A reader from Pennsylvania asks whether charter schools are public schools if they seek to avoid transparency and if their teachers are not subject to the same evaluation scheme as public school teachers:
Charters insist on being called “public” schools.
Yet in Pennsylvania charters are in court trying to prevent laws requiring them to be transparent about their operations, as public schools are required to do.
The state legislature just passed a law requiring 50% of teacher evaluations to be based test scores. The law EXEMPTS charter teachers from this new evaluation system.
In the ALEC rush of legislation at the close of its session last week, a bill was introduced in the PA legislature to EXEMPT charters from the state’s Sunshine Law which requires public institutions receiving state money to be transparent about their contracts. It received 120 favorable votes in the House and failed by a few votes in the Senate.
In Philadelphia we have a charter operator, Universal, which was given Audenreid High School, which was made a charter as soon as a new facility was built at tax payer expense, operating for the past year rent and maintenance cost free. Next year they will have to pay $500,000 which just a quarter of the expense for rent and maintanence. The SRC will cover the rest. This is in a School District which has a $265 million deficit, plans to close 65 public schools over the next few years, and is threatening to unilaterally cut the wages and benefits of public school employees.
So I take back what I said at the beginning of this thread. Charter schools are not open to public scrutiny.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters pick when they want to be public or private, and do so to benefit their goals. They want to advertise, hire, invest, admit students and lobby as a private school. But let them be the target of a lawsuit, then it’s a quick claim they are part of the public school system and hence my liability as a school taxpayer.
If they want a penny of public school tax revenues, they should be accountable to an elected board and standing ed laws and regulations.
The only thing public about charter schools is the money, so it seems here in the northeast. Love the money….not so hot about the transparency though.
Diane, I thank you for calling attention to the challenges of public schools working well with public charter schools. (when i say public charters, i’m referring to those I’m familiar with where the local school district is the authorizor and the transparency and accountability measures are in place).
As a strong supporter of teachers, i’m surprised you don’t think it is a positive for some schools to be able to get out of all this ridiculous tying teachers to test scores…isn’t this a good thing ?? Or is this just really galling because because your goal is for ALL schools to be exempt and transparency?
I’m reading all of your blogs posts, and you are posting many, and I love your perspective. Your book The Great American School system actually educated me at how much I had been”fooled” into using many of the buzzwords (like choice). Now, as a parent serving on a governing board for a local not-for profit-public charter I feel i now have to use instead of “charter school” to accurately share what kind of public school my kid attends and to avoid rapid rush to judgement during conversation!
After reading your book, I was left seeking the solutions to preserving the pubic schools and promoting the quality charters who work well with the district. YOur blog posts point out many areas of concern, but I’m not seeing enough solutions. ARe there any? Is there one group you’d recommend supporting or a school district you’d suggest as a good model of public charters? Thank you.
I don’t think that teachers should be evaluated by student test scores. Most of the variation in test scores is caused by factors beyond the teachers’ control. I certainly believe in the importance of meaningful evaluation of teachers. No incompetent person should be allowed to teach. But from everything I have learned about value-added assessment, I have concluded it is a sham and junk science.
The purpose of charter schools is not to allow teachers to escape from foolishness. No one should have foolishness imposed upon them. No one’s career should be determined by junk science.
The purpose of charter schools should be to help solve problems that public schools have not solved; to act as laboratories on behalf of the public schools; and to benefit the public schools by doing so. Unfortunately, in the current entrepreneurial gold rush, charters are now treated as competition for the public schools, as market strategies intended to make public schools get higher scores or die. That is wrong.
There is a place in American education for charter schools. Its place should not be to disable public education, but to make it better.
Agree. “value added” another buzz word. Agree, competition is not good in education since children are not widgets (despite everyone wanting to apply a business model to education).
SOlving unsolved problems is a good purpose for charters. WHy is it that districts don’t create their own laboratories? Why do they have to look to charters at all?
A very helpful post, Diane. I will check out this docket. Thank you!
My city pays a private company to pick up our trash and recycables. I suppose we could expand our public works department and have our city government become directly responsible for trash and recycable pick-up but we have chosen, through our elected representatives, to contract this essential service out.
No one refers to this company as a public company, because it isn’t. I don’t think charters, which similarly provide a contracted-out service can honestly be called public, either.
Of course, if the private trash company started to perform badly — say, skipping entire streets or leaving messy piles of garbage behind — my fellow citizens and I could make our displeasure known to our elected representatives. If they didn’t respond to our satisfaction, we could support different candidates for city council or even choose to run ourselves.
The voters have a means of recourse — City Council must be accountable to us.
This is where the analogy breaks down. Where is the parallel acountability to the public in the charter system?
As others have pointed out, charter schools are public only in so far as they get public money. Here in NJ, charter schools are imposed on a school district without any input from the residents of the district. The tax payers do not get to vote on whether they would want the charter shool in their district or not. They do not get to vote on the charter school budget, they do not get to vote on the charter school board of directors. In many of the more affluent and successful municipalities of NJ there is a firece resistance developing to the imposition of charter schools on their school districts. NJ Commissioner of Education Cerf is, in effect, a czar, an autocrat who imposes a charter school on a school district without any consideration of the residents and tax payers. Charter schools are almost like separate school districts unto themselves totally unaccountable to the local ELECTED school board but still they take public funds.
Joe, we need to keep the dialogue with our state and local elected NJ officials going. Many in the state legislature are hearing us on other education-related topics, but they don’t always get THIS message. We need to keep the “public” in education, and we have the means to do so at the grass roots level. It’s happened before. Get the word out, and keep your network going. Never give up.
It appears that many people do not understand the meaning of the word “private” as used in the term “private corporation”. Combined with the popular myth of “corporate personhood” — that our benighted Supreme Court has so far declined to dispel — private corporations have managed to claim rights to privacy that our sonically probed, video-taped, and x-rayed masses of non-corporate persons lost some years ago.
See Thom Hartmann • Unequal Protection for the hysterical history of how a myth became quasi-legal.
Let me try that link again …
http://truth-out.org/thom-hartmann-unequal-protection
Charter schools ARE public schools. We are audited, all our teachers are fully certified and highly qualified. We abide by all the rules of every other public school.