When the CREDO national study of charters was released in 2009, it made huge headlines because it found that only 17% of charters were higher-performing than traditional public schools. The other 83% were either no different or lower performing.
Critics of charters often cite this study because CREDO has impeccable pro-charter credentials. Its leader Margaret (Macke) Raymond is affiliated with the conservative, pro-choice Hoover Institution at Stanford. The study was funded by the pro-choice, pro-charter, pro-voucher Walton Foundation.
When New Jersey Acting Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf released the CREDO study of NJ charters, he pointed out that CREDO was “not part of the bandwagon” promoting charters.
But critics complained that the NJ study left out charters with the lowest performing students and did not show the tiny proportions of ELLs and special education students in the “best” charters.
Now New Jersey mom Darcie Cimarusti weighs in. Cimarusti came to the charter battle only recently, when the state tried to plop a Hebrew language charter school in her district. Darcie became “Mother Crusader” and joined with other parents to fight the charter intrusion into suburban districts like her own. She testified at hearings and writes a blog.
Mother Crusader conducted her own investigation.
She dug into CREDO, its funders, its PR firm, and its staff to argue that it is part of the corporate reform movement.
Contrary to what Cerf said, it is “part of the bandwagon.”
The moral of the story: Don’t mess with Mother Crusader.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a propaganda technique I suppose the constant brainwashing of the ill informed public is their strategy:
#1: Bandwagon
This technique tries to persuade everyone to join in and do the same thing.
Thank you to Darcie for all the research and for connecting the dots, something the privatizers don’t want children to master….filling them in is good enough. That is how you control the masses.
Great work, Mother Crusader! I try NOT to be paranoid about businesses working together to privatize education, but this investigative reporting makes me think people ARE out to get public schools…
The fact that the mainstream media are not reporting on this is a result of the severe cutbacks they made to maximize their profits so their shareholders would be happy and— perhaps– to make some money selling to privatized charter schools. No… wait… I’m trying NOT to be paranoid!
You are not paranoid. Casting doubt about scientific research is a marketing strategy designed to brainwash the public and influence policy makers.
Read “The Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes & Eric Conway if you want a template for the corporate edu-research strategies. The authors revealed the oil industry’s research funding to a few well known scientists, housed in privately funded Think Tanks, who published works that cast doubt on the emerging scientific consensus on global climate change. The goal was to spark debate and challenge climate change findings that threatened the oil industry’s interests. Their product was doubt. The targets for the allegedly independent research were media outlets who promoted the controversy and gave policy makers cover for stopping political action on climate change. One component of the policy campaign was to discredit the EPA. This deceptive campaign began in the 1980’s and has poisoned the information landscape since then. It’s only NOW, prompted by Sandy’s devastation of Wall St, that some prominent R’s and D’s publicly admit climate change is a fact.
Following this same strategy, it’s not surprising that the charter industrial complex needed one study to cast doubt on previous charter studies showing no differences in outcomes from the public schools. The attacks on public schools will balloon now that “doubt” is out there about charter effectiveness. Prepare yourself for a media onslaught quoting this new CREDO study from the likes of Jonathan Alter, The NYTimes, Thomas Freidman, Bobby Jindle, Corey Booker, Chris Christie, Arne Duncan, Rahm, et al.
Expect the quotes of charters as transforming Newark public education to increase exponentially now that the privatizers have their doubt selling “research’ in hand. Let the marketing campaign begin.
I love how Mother Crusader connects the dots, but I wonder where it goes. David Coleman tells the truth when he says, in bluer terms, that no one cares what we think. The power elite doesn’t care about reputation or qualifications. Isn’t that quaint notion for middle class wannabes? Who in ed reform is more discredited than Michelle Rhee? Yet, she continues undeterred in her meteoric rise. What do we know that matters to her? Nothing. In the world that she travels in, knowledge isn’t power. Power is power.
It does matter what we know about them. But, I wonder if our best strategy isn’t a closer look at what we know about us. The public wants a well organized school option in decaying inner cities; that means that we need to remove students who disrupt learning or school climate. Maybe it’s time we embrace distance learning for our own purposes. Pump up suspension and expulsion of disruptors and provide a distance alternative for them. School safety and school environment… solved. Get your act together, come back. Can’t get it together, stay out until you can. Lets stop sacrificing every other child for the ones who suck all our real and emotional resources away. If we did that we might find heterogeneous grouping would be more successful, but where it isn’t… lets talk turkey. Parents want the right for their children to learn at a pace commensurate with their abilities. Parents also want their children to be able to aspire. These two interests are in some respects conflicting… Especially where the range of skill in one room goes from second grade to post high school. Say what you want, differentiation gurus. Differentiation cant handle it all. Its time that we address the flaws in how we group children more honestly so that we can meet the different needs in our schools and give our parents a reason to vest.
Reports come and go. The real disaster is that concerned mothers have a reasonable and understandable interest in charters if it will remove their children from bad elements, give them a view they don’t yet have or a reprieve from a slowed down curriculum.
I’m confused — Diane Ravitch is bashing CREDO after she’s spent the past two years or so citing the CREDO national charter school study and nothing else?
I will continue to cite the CREDO 2009 national study. Is there a rule that if I cite one study, I have to praise every study from the same research group? Where is that written?
Yawn. Instead of posting these complaints against charter schools, why don’t you try to make the “regular” public schools better so that caring parents would feel good about sending their kids there?
Thanks for the uninformed contempt. Maybe YOU could do more for public schools… like make some effort to find out about them, and learn something about why some are successful and some are not. If you’re very special, I’m sure you could get that done in two years. While you’re at it… Feel free to ignore how charter schools work against public schools in some places. Ignore the largely dedicated staff who literally slave to support kids. In my own case, last week alone.. I worked till after 8 pm three nights, and til 10 pm on one night. Meanwhile…. reform pundits with two or three years of experience that they call a lifetime of concern for ed reform can tarnish my reputation and that of my hard working colleagues as they dive in to turn profits or build elite careers.
Here’s a news flash. There are few teachers who are unworthy, but all teachers are taking the hit. Every teacher can now worry that if they don’t teach to the test they will be shamed in the news, that if tenure and LIFO is removed that their hard won salary will be the reason they get dumped out.. That their decent school will be destroyed as caring parents vacate public school that test prep kids to death or as a predatory charter company comes in and convinces backbone parents to leave. You may not know this, but you can’t make a public school better by dumping all the problem kids into them, cherry picking out kids whose parents are supportive or turning schools into test prep factories so that any parent with the means pulls their kids out. But, never mind…
What a delightful time of opportunity.. Entrepreneurship and social change at the same time. Thank god for all those elite school grads looking for the fast rise to superintendencies and policy positions. All in it for the children those folks, no conflict of interest for pious little careerists who hang out for exactly one minute past three years. Too bad, I suppose… they might actually find out that some of that brilliantly uninformed ed reform is destroying schools not saving them. Oh but wait.. No time for that. Real change needs another inexperienced, pontificating Indian chief.