. I went to Catholic school, then to a Catholic college. I spent my career working in the New York City public schools. I deeply love each of these institutions down to my toes. Each serve the children in their care with dedication, love and concern.
Yesterday while watching the Pope’s visit a Catholic school in East Harlem, I watched Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senator Chuck Schumer, and Mayor Bill de Blasio hovering around the children. I was struck with a simple truth that this city is not facing. THEY (our influential leaders in government, business leaders, and philanthropists) are allowing Catholic schools to be closed and disappear. I am not advocating for vouchers – I am advocating for funding from the philanthropies and hedge fund managers who shower millions of dollars on charter schools that try to imitate Catholic schools.
Why is our governor opening more and more charter schools that receive extra millions from wealthy hedge fund managers? Why are these hedge fund managers pumping their money into the unknown? Why are we taking taxpayer funds away from public schools to support these schools? Why are they speculating that charter schools will succeed? Some will, some won’t.
The billionaires behind “Families for Excellent Schools” are spending millions of dollars on a television campaign to demand more charter schools. That same money would save many Catholic schools without undermining public education.
Can they not see the light before them? If they care about poor children, why don’t they fund Catholic schools? Why are they using their millions to drain students and resources from public schools? Why don’t they use their money as donations to Catholic schools, instead on spending it on political attack ads? The business community should help to sustain and grow schools with a long history of service while simultaneously allowing our public school to survive.
Catholic education has been and continues to be hugely successful. Children who come from poverty-stressed homes blossom in Catholic schools. Why is that? Is it because they are strict and orderly? Yes. Is it because their expectations are clear and defined? Yes. Is it because they require parents to participate in the education of their children? Yes. So, don’t charters do the same? Well . . not necessarily.
Charter schools have adopted the trappings of Catholic education: uniforms, neat and orderly buildings, defined objectives, parent involvement. It all sounds good and looks good on paper but they lack the genuine ingredient for student success. SOUL.
Charter schools focus on test scores; Catholic schools focus on character. Honesty, integrity, compassion, social justice.
Catholic schools care for the whole child. Catholic education fosters, teaches and preaches a body of belief that embraces service, gratitude and love. Children learn because they are loved. They learn because they are safe. These children learn because their principals, their teachers, their fellow students all adhere to a higher code.
Hedge fund managers, corporate leader, and foundations: Put your money where it will make a lifelong difference. It is such a simple, honest solution. It is clear and obvious. Catholic education works. It should not die. Stop funding imitations when the real thing is right before you.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In the imterest of inclusion…maybe this call could include Lutheran and all the not for profit schools that serve other than the 1%.
Hedge fund managers are teaching their clients to invest for profit in the free market of education which includes charter schools and the many business offshoots that are emerging to fulfill the needs of charter schools, not to donate money for no returns out of the goodness of their hearts.
Wall Street doesn’t care about community. 😦
Hi, Mary. It’s good to see you featured in a post. 🙂
Funding imitations bespeaks ulterior motives. Like greed.
It’s interesting that she likes all of the attributes of charter schools except two: their supposed lack of a soul and the fact that they take money away from neighborhood when the take students, as opposed to the catholic schools that take the students but leave the money.
It’s insulting to say that charter schools are missing “soul”. My experience is that have lots and that community and family nature is part of what makes many of them work.
So, it’s OK to lose students to catholic schools because neighborhood schools keep getting the revenue for that missing student, but not OK to lose them to a charter? Just a reminder that the anti-charter message isn’t about the kids and isn’t about the parents, it’s all about the money and the jobs.
John,
No one in Catholic schools gets a salary of $500,000 like Eva Moskowitz, Deborah Kenny, and Geoffrey Canada.
The teachers and principals work for less money than they would earn in public school. There is very little teacher churn. They work for the live if God, not the love of Mammon.
You really don’t get it.
You are very disdainful of charter teachers, whose motives you somehow think of as being less than those of other teachers, when in fact they frequently work longer hours with very challenging kids.
But, once again, you focus on the adults and their salaries, not the kids.
John,
I wish you knew how many charter teachers ask to meet with me to tell me how terrible the working conditions are and why they are leaving. You know that charters have very high teacher attrition.
Diane,
I have a lot of district teachers telling me that 1/2 the money going in to their schools never gets to the classroom, that professional development is a joke, etc. Why don’t we focus on what’s best for kids instead of what’s found at charters vs. district schools. Plenty of room for all to improve.
John,
I dont believe in privatization of public services. I dont believe that entrepreneurs who have never been teachers, principals, or superintendents sgould be paid $500,000 a year. Do you?
John,
You call yourself a progressive Democrat, and you can call yourself whatever you want. But don’t you find it strange to be in the same boat with Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, ALEC, the Koch brothers, and every reactionary who hates public education? I know you will come back with Obama and Duncan, and my reply is that Obama allied with the hedge fund managers and Democrats for Education Reform when he started thinking of running for President and needed to raise $1 billion.
If you think about a system if public schools, it makes no sense to run two systems. No high performing nation does that. Look at the top 10, none has charters or vouchers. Read Gary Orfield on the segregating effects of charters. Or read about the profiteering in Ohio, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, etc. I know what charters were supposed to be.they have turned into something else: an industry that makes lavish promises and avoids transparency and accountability.
You know how I feel about these issues. I have followed charters from the beginning. I still remember Al Shanker sketching it out on a paper napkin in the conference center of ETS in 1988.
I wonder why you read and comment here. It seems masochistic. You don’t change anyone’s mind. Curious about your motivation.
Diane,
I understand that for you, this is about schools as employers, so you see me as aligned with these people that I in fact couldn’t disagree more with.
For me, this is about children, so I see you aligned with those who think that it’s more important to protect the dysfunctional aspects of public education than to do what’s in the best interests of students.
You want to close charter schools that low-SES parents have chosen for their children, take away that choice, force those kids back into schools with dismal performance, and fire their teachers because the volunteers that run them aren’t publicly elected and the teachers don’t want a union telling them what’s best for their students. You are OK with parental income determining the qualify of the school a child goes to as long as teachers get more job protections than any other profession.
You want the predominantly minority, low SES children in low quality schools to “take one for the team” to protect adult interests. While you talk, more kids drop out of high school because they never learned to read or do math and don’t see any hope in education. Many end up unemployed or in prison. You place blame for this everywhere except in the institutions where kids spend most of their waking hours and where the public invests thousands of dollars in their education.
That is not progressive.
Here is the text of the Shanker speech where he began to lay out his vision for charters: https://reuther.wayne.edu/files/64.43.pdf
It is astonishing to think that the leader of one of the national teachers unions gave a speech in which he repeatedly said that traditional education was not working for 75-80% of American public school students. Not because of poverty or anything outside the classroom, but because traditional methods could not reach these children.
It has always been my sense that, above all, Shanker’s “vision” for charter schools (and education reform more broadly) was about building a bulwark against vouchers.
“Now here we are five years later; we have no regrets about our stand on education reform. A lot of good things have happened. The public responded to the schools, it responded to our receptiveness to some new ideas, responded to the governors, responded to the business community. Teacher salaries are now higher, in some places quite a bit higher. More students are taking math and science. More teacher candidates are being tested before they can come on the job not that the tests are very good, even now, but at least they’re better than what existed in most places before. And issues like tuition tax credits have at least temporarily receded in the public mind as the public sees the public schools trying to improve and trying to change.”
Could John be the pseudonym for Seth Litt of PRev?
“Not because of poverty or anything outside the classroom, but because traditional methods could not reach these children.”
So the charteristas took all the worst elements of traditional public education and doubled down? Right at a time when traditional public schools were themselves expanding into more progressive methods?
John – funny you should mention “professional development”. You do realize that today’s version of that is brought to us by the same people who bring us charter schools, right? The fundamental underpinning of both is that there is one right way to teach one set of standards for all students in all classrooms and if it’s not working it’s because you’re not managing your students right, and they can help you with that too. Both charters and today’s “professional development” are all about ramming through drill and kill, no excuses policies solely for the purpose of raising test scores.
Public school budgets are determined annually; if the kid isn’t there, the school doesn’t get funding for that kid–so get that straight.
I don’t know many Catholic schools that pop up, take the money, then close leaving the kids in the lurch. Quite the opposite – Catholic schools are generally tied to the neighborhood church, and have been begging parents to become pro-voucher so they can stay open. The only issue with those vouchers is they are taxpayer funded. Secondly, there are scholarships for kids who want to attend Catholic schools whose families can’t afford it.
Charters, from the news I’ve read, are either fly by night, absconding with millions and not giving a rat’s rear what happens to the students they leave without a school to go to, fight in court that the furniture, etc., and even the real estate, belongs to the administrators or managers, though paid for by public taxpayers, are accountable to no one, and pay themselves handsomely while hiring uncertified teachers, or a revolving door of scabs supplied by TFA through Wendy, or on the other spectrum, are chains like Rocketship or Green Dot, even Kipp, who are also in it for the quick ka-ching and don’t care about the students.
Its easy for the charters to close down a k-8 school, send the unwanted 3-8 kids elsewhere, and start from K-2 for a couple years, then add a grade, etc. By the time, however, the kids have reached 8th grade….how many of those kids have been counseled out?
Charters are soul-less–they don’t care about the kids, they make sweetheart real estate deals from which they profit, they pay their administrators handsomely and their uncertified unqualified teachers poorly, or use those funneled TFA scabs, and treat the children like criminals. HUGE difference between charters, Catholic, and public schools.
I don’t share your love of charters.
A one posting answer to those furiously opposed to parents, students and their associated communities having the choice of well-resourced and well-supported public schools.
This blog, 9-27-15, “A List of 2,500 Charter Schools That Closed.”
[start posting]
The Center for Media and Democracy has compiled a list of 2,500 charters that closed since 2000, either because of financial or academic problems.
This should dispel the myth that charter schools are superior institutions that “save” children.
Some of the schools closed before they opened, but their founders collected public money for “planning.”
[end posting]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2015/09/27/a-list-of-2500-charter-schools-that-closed/
Yes, charters are all about the kids! Not the adults!
Sure, just read that last paragraph—
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Thanks to the owner of this blog for posting these comments.
Thank you to Mary Butz for making them.
Food for thought…
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An especially beautiful statement! Thanks to Diane for posting it.
I doubt foundations and hedge funds would be interested in funding Catholic schools since the many foundations wouldn’t be able to pursue the joy of union busting, and the hedge funds already have their own God called $$. The corporations wouldn’t enjoy all those tax credits, profit and money hiding. Their egos would suffer because they wouldn’t be able to reshape the world in their own image. They would have to live by humble Christian principles without six figure CEO and CFO salaries. How boring!
Retired smartie….Once again, you find the key to why the Billionaire Brigade prefers to charertize public schools to investing in parochail schools. As a pure charitable gesture, an donation of their lucre to a Catholic school is an end game with few write offs other the what the IRS allows, It does not mean that the public will, in perpetuity, fund a charter in which they have ownership, and thus they get NO return. As simple as that…all about greed.
WELL SAID INDEED!
PSP/ Philadelphia School Partnership allows for money, and subsequently students, to flow OUT of district schools into parochial schools and charters.
PSP has used its own funds, as well as its connections with the other institutions such as the $15 million grant from William Penn Foundation, to expedite this process.
PSP has also raised millions from foundations, philanthropic organizations and anonymous donors. The Walton Family Foundation, Janine and Jeffrey Yass, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation have all invested between $1 million and $5 million.
Over time, the district sector will diminish as the parochial and charter schools expand.
First, they won’t donate because there is no return on investment, ROI. Secondly, there is no union to bust. Lastly, they don’t care about religion, they care about MONEY.
Is the education in a Catholic school better than public? No. Generally what you can count on are smaller class sizes, usually free morning care for a 1/2 hour, and paid aftercare until 5:45.
The price of tuition has risen substantially as nuns stopped teaching, and though they push for vouchers laws, they are closing left and right as they can’t afford to stay in business.
Is Catholic school the answer? I don’t think so. Would I rather see the monies go to religious schools rather than have the villainthropists abuse public school funds, open charters, bash teachers, and profit on the back of children? Yes, but I doubt it will ever happen.
Mary Butz sounds like a wonderful person and partner!!
I believe the point of some charters is to replicate religious schools but secularly. The ones with which I am familiar are able to do so because they do not have to keep the students who do not respond favorably to academics or to discipline. It has been my experience that religious schools remove these students as well.
The ad speaks to that problem–a problem politicians are afraid to confront for fear of being labled racist. They would rather blame teachers who are willing to work in the inner city than confront the complexity of issues. It is easier to provide charters for the “middle-class” poor or “deserving” poor than to support the public school and teachers materially or with appropriate law.
Not sure how many people will feel comfortable with the idea of re-funding Catholic schools, due to prolonging public stigma on its founding church. But, I will say, they still have hope for redemption from years of public scandal within its church hierarchy, if Pope Francis and his aides would make a draconian measure to crack down on the institutional culture of corruption for good. No matter how much people hate, Catholic schools are still considered as respectable institution in the world. It’s not something replaceable by a bunch of vouchers and charters that can neither maintain high public accountability nor religious integrity.
Catholic education is on the decline and has been for the past fifty years and that is because Catholics are assimilated into the larger society. The schools came into being as a direct result of anti-Catholic bigotry, and today there is a far less need for them. They are not superior, by the way, to public schools, since they can pick and choose who attends them.
Susan,
One reason for the loss of Catholic schools is the loss of low-wage religious. Another reason is competition with charter schools. Charter schools are free; Catholic schools used to be free, at least in elementary schools. They no longer are free, and even though their tuition is low ($3,000), it is too much for poor and working class families, especially when the charter is free. Open a charter, kill a Catholic school.
I repeat: public money for public schools, private money for private schools.
Good and necessary info.
Thank you.
😎
Public schools in the United States have been grappling with the problem of cultivating “moral values” for a long time.
In the wake of desegregation, and two rulings bearing on prayer and Bible reading in public schools in the 1960s (a double whammy for some people), some parents moved their children from public schools to Christian schools, especially in the South.
Public schools have the legal obligation to teach values but within a legal framework that requires secular wisdom (e.g., about valued behavior in and beyond school). Efforts to address codes of conduct from a principled basis have been troubled by the growing influence of popular culture and social media in “legitimating” transgressions of once taken-for-granted social norms. Add to the overt and tacit culture wars of the last several decades a growing insecurity of parents and students occasioned by real violence and mixed messages from school officials on “discipline” in public schools.
I suspect that these concerns about bad behavior and safety in public schools has made charter schools attractive to parents who want some “no-nonsense” surrogates for religious indoctrination. Doug Lemov’s Skinnerian training can be viewed as a proxy for the disciplines of mind and heart demanded by some religious traditions. Some charter schools offer a version of character education featuring “virtues” of the month and badges for behavior exemplifying that virtue.
Since the 1960s, scholars have tried to offer a plausible moral compass for public education. Some may recall Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and problems with the values-clarification programs that theory helped to spawn. Some programs in philosophical thinking for children were tried and have survived. Others may recall Reagan’ Secretary of Education William Bennett, who made a case for Character Education in federal policy and in popular books. Bill Clinton mentioned Character Education but offered no federal guidance except to “make kids wear uniforms.” In the midst of these efforts, Phyllis Schlafly’s was among many ultra conservatives who fought for strictly academic instruction in public schools on the grounds that trafficking in values undermined parental teaching about right and wrong.
Since the 1990s, the problem of teaching values has been addressed through concepts drawn from cognitive and behavioral sciences and old-fashioned psychology and social psychology. The lingo of the day is unsettled but it includes references to personal qualities, dispositions, soft skills, “emotional intelligence,” “social emotional learning” (SEL), and non-academic or non-cognitive behaviors said to be essential for success in school and in life. Among these are ”self control,” “grit,” “growth mind-sets,” cooperative problem solving, and the like. The literature supporting much of the work on SEL (and emotional intelligence) is clearly aimed at reducing disruptive behavior in schools; preventing drug and alcohol abuse; promoting “pro-social behavior,” inducing compliance with rules, with training in “constructive conflict resolution.”
SEL programs are proliferating in schools, and they are aided by CASEL.org—Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning— founded in 1994. In 2004, Illinois became the first state to adopt SEL standards for preschool through twelfth grade. By 2014 CASEL was monitoring progress on the development of SEL programs in all 50 states.
The most effective programs, and there are only a few, change the culture of the school. They engage parents and members of the community. They reduce incidents of anti-social behavior and they are associated with small to modest gains in test scores. The programs work best if there is little turnover in school personnel and if they are sustained long-term (e.g. seven years) with trusting relationships well developed among key proponents and participants.
I am still in the process of looking into SEL. The SEL effort has become entangled with the Common Core. That tethering is reshaping the professional work of school counselors and school social workers. It is modifying the content of social studies, especially civics.
So far, everything seems to be a mash-up and with results that are not pretty. Indeed they strike me as Orwellian. Regrettably, the standards for SEL—social emotional learning, emotional intelligence—are the product of unthinking faith in standardization.
So far, the Illinois SEL Learning Standards are being treated as if exemplary. The Illinois standards are framed around three major goals, ten learning categories, with 18 specific objectives for each of five grade spans. The standards are rationalized as essential for achieving academic and personal goals, avoiding “risky behaviors,” being a good citizen in a democratic society, having positive relationships with others, and resolving conflicts “constructively.” The standards put students on a proverbial couch for self-analyses and emotional management.
In other words, my overall impression of the Illinois standards is not favorable. If you have heard about “unpacking standards” to make them intelligible, these standards are perfect case material for that.
Consider the Early Elementary Standard 1A.Ia: “Recognize and accurately label emotions and how they are linked to behavior.” Note that word “accurate.” Precision is wanted in labeling emotions from students in grades 1-3. Note also the call for cause/effect reasoning about matters notoriously subtle and elusive even for professionally trained adults.
Standard 1A, 3b, for Middle Jr. High reads like a tip from a best selling business book for entrepreneurs: “Apply strategies to manage stress and to motivate successful performance.”
Work on standards of this kind is supported by an appeal to a limited array of economic and stop-loss benefits and metrics—staying out of jail, staying off welfare, avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, being free of addictions to drugs and alcohol, earning a living wage.
There is not much discussion of “the good life” or deconstruction of the values these standards honor. Instead of the 90 Illinois standards I suggest that schools try to emulate the eloquent simplicity of Deborah Meier’s views about values that schools should promote: “empathy and skepticism: the ability to see a situation from the eyes of another and the tendency to wonder about the validity of what we encountered.” Cited in a great discussion by these issues bearing on character education by Alphie Kohn at
http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/teach-values/
This excellent. Thank you for this good info and your clear writing style.
I’m late to this post because I’ve been thinking about it for several days.
I think Dr Ravitch has respect for Mary’s idea because Catholic schools do have a good reputation and because philanthropy has muddied the mission of public schools and what they represent in communities.
But I think what Mary is really getting at is: why not put private money towards private efforts that have already earned a good reputation instead of giving it to the public but with strings attached, especially when these strings hurt the public institution in favor of unproven hybrids.
My first reaction was, “well they probably don’t give to Catholic schools because they are not Roman Catholic.” Her point about the purity of the original endeavor meriting support over that of a watered down copycat version makes sense to her, but you cannot support a Catholic school without making a statement that you are supporting the Catholic Church, right?
I said to a friend, “it’s refreshing to have the Pope here bringing a moment of pause and hope for us,” to which friend replied: “A Catholic is still a Catholic and birth control could help a lot of the world’s problems. Let’s not forget that.”
So I would build on Mary’s thought and suggest that the wealthy give to private schools that they believe in and not seek to hijack public institutions or dollars for hybrid versions of pie in the sky ideas and the realities of the American public. Or else give the money without strings attached. Buying their way into public policy is what has happened.
Laura’s post above about values and morals is a good one and is probably why many have so easily wanted to see charters.