For the past twenty years, the New York Times has fawned over charter schools. Not in its reporting but in its editorials.
In its editorial about the Senate’s rush to confirm Betsy DeVos, the Times acknowledges that charters are not a cure for education problems.
“Beyond erasing concerns about her many possible financial conflicts, Ms. DeVos also faces a big challenge in explaining the damage she’s done to public education in her home state, Michigan. She has poured money into charter schools advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else. She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers for private schools. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.”
The Times has gone up a steep learning curve on this topic. Now if only the editorial writers can continue to understand that school choice is not a cure for low-performing students, not even a band-aid. As voters in Massachusetts showed last November, when they rejected a proposal to expand the number of charters, the main effect of charters is to drain resources from existing schools. Slicing up the education budget into multiple sectors impoverishes them all and enriches only the corporations that operate charters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Dems form House public education caucus: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/public-education-caucus_us_5875183ee4b099cdb0ffb0c2
The fact that Sheila Jackson Lee is on it tends to signal to me that this is not serious and just a stunt. Hope I’m wrong.
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Testing.
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We’re opposed to the standardized kind. 🙂
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off topic but
What did he know and when did he know it .
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/russia-hacking-probe-campaigns-kremlin-233419
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There is old proverb that says, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”
When I was still teaching in a public high school with a low 2 or 3 out of 10 with 10 being the highest Academic Performance Index measurement in California’s schools (API was the main component of the Public Schools Accountability Act passed by the California legislature in 1999), I dealt with an incident in my 9th grade English class that was also homeroom with an extra ten minutes allotted for announcements and discussion about issues like this.
You can read more about California’s API here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Performance_Index_(California_public_schools)
Anyway, when the API was reported by the media in California, my English/homeroom students laughed and talked about being in a failing school and students, who didn’t make much of an effort to learn what was taught, scoffed and said why bother to do the work when most of their teachers were failures.
Some of the students in that class called me a failure because of that API score.
A few miles away there was another high school called Walnut High School in another district called Walnut Unified. That high school’s API was ranked a 10. That was almost 18 years ago and Walnut School District was an upper income district with a much lower child poverty rate than Nogales High School where I taught. Almost 54 percent of Walnut High school’s student population was Asian and more than 12 percent were white; only 23.9 percent of Walnut’s students were rated Not Proficient on the states high stakes annual test. At Nogales less than 16 percent of the student population was white and Asian combined. In the district where I taught 98.6 percent were high-poverty schools.
Here are the links to the two high school API report cards.
Click to access Walnut%20HS%20SARC%2006-07.pdf
Click to access 2008-09%20English%20SARC_Nogales%20HS.pdf
I put a stop the teacher bashing, and said, “If we were to swap all the students at Nogales with all the students at Walnut High School and leave the teachers in place, that API score would go with you to Walnut and those great teachers at Walnut High School would be called failures next year, and because Nogales would suddenly be ranked a 10 on the API, all of the teachers here would be not be failing. Where do you think that API ranking comes from? From the tests you took last year. The results on those tests has nothing to do with how teachers at Nogales or Walnut High school teach. Those scores have everything to do with the effort you all made to learn what was taught, and when you don’t put in the work it takes to learn, when you aren’t reading your assignments, you aren’t reading books on your own like I have urged you to do all year and less than 5 percent of you have, those test scores reflect the results. You don’t learn when all you do is warm a seat in a classroom and don’t do the classwork and homework and read books on your own for enjoyment.”
When I was done talking, all the noise of accusations of teacher failure were gone and the room was stone-cold silent, because every student in that room knew what I said was true. Too bad the cons and liars we called corporate reformers of public education will not admit that, but they are cons and frauds just like Littlefingers Donald Trump who never admits he’s wrong even when the evidence that he is a failure and that he lies repeatedly is overwhelming.
Remember what John Paul Jones said when he was horribly losing the naval battle with two British war ships in 1779: “I have not yet begun to fight!” And Jones won the battle.
I’m suggesting we adopt that as our slogan: “We have not yet begun to fight!” to save our public schools from this frauds, liars, cons, and crooks, and then fight, if we have to, just like John Paul Jones did.
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Those were tough words for your kids, but they needed to hear them and did. The teachers I remember most clearly from long-ago K-12 & college are the ones who were tough but fair, who showed me that one needs to shoulder responsibility in order to achieve.
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I think it is the old story of education and income-nothing changes esp. in to core cities. Of course if the money wasted on charters was put back into the public system (I know, charters are publicly funded but privately operated) it might be a little better. Test scores aside, I believe that the charters create inequality.
Detroit (where I worked for 43 years) almost had a solution of unifying all non-parochial schools under one management-but Devos and her paid followers would not allow it.
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You said: “The Times has gone up a steep learning curve on this topic. Now if only the editorial writers can continue to understand that school choice is not a cure for low-performing students, not even a band-aid”
YOU EDUCATE THEM DIANE!..They are slow-learners… but as I said in my letter to them:
“It is time that The NY Times made the assault on public education the TOP STORY — because A PUBLIC WHICH CAN READ and GRASP MEANING from words, is CRUCIAL to the future of your paper!
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Reblogged this on Network Schools – Wayne Gersen and commented:
Diane Ravitch’s closing quote hits the nail on the head: “Slicing up the education budget into multiple sectors impoverishes them all and enriches only the corporations that operate charters.” And her analysis of the NYTimes editorials is spot on.
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Yes indeed. The ‘slicing up’ part. IMHO we pro-pubsch folk should be sounding this trumpet loudest. I am a practical sort, & I remember that being my initial reaction when I first heard of school choice/ charters/ vouchers: how on earth could anyone imagine the nation can afford quality education without regard to economy of scale? Peel that obvious practical issue aside & you are left w/nothing but airy-fairy notions like ‘choice for all’.
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We had a dual system for many years. It was called racial segregation. White schools typically were funded at the expense of black schools.
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The NYT hasn’t gone through any type of learning curve. Its impossible not to see DeVos as a religio-maniac. Impossible. That they are reflexively critical of such people should be seen as ground-floor level journalism in a republic that claims to be built on Enlightenment principles.
The uncomfortable truth here is that the NYTimes has been on the neo-liberal, education reform bandwagon for quite some time. This is not news nor is it anything but patently clear and obvious. The Times prefers the Democratic Party’s brand of ed reform……policies wrapped in the language of liberation, civil rights, and slick technocratic economic verbiage….rather than the current Republican Party’s brand of ed reform….blunt, aggressive talk that points to a fundamental dislike of democracy.
The truth is that both versions of Ed Reform have as their goals the same thing….privatizing public education and destroying organized teachers.
We blur this stuff and ignore it at our peril.
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Well said!
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NYS Teacher,
you are right. I should have recognized that the Times was embarrassed by DeVos’ brand of privatization. They sneer at anything of a religious nature. They prefer the secular privatization of Obama and DFER.
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“The status of the background checks and ethical clearances can change by the day. Republicans say they expect the missing documents to be submitted for all the nominees eventually.”
Just like we can expect that 5.3 million fine owed by DeVos to be paid. . .
. . . EVENTUALLY, eh!
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Just like we can expect Trump to release his tax returns…eventually. When the audit is finished. Eventually.
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Just like when someone buys my white sand beach ocean front property over at Lake of the Ozarks in Central Missouri-eh!! They’ll eventually get a deed to the property.
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Oh, so now the Times is concerned about so-called education reform, after having shilled for it and enabled it for years?
Yet more evidence that Trumpismo could not have come into being without the stupidity and folly of highly educated /credentialed liberals.
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Truer words never spoken. We can only hope that we are looking at “Tilt”: the years of neoliberal-Dem hand-holding w/Republicans have delivered an admin which is so openly hostile to the public good that its nakedness demands blunt commentary.
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Bethree, that’s the reason I wrote a SATIRICAL “endorsement” of DeVos, because she shows reform in its naked form, without pretense.
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bethree,
Yes, blunt commentary, and active resistance…
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Another warning should be heeded, noted by some commenters to the NYT article: the DeVos nomination may be a shrewd chess move, an outrage attracting over-the-top disapprobation which distracts from equally outrageous nominations to which the Trump inner circle is more committed. DeVos can easily be sacrificed & replaced by any ed-reform shill. The next one up at bat will have to be allowed to slide through at lower volume, otherwise we look like obstructionists.
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Trump doesn’t know how to play chess. He knows wrestling. Fake.
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Quoting Gates, “President-elect Donald Trump could, like JFK, establish American leadership”, through education innovation.
Neocon, Bill Gates, desecrates Kennedy’s memory. The accomplishments of astronaut, John Glenn, who was educated in an American PUBLIC school, reflected Kennedy’s scientific and engineering goal.
Great leaders, like Armstrong, do not emerge as a product of Gates’ for-profit schools-in-a-box. Men of avarice, like Gates and Trump, drive innovation for the sole purpose of profit, including the greed that produces hollow men of labor, similar to the cardboard-packaged software of the tech industry.
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