Charter schools were created twenty years ago to address problems that public schools could not solve and to collaborate with public schools, sharing their best ideas. They were not intended to compete with public schools, but to support them. Today, however, many charter schools (especially the chains) see themselves as antagonists to public schools. eager to take their funding and their space. A reader from Buffalo sent in this comment:
Many of the charter schools in Buffalo are a throw back to segregation. These all black schools are actually favored by the parents, but they aren’t getting different results.
Anyone can start a charter school, you don’t need to be an educator (and it shows). Some of the charter schools are run by for profit corporations funded by public money.
Besides being a way to weaken the unions, charter schools are funded on the back of public education.
I am not against the idea of charter schools, I am against the reality. Charter schools could provide unique services, such as schools specializing in autism or all male schools for wayward boys. How about a charter school for pregnant teens or teen mothers? Maybe a hands on school for the child that learns by doing instead of seeing and listening. However, these schools should not take away funds from the public schools, they need their own funding line. The teachers should be given some rights and guarantees, even if not unionized – i.e. They are not slave labor to be made to teach almost year round, Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 5:00 or later, then cast aside when rightfully complaining or when due for a salary raise.
Buffalo has lots of problems, charter schools should not be one of them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not to worry — Buffalo now has Johns Hopkins and its experts on the case. Imagine that comes with TFA riding in on a white horse also.
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/turnaround-plans-for-troubled-buffalo-schools-now-properly-completed-20130823
LikeLike
I envision a bumper sticker with a clique, or label warning. Public beware of charter schools; Charter schools segregate; Investigage Charter Schools; Who’s Running Charter Schools?; Who’s Paying for Charter Schools?; Make Charter Schools Equitable…
LikeLike
Agreed that charter school teachers should be afforded “some rights and guarantees” — but certainly not at the level of unionized schools and at no greater level than the children and parents who attend those schools are legally accorded, which is far less than the due process and other rights accorded all within the traditional public schools. While it’s easy to empathize with parents who enroll their kids in charters as a last-ditch attempt (albeit usually a misguided choice) to get them a better education, it’s not easy to understand why any qualified, well-educated teacher would agree to work in such test factories and function at the mercy of their typically non-educator principals and CMO honchos. That they endure brutish work demands, longer hours, lower salaries, fewer health and pension benefits, and other professionally demeaning stresses should be a daily reminder to them of the essential value of teacher unions.
LikeLike
“unionized schools”
Can you name one “unionized school”? And what is your definition of a “unionized school”?
LikeLike
The *return* of segregation? Good grief.
Maybe a simple visual will help people understand why the worries about charter schools and segregation are akin to fretting that the deck chairs on the Titanic weren’t in neat little rows.
This is a link to a dot map showing residential patterns by race in Buffalo and its surroundings, which is one of the five most segregated metropolises in the US. As is typical for a northern/midwestern city, people of color are confined to a relatively small section of the inner city: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5010997834/sizes/z/in/photostream/
That giant sea of red didn’t get red by accident or through benign happenstance, and for all intents and purposes it remains off-limits to most people who live in the city core. The real issue here is that districts and residential segregation have walked together hand in hand ever since Brown. I encourage anyone who is concerned about worsening segregation in the inner city to ask the walled-off “red zones” to pull their fair share. To do something. Anything!
LikeLike
Buffalo moved away from neighborhood schools and created a Magnet School program. There were also sister schools – 2 neighborhoods, black and white, PreK to 2nd grade in one neighborhood and 3rd to 8th grade in another. White teachers could not get tenure until there were a certain amount of minority teachers who also got tenure. It was overseen by Judge Curtin.
Over time more white families left the city. Programs changed. Yet there are inducements to stay. City Honors, a nationally renowned school grades 5 to 8, guarantees success if you can pass the entrance requirements. The Frederick Law Olmsted schools, K to 4 and 5 to 12, have 70% gifted and talented students and 30% neighborhood students. The Acadamy for the Visual and Performing Arts, grades 5 to 12, is by audition only. There are two schools on college campuses, one is a five year program with an associates degree at graduation, and we can’t forget about Emerson Culinary School with an attached restaurant. These are some of the bright spots.
And now there is Say Yes which will pay the NYS tuition for Buffalo students who graduate. It’s a new program, but hopefully it will prevent further white flight.
So, there are major poverty issues, but there are also some excellent opportunities. It’s the students themselves who need to be convinced of the value of education.
LikeLike
Charter schools was always a fox in sheeps clothing. When Albert Shanker and others put forth the idea, I initially saw worth in a very Deweyan approach to schooling—which continues to be missing from our public school system. But early on I observed the perfect storm of the market, privatization, and race merge to form the charter school movement we see in our states today. The charter school movement long ago abdicated its potential role as an engine of innovation for the institutional caboose of standardization and segregation.
LikeLike
I totally agree with this post, except instead of “slave labor to be made to teach almost year round, Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 5:00 or later,” charter school teachers are often working 7am to 10pm or longer, and they are required to respond to phone calls and emails from students at all hours of the day and night.
I was at one meeting where charter teachers talked about working every waking hour while getting only 4 hours or less of sleep per night. Several teachers talked about being so tired after late nights of grading and lesson planning that they regularly fall asleep with their shoes on.
Yes, we want teachers to put maximum effort into their work, but teaching should be a sustainable profession, not a brutal slog that burns out even the most energetic young teachers after only a few years.
Quality teacher training that prepares teachers to work smarter instead of harder and longer hours, rather than throwing newbies to the wolves with 5 weeks of training, is one important way to improve education.
LikeLike
“charter school teachers are often working 7am to 10pm or longer, and they are required to respond to phone calls and emails from students at all hours of the day and night.”
That’s what’s so funny about the Eli Broad School of Management.
No one manages like this anymore. No one. It was an 80’s idea that is totally discredited. People can’t work productively and well for those kinds of hours, particularly in a field like teaching young children which I imagine requires lots of careful listening and constant dialogue and on-the-fly adjustments to changes.
“Putting in lots of hours” doesn’t mean 1. getting a lot done or, 2. producing anything worthwhile.
Eli Broad’s management training seems to me to be 30 years old. I have no earthly idea why he’s considered an “innovator” or someone to follow in ed reform circles. Lots of hours, no autonomy, and rigidly top-down. This is supposed to be “cage busting”?
We somehow got the worst of business and the worst of education in this idiotic, misguided marriage of the two disciplines.
LikeLike
Concerned Citizen & Chiara Duggan: thank you for your comments.
Notice this is similar to high-stakes standardized testing in which a very narrow and imprecise sliver of quantity (test scores) supposedly represents a broad range of qualities like all the complex aspects of student learning and excellence (or lack thereof) of teaching.
Simply adding up countless extra hours—a quantity—only gives the appearance of improving quality. In fact, it strongly works against having time to prepare and refresh oneself and maintain the necessary mental and emotional balance to be in tip top condition to perform consistently at a high level.
The leading edge of the charterite/privatizer movement values thoughtless frenetic activity—the appearance of accomplishing something—over the reality of truly accomplishing something, anything, worthwhile and sustainable.
Let the stellar purveyors of $tudent $ucce$$ defend their proven failures on Feb. 6 at Lehigh University.
Try as they might, they can run but they can’t hide.
🙂
LikeLike
“The leading edge of the charterite/privatizer movement values thoughtless frenetic activity—the appearance of accomplishing something—over the reality of truly accomplishing something, anything, worthwhile and sustainable. ”
No doubt, KTA, no doubt!
It’s the ol “Doing the Wrong Thing Righter” mental masturbation appearance trumps substance American Way!
Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan (Viet Nam) did when he noted in Sir! No Sir! that:
“I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
LikeLike
Some good news from Toledo. Marilou Johanek is a columnist for the Toledo Blade.
Lately she’s been writing on ed reform.
http://www.toledoblade.com/MarilouJohanek/2013/11/02/New-group-befriends-beleaguered-public-education.html
“Political and corporate forces are reshaping public education by standardizing, quantifying, and privatizing it. Public schools are buffeted by all sorts of competing agendas that seek to influence policy on charter schools, vouchers, value-added measures, unfunded mandates, high-stakes tests, and Common Core. Who wants a piece of the public school action?
Those who work in local schools are as frustrated as those on the outside, trying to make sense of the upheaval. Educators are exasperated with cyclical attempts at school reform that are hastily embraced and poorly developed. Administrators are tired of begging for money. Property owners are sick of school levies. Parents are dismayed with eliminated programs, laid-off faculty and staff, and pay-to-play sports. Students are numb and joyless about learning. They’re guinea pigs for revised expectations, exams, and for-profit education.
Public education is at a crossroads. It needs advocates to sustain it as an indispensable public service. Fortunately, a grass-roots campaign is forming to raise awareness of what’s at stake in public education.”
I wrote her and thanked her for her last piece on this.
LikeLike
When one of the Buffalo Charter Schools was closed down by King in NYS, due to low test scores (less than a week before the new school year started), the BPS took the school over, gave the parents choices on whether to stay or attend another Buffalo Public School, arranged busing, and rehired some of the faculty. Not all the faculty could be hired because they did not have the required credentials.
It was an amazing feat. Yet the concept of uncertified teachers in a charter school gives me pause. Is this common practice? Is this a way to keep the costs down? Is this even legal? Are there any rules at all? One has to wonder if this is the direction which the “powers that be” have in mind for educational change. At this rate there will soon be a teacher shortage in numerous, difficult to fill, subject areas, like math and science, which will result in hiring warm bodies. These warm bodies might one day be excellent teachers, but do we want them cutting their eye teeth, with little or no training, using our children as guinea pigs?
Just a concern as we look forward to the future of education in America.
LikeLike