My favorite New Jersey blogger, known as Jersey Jazzman, is a teacher and one smart guy (I’m assuming he is a guy because of his moniker, which is not Jersey Jazzperson or Jazzwoman).
He has written a very important post. I urge you to read it carefully. It reflects on where the reform movement is heading in his state, and for that matter, nationally. He looks specifically at Newark, which has been a focal point for “reform” money and programs.
He shows (relying on the work of Bruce Baker) that the successful charters are the ones with the least challenging students, and the less successful charters have the most challenging students. The independent variable, as he points out, is not the teachers but the students.
The reformers want even more charters, as they do everywhere else. They want more public money in private hands. Why are they so unwilling to let local residents and parents have any role in the future of their schools other than to choose which one to apply to? Why do billionaires who live in California have more to say abut the future of Newark than the people who live there?
Why do the reformers blame the teachers in Newark for low scores? Why do they blame tenure and seniority for poor results? In the neighboring town, the teachers also have tenure and seniority and get great results.
This is a powerful post. Jersey Jazzman looks deep into the heart of the current American dilemma: Intense concentration of poverty and segregation in certain communities. And he calls on us to look too.
You should.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Why do the reformers blame the teachers in Newark for low scores? Why do they blame tenure and seniority for poor results?” Because #1 they aren’t reformers but deformers and #2 to attempt to destroy the teachers unions as a means of “lowering productivity costs” and, therefore, who as the owners of said privatized charters can then make that much more mullah off the backs of the average Jane and Joe (through J & J’s higher percentage rate of taxes that goes to the government and back to those supposed public schools).
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Jersey Jazzman usually hits the nail on the head. Too bad that Zuckerberg and Broad don’t follow him on Twitter or read his blog.
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Can we send a Facebook message to Zuckerbrg? I don’t do Facebook and I don’t know if he would read it….but he NEEDS to know! Maybe some could bombard him with this post?
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Charter schools that perform better by recruiting and retaining better students don’t exist in a vacuum: skimming the best and most profitable students affects other schools, though it is hard to detect in systems with few charters. The systemic effects are easier to see in a “closed system” as we have in New Orleans in which 80% of students attend charters. Every high-performing charter creates a chronically low-performing school somewhere in the system. The students that charters reject, who are high-needs and high-cost, become concentrated in a separate set of schools. These “dumping schools” concentrate students with enormous skill deficits and disruptive behaviors, making it impossible for educators to teach and also creating an intractable non-compliant student subculture. Privatization creates good schools by creating even worse schools.
The evidence of this “rob peter to pay paul” phenomenon is not difficult to find. As charter schools increased in relative performance the first few years in New Orleans, the remaining state-run public schools were locked into chronic failure. For four years in a row, the direct-run state schools posted an average 80% failure rate on the 8th grade math LEAP progression test. This, despite the fact that the state had doubled the expenditure per pupil for a period of time and all these schools were directly run by Supt. Paul Vallas who selected the “world class” school administrators, contracted to staff the schools with the “best and brightest” teachers (TFA), and controlled the curriculum and hours of instruction. It was clear that the every year charters would skim the best students from the remaining schools and dump the low-performing students forced on them by the lottery.
In 2007, the highest ranking official in the state takeover of New Orleans schools said in a meeting that I attended that some charters were systematically dumping challenging and low-performing students into the remaining public system. Six years after the takeover, only 6,000 of the total 42,000 students remain in non-charter dumping schools: 100% of those students are in state-run schools that the state itself graded as “D” or F” schools in 2011. It is a wonder that New Orleanians can’t figure out why we have the highest per-capita murder rate in the nation, and school-age teens are the principal perpetrators of the most reckless of the violence
.
Creating excellent schools is not the same as creating excellent school systems. The free-market has one goal: profit. It did not come into existence to create innovative and equitable public services. The New Orleans Model ensures that successful schools are created at the expense of the system as a whole; one student advances at the expense of another. If other school systems opt for the New Orleans Model, they need to do so knowing that the result will be a separate and unequal system of “college prep” and “prison prep” schools.
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As always, Diane, thank you. A couple of updates from Darcie Cimarusti and myself:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/07/virtual-cronies.html
http://mothercrusader.blogspot.com/2012/07/benjamin-rayer-new-jerseys-king-of.html
I try very, very hard not to engage in hyperbole (other than for satire), but when it comes to what’s happening in NJ…
“Cesspool” is the best word that comes to mind.
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This is now, and has always been about who controls a $1.2 trilliondollar public school “industry” now largely controlled by 1) teachers and school administrators, 2) parents and their organizations, and 3) low level officials like elected school board members. Unless we ge some big time help and soon, we are toast! Lets not just sit around “waiting for stupidman”. We need to consolidate our efforts and get out the message that public schools are important, they work and they should be for everyone.
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