A few weeks ago, I posted a column by Mike Petrilli defending the idea that charters skim the best, most ambitious kids from public schools. The column was refreshing in that Mike abandoned the usual reformer pretense that charters enroll “exactly” the same children as public schools and get amazing results. Mike said that charters are for “strivers,” not for the others.
Here is a story about a non-striver and his teacher. Would the charters want him?
Note that his teacher is in Mayor Bloomberg’s ATR (absent teacher reserve) pool. These are teachers who lost their jobs when the mayor closed their schools. They float from school to school, at great cost to their dignity. Through no fault of their own, they are humiliated by the NYC Department of Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Skimming” the “top” students is a hallmark of private schools. So much for the “argument” charter schools are “public” schools. They aren’t. They were created to steal from the taxpayers.
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Petrelli does not speak for many who work with inner city youngsters, whether district or charter. Also note that his children attend a suburban “public” school with few low income students. Yes, his words are troubling.
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Wonderful to hear about a teacher who made a difference for a youngster. Teachers can have a huge impact.
Darn right, many inner city charters would welcome this youngster, and any other youngster who wants to attend.
Hope readers also will pay attention to what the district teacher who wrote this reported another (district) teacher said about this student, ” I spoke with his science teacher from last year and she shuddered. “Forget him,” she said. “Not worth it.”
There are some great district & charter teachers. And there are some who have given up on youngsters. We need more who know they can make a big difference – not solving ALL problems of all students, but helping many accomplish far more than they thought possible.
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This is an inspired posting. I urge everyone who reads this piece to click on both links. Consider the contrast. Art Gold—a real teacher having to deal with real students. Michael J. Petrilli—one of the major spokespersons for the charterites/privatizers, an Executive Vice President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (“Advancing Educational Excellence”) who is modestly described on the Fordham website as “one of the nation’s foremost education analysts.”
My first thought was to remind people of the Woody Allen movie “Bananas” in which there is a scene where English-to-English translation is offered up as both a sight and thought gag. Petrilli’s “strivers” in an English-to-English translation might be rendered “the worthy few among the generally undeserving poor, properly pliant and compliant, attentive to every wiggle of a teacher’s finger, worthy of attending and graduating from obedience school.” *Of course, not the kind of school he and the other leading lights of the charterite/privatizer movement almost invariably send their children to.*
Then I decided to go Old School. Petrilli’s posting was merely “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” [Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5]
Good thing I didn’t go with my first impulses. They trivialize something very important.
First of all, I sincerely applaud Petrilli for saying what a great many of his colleagues in, and directors of, the charterite/privatizer movement almost never say out loud. I disagree with him, but good for him for speaking his mind. Honesty matters.
Second, let’s “figure” out what he’s getting at. One of the critical ideological linchpins of the charterite/privatizer movement [not necessarily every last person in it] is the notion of “accountability” [not the same as “responsibility” as Deborah Meier and Diane, among others, have suggested]. That is, what matters is what can counted. And according to accountability measures, count public schools out and count charter schools [and often vouchers] in.
But then along come unimaginative and innovation-challenged persons like, say, Albert Einstein, who is supposed to have said “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” So consider. Just where would Art Gold’s efforts to teach a ‘non-striver’ figure in a VAM formula, or for that matter, how would VAManiacs measure [before and after the fact] the selfless heroism of the six school staff who died at Newtown and the staff that remain? Got a teacher eval percentage for that?
So with all due respect to those who post here, I don’t think we are understanding what Petrilli was saying if we interpret his remarks simply as exhibiting a sneering contempt [or other negative attitude] for the vast majority of students and parents and school staff of this country. IMHO, that misses the more important point. When you fixate on deeply flawed accountability measures like VAM and the high-stakes standardized test scores that increasingly drive it, you literally are deciding not just WHAT counts, but more importantly WHO counts. And if you aren’t counted IN, then you are counted OUT. You just aren’t there any more, you don’t exist, you don’t matter.
So it’s not so much that he and his ideological brethren frequently look down on, say, teachers and students, they simply don’t even take the ‘non-strivers’ into account. What matters, what figures large in their minds, are those who ‘make the grade’ and deserve to be noticed. The rest don’t even exist, except when they get in the way of the “strivers.” Then they have to be removed. Literally.
So while I applaud Mike’s honesty, I deplore what I consider his destructive POV.
Just my two centavitos worth.
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Some charters may kick or “counsel” kids out. Others strive for diversity of all kinds. I don’t agree with Petrilli’s characterization of the proper function of charters, but I also think both your and his comments on charters rely on faulty assumptions. While some charter schools and chains have high rates of attrition, many others have the same or lower than district schools. WNYC did a comprehensive report on this recently. Reporter Beth Fertig found that charters in NYC had a lower attrition rate than district schools. See: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/dec/13/looking-charter-schools/
I agree with Joe Nathan that the original blog post is not about public v charter but about good v bad teaching. Those quiet ones are often the true critical thinkers, who are not well served by the conformity school as an institution asks of students.
Full disclosure: my own child attends a charter school, which aims to serve all its students well, especially special education and ELL students. Percentage-wise, it does have fewer special education and ELL students than the district schools. As a new school, funding comes per pupil and there is no extra funding for specialists (or even for facilities, but that’s another matter). As I understand it, the school needs a certain amount of designated IEPs to get funding for a sped teacher. So it’s something of a vicious cycle: parents who want services see that there is not a huge sped or ELL staff and go elsewhere. (Those parents of children with IEPs have said they are happy with the inclusion model at our school, which does not have a big political or celebrity name or even a single hedge fund manager on the board to make up those funding gaps.) Perhaps someone good at following the money can analyze the various state funding incentives for new charters to hire or not hire specialists. Then again, according to much of what I read, if the state provided more money for specialists, it would be undermining public education.
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Here’s a brief radio interview with students who had trouble in previous large schools, and found a home at a charter.
http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/audio-on-demand/saturday-night-with-esme-murphy/#
The first student made it clear that several factors, including family problems and bullying, led to his dropping out of the previous school. As with many others, dropping out is complex decision.
This is not a description of all charter public schools – it’s a description of this one.
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Jane, states have different strategies for funding students with special needs. Also, some states have created cooperatives that help either district and charters or both work with students having special needs. I know of such cooperatives in DC, Mn, Ohio and NY. They may be elsewhere.
Some very small districts send “low incidence” students full or part time to programs that several districts have created to work with these youngsters. Sometimes these cooperatives provide staff who work part time with several schools so students don’t have to leave their schools.
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It is refreshing when right-wingers like Petrilli tell the truth about the charter industry, and don’t try to obfuscate the practices and purpose of this popular form of school privatization. For the most honest admission of how the charter school sector really views children that cost them too much, see an essay by Petrilli’s good friend Andy Smarick entitled “The Wave of the Future.” In it, Smarick details the purpose of the proliferation of the lucrative charter school industry is to bankrupt public schools and districts. Cynically, he describes how the costs of special needs students are an integral part of that plan.
As I always say, the opposite of ‘school choice’ is school equity. I stand for the latter.
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Robert, years before there were any charters, there were “magnet” district schools that explicitly used admissions tests. Boston Latin is one of the nation’s oldest such schools. As I’ve noted elsewhere on this list serve, there are district public schools all over the nation that use admissions tests.
Most state charter laws prohibit use of admissions tests. Nevertheless, unfortunately there are some charters that use them. I think it’s wrong, and have testified on that in more than 20 states. Most legislators have listened.
Just this week some parents contacted me to describe huge difficulties their youngsters had in large suburban high schools, and stated that these teenagers are doing far better in small, non-traditional charters.
Having said that, I readily acknowledge that traditional district public schools do very well with some youngsters.
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