On November 11, right before I fell ill, I gave two lectures in Princeton. The first was held at Princeton High School and open to the community. After dinner I lectured as part of a series at Princeton University. Two different speeches, but the message was the same. The High School speech was focused on New Jersey, the evening speech on national trends.
Within a few days, I noted that someone from a New Jersey charter school attended the High School lecture and disagreed. It happens. I forgot about it. These days my attention is devoted to getting well.
Mother Crusader (Darcie Cimarusti) was there, and she didn’t like the column one bit. In this post, she took apart the charter advocate’s claims one by one, with her usual research skills and panache. You can see the original column and Darcie’s careful dissection here.
Behind the point-counterpoint is a larger question. What happens when charters open in small towns and villages? I recently read about a push to introduce charters in Idaho? What happens in a town of 15,000 when the public school loses money and students to the charter? With less money, the public school is not likely to get better. In the larger picture, however, the real danger is that the school that was once the glue of the community is torn asunder. The public school suffers. The community suffers. The academic results are no different. One school has few or no students with serious disabilities or English learner. The other gets them all. What’s the point?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We kind of know what happens. In PA, we have limited brick-and-mortar charters, but we’ve been dealing with cyber-charters for a few years now.
It is a crushing formula for reimbursement– the state gives the charter the per-capita cost for each student. That generally translates into about 10K per student taken from the home district and redirected to the cyber school (the cost is greater for special needs students).
In my mainly-rural district two years ago, the total cost of cyber-students to the district was about $800,000. And then the district closed two elementary schools with the stated intent of saving— about $800,000.
How charters will affect school districts will depend a great deal on the funding formula imposed by the state. In Pennsylvania, cyber-schools are choking smaller school districts.
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Scary! Who knows what other questionable acts are being perpetrated by Charter School Administrators.
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This is Patty Murray on the early childhood bill in the senate:
“It works directly with individual states to create early learning programs with quality teachers and high standards, but it also provides states, school districts and preschool programs the flexibility they need to meet their local needs.”
http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/nov/17/investment-in-early-education-crucial-to-state-us/
Okay, KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW about the last decade of ed reform, can we at least ask some specific questions this time on how they plan to measure our preschoolers?
Because we know how this goes. It starts with vague language about “quality” and “standards” and the next thing you know they’re taking standardized tests for a third of the time they spend in school.
No expansion without specifics. The data freaks will be off to the races again without adult supervision 🙂
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Are there any recordings of Diane’s lectures at PHS and PU?
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I’ve been teaching in the trenches for seven plus years looking at the rise and fall of charter schools in the Baltimore Public School System. Dr. Alonzo, recently departed CEO, worked on engineering a system where these small charters could compete with each other for students. Many thought that a great advantage was that the smaller schools gave teachers more of a chance to get students focused, to penetrate the restraints of the cultural environment from which they come. There is some merit to this argument, but there are a number of other factors that, in my opinion, are stronger, and make the efforts of these schools a Quixotic dream.
First of all, the Baltimore City Schools method of skimming off the best students for city wide schools (there’s a different name for that entity now, but what’s the difference….); such schools have academic entrance requirements, so the remainder of the secondary schools get the leftovers, which lowers the level of learning and social atmosphere, in my opinion, by a significant degree. A whole array of different styles of experimental schools, which, in my opinion, is what they are, come and go. One that I worked in for five years trumpeted the course Freshman Seminar, about basics of note taking, resume writing, and other foundational elements, having it taught in an 87 minute period (I have yet to meet a teacher who enjoyed teaching that class). In any event, the school was written up in USA Today, and many thought it was on the road to the answer to the problems of inner city education. It is closing at the end of this year as a failing school. This pattern has occurred at many other schools in Baltimore, with a fresh start, a couple years of promise, and then the school declining and closing or being taken back over by the Baltimore City School System. There are turf wars for control in some instances, where companies like Edison bicker back and forth with Baltimore City for control, before leaving. In my opinion, these experiments are all examples of top down prescriptions and fancy theories that get away from some of the basics of education that are, in my opinion, the root of the problem.
There are no neighborhood schools anymore on the secondary level in Baltimore, Students travel all over the city to get to these supposedly magic schools, and often disciplinary problems occur which started out on the students’ lengthy travel arrangements, which are then brought into the school. As noted above, this takes away from feelings of community participation in the school, personal pride, feelings of self worth, and leaves the students feeling dispossessed. In Dennis Shirley’s excellent book, Community Organizing and Urban School Reform, he rightly argues for the importance of getting communities involved, local businesses and community organizations among them, to raise up the level of the school. This is very difficult to achieve when the students take public transportation to distant locations.
Fundamental facets of American society have gone by the wayside in education in Baltimore- such as neighborhood schools, and community participation. Unlike suburban schools, where parents line up on Parent Teacher Night, in urban schools a handful of parents show up, and those, most often are not the ones who it would be best to see. That points to a much larger problem in the inner cities, that the breakdown of the family and other social structures is so complete, that it is an almost impossible task for the schools themselves to solve. But they are trying and, in my opinion, the methods they are using, at least in Baltimore, are way off track.
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But Arne Duncan says charter schools “deliver on the dream” so it doesn’t matter what impact the 5% of charter schools have on the 95% of existing public schools.
http://www.wacharters.org/arne-duncan-says-charters-deliver-on-the-dream/
Has anyone ever heard Duncan say anything as REMOTELY complimentary about US public schools? Anyone? Ever?
Besides how “moms” are deluded about their quality, I mean?
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“Duncan said his point was that the goal is to prepare U.S. students for a “globally competitive work force” and to challenge education leaders to better explain to parents why higher standards are needed and what it takes to achieve them.
“I didn’t say them perfectly, and I apologize for that,” he added. “My point is that children from every demographic across this country need a well-rounded, world-class education and frankly we have challenges not just in our inner cities but in our suburban areas to and we need to have honest conversations about that.”
Once again, The Only Honest Actor speaks. He’s too honest. That’s what people object to.
It’s not that his practice and policy are actually harming existing public schools. We object to him because we can’t handle The Truth.
It’s the arrogance, stupid. He still doesn’t get it.
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Dr. Ravitch refers to a “push to introduce charters to Idaho.” Idaho has had charter schools since 1991, though the initial legislation authorizing them has been so often revised by the Legislature that Idaho’s Office of Performance Evaluation recently reported that there is little difference between Idaho charter schools and traditional public schools, and that Idaho charter schools no longer live up to the legislative intent of the laws that created them. (See “Policy Differences Between Charter and Traditional Schools” http://legislature.idaho.gov/ope/publications/reports/r1304.pdf)
Dr. Ravitch. may be referring to the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho, a 9-member task force formed in August that is assisted by an advisory group consisting of the task-force chair Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education; Jamie MacMillan, executive director of the Albertson Foundation; Mary Wells, managing partner and co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners; and Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether. Bellwether is an organization founded and populated by hedge-fund managers and venture capitalists with ties to NewSchools Venture Fund. Upon its creation, NewSchools Venture Fund CEO Ted Mitchell described Bellwether as “a new nonprofit consulting organization designed to strengthen the leadership and organizational capacity of entrepreneurial education organizations by offering specialized executive search, strategic consulting, leadership development, and thought leadership services.”
Andrew Rotherham is on the 9-member task force; he is also a partner at Bellwether. He’s joined by Marguerita Roza, senior research associate at the Center for Reinventing Education, and by Terry Ryan, former VP for Ohio Programs and Policy at the right-wing Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Mr. Ryan is the new president of the Idaho Charter Schools Network. Idaho taxpayers can only hope and pray that he is unable to achieve in Idaho the results he achieved in Ohio, where for-profit charter schools have wreaked havoc on public school finances while embroiling themselves in scandal after scandal involving tax evasion, fraud, and misappropriation of tax dollars.
With the lineup listed here, one can easily imagine that any recommendations coming from the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho will be steeped in the New Markets Tax Credits Program, which enables hedge-fund managers and venture capitalist to almost double their money in seven years by financing the building and operation of charter schools. Vouchers, no doubt, will also be part of the plan, as will the use of tax dollars to fund private and parochial schools.
More about the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho is available here:
http://www.idahoednews.org/news/experts-to-exam-rural-idaho-schools/
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Wasn’t much of a take down. Mother never addressed the 90% claim (this is by statue, and a study shows it is as low as 65%*), throws in a the typically ad hominem attack, then shows some graphs comparing demographics which do not support the fact that BY LAW charters must take every kids who comes to the door. Oh yeah, don’t forget Mother’s slam on CREDO which reform critics either hate of love depending on the day of the week.
Anyhoo, Ms Ravitch writes…
“In the larger picture, however, the real danger is that the school that was once the glue of the community is torn asunder. The public school suffers. The community suffers.”
Does this tearing apart of communities hold true for open enrollment? Does this hold true for district magnet schools? Does it hold true for club sports who ‘steal’ the best athletes from district schools? Does this hold true for those who homeschool?
* – http://www.csinj.org/2012/02/charter-school-finance-101-comparing-charter-schools-to-their-host-district/
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Charters do not work WITH public school districts. All those other schools you mention do. The implications of non-affiliation speak to the appropriations of resources.
As sometimes happens with twins in the womb, a dual system creates a competition for the very life energy of sustenance that starves one and then eventually destroys the other by segregating the population.
No one wins when schools compete for resources. Instead, education resources should be available to all with careful local self-governance, not governance mandates by appointees and profit-making opportunists. Charters, as the lawmakers have been influenced to support, are just plain wrong for the education of society.
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In Finland, the average size of Comprehensive Schools (7 to 16) is 186, while the average size of the Upper School (17- 19) is 260. In Finland, a town of 15000 would have multiple local neighborhood schools at all levels without damaging the local community.
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So what your getting at is that we should have a lot more smaller public schools located in the neighborhoods all resourced with adequate staffing, no standardized testing, and all the concomitant social services, health care, subsidized housing etc. . . ??
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Duane:
The point is simple: A single large HS does not make a community. I can see lots of legitimate reasons to oppose Charter schools, but the notion that a Charter School will destroy a sense of community seems to be a stretch and not a legitimate argument.
The town next to ours has a population of 16,000 and 3 Elementary Schools, a Montessori School, a Parochial School, a public Charter/Alternative School, a regional Vocational Technical School plus a Middle School and a High School. The community identity is tied to the success of the sports teams and little else.
My town has a population of 5000 and we have an Elementary School and a Regional Middle School and High School. The regional schools cover four geographically dispersed towns and there is no sense of community as evidence by the constant fights over the relative funding from the different towns.
At the same time, I think there is a strong argument for smaller schools as a basis for a sense of community – assuming that there is an adequate supply of competent school leaders who value substantive parental involvement..
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Thanks, Bernie! I wasn’t sure what point you were trying to make. And you are correct, I’m not sure that it is very valid as an argument against charter schools.
I’d like to see community public elementary schools for all as TE might put it “catchment areas” but not as an argument against charters. And, for some sports may be the only “community builder” at the secondary level but the town in which I teach (I live in the woods in the “catchment area”-in other words outside the town) the high school is much a focal point for choir, band, the plays, the special olympics, FFA, and many other areas.
And “. . . assuming that there is an adequate supply of competent school leaders who value substantive parental involvement.” you have identified a first order problem. The problem being that we don’t need “leaders” but “stewards” with the idea being that the administration should be serving, at the service of the teachers, parents and students and not “leading” them anywhere. Leadership is an archaic concept that continually pop ups its ugly head in authoritarian fashion. Maybe we should consider the administration as “stewards” of education. Quite a different concept, eh!
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