What happens when privately managed charter schools replace public schools? when experienced teachers are replaced by TFA temporary teachers? A reader comments:
“From what I can tell, Arizona’s TFA teachers are thought of as rock stars in education. Knights in shining armor to save the school day. It’s the new baby and everyone loves it. Charters are popping up all over the place. The buildings are beautiful. The shiny new baubles in town capture the eye of many parents who have bought the propaganda that public schools suck. No facts, just feelings…look at where MY kid is going to school. WE are better parents than those public school parents. I think I’m going to be sick…of a broken heart over the demise of what once was the center of a community…the neighborhood school where a sense of belonging made all the difference.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All I can do is read that and at what is being destroyed before my eyes.
LikeLike
oops. I had “sigh” between arrows and the software evidently deletes words between arrows. Well, I learned something today. 🙂
LikeLike
If allowing students in the same neighborhood to go to different schools is so socially disruptive, should we make private schools illegal? Twice as many students go to private schools as charter schools.
I am also curious about the thinking that goes on when determining attendance catchment areas. Is the goal to preserve neighborhoods or some other worthy social goal like making the school more diverse than the typical neighborhood?
LikeLike
You’re presuming that children whose parents send them to private school socialize with those who don’t. That’s not been my experience.
Your mileage may vary.
LikeLike
Actually I am pointing out that the lack of social interaction you discribe is destructive of neighborhoods and perhaps should be discouraged by making private education illegal. Dealing with the competing goals of determining catchment areas would be more difficult.
LikeLike
I realize what you were getting at–I’m saying that the wealthy have always sent their children to private schools. Public schools have always been for the “rest of us”.
I don’t think one could legally close private schools, for one thing, and for another, the wealthy would fight that tooth and nail.
LikeLike
Teaching, we as a society agreed to create one system of education. And we made it compulsory. Being that we are a democracy, we also believe in choice – however – we also believe in shared sacrifice for the common good which is why we pay taxes which pay for things we may not personally use.
So, your point of making private schools illegal does not jive with our democracy – our society is concerned so far as that everyone has the opportunity for an education – if people are willing to go beyond their commitment to the shared public system and pay for private schools – so be it.
Those who go to private schools, usually do have a very cohesive community (and from what I’ve seen, not usually an integrated one which I think should be addressed except that then the government would be controlling the “private market”).
We should not ignore though that we cannot have 2 systems of public education that are separate but “equal” which is what school choice purports to be yet we constantly see massive amounts of low achieving students crammed into the same public schools that then become failing sometimes overnight. One system has one set of rules and charters have a different set.
That was created under the guise of “innovation” but has led to nothing of the sort – it was a great trojan horse that’s led to a way to split the system open and let the one that supports communities fail.
The charter system offers nothing but instability and a way for parents to try to “escape” to the “good” schools while concentrating “undesirables” that will create the most problems and cost the most to educate (and which we’ll give new constantly burning out teachers).
LikeLike
The criticism of open enrollment schools presented in this post is that it is destructive of existing housing neighborhoods.
Does the following paragraph ring true?
The private school system offers nothing but instability and a way for parents to try to “escape” to the “good” schools while concentrating “undesirables” that will create the most problems and cost the most to educate (and which we’ll give new constantly burning out teachers).
LikeLike
TE:
In a strange way your arguments make me smile like the outspoken regulars on here do. Remember, this is a forum for discussion, but many days all I do is read the comments and watch the interaction.
If I might just say, TE, you remind me of a ten year old I had in Sunday School once. (With all due respect, I might add). I think we know what our host blogger thinks, but I do think the purpose of the blog is discussion. But anyway, I think you keep coming back, TE, because you know there might be some truth to the prevailing ideas on this blog. Your persistence speaks louder than your arguments. Like a ten year old who wants to argue the existence of God at Sunday School (where he is surrounded by believers), I propose you suspect there might be some truth to the responsibility a democratic society has to providing a public school. That a public school would be stronger if those who instead attend private schools if they attended the public schools could probably be argued all day. But what I think is undeniable (and that even you are catching on to) is that whether the wealthy use it or not, we need to provide public schools for all children.
I have been told that the most dangerous word, in application, in our language is “exclusive.” And yet, we do it all the time. And just as someone should be able to have piercings and tattoos if they want, so too should they be able to be exclusive if they want. But they are still a part of the society at large (their town, county, state, country) and an obligation to the general welfare is inherent in that (they still use the roads, the cops, the firemen etc). Our country, in my opinion, is going through a sophomoric struggle to determine what responsibilities we have to society at large–and on this blog, in particular, in regards to education.
But in general watching the choice argument play out is like watching a four year old rationalize why he should get the biggest piece of cake and still call it sharing.
LikeLike
One of my sentences was not clear:
Whether or not a public school would be strengthened by the attendance of those who instead choose private is debatable. If people don’t want to be somewhere, they might end up detracting from the experience of others.
There are, however, plenty of affluent families who do raise their children with a sense of obligation to their societies and who send their children to public school with the intent of being good contributors who will keep standards high.
LikeLike
Gee, maybe the so-called reformers are right, and the problem is teachers: your inability to reason and debate honestly makes me fear for your student’s futures, unless of course you know what you’re doing and intend to derail the discussion.
To my knowledge, no one on this site has ever, EVER, raised the issue of prohibiting private schools: that’s a straw man argument that you persist in bringing up.
What Diane and the majority of this blog’s readers object to is the redistribution of public dollars to private entities (i.e., charter schools) that masquerade as public schools, while extending the economic and social reach of those of promote them.
You could engage in that debate if you wanted to, but apparently you prefer to divert the discussion with irrelevant points.
Please go back to miseducating your students about homo economicus, self-regulating markets and the Godliness of the Invisible Hand.
Who knows, maybe if you’re successful, one of your grads will in a few years will enrich themselves by afflicting public school teachers with all sorts of Free Market fundamentalism, and you can feel proud.
Otherwise, please spare us your constant misdirection.
LikeLike
I agree that no one has proposed making private schools illegal here. My point is that posters here SHOULD be proposing that private schools be made illegal because of the impact that private schools have on public schools.
LikeLike
TE The Method of Elechus was amusing at first but now your tiresome posts seem only to disrupt honest discussion.
Are you saying private schools should be outlawed? Do you have a point or opinion?
LikeLike
Many parochial (private) schools in our state are VERY community oriented and centered around a church. The non-religious private schools also have a very tight knit community being the social and financially elite who frequently mingle at the country club, business functions, fundraisers. Your premise that private schools do not form a community/neighborhood is false. I do not understand why you make the leap to outlawing private schools because public schools also form communities based on location.
LikeLike
It is the original poster’s premise that allowing students to attend schools outside the neighborhood is destructive of the community, not my premise. I agree that many schools, private, magnet, and charter create their own community.
LikeLike
I have no idea what point you are trying to make. Please excuse my exasperation as I am sure Socrates face the same reaction to endless questions with no conclusion.
Yes. Public schools DO form a community as we agree. So do private schools. I have heard few people wanting to outlaw private schools in America, but there are MANY – mostly those who view Ayn Rand as the second coming – who want to outlaw and, if they can’t do that, destroy via underhanded means the public schools that many of us value. Is there freedom in that?
LikeLike
The post claims to be an argument against charter schools but it is not. If you find it persuasive, it is an argument against any school that admits students from multiple geographic neighborhoods, so it applies to magnet programs and private schools as well.
I take it that you do not find it persuasive because you believe schools form their own communities. I think you are probably right about that and have argued in e past that charter schools do form their own community.
LikeLike
His point is to mislead and misdirect.
Don’t let him, since he has a long track record on this site inserting fallacious points and reasoning.
LikeLike
My point is that if you want to argue against charter schools and not argue against private or magnet programs, you need to draw some tighter distinctions.
Why does do charter schools with randomized admission requirements harm local public schools by creaming while private and magnet schools with explicit performance based admission requirements do not? Why does my neighbor enrolling his children in a private school because he believes in a Montessori education hem my neighborhood but my neighbor enrolling his children in a public magnet Montessori program (not that we have one in our town, but others in other states do I believe) does not harm the neighborhood?
LikeLike
I chose to send my children to parochial schools because their father and I agreed that we wanted religion to be a central focus in their daily lives. I did not make this decision to “avoid” the public schools, where I have been teaching for 20+ years. We paid tuition for their parochial education. The school is a focus of our entire parish community, which contributes greatly to the larger community in our city. The blog post refers to the assumption that all teachers and public schools are”deficient” and must be changed, managed or replaced. The what we are teaching has eclipsed the who.
LikeLike
And you BELONG to a place where everyone “knows” you. This place does not permit pop-up, paid “experts”, to prance about and pretend to know how to instruct or assess you. This place where you BELONG is already into you. They dig you. You are an interesting person to them. They honor and challenge you. They protect you from adopting a destructive view of yourself as a failed learner, citizen and human being.
LikeLike
There is, of course, another side to the neighborhood. You might be seen as an outsider, one that does not fit in. You become a loner or perhaps what has come to be called a “stairwell kid” in the public schools in my town.
LikeLike
Kathy:
I disagree with the point teachingeconomist raised, though I think I understand the reason behind it. However, you do your argument little good with your ad hominems . You do realize that our host has no K-12 classroom experience.
Diane: Please correct me if my statement is inaccurate.
LikeLike
I don’t think poster Kathy was particularly responding to me, but was pointing out the virtues that might come from the very best sort of community. I just believe that few actual communities live up to that very tolerant ideal.
LikeLike
Where were the “ad hominem” attacks? Is that your new schtick when questioned or challenged? You seem to be going overboard.
Diane has other credentials that you don’t have and this is HER blog.
Was that an attack?
LikeLike
Linda:
I don’t think I was being questioned or challenged at all. I thought that Kathy comment was directed at teachingeconomist Perhaps I was wrong.
LikeLike
Kathy:
To whom was your comment directed? I thought it was teachingeconomist but others think not.
LikeLike
Chicago has dozens of examples of how charters killed community, sometimes quickly, other times more lengthily. One of the tricks to this scam is that the charters are exempt from the personal and professional scandals that would be blaring as front page “news” were the same to happen in a real public school.
Two Chicago examples are worth remembering, because the history is so sad — or tragic.
Eight years ago, during Arne Duncan’s sanctimonious prattling racism, Chicago Public Schools moved to close George W. Collins High School on the West Side (North Lawndale). The school was a few blocks from where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had lived while in Chicago, and had been built, as the “school in the park,” as the result of a massive community organizing project that spanned the decade of the Civil Rights Movement. Led by the “mothers” — the foremost of whom was called “Ma Fletcher” — the community demanded a new public school in Douglas Park. They got it, and Collins High School opened in September 1976. I was part of the opening faculty there, teaching English. The founding principal was Grady Jordan, who had been a fierce community organizer, teacher, and administrator for more than a decade before the opening of Collins. Like most of the “mothers”, Grady (I use his first name, because he is a long-time friend) came from Mississippi and had enough stories to fill another dozen volumes of “The Warmth of Other Suns.”
Collins was based on the idea that the best we could do was serve the community. And the community — when Dr. King came to Chicago, when Collins opened, and into the 21st Century — was tragically poor and segregated and black. We worked hard with every students, and had many successes. At the same time, under the circumstances, the tragedies of the conjunction of poverty and vicious segregation were always near. It was at Collins that I learned a rule about inner city teaching: always try to go to the wakes of dead students. I kept practicing that until I was fired and blacklisted by Paul Vallas in 2000 (it’s had to believe this is the 13th anniversary of that Board of Education vote, but this month it is).
As the 21st Century dawned, it became clear that the ruthless racism of “standards and accountability” was aimed at schools like Collins and teachers who had remained, as I had (though not at Collins) in inner city segregated schools serving the poor. Paul Vallas began publishing a list, with the cooperation of the newspapers, of the city’s “best” and worst high schools. Collins was always near the “bottom.”
Finally, Arne’s racist policies singled out Collins for destruction. Collins was a “failing school” and had to be closed, replaced by a “turnaround” school and also a “co-located” charter high schools. Despite enormous protests, and eloquent denunciations of Duncan’s policies, Collins was closed, the majority of the teachers were purged, and my brothers and sisters were replaced by FNG teachers like those described above.
The arrogance of the “turnaround” and charter people who occupied Collins was surpassed only by their basic ignorance.
As a predictable result, tragedy struck.
The charter school staff took a bunch of the kids on a weekend trip to a rural YMCA camp. Some of the kids snuck out at night, and took boats into the lake. The boats had already been readied for storage for winter, and the plugs in their bottoms had been taken out. The boats sank and three of the North Lawndale Charter High School students drowned.
The media cover up of the criminal negligence of the principal and staff of the charter school began almost immediately. Instead of placing the monstrosity in context (a bunch of FNG staff who wouldn’t listen to us veteran went out and failed to supervise a field trip properly — basic stuff for any real public school teachers), the newspapers wound up quoting the grief of the school’s principal, etc. etc., etc. blah., blah., blah.
That principal is still there, and the arrogance of that approach continues. One of the many unanswered context questions was why the “new” Collins charter school hadn’t been teaching all of its students to swim. But like so many questions that have come up over the years, the coverup on behalf of the charters was firmly in place. And there were no longer any independent black community media to call for justice, rather than make excuses.
I’m sorry. We all make mistakes. But some of the most basic rules of urban teaching and administration are ignored by the charters because they know they are better than the rest of us. So even when they are guilty of negligent homicide they get away with — murder.
I won’t share my other charter corruption story about “Perspectives” charter school (Calumet High School version) here and now, except to say that one of the grave dangers children face going to charter schools is that an outfit that hires its teachers because those teachers “love children” and believe that “all children can learn” are open to infiltration by sexual predators.
LikeLike
George, it is clear that you care/cared about the children you served. I am glad you have this forum to share those stories. I absorb all of them.
Thank you.
LikeLike
I love George!
LikeLike
Thank you, George , for a great post.
LikeLike
George, your post is quite moving. Thank you for this perspective and history. I want to copy and post your comment on my own blog.
LikeLike
Anything I post here or elsewhere is public and can be shared anywhere else.
LikeLike
Please tell us more about charter school crimes.
I am starting to realize that what Clarence Thomas is to the Supreme Court, Barack Obama is to the US Presidency.
The cynic in me was lulled for too long. When Obama made Arne Duncan–the racist scourge of Chicago public schools–his Secretary of Education, that proved it.
LikeLike
I have a different opinion. Clarence Thomas is a rock of constitutionalism on the Supreme Court. And also an educated man who can write. By contrast Barak Obama likes to circumvent the constitution when he can get away with it, and can neither think, write or speak absent a teleprompter. You are confusing Clarence Thomas’s real intellect and legal scholarship with a person whose study of law has taught him nothing about law.
LikeLike
By the way, where was the “community organizer,” Barack Obama back then? Shilling for charter schools? Was he at any school children’s wakes in Chicago?
The only thing he probably organized in Chicago was faux-support for charter schools.
LikeLike
Talk about babies! Cry, baby cry!
This is the statement I give to all those moaning about a change coming to education.
They are lost in the past and cannot see anything but their own selfish wants and needs
More on my site: In Defense of Freedom. http://bit.ly/14kQyG4
Dick Velner – Parent, Teacher and Curriculum Writer
LikeLike
Whatever gets you through the night, Dick.
LikeLike
Do you even read what people post? We have George’s heartfelt story and your nonsense. What is wrong with you?
LikeLike
We need to keep doing everything we can to educate parents about things like charter schools…like how they don’t always outscore public schools and like how they drain resources form public schools. I also suspect that if charters showed up in my city, a number of the Catholic schools in my city would close. If a charter school is providing things like arts, not so much testing, etc. then I can see how parents might like the escape from the neighborhood public schools. What we need to do though, is band together and insist that rather than spending the money on a charter school spend the money on what the charter school claims it will provide on the public schools.
LikeLike
Diane:
What are the conditions which would warrant the closing of a High School?
LikeLike
Under enrollment not test scores
LikeLike
Of course, charter schools can create under enrollment. CPS used that as one of their key reasons for closing schools. In “the olden days,” under enrollment would truly be demonstrated without any machinations. Now, under enrollment is being manufactured.
LikeLike
Adelanto, where the “Trigger” was pulled is an exception because all factions were at each others throats for years previously. Plus, the district had a chance to submit a proposal to the parents to keep their school, but alas, missed the deadline.
LikeLike