Steven Singer finds it annoying when corporate reformers insist that “charter schools are public schools.”
He insists in this post that the two are almost the same.
Neither is a public school, and neither should be subsidized by public funding.
He writes:
The stark orange monolith that was Donald Trump is starting to crumble.
And with it so are the dreams of corporate education reformers everywhere.
Where in previous administrations they could pass off their policies as Democratic or Republican depending on whichever way the wind blows, today their brand has been so damaged by Trump’s advocacy, they fear it may never recover.
Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, they could champion both charter schools and school vouchers with impunity. But now the privatizers and profiteers hiding in progressive clothing are trying desperately to rebrand.
Not only is Trump’s voucher plan deeply unpopular, but the public has already begun to associate any kind of school privatization with a doomed President.
So like cockroaches, neoliberals have begun to skitter to one type of privatization over another. Fake Democrats hide beneath unfettered charter school expansion. Bought-and-sold Republicans cling to the idea that we should spend taxpayer dollars on private and parochial schools.
But is there a real substantial difference between each of these so-called “choice” schemes? Or are they both just scams when compared with traditional public schools?
THE DIFFERENCES
Charter Schools and Private Schools are basically the same thing.
The biggest difference between the two is funding.
Charter schools are completely funded by tax dollars. Private schools – even when school vouchers are used – often need to be subsidized by parents. For instance, many private schools charge tuition of $30,000 – $40,000 a year. Vouchers rarely provide more than $6,000. So at best they bring the cost down but still make it impossible for most students to attend private schools.
Sure they may start as an effort to allow only impoverished children to use tax dollars towards private and parochial school tuition. But they soon grow to include middle class and wealthy children, thus partially subsidizing attendance at the most exclusive schools in the country for those families who can already afford it.
Parochial schools, meanwhile, are exactly the same except for one meaningful difference. They teach religion.
Their entire curriculum comes from a distinctly religious point of view. They indoctrinate youth into a way of seeing the world that is distinctly non-secular….
The biggest commonality between these types of educational institutions is how they’re run. Unlike traditional public schools – which are governed by duly-elected school boards – charter, private and parochial schools are overseen by private interests. They are administered by independent management firms. They rarely have elected school boards. Their operators rarely make decisions in public, and their budgets and other documents are not open to review by taxpayers. This is true despite the fact that they are funded to varying degrees by public tax dollars.
So in all three cases, these schools are run privately, but taxpayers pick up the tab….
Neoliberal Democrats may try to save the movement by claiming charter schools are completely different. But they aren’t. They are fundamentally the same.
Open the posts to see the links and to finish reading the rest of it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/19/1664123/-A-Seattle-parent-is-overwhelmed-by-the-support-he-got-in-ending-lunch-shaming
A question – how does Singer feel about district schools (like the elite magnets recently profiled in the NY Times – using test scores to screen out all but a few students? Where is your criticism of them?
Fortunately low-moderate income families all over the country are recognizing the value of public school choice. How sad that the late Dr. Mary Anne Raywid of Hofstra University, a strong ally of public school choice including district and charters (and an opponent of vouchers) has been replaced by someone who refers to those with whom he disagrees as “cockroaches.”
As an alternative school educator for more than a decade I (and many other alternative school educators and students found Raywid one of the very few college faculty who understood the value of providing options in public education.
There’s no comparison between elite magnet schools and the charter school/voucher movement. In NJ, charter schools are imposed on school districts without the input of the residents/tax payers. Who the hell is imposing willy-nilly elite magnets on school districts. The elite magnets are the creation of the school district itself with possible input from parents/residents and taxpayers. I’m really getting sick of this lame GOTCHA nonsense. Nobody is proposing replacing district schools with elite magnets. The New Orleans school district was not converted into an elite magnets school district.
Joe, you say there’s no comparison between elite magnets and charters.
I agree that charters are in most cases open to all with no admissions tests while elite magnets get to pick and choose who they will serve. So yes that is a difference. It makes elite magnet schools a lot like elite private schools.
You talk about the imposition of schools on a local community. One of the central principles of a state legislature is that it can make rules that apply throughout a state. Chartering empowers educators and families to create new options.
Civil rights legend Kenneth Clark encouraged creation of new public schools outside the control of local school districts because he (and many others) recognized that local school districts were failing to serve many students and families, especially low and moderate income students of color.
Fortunately it some places like Boston and LA, local districts have reacted in part to chartering by turning to district educators to create new within district options. The same thing has happened here in Minnesota. For example, after a local district resisted for years, parent requests for a district Montessori middle school, a group of educators and parents created a charter Montessori middle school. IT was quickly filled (on a lottery basis) So the district decided to create a district Montessori magnet.
It was a win-win situation.
The district schools are not being closed down to make way for elite magnet schools. There is no well funded vast movement to replace district schools with elite magnet schools (EMS). These EMS are not proliferating all over the country, most school districts do not even have EMS; they are mostly in the big cities and larger population areas. The idea of a parallel school system that duplicates many of the functions and positions of the host district is ludicrous especially in light of the fact that charter schools are no better than the district schools.
The suburbs are a great example of a “parallel school system” created by people who did not want their kids to go to school with those (inner city) kids. As a parent of 3 youngsters who attended and graduated from urban public schools, open to all, I’m fascinated by the lack of criticism on this list serve and elsewhere of people who withdraw their youngsters from urban districts and send them to suburbs.
Why is it ok for affluent (mostly white) families to withdraw their kids from urban districts and move to suburbs, but it’s not ok for inner city families, many families of color, to withdraw their youngsters from urban districts they believe are failing their students?
Why is it ok for some suburban districts to hire detectives to make sure students attending their district schools are either living in the suburbs or paying tuition?
Joe Nathan, calling your bluff.
Notice that charters don’t proliferate in those suburbs where you claim parents want good schools. That’s because there aren’t enough kids to allow them to pick and choose among them.
Minnesota and a number of other states have charters open to all. They demonstrate that many families are looking for options to large traditional district schools. We also have helped create suburban district options Joe
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There is nothing wrong with having “options”. Even back in the 1970s and 80s students where I grew up had the “option” of attending a local vocational high school. In NYC they had the “option” of attending a specialized high school.
None of those options were run by a private entity insisting that they deserved a per-pupil rate for any student they could convince to come and that they were exempt from local community oversight due to the fact that there were highly connected people on their board who had friends in state government.
You can have “options” without having privatization. Everyone knows that except the billionaires and their minions willing to be complicit in their attempt to privatize yet another public good.
By the way, I live in a District where there are two middle schools that are purely by lottery. Many parents — both affluent and poor — choose them for their children. The selective middle schools don’t spend huge amounts of money attacking those lottery school for not having scores as good as theirs and the lottery schools don’t suspend 20% of their at-risk kids to get the lowest performers out of their school. But then again, those lottery schools are not private charters underwritten by right wing billionaires but are part of the entire public school system. No doubt you think that the fact they don’t get 100% passing rates like high suspending charters makes them worthless and if only they were exempt from oversight they could rid themselves of all their low-performing students.
You promote privatization, not choice. You COULD have promoted choice but you chose not to, and used the very tired argument that because there are magnet schools that select high performing students, your own charters should be exempt from oversight instead of being like the myriad of LOTTERY magnet schools that are part of the system.
You don’t want choice. You want privatization. And you keep claiming that without those charters being “separate but equal” there can be no choice except highly selective magnet schools. Why do you keep on being dishonest about that?
Choice is choice. Privatization is privatization. Reformers don’t want choice, they want privatization. Just own it. Separate but equal is your mantra. No oversight is your mantra. Unfortunately, the people who don’t like oversight often have very good reason not to like it. See Donald Trump as an example.
The fact that Joseph Nathan is relegated to making this comparison shows just how far the charter school movement has fallen. They no longer actually WANT to educate the kids who have been failed by public schools and that speaks volumes about their moral and ethical compass. They want to teach only the strivers who were never being failed by their public schools and they want the freedom to remove the unworthy children by any manner necessary without any of that pesky oversight that might question Joseph Nathan when he says “hey, it might be possible that 25% of the 5 year olds are violent so why would I ever question a charter school that my big funders have told me is okay.” The reason no one trust people like Joe Nathan anymore is that when it comes to speaking out for what is right versus pleasing the billionaire funders, well, speaking out for what is right just has to be sacrificed. They are COMPLICIT.
To answer your question, Joe Nathan, if you want to have magnet schools that are open to everyone based on lottery, THEY ALREADY EXIST.
Joe Nathan is not only dishonest, but totally complicit in his claims that unless you PRIVATIZE the education of the poor children who are strivers, it can’t be done. What he means is that each lottery magnet schools that draws the better children leaves a disproportionate number of more at-risk kids for the fallback public schools. And before charters decided privatize the education of the least expensive and most profitable, everyone knew that because people interested in education were honest.
But dangle a little money before Joe Nathan and his pals in the privatization business and they are suddenly unwilling to recognize what they know is true. Joe Nathan cannot be stupid enough to sit there and tell us that he doesn’t understand that if you set up 50 lottery magnet public schools for at-risk kids with the most motivated families, it means the 50 fall back public schools aren’t going to be worse off. I think he just pretends to be that ignorant because it pays better.
Joseph Nathan, start your magnet charter as part of the system with the SAME oversight that means you don’t kick out the expensive kids. Of course you oppose that! As do your funders. You are all complicit. I suspect you know it yourself.
“…like cockroaches, neoliberals have begun to skitter to one type of privatization over another….” The language of cockroaches skittering exactly captures the transparently opportunistic lack of loyalty offered to the public by so many school reformers on both sides of the political isle.
Or else there are civil rights heroes like Rosa Parks and Kenneth Clark, both of whom advocated for new options in public education.
Would you or Singer called them cockroaches?
I doubt that either of them envisioned a system that destroys educational options for the vast majority of students, and re-segregates schools to boot.
You might want to read what Kenneth Clark has to say about the impact of competition on district public schools. It’s in his 1968 Harvard Ed Review article.
You are shameless in pretending that Kenneth Clark and Rosa Parks would have supported charter schools whose WHITE leaders publicly explain that they had no choice but to suspend 25% of the 5 year olds in their school because those at-risk non-white kindergarten children were so violent that suspension was all they could do. You are shameless in pretending they’d be supporting the billionaires like Eli Broad HONORING the charter leaders who claim that so many of their non-white at-risk 5 year olds are violent thugs so let’s not question any of their treatment of those children because they deserved every humiliation meted out to them.
Shameless — no doubt you despise the Black Lives Movement who question the high-suspending charters who you complicit charter folks like you refuse to criticize. You pretend it “could” be possible that those charter folks are telling the truth and lots of non-white 5 year olds are very violent. And you pretend Rosa Parks would agree with you.
Parks and Clark likely would be turning over in their graves to hear you pretending that they’d ever agree with your racist views about how violent 5 year old children are if they aren’t white. You are complicit.
Both vouchers and charters are alike in the way they drain funding from public schools. The choice mostly involves schools that do the choosing, rather than the students. Both charters and private schools with vouchers hire teachers that may not have a credential to do the job well. Students often receive an education of questionable quality. The monetization of education has resulted in unparalleled waste and fraud as there is very little accountability or oversight in many privatized institutions.
I agree with Singer that our better option would be to fund schools differently so that more equitable education is available to all. Poor students would benefit from schools that offer wrap around services. I also think we should continue to find ways to incentivize integrated schools as all students benefit from attending diverse schools.
Wrap around services also are a good idea. Some of us have been advocating that for more than 40 years. So is providing greater funding for schools that serve high % of low income families.
State legislatures in more than 40 states have decided that charters are part of public education. I realize there are many posting here who don’t want to acknowledge that.
“Wrap around services also are a good idea”.
Not according to the pro-charter organizations that have mounted a public campaign against Mayor de Blasio’s attempt to do just that. Because don’t you know that extra money isn’t raising test scores to the levels of charter schools? So your favorite pro-charter organizations are lobbying hard to take away the funding from the schools that teach the kids they won’t touch with a ten foot pole because their charters for strivers are far more deserving of it. Shut down those failing renewal schools and let a new charter open that will educate the strivers if they find any and market to kids who would never be in those schools if they can’t. As for the rest — let them rot, you say. Maybe not you, but the people whose financial support you drool over and thus refuse to criticize.
The attack on renewal schools because they aren’t matching the results of high suspending charters is typical of the movement you support and always, always take a pass on criticizing.
You give lip service on here while you could not be more complicit in never criticizing the well-funded organizations attacking public schools.
And it’s all okay, you say, because of Stuyvesant! After all, an honest magnet school for the brightest kids is just like lying about a charter school suspending tons of non-white 5 year olds by claiming they are violent! No difference for Joseph Nathan! If you allow Stuyvesant to exist, you must allow a charter school to lie as much as they want to get rid of those kids you prefer would remain invisible.
St. Louis has a few things happening….almost a dream come true for me….not that anyone will pay any attention, but within the last few days, what should be an explosive study…272 pages….”Charter Schools, and
the End of Desegregation in St. Louis, Missouri
Nicholas J. Eastman
Georgia State University” count on the fact that local media will studiously ignore the existence…but I am gathering as many people aware of the dishonest reporting over the last decade, and I have been told that five charters which were hacked, both staff and students might have to close…..stay tuned. Not sure if Jeff Bryant and Peter Downs will be connecting…sometimes it is best if I just make the suggestion and stay out of the way….but my long frustration for the blackout of news and history of public schools in St. Louis might be about to change.
I remember visiting St. Louis some years ago and meeting, at their request, with some African American ministers and families. They described their bitter disappointment that the deseg plan had created magnet schools in the city which received extra money, and which were allowed to use admissions tests. So many inner city youngsters were not allowed to attend these magnets in their neighborhood because they could not pass the tests.
These same families (and the local newspaper) noted that part of the deseg plan involved bringing in suburban (white) youngsters via taxi to the elite magnets.
Is it any surprise that these families were furious at the extra $ being spent to drive white suburban kids into the city, so that they could attend magnet schools that many inner city youngsters could not attend because of admissions tests?
Joe, do you support the ability to magnet schools to screen out inner city kids via use of test scores? Do you support paying for taxi cabs to bring suburban kids into the city to attend magnet schools that many inner city kids won’t be able to attend?
No I don’t. It became ludicrous….A lawsuit has been filed against a St. Louis educational organization for refusing permission for a student to enroll in a school because of his skin color.
Black.
“The only thing preventing E.L. from enrolling at Gateway (Science Academy) next year is his skin color. E.L. is prohibited from attending public schools in the city of St. Louis, including magnet schools and charter schools, because he is African-American.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/black-student-denied-access-to-school-over-race/#JDkImPbKLeeLB5iP.99
I favor the strongest possible efforts to provide the schools which educate the majority of students……I understand the idea behind magnets more than charters, because the finest students should not be denied a chance at the finest education….but it is a form of elitism, usually fueled by parents in the strongest position to push hardest…..and sometimes it can be a form of institutional racism……some charters do try and avoid this from happening, but the overall stats point in the direction of re segregation going on. …..in st. louis, they have 24,500 in the regular schools, and 10500 in charters….st. louis is in the 30 mpercent category.
some of the charters are special schools. It is hard to get info in st. Louis, which is why I doubt the study I referenced will be mentioned…Gateway might be a gulen charter….the charters used to be part of the regular school system, but I think them going their own ways was a mutual, and unwise decision.
Diane’s place here is one of the most important places on the internet……reporters do not like to report much about education. Anything we can do to leave them no choice but to do so is good public pressure…..
We agree that (admissions magnet program with some suburban students coming into St. Louis via taxi )was a terrible approach. Furthermore, my understanding was that African American students could transfer to the suburbs ONLY if the suburban district was willing to accept that individual student. Another terrible provision.
I think the schools in a metro area should be equally available to all – with transportation available.
Joseph Nathan,
So why aren’t you fighting to establish magnet schools with lotteries instead of charters?
You have no answer to that. None at all. The answer to magnet schools that screen is to also have magnet schools that don’t screen. Of course, that would require oversight.
The nasty little secret that you won’t acknowledge is that the charter schools you support just screen AFTER the fact. And you look the other way at high attrition rates and high suspension rates and kids repeating 1st grade 2 or 3 times until they leave and similar tactics that separate the strivers from non-strivers and pretend that it’s all for the kids. When it is really all for your pocketbook because billionaire funders reward the “educators” willing to be complicit in their dishonesty.
If you want magnet schools to be lottery based, do it. You have yet to explain even once why you need them to be exempt from oversight. I realize that’s something you can’t address so you ignore the question but I will keep posting it.
Why can’t you have magnet schools open by lottery with OVERSIGHT by the same people who oversee public schools. Instead of the fake “separate but equal” system you privatizers keep promoting as if that “separate but equal” isn’t intended to signal to the racists exactly what you intend it to signal.
YOU are the one claiming that the only way to have non-selective schools of choice is “SEPARATE BUT EQUAL” charters. Why?
“So in all three cases, these schools are run privately, but taxpayers pick up the tab…”
This sums it up for me as a teacher, parent, and tax payer. No, no, and no thank you.
the reason I say mutual and unwise…..I asked the superintendent at slps if he had heard about the charter schools…five of them…which had been hacked….students and staff were all affected….I asked if they were under his jurisdiction..no…they are on their own…one person told me they are about to be taken over anyway….but that gives an advantage to the main school…they have no responsibility for them, and the charter owners have far less accountability—-the story about the hacking ran for a few hours on line….then was removed, and did not appear in print. I imagine the chain pressured to keep things as quiet as possible. If charters were part of the regular system, they would have a lot more to account for, and would not be able to get to set up so easily. Many are dumping grounds….profitable for owners, and convenient for the not charter part of the district. Kids are sometimes the ones who pay the price. Sometimes they are specially privileged.
It is a lousy way to do things in my opinion.
I’m curious how this differs across districts and states. I accepted a job at a charter school, but only after doing a lot of research about the school. The school is non-profit; its director is pretty outspoken about the importance of public schools. There is an independent governance board for the school, but it is also considered a district school and as such is subject to oversight by the elected school board. It only accepts students from the surrounding neighborhoods in order to avoid a middle class take-over. If any of these things weren’t true, there’s no way I would have taken the job.
I’m not sure if all of this is a requirement of our county or just the school’s individual mission, but it certainly highlights how inconsistent Charters are state- and nation-wide. Reformers want to highlight schools like mine even though they’re CLEARLY a tiny minority of Charters. It’s misleading and unfair, and it’s why I continue to advocate for public education even as I work for a charter.
Mads, the charter idea empowers district educators as well as others who want to work outside the control of a local board. In some cases, educators have created schools in which the majority of boards of the board of directors are teachers who work in the school (on the model of rural cooperatives)
State laws vary but virtually every charter law allows teachers within a traditional district to create a new school or convert an existing one to charter status. That’s been an option from the very first charter law here in Minnesota.