This http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/for-detroits-children-more-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news confirms our worst fears about charters. Its conclusion: Detroit parents have many choices but education in that embattled city is in a state of collapse. The politicians, civic leaders, and big money bet on charters instead of focusing like a laser on improving the public schools and services for children and families. That bet turns out to be a disaster for the children of Detroit.
Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.
While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.
Detroit now has more students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse, than Detroit’s traditional public schools.
“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”
Detroit is now the poster child for the failure of charters. Next time a friend asks you why you don’t like competition among schools for students, tell them about Detroit.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
The NYT does a weird thing where it puts an article up without allowing for comments, but then later opens a comments section.
They delay the option to comment because they know the comments section will fill with comments antithetical to what the NYT oligarchs want, which means the reporter will have to disappear the article into the archives if they want to keep their jobs.
Charter articles, when comments are allowed, make it very clear that the public has caught onto the charter scam.
And as long as there is a money carcass top pick at, the corporate charter school vultures will not fly away. The losers will be one or more generations of children, and the corporate vultures will eventually struggle to fly away but only after they are already too fat from gorging themselves on a buffet of public money.
So this is what the civil rights movement of the 21st century has produced.
All about the children.
Expect much more of this under either Clinton or Trump.
The problems and scandals associated with the charter movement must have become too egregious that even the ‘New York Times’ can longer ignore it all. Setting up parallel schools systems does not solve the problems associated with poverty. It is costing communities more to get less, and they will get a lot less if their public schools collapse under the burden. Overall, public schools are more efficient and effective, and the money spent on them goes directly into instruction, not profit or unproven gadgets. It is time to put our resources into strong public education.
My district is spending plenty of money on gadgets also known as Chrome Books deemed necessary for the administration of the PARCC tests, which coincidentally also gobbled up a sizable amount of cash.
AND make tech companies rich, rich, rich.
SCOTUS will not reconsider Friedrichs case on public employee unions when 9th Justice is named. Rehearing denied.
🙂
While the idea was to foster academic competition …
Anyone who starts from that premiss is already too clueless to get a clue.
Any piece on Detroit ed reform shouldn’t ignore Eli Broad:
“”Broad said the EAA is a good idea but is still a work in progress, demonstrating some “destructive competition” for students, but also with schools showing academic progress.”
Broad lobbied hard to expand the EAA to the whole state. Don’t forget that. If there hadn’t have been effective opposition, Broad’s experimental charter system that relied upon cheap computer instruction would have been Michigan-wide.
They almost jammed Broad’s agenda thru statewide. The whole ed reform celebrity choir were endorsing it, including the Obama Administration.
I don’t know how to break this to ed reformers, but their privatization agenda has been a disaster in Great Lakes states. It’s an deregulated, for-profit corrupt MESS and public schools are getting hurt as a result of this chaos they have wrought.
They should parachute back in and clean up the mess they made- in Ohio, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania.
This was an interesting EAA experiment:
“But in reality, what internal EAA documents reveal is the extent to which teachers and students were, over the course of two school years, used as whetstones to hone a badly flawed product being pitched as cutting-edge technology.
In fact, a SINET employee in November of 2013 informed Mary Esselman of his “fear” that another school district might want to start using Buzz (re-branded as GAGE for the purpose of marketing the product to others) before a second major upgrade could be finished and ready for use in March of the following year.
Records show that such an upgrade did finally land in April of 2014, and was installed over spring break. Another two months passed before a press release was issued announcing that the upgraded product would be available to selected school districts for the start of the 2014-2015 school year.
Agilix and the School Improvement Network began working with Covington and his team in Kansas City.
“In Kansas City, the leadership team implemented the model with limited technology…,” according to the response provided to Snyder. “In Michigan, they have had the opportunity to select staff and leverage a strong teaching and learning platform with strong, short-cycle innovation.”
By short-cycle innovation they mean this: improvements were made as Buzz moved from Kansas City (where it is no longer used) to Detroit. And in the two years since its arrival here, it has gone through technological upgrades significant enough to warrant press releases heralding the breakthroughs that were achieved.
“We’re building this plane as we fly it,” is a phrase numerous sources we’ve interviewed have attributed to Mary Esselman, who was in the thick of the technological planning.
Part of that build-it-as-they-go model included paying inexperienced Teach for America instructors to provide curriculum content that was loaded into Buzz when it arrived at the EAA. They were recent college grads who didn’t study to become teachers and who lacked certification, coming to the EAA with only a few weeks of training in the art of teaching. (About 25 percent of the EAA’s teachers were from TFA when its schools opened in 2012.)”
Do ed reformers use wealthy schools to test ed tech product? Why are they palming this garbage off on poor and middle income schools?
http://www.aclumich.org/article/guyette-how-eaas-buzz-program-exploited-detroits-most-vulnerable-kids
I am not here to defend charters . I am in full agreement that the diversion of money away from public schools has been a failure. But more money for public schools is not the answer either . Detroit schools preform as they do because of policy decisions made by a global elite . Decisions that have devastated much of the working class of first world nations . Brexit and Trump have xenophobic appeals but the reality is that public policy from education to global trade is not created through divine intervention. It is the product of a political system that for some time has resembled oligarchy more than democracy.
There is a myth that that there are all these jobs out there just waiting for an educated workforce . A myth that the vast majority of Americans many with that education are at fault for not being prepared for the Global economy . That myth serves the interests of the elites very well . The Walton’s, Paul Singer /Campbell Brown and his vulture fund so concerned about American children, I think not . Pete Peterson at it again with” fix the debt”, nice commercial we wont have money for our schools or our bridges unless we throw Grandma out on the street and cut our spending on schools and bridges can’t argue with that logic(LOL).
The media from print to television repeat the narrative of the publishers who own them Panic !!, your 401 k is back where it was in April, never mind that for most this worship of markets has eliminated their defined benefit pensions. We nor the Brits will survive this calamitous event they say. This is class warfare and as Buffet says his class is winning . The amount of income inequality today rivals that of the age of robber barons . It is worse along a generational and racial divide . Those of us fortunate enough to have been born white and entered the jobs market in the sixties and early seventies have fared rather well . Those under 45 dismally
We see that ,in the generational divide between Sanders and Clinton supporters .
The British just rejected this model, that it came from the right and not the left is the travesty. It will be bad for the Bankers in London but will it be bad for the blue collar worker in the industrial north east of England as a lower pound makes British goods cheaper on world markets.
We will solve the problems of Detroit ,Baltimore , New Orleans , Flint and Youngstown… … when we recapture our Democracy and create an economy that serves all Americans not just the top 10% .
The problems we have in our schools are not the cause of our economic malaise they are the result of it.
A very interesting video from TruthDig this morning
Poverty without hope is the legacy of the ruling class. As teachers, we can no longer sell the American dream as a reason to work hard in school.
Rager stated:
“As teachers, we can no longer sell the American dream as a reason to work hard in school.”
As a teacher I never did, but then again I came into the profession at age 39 after seeing what hard work and effort could get you–laid off, fired, let go, etc. . . .
“In fact, the law repealed a longstanding requirement that the state Department of Education issue yearly reports monitoring charter school performance.
At the same time, the law included a provision that seemed to benefit Mr. Huizenga, whose company profits from buying buildings and renting them back to the charters it operates. Earlier that year he had lost a tax appeal in which he argued that a for-profit company should not have to pay taxes on properties leased to schools. The new law granted for-profit charter companies the exemption he had sought.”
This should outrage Michigan residents. Their lawmakers, public employees, are stealing from them to benefit their donors. It’s outrageous. They’re paying Mr. Huizenga twice and they don’t even own the property they’re paying for! He does! No one in their right mind would make this deal, yet Michigan lawmakers made it on behalf of Michigan residents.
We need a government that works for all the people, and we need strong public schools because they also work for all the people. What we don’t need is a government that serves at the whims of billionaires whose goal is to use public funds as their own personal slush fund.
A reporter wrote a piece that was critical of the Rocketship chain and the echo chamber sprung into action:
There will be NO CRITICISM of charter schools! That’s barred. Only glowing puff pieces may be published.
So @NPR reporter @anya1anya wrote a hit piece on @RocketshipEd without ever visiting even one school??!! Seriously.
I wonder how many public schools Brown has visited?
The Detroit school system has collapsed due to its inability to fight its own corruption and outdated modes of educating young people. There is no way in gods good green earth that I would send my own child to a Detroit Public School and many of the parents of the students I served would agree.
Nicodemus,
Instead of deserting the Detroit public schools like a rat from a sinking ship that the rats drilled holes in so it would sink, the parents, teachers, teachers’ unions and advocates/supporters of traditional public schools must use the democratic process enshrined by the U.S. Constitutions to fix the problem at the community level instead of turning a public sector school district over to an autocratic, opaque, corrupt, profit mongering, democracy hating, union busting, corporate charter school industry.
If corruption exists in a public sector institution like a community based, locally controlled, democratic, transparent, traditional public school district, then we turn to/allow the justice system to dig out the corruption and send the frauds and criminals to prison. You don’t punish everyone by turning the public schools over to autocratic, dictatorial, private sector corporations that are not democratic institutions and do not have to answer to the U.S. Constitution to the degree the traditional public sector has to.
The democratic system of justice is not perfect but it is much better than all the other choices. In additoin, since we are all humans, there is no perfection and corporations are much worse because when they make mistakes, they often vanish and are replaced be competitors. Fraud, incompetence and corruption takes place in the corporate sector to a much larger degree than it does in the public sector.
What government system do you suggest we replace the U.S. Constitution with – Putin’s Russia, ISIL, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, or should we turn the United States over to a Donald Trump, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walmart Walton family, Eli Broad and let them set fire to the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights?